them to a table, far from the other diners. “Your waiter will be here shortly.” She placed the menus on the table and promptly left.
JD put his rain-damp jacket on the back of his chair and sat. He looked down out the window, and his body swayed with vertigo. He peeled his eyes away, and looked deliberately at Soo-hyun. “What is with you today?”
“I had a really good talk with Kali last night. I’m feeling more myself than I have in a long time.”
JD chewed the inside of his lip, but didn’t speak. A waiter appeared at his shoulder, face shrouded like all the rest, some features dimly visible in the light from the tablet resting on his palm.
“Some drinks to start with?” he asked.
“What’s with the veil, bro? You fucking ugly under there?”
“Khoder,” JD said firmly.
“What, bro? It’s cool; my grandfather was Dalit.”
Soo-hyun handed the waiter all three menus: “Can we get three servings of the fried chicken, and three of the salt and pepper calamari. Oh, and three whiskeys, neat.”
“I’m sorry, but the younger gentleman doesn’t appear old enough to drink.”
“No,” Soo-hyun said, “the whiskeys are all for me.”
“I’ll have a stout,” JD said. “And a coke for the kid.”
“Yeah, a long fucking line of it, bro,” Khoder said with a grin. When the waiter was done keying the order he left the table without another word.
“Was that true?” JD asked Khoder. “Your grandfather was part of the untouchable caste?”
Khoder shrugged, attention now focused on something beyond the glass. “I don’t fucking know, bro. Just making conversation.”
Khoder stuck his forehead against the window, and JD looked around the restaurant casually, careful not to let his gaze catch anyone’s eye. Most of the other diners were corporate elite: well dressed, with a rigid posture, as though each table represented a job interview, business meeting, or hostile takeover.
“Alright, Soo-hyun; what are we doing here?” JD asked.
“I told you: this is a planning dinner.” They sat up in their chair, eyes cast down to the city beyond the window, flickering steadily to combat the motion of the restaurant. “There,” they said. “What do you see?”
JD followed their eyeline. Without the augmented layer provided by his phone, he saw the city as it was. From their vantage Songdo looked less like a precisely structured and engineered city, and more like a living thing. Mounds of garbage collected in alleyways, spreading like mold, and everywhere the city’s poor had twisted infrastructure to forge themselves a place where the corps didn’t want them: mini-favelas emerging in parks and the gaps between buildings. They must have seemed like cancer to the corporations, but JD saw only evolution, mutation; antibodies fighting back against the corporate infection, the illness of greed.
“Buildings?” JD said. “Garbage? What am I meant to be looking at?”
“The rampartment complex, right there. That’s the target.”
With that new context, JD saw the structure emerge from the swamp of streets. Compared to the skyscrapers that towered over Songdo, it was a squat walled compound, four eight-story buildings joined together by enclosed skybridges.
“Alright,” JD said. “How do we get in?”
“Maintenance. Oldest trick in the book.”
“Oldest and most obvious,” JD muttered to himself, but he watched carefully as the restaurant kept spinning. His view shifted incrementally until he could see the maintenance access alleyway squished between the southeastern building and the high cement wall of the outer perimeter. A white van sat parked beside four dumpsters overflowing with garbage.
The waiter arrived with their food and drinks on a large tray. He placed the food in the middle of the table, and set the drinks down carefully, placing Soo-hyun’s three whiskeys as far from Khoder as he was able.
JD said, “Thanks,” to the waiter’s receding figure, and took a sip of his stout—hints of coffee and chocolate above the tang of hops.
Khoder drained his glass immediately and started crunching loudly on his ice while Soo-hyun reached into their bag and removed a digital SLR with a compact ultrazoom lens. The camera’s black casing was scuffed and scratched, and a crust of brownish gunk had built up over the shutter-release button.
“Haven’t seen a stand-alone camera in years,” JD said, but Soo-hyun wasn’t listening.
JD and Khoder dug into the food while Soo-hyun made some adjustments on the rear of the camera, raised the device to their eye, and started snapping. When they were done they keyed the camera’s screen and inspected the images displayed there.
“Got a decent shot of the van’s number plate,” they said. “Can you get the driver’s