would last on the power from the cube. He shook his head, incredulous.
Picking a direction at random, JD walked fast. He ignored the throbbing ache in the gristle of his knee, paranoiac fear pushing him forward, as though everyone on the street knew what it was that he carried.
He didn’t even know what he carried, but he knew immediately that it was worth a lot more than fifty thousand euro.
He plunged the phone back into his pocket, clutched tight in his left hand. He brought the contex interface up at fifty percent opacity and found eleven messages waiting for him, each from Troy. JD smiled and checked the map. Troy’s place wasn’t far, and he didn’t want to go home—he wouldn’t be able to sleep if he did.
Decision made, JD took the next left, putting his clogged dorm room somewhere behind him. After hours of disconnection, he soaked up the Augmented advertising plastered over every surface. World Cup merchandise—licensed and un—and other soccer paraphernalia were a constant, hovering in the air across billboards and buildings, shimmering on buses that sped past loaded to capacity with post-game revelers.
JD slowed his pace. The ubiquitous ads always came packaged with pervasive surveillance on the street and in the skies above. The further he got from the post-game crowds, the easier he would be to distinguish. JD stepped into an apartment building’s alcove, removed his hat, put his jacket on over his rucksack, and counted to thirty before he stepped back onto the busy sidewalk. JD focused on keeping his gait steady, and clenched his jaw to tamp down on the pain from his knee.
As he reached a corner and stood waiting for the light, JD looked up and closed his eyes against the steady rainfall. Rain had a way of scaring people off the streets—at least, the ones who had elsewhere to go—but nothing less than a torrential downpour could dampen the city’s spirits tonight. He noticed the camera sitting just above the traffic light—the long, squared head stared up, as if mimicking him, as if it too were content beneath the clouds, at home in the rain.
The signal turned green and JD crossed. He glanced up to the camera at the corner opposite; it turned away from him by degrees, pointing further and further up until it was vertical, more telescope than security. What stars could it see in the polluted sky?
JD flicked his collar up against the rain and returned to watching his feet—finding something perplexing and uncomfortable in the way the cameras avoided his gaze. He quickened his pace, ignoring crosswalks and lights, ducking across streets when he shouldn’t, watching the ground light up red in warning signs that glitched, flickered, and died beneath his feet.
This far from the stadium he finally found quiet, apartment blocks on both sides of the street half in darkness, the sidewalk populated only sparsely with other people on their own mysterious errands. Ahead, a group of fireflies hovered and danced above the sidewalk, unperturbed by the rain. JD stopped, and approached the flitting lights slowly. More fireflies joined the small swarm and they began to fly faster, drawing small circles of light in the air. JD drew near and reached both hands out. Quickly he cupped his hands around one of the insects, and pulled his thumbs apart to see the glow of its yellowish light. He opened his hands all the way, expecting the insect to fly away. It didn’t. It hung static in the air above his palms. He lifted his eyes and saw that all the fireflies had stopped. The small still lights had formed a vaguely human shape, mimicking him.
JD stepped back for a better view, but the instant he moved, the fireflies disappeared. He searched for another sign of them, but they were gone. An older Korean woman passed by, staring at JD as if he were unwell, but she didn’t speak.
He kept walking, sidewalk empty now but for pieces of bike chained to trees and fences, rain falling steady, cement a dark, rippling mirror with the sheen of wet.
* * *
JD knocked on Troy’s door. He mentally prepared himself for another frown, but when Troy opened the door, he burst forward, threw his arms around JD, and squeezed.
“I saw the news,” he said. “The fire, the chase, the overturned van—that was you, wasn’t it?”
“I just saw the weirdest thing,” JD said. Looking over Troy’s shoulder, he expected to find the swarm of fireflies waiting inside the apartment, but