Rook

  Chapter Seven – A Growing Shade of High-Vis

  METRORUN: REAL-TIME ROUTING

  If the fastest path changes, so do you.

  Don’t think. Follow.

  — MetroRun in-app tutorial

  By four in the afternoon, Rook had done the math and decided the numbers hated him personally.

  He stood under the overhang of a strip of shops on Gratiot, sweating through his windbreaker, thumb tapping his phone while his bike leaned against the brick beside him.

  METRORUN BALANCE: $93.89

  UPCOMING: Rent due in 3 days

  UPCOMING: Loan payment due SOON ($214.37 PAST DUE)

  A notification chimed over the MetroRun screen.

  IMPORTANT: Your account remains past due. Failure to remit payment may result in COLLECTION ACTIVITY, INCLUDING REPOSSESSION OF COLLAT—

  He closed it before the sentence finished, like that might prevent the repo man from physically existing.

  “Patience is key my friend,” he told the notifications. “Trust.”

  The sidewalk in front of him shimmered in the heat. Cars rolled by in slow fits, AC units working overtime. Across the street, a Helios billboard towered over a tire shop and a liquor store, cycling between advertisements.

  WHEN EXTREME WEATHER HITS, HELIOS KEEPS YOU CONNECTED.

  ALWAYS ON. ALWAYS THERE.

  He gave it the finger without moving his hand from the phone.

  MetroRun’s map refreshed with a little stutter. A cluster of job pins bloomed downtown; another around Midtown; a scattering further out. Five of them went gray before he could tap them, claimed by other riders.

  One blue pin remained active.

  RUSH - MEDICAL

  PICKUP: PHARMACY (MIDTOWN - NEAR WARREN)

  DROPOFF: RESIDENCE (SOUTHWEST DETROIT)

  PAY: $21.75 (+ distance, + rush bonus)

  He whistled under his breath.

  Medical runs paid better than office envelopes and cold brew deliveries. They also came with the kind of stress that knotted between his shoulder blades.

  He hit ACCEPT anyway.

  Two seconds later, another notification slid down over the map.

  METRORUN ADVISORY:

  Due to increased utility work and traffic signal issues, some routes may be delayed. Please follow posted detours and ride with extra caution.

  He flicked it away, jammed the phone back onto the handlebars, and pushed off.

  The air felt like warm soup with the occasional note of metallic, ionized air.

  He cut along Gratiot toward downtown, then swung over on Woodward to catch Warren west. The city was loud and weird in all the usual ways, buses groaning, someone’s music leaking from a passing car, a kid yelling at a sibling on a corner, but there was a different vibration underneath it.

  More trucks.

  He’d noticed the uptick over the last couple of weeks. Today, it felt like the city had been colonized by high-vis vests.

  A white Helios bucket truck idled at a pole near Brush, arm raised, a worker fiddling with something near the cross-arms. Half a block down, a Helios van with its sun logo sat nose-in to the curb, hazard lights blinking. Two more trucks blocked off a section of the bus lane, creating a buffer zone so a pair of techs could investigate a utility manhole.

  Rook threaded between cones and tried not to imagine them as teeth.

  He pulled up outside the Midtown pharmacy, locked the bike for form’s sake, and slipped inside.

  The air conditioning hit like a wall. For a second, he considered just lying on the floor in front of the frozen food aisle and refusing to move.

  “Pickup for Vega,” he said instead, stepping up to the counter that handled prescriptions and other life-or-death parcels.

  The tech behind the counter had the exhausted look of someone who’d been explaining the same thing all day.

  “MetroRun?” she asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Lucky you.” She turned, grabbed a medium-sized insulated box from a stack marked HOME DELIVERY - PRIORITY, and scanned its barcode. “Sign here.”

  He glanced at the label.

  OXYGEN SUPPLIES / MEDICATION

  DELIVERY: RESIDENTIAL - WYOMING & LAFAYETTE AREA

  He recognized the intersection: one of those half-forgotten residential pockets where the houses were stubborn and the sidewalks cracked.

  The tech slid the scanner across the counter.

  “What’s with the surge?” he asked as he signed. “You guys sending out more than usual?”

  She snorted.

  “You kidding?” she said. “Every time Helios sends one of those ‘advisories’, half our home-care patients panic-order backup everything. Tanks, meds, monitor batteries. Can’t blame them. If my life depended on the wall socket, I’d be twitchy too.”

  “Comforting,” he said.

  “Hey, I don’t write the brochures,” she said. “I just try to make sure the boxes leave here before the lights decide they’ve had enough.”

  He took the box, feeling its weight and the way it pressed obligation into his arms.

  Outside, his phone chimed again.

  HELIOS WEATHER ADVISORY - REGION: SE MICHIGAN

  Severe thunderstorms expected within the next hour with strong winds and cloud-to-ground lightning. Localized outages possible. Helios is monitoring conditions closely.

  “You can’t even keep the power on when there isn’t a storm,” Rook scoffed.

  He strapped the box into the cargo rack, double-checking the bungee cords like that would help anybody breathe.

  Then he started pedaling.

  The route took him down Cass, past Wayne State’s blur of buildings and students, then over toward the Lodge and out through the web of streets that led toward Southwest.

  Traffic was worse than usual.

  Not in the “game day at Comerica” way. In the “something’s off and nobody wants to be the first to say it” way.

