By 2:13 a.m., the city is a grayscale heartbeat on my monitors.
Red and white blurs smear through rain-slicked streets, tiny arrows inch along bus routes, and the control center hums like a tired animal—fluorescent, overcaffeinated, pretending to be awake. I can track half the city with a flick of my mouse. I can reroute drunk college kids and exhausted nurses around stalled trains with a few keystrokes.
I can’t do a damn thing about my own life.
“Monroe, you taking a break or marrying that chair?” Ken calls from the back, his voice thick with vending-machine sugar.
“Chair and I are in a committed relationship,” I say without looking up. “Don’t be jealous.”
He laughs, the sound bouncing off concrete and glass, and I tap in a manual override to push Route 7 around an accident icon that’s blinking orange. On screen, the bus’s little arrow shivers, thinks about it, then obeys.
If only bodies were as easy to reroute as buses.
A camera feed blooms larger when I double-click: street-level, three floors below, rain silvering the empty plaza. Night wind shoves trash into a muttering circle. The building’s glass doors flash with passing headlights.
For a second—just a second—I see a smear of darkness that’s too still to be shadow.
Then someone steps into the halo of the entrance lights.
Dark coat, darker suit. Rain on his shoulders like he’s been carved up out of the night itself. He pauses with his back to the camera, head tilted to scan the lobby through the glass.
The hair on my arms prickles.
Ken’s footsteps crunch past the row of old keyboards. “Want anything? I’m going on a snack run.”
“I’m good,” I say, because my throat is tight, because I’m suddenly not sure I remember how to swallow.
I zoom the camera. It glitches, struggles, focuses.
He turns his head just enough for me to see his jaw, the slash of his mouth, the ghost of a profile I’ve seen before—in news clippings, grainy photos shoved under doorways, in fever dreams that drag me back to the night everything went wrong.
No.
“Actually, Ken?” My voice sounds wrong—too thin, too far away. “Grab me a soda?”
“Type?”
“Anything.”
He makes a low whistle that says he heard the shake I tried to hide. “Back in five.”
The door clicks behind him. The room exhales.
Below, the man swipes something at the security turnstile. The camera angle doesn’t let me see his face fully, but I see enough: the precise, fluid economy of his movements; the way he walks like he owns not just the building but the ground under it; the faint smile that’s more calculation than warmth when the night guard glances up.
The guard nods. No hesitation, no questions.
He was flagged as cleared access. By who?
My fingers move on their own, pulling up the visitor log. For a moment, all I get is a spinning cursor.
Then a line appears:
03:12—VOSS, KILLIAN—TEMPORARY ACCESS GRANTED—LEVEL 19–21.
My heart doesn’t pound. It stops.
Killian Voss has been dead for six years.
Burned to nothing in a warehouse fire, according to the papers. Whispered back into existence in every rumor the underworld trades like currency. But the official story is clear: no body, assumed perished, case closed.
On my monitor, the elevator indicator ticks upward. 3. 4. 5. 6.
