the job.
Satisfied, JD carried on. It was still early, but already the roads were congested with auto-cars and ride-shares crossing the city toward Songdo Stadium. He turned a corner and walked through stalled traffic—the street becoming an impromptu car park watched over by two glowing red eyes. The footpaths on both sides of the road surged with crowds dressed in red and blue, broken up by pockets of Brazilian bright green. At street corners, ubiquitous advertising gave way to stadium directions and mealy-mouthed suggestions for good behavior, as though some focus-tested slogans would stop people from rioting if the mood took them, or if the game didn’t pan out the way they wanted.
Traffic passed in fits and starts, cars and vans decorated with the red, blue, and white of the South Korean soccer team—scarves and streamers hanging from windows, stickers adorning bumpers, glass paint on rear windows.
The light turned and he kept walking. He rounded a corner and spotted Soo-hyun and Khoder waiting up ahead on the other side of the road, wearing matching coveralls and baseball caps. Khoder was still trying to affect cool with a cigarette pinched between two fingers; Soo-hyun wore knockoff Ray-Ban aviators, reflections of the street where their eyes should be. JD guessed Soo-hyun was trying to look inconspicuous, but with their arms crossed over their chest and their lips twisted in a snarl they looked like a low-level gangster, resting up between extortion visits.
As JD waited to cross the street, a cloud front moved to block the sun. He shivered. He didn’t need to see the clouds to know that more rain was coming; he just had to listen to the whisper of his knee as it swelled and ached with the shifting air pressure. He ambled quickly between cars, stepping up onto the sidewalk to join Soo-hyun and Khoder.
“You ready?” he asked Soo-hyun, two of him caught in the lenses, staring back at the real one.
“Born ready,” they said, deadpan.
Khoder passed JD a small bundle of black wire—AR projectors attached to clips for his cap. “Mike Tyson, bro. Heavyweight champion.”
“You calling me fat?” JD said. He took the hat from his bag and clipped the device to the brim. He put it on and looked to Khoder—the kid held up his phone, camera lens shifting with a minute whir as it focused on his face.
Khoder nodded. “Bro,” he said, the single word telling JD that the hacked-together piece of counter-surveillance tech was working properly.
“Who’s Soo-hyun?” JD asked.
“Needed to be someone cool,” Khoder said, “so I went with Chow Yun-fat, in his prime.”
“Now who are you calling fat?” Soo-hyun said with a smirk.
JD took the tight bundle of latex gloves from his bag, gave a pair each to Soo-hyun and Khoder, then pulled his own pair on. “Alright, let’s go.”
JD pushed forward, taking the lead, as though this one piece of initiative would give him control over the rest of the job, and stop Soo-hyun’s urges from sending them violently off course. They walked around the block to the target building and climbed three cement steps to the entrance—a glass-and-metal door attached to an old-style intercom and buzzer system.
“Gonna pick the lock, bro?”
“Nope,” JD said, “just a little social engineering.”
He approached the intercom and hit a button at random—only checking that he wasn’t accidentally buzzing their target. Excuse me, sir, sorry to bother you. Mind letting us upstairs so we can steal your van and infiltrate your place of work? He tried four apartments before someone answered.
“What?” A man’s voice, noise in the background like children playing, TV blaring loud. Perfect.
“Plumber. Need to get up to 4A, but nobody’s responding.”
“Sorry, I can’t let you in.”
Soo-hyun’s eyebrows peered up over the rim of their sunglasses, amused.
“I understand, of course,” JD said quickly, before the man could hang up. “Maybe you could just run upstairs and knock on his door for me?”
There was a long pause, then a raucous buzz as the door unlocked.
“Thank you, sir,” JD said as he yanked the door open, but the impatient father had already signed off.
“Social engineering,” Soo-hyun said. “Next time I’ll engineer a broken window.” They stole ahead, taking the stairs two at a time, clinks and clanks emanating from their backpack with every step.
Trash had accrued on the stairwell and the landings, food rubbish mostly, rustling with cockroaches and other wildlife. Graffiti marked the walls—children’s crayon scribbles, inelegant spray-painted tags, and municipal markings from the last time city health came through and condemned an apartment or cleared out