Total pages in book: 173
Estimated words: 169266 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 846(@200wpm)___ 677(@250wpm)___ 564(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 169266 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 846(@200wpm)___ 677(@250wpm)___ 564(@300wpm)
“Will do,” I say and then end the call before she can say more, her image fizzling into the air.
I exhale, pour myself another useless drink, and step out of my suit, ready to put this day to bed.
Wondering what tomorrow might bring.
Wondering if I’ll dream of her again.
CHAPTER 6
MIA
The last time I saw New York, it was on fire.
Not literally, though there were fires too, in those days—burning cars, burning buildings, burning flags. But it was the other kind of fire I remember most: the feverish fear in people’s eyes, the way the city seemed to vibrate with barely contained violence. That was 2034. I was twenty-three, barely three years into my career, and MI6 had sent me to extract a British asset embedded in what was left of the State Department. The mission was supposed to be simple—a quiet handoff at a hotel on the Upper West Side, a drive to a private airfield in Jersey, wheels up before anyone noticed he was gone.
Instead, I spent four days dodging military checkpoints and surveillance drones, watching soldiers in American uniforms treat American citizens like enemy combatants. I killed two DHS agents to get us out, one with my hands, one with my lips. The asset made it home. I made it home. But I left something behind in that burning city—some last shred of naivety about what governments are capable of when they stop pretending to serve their people.
That was six years ago.
A different America.
A different me.
Now, as the plane descends through a gauze of autumn clouds, I press my forehead to the window and try to reconcile what I’m seeing with what I remember.
New York in 2040 is a city of contradictions. From the air, it looks almost normal—the familiar silhouette of Manhattan rising from the water, the Statue of Liberty still bravely holding her torch, the grid of streets and avenues I studied on maps before I ever set foot here. The city that never sleeps, never weeps.
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 with the 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.