he tried to catch his breath.
“Come on, let’s go,” Soo-hyun said.
Soo-hyun and Red bailed from the van; JD stayed behind to shove his gear back into the rucksack. When JD opened the driver’s door, he nearly fell out of the vehicle. His legs gave way beneath him and his head swam as the adrenaline quickly leeched from his system. He opened the rear doors and Khoder clambered out, his brown skin shaded green with nausea.
“Sorry, Kid.”
“Apologize with money, bro.” He offered JD a weak smile.
JD clapped him on the shoulder. “I’ll be in touch. Look after yourself.”
Khoder nodded, and joined the approaching crowd, disappearing instantly in his team colors.
Soo-hyun hugged JD briefly. “Thanks, Jules.” They squeezed his arm and held his gaze. “We couldn’t have done it without you.”
JD nodded.
Red grabbed Soo-hyun by the arm and pulled them away. “We’ll be in touch about payment,” he said, wearing a grin that bordered on a snarl.
Yeah, you’ll be in touch, asshole, JD thought, just as soon as you check the contents of that cube.
Red and Soo-hyun drifted into the oncoming rush of bodies—Soo-hyun glanced once over their shoulder, and they were gone, swallowed by the mob.
With everyone else out of sight, JD dipped his hand into the cleaning bucket and scraped around in the dirty water until his fingers found the slick plastic bag. He retrieved it, wiped it on his coveralls, and shoved it into his rucksack. He stripped out of the coveralls and put them in the bag too, then wrapped his South Korean–red scarf around his neck, shouldered his bag, and joined the crowd.
After years in Songdo, JD was used to standing out, used to the stares. But dressed in football colors, he was finally, for perhaps the first time, just one of the locals. When he made eye contact it was to swap grins—elation at a team’s victory and a successful heist looking indistinguishable.
Overhead, drones were already gathering—the high-pitched whine of quadcopters buzzing the air, while the police sirens grew louder with each moment.
JD kept walking, jostled by the fans, hidden deep inside the mass of bodies. He smelled the sour tang of his sweat, but soon it mingled with the smells of the crowd—the sweat on their clothes, the beer and soju on their breaths. When he reached the end of the block, JD looked back. Football fans stood on top of the van, waving banners and cheering, red and blue smoke pouring into the air from flares, music playing everywhere.
Police surrounded the van, but no one paid them much mind. By the time they realized the fans weren’t the thieves, he’d be long gone.
* * *
As the army of soccer fans marched across the city, restaurants, bars, and cafés opened their doors, ready to feed the crowds with food and booze. The people were the lifeblood of the city, causing it to wake and breathe as they passed down the veins of asphalt and cement. The rain pattered loud against the polyester shell of JD’s windbreaker, but he could barely hear it over the fans’ chatter and songs, unperturbed by the wet.
The crowd broke like a wave at the corner of Central-ro and Convensia-daero. Bars on all sides of the intersection glowed bright with neon, siren song of various dance beats competing to see who could call in the most lost souls. Three bars shone a little brighter, and JD watched as the crowd split, tracking people with his eyes as if he knew before they did which bar they would choose. Half the throng split away, filing into the three brightest bars; the other half boarded auto-buses and climbed into share cars.
JD took his phone from the sandwich bag, the thin rectangle of glass and silicon warm in his hand. At his touch it displayed the lock screen—a VOIDWAR wallpaper of ships exploding against a backdrop of stars. He swiped across the screen, unlocking it, and was greeted by a message:
>> Overheating Risk. Processor usage restricted to 0.3%
JD flipped the phone over in his hand and for a moment, the noise and bustle of Songdo fell away. He stared in shock—he had never reconnected the battery.
The datacube sat snugly in its port, but it wasn’t a datacube at all. He’d been told he was stealing a virus, but this was something else, something that shouldn’t be possible—storage, power supply, and shit only knew what else, miniaturized beyond anything he’d seen before. JD slotted his battery back into place, unsure of how long the phone