The next morning, the sun didn’t rise so much as it bled over the horizon, casting long, sickly orange shadows across the city. Emilia didn't wait for the household staff to wake. She was out of the villa before the dew had even evaporated from the hood of her car, her mind already back at the site.
But as she rounded the final corner toward the redevelopment gates, the smell hit her first—the acrid, throat-stinging scent of burning rubber and diesel.
"No," she whispered, her heart dropping into her stomach.
The Apollo redevelopment site was no longer a symphony of progress; it was a scene of calculated c*****e. Plumes of black smoke spiraled from an overturned generator. Massive spools of copper wiring had been slashed and unspooled like metallic guts across the dirt. Several excavator
