The drive was a fugue state. Streetlights bled into neon smears across the rain-slicked windshield, each one a flash of interrogation. The city, my city, was a ghost town, its familiar landmarks rendered alien and hostile. My hands were locked on the steering wheel, knuckles white, the only part of me that felt solid. The rest was a hollow shell filled with the echoing static of a dead comms channel and the sickening loop of two videos playing over and over in my mind.
The lie, and the truth.
The GPS guided me away from the steel and glass canyons of my domain and into the quiet, sleeping suburbs. The houses were modest, lawns neatly trimmed, a world of meticulously maintained normalcy I had always viewed with a distant, clinical contempt. It was a world I protected and preyed upon in eq
