“Whatever’s on. Old movies, mostly. The kind they don’t make anymore.”
“Like what?Iron Man?”
“LikeCasablanca.The Maltese Falcon. Anything with Bogart.”
“Oh,ancientfilms. Got it.”
I slide my sandwich onto a plate but don’t eat it. “Emma got me into them. She had this theory that old movies were better because people had to actually talk to each other. No explosions, no CGI, no AI, just dialogue and chemistry. You could tell all the story you needed to tell with just two people in a room.”
“She sounds smart.”
“She was the smartest person I ever knew,” I tell her. “Smarter than me, that’s for damn sure. She could’ve done anything, been anything.”
“But she chose activism.”
“She chose to give a shit.” I meet Mia’s eyes across the counter. “That’s what got her killed. Caring too much about people who couldn’t care less about her.”
The silence that follows is heavy, charged with things I don’t know how to say. Once again, I feel I’ve said too much. Mia sets down her tablet, her expression softening in a way that makes my heart feel water-logged.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “For what happened to her. For all of it.”
“Yeah.” I look away, out the windows at the city sprawling below, at lifegoing on. “Me too.”
She’s about to say something else—I can see the words forming on her lips—when my watch buzzes.
No. Not now.
I glance at the screen.Emergency alert. Art heist in progress. MoMA. Armed suspects, civilian hostages.
Fuck.
“I have to go,” I say, already moving toward my bedroom.
“What? Now?”
“Armed robbery at the MoMA. Hostages.” I reach the closet in my bedroom, grabbing my suit. Contrary to popular belief, in emergencies like this, I pull it on over my existing clothes to savetime. The nanotech in the fabric makes it slide over my shirt and jeans like a second skin, familiar and suffocating all at once. “I’ll notify Danny on the roof. He’ll take you home in a minute.”
“Nate—”
I stop. She’s never called me that before. Just Vanguard, like everyone else.
“Be careful,” she says quietly.
Something twists against my ribs. It makes me want to cross the room, cup her face in my hands, and kiss her until neither of us can breathe.
But that’s all too much, too soon for what we are to each other.
Because she is just a journalist doing her job.
So, I just nod, open the glass doors, step onto the balcony, and launch myself into the sky.
The Museum of Modern Art is chaos when I arrive a minute later.
Three armed suspects, all wearing masks, all carrying weapons that look military-grade. They’ve got a dozen hostages corralled in the Tang Wing while NYPD has set up a perimeter outside, but they’re outgunned and out-negotiated, and they know it.
I don’t bother with the front entrance.
I crash through the glass ceiling and drop into the middle of the gallery like a nightmare in black, shards going everywhere, alarms blaring.
