But as we drop lower, the scars start to show. Gleaming new towers stand next to crumbling buildings, and there are gaps in the skyline where landmarks used to be, empty lots that haven’t been rebuilt, memorials to whatever happened there during the dark years of autocracy and fascism.
The pilot announces our descent into JFK, and I sit back, smoothing my hands over my thighs and doing my breathing exercises again. Anxiety can be a real bitch.
I’m traveling as Mia Baxter, journalist, which means economy class and the kind of rumpled exhaustion that comes from a sardine-can trip across the Atlantic. No MI6 chartered jets for NOCs, or even business class. Just me and three hundred other passengers and the smell of recycled air.
And yet, I love it. Despite my anxiety, I actually fucking love it.
The excitement has been building since we took off from Heathrow—a fizzing energy in my chest I haven’t felt in months. Not since before Minsk, before the filing, before I started wondering if I’d ever feel like myself again. But here, now, descending into a city that nearly tore itself apart and somehow stitched itself back together, I feel awake in a way I’d almost forgotten was possible.
This is the job. This is what I’m good at.
And I’m going to prove it.
Immigration is a slow crawl of biometric scans and AI-assisted questioning, the kind of security theater that makes everyone feel watched without actually catching anyone. My cover holds up beautifully—Vantage credentials, a history of international travel, nothing that flags the algorithms. The customs officer, a tired-looking woman with grey streaks in her hair, waves me through with barely a glance.
Outside, the crisp air hits me like a slap, cold and sharp, tinged with exhaust and something electric. The smell of a city that never quite stopped running, even when the wheels were coming off.
I take the AirTrain to Jamaica, then the E Train into Manhattan, because that’s what a journalist on a magazine budget would do. The subway is cleaner than I expected—another post-Dark Decade improvement, apparently—but surveillance is still everywhere. Cameras in every car, every platform, every stairwell. Facial recognition scanners mounted above the turnstiles, their little red lights blinking like mechanical eyes. When President Vasquez won as leader of the New Democrats Party, she promised to undo the surveillance state, but so far, a lot has remained in the guise of security.Public Safety Initiative, the signs say.Keeping New York Safe.
I’m wearing a light layer of reflective foundation—counter-surveillance cosmetics, standard issue for field operatives—but I still feel the weight of all those lenses tracking my progress through the system. The infrastructure of control never really goes away. It just gets better PR.
The train fills and empties as we rattle through Queens into Manhattan. I watch the passengers: a woman in a hijab reading something on her phone, a cluster of teenagers laughing at a video, a man in a suit staring at nothing withthe glazed expression of the chronically exhausted, overworked and underpaid. Normal people living normal lives. You’d never know, looking at them, that six years ago, some of them might have been classified as Provisional Citizens—second-class, surveilled, one algorithm away from a detention center.
Legal equality was restored in 2037, but equality on paper and equality in practice are different things. Kat briefed me on this before I left, the social stratification that still lingers, the neighborhoods that are effectively segregated, the jobs and opportunities that somehow never quite reach certain populations. America wants to believe it’s healed, but there are still scars here, and they say otherwise. After all, America has always been this way, and has never strayed from how it was intended to function by its Founding Fathers.
I get off at 50th Street and climb up into the pale sunlight. Times Square assaults me immediately—a canyon of holographic billboards and scrolling news feeds and advertisements that seem to know exactly where I’m looking. Vanguard’s face flashes past on at least three screens, that perfect smile, those blue eyes.America’s Hero. The World’s Protector.Global Dynamix branding, subtle as a bloody sledgehammer.
I stand there for a moment, letting the crowd flow around me, and just look.
Gawk is more like it.
This is his city now. His image is everywhere—on buses, on billboards, on the T-shirts of tourists posing for photos. He’s become something more than a man, more than a soldier. He’s become a symbol, the face of recovery, proof America can take its worst impulses and transform them into something heroic.
Or, at least, that’s the story they’re selling.
And I ain’t buying it.
I check my burner phone and see a message from Bayo, who arrived with Kat late last night, confirming the safehouse address with a time for our meet, everything written in code. I have three hours before I need to be anywhere, which means three hours to get my bearings, check into my hotel, and start getting into the right headspace, start becoming someone I’m not.
I start walking, and New York swallows me whole. I’m so swept away with the glitz and grit and buzz and excitement of it all that I wish I had someone I could call and talk about this with, wish I had a reason to take photos, so I could share them with someone later.
My hotel is in Midtown—nice enough to suggest Vantage has a decent expense account, anonymous enough that no one looks twice at a woman traveling alone. The lobby is all warm lighting and leather armchairs, the kind of generic elegance that saysrespectable business travelersstay herewithout committing to any actual personality. I check in under Mia Baxter, accept the key card, and take the elevator to the thirtieth floor.
The room is better than I expected—burgundy walls, navy bedding, floor-to-ceiling windows with a view of the city that almost makes up for the seven-hour flight. I stand there for a moment, watching the traffic crawl along the streets below, the afternoon light catching the windows of a hundred buildings.
I quickly shower off the plane grime, change into jeans and a black sweater, and do a quick sweep for bugs. It’s clean, as I expected, but you can never be too careful. Someone can always be listening.
Then, I throw on my leather jacket and a scarf and head back out. The safehouse is a twenty-minute walk, and I use the time to memorize the neighborhood—escape routes, blind spots, which bodegas have back exits and which streets dead-end into nothing. These are things I do without thinking, habits that havebeen ingrained in me, habits that have saved my life and the lives of others more than once.
The building for our hideout is a prewar walk-up on 49th near 10th, sandwiched between a laundromat and a place that sells organic adaptogen doughnuts for six dollars each. The super is a heavyset guy smoking on the stoop who doesn’t look up as I pass. Good. Bayo’s done his work.
I run up the stairs to the fourth floor and apartment 4C. I knock twice, pause, knock three times.
The door swings open, and Bayo’s face splits into a grin. “About bloody time. I was starting to think you’d gotten lost.”
“Please. I never get lost.” I slip inside, and he closes the door behind me, throwing three separate locks plus a chain. “I just like taking the scenic route.”
The apartment is small but functional—a living room with a battered couch, a kitchenette that’s seen better decades, and enough tech crammed onto a rickety table to make GCHQ weep with envy. Monitors, hard drives, a tangle of cables that looks like a robot’s nervous system all spread out like a virus. It’s Bayo’s natural habitat, one that’s taken over the area surprisingly fast.