  At one corner, near 3rd and MLK, every signal head was dark. A cop in a yellow vest stood in the center, arms waving a tired semaphore to keep everyone from killing each other.

  As Rook rolled past, the cop blew his whistle and gestured sharply.

  “Bike lane or sidewalk, not both!” he yelled.

  “Pick one that doesn’t have a truck on it!” Rook yelled back, then veered around a Helios van that had planted itself halfway over the painted line.

  He cut south through Corktown, tires humming over patchwork asphalt.

  The sky had gone from clear blue to a flat, high gray, the kind that made the world look like a badly calibrated monitor. To the northwest the clouds were darker, stacked in uneven layers.

  Rook slowed without meaning to, eyes tracking the bruised edge where the cloud bank was building height. A low roll of thunder reached him a beat later, faint but unmistakable, like the city clearing its throat before it started yelling. He checked his map, then the horizon again. Two deliveries, maybe three, if traffic didn’t turn into a demolition derby. If the grid didn’t blink. If the sky didn’t decide now was personal.

  On Vernor, just past Trumbull, he hit his first real snag.

  A cluster of vehicles choked the street: pickup, city truck, two Helios vans, an ambulance with its lights off but doors open. Yellow tape stretched in a loose triangle around a chunk of sidewalk and the base of a wooden pole that looked scorched.

  The transformer mounted on it hung at a crooked angle, black streaks up the side of the can. A thin trail of smoke still curled from one seam, like the last breath of a cigarette.

  He slowed, heartbeat kicking up.

  A couple of neighbors stood on their porches, arms folded, watching. One woman fanned herself with a folded piece of junk mail.

  “You gotta take the alley,” one of the Helios guys called to him, waving an arm. “Street’s closed for now.”

  “What happened?” Rook asked.

  “Equipment failure,” the guy said. “But don’t worry, everything’s under control.”

  “Looks super controlled,” Rook muttered, then he swung into the alley like told.

  On the other side of the block, the traffic signals were still on. For the moment.

  He delivered the box to a small brick house near Wyoming and Lafayette. A woman in her fifties met him at the door, face drawn in that tired way that came from nights spent listening to someone else’s breathing.

  “You’re a lifesaver,” she said, signing the screen and clutching the box.

  “Nah,” he said. “I’m just the delivery guy.”

  “Same thing today,” she said.

  He wanted to say, Only if the power stays on, but he liked his tip chances and her blood pressure more than he liked being right.

  On the ride back east, the city felt different.

  There were still people out, kids on bikes, someone grilling in a tiny backyard, a man selling elotes from a cart, but the baseline noise had a stutter in it.

  Twice, he heard that hollow whump of a transformer blowing somewhere out of sight. Once, on Michigan near Rosa Parks, a full block’s worth of storefronts went dark all at once, neon signs dying mid-flicker.

  At first he tried to file it under Detroit being Detroit, old bones, old wires, summer load, the usual. But the booms kept stacking. Not one busted can on a bad pole. Not one “well, that sucked” outage. More. Closer together. Like somebody was walking down the grid and kicking it in the ribs.

  His mind snapped back to the hallway in his building, how the light had dimmed, brightened, dimmed again, and then those muffled bangs had rolled in like a domino run. How he’d stared out that end window until his eyes hurt, seeing nothing but a few faint glows and wondering if they were fires or just the city lying to him.

  Now every new whump felt like that moment repeating, only louder, wider, and way less ignorable.

  Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  His phone vibrated against the handlebars.

  METRORUN SYSTEM NOTICE:

  Some app features may be limited due to connectivity issues. Offline mode is available for active jobs.

  Another chime piggybacked it.

  LOAN SERVICER: URGENT - CONTACT REQUIRED. COLLATERAL SUBJECT TO REPOSSESSION.

  He swore under his breath.

  “Yeah, you’re gonna have to rip me from this bike,” he joked. “I will not give it willingly.”

  Two new job pins bloomed on his map like little blue threats, one downtown, quick turnaround, probably some office nonsense. The other sat higher on the grid in New Center, tagged MEDICAL with a payment and rush bonus that made his eyebrows climb.

  Good money. The kind that covered groceries and shaved a sliver off the loan monster.

  He looked up from the phone and caught the sky in the corner of his vision. The gray had thickened, darker layers stacking like someone was building a wall over the city. The rain hadn’t started yet, but the air had that pre-storm tension, like the whole block was holding its breath.

  He rolled to a red light and stopped, one foot down, bike swaying under him. Downtown first, then New Center. Two hops. Easy, if everything stayed normal.

  But nothing had felt normal all day.

  His brain whispered, Go home. His bank balance screamed, Don’t you dare.

  The light flipped green. A horn barked behind him like an impatient judge.

  Rook exhaled through his nose. “Yeah, okay. A couple more bad decisions for the road.”

  Downtown first, then New Center. He hit ACCEPT on the first delivery like it was a dare, shoved off the curb, and let traffic swallow him before his better judgment could catch up.

  He cut east on Michigan Ave, wind throwing hard gusts like a tease for what’s to come.

  Awareness for his environment spiked like he unlocked a special ability, somehow. His pedaling took on a sense of urgency that wasn’t heroic so much as necessary.

  He skidded into a curb spot, locked up quick, and jogged into a glassy office lobby.

  The receptionist looked like she’d been swallowing stress for breakfast. One envelope slid across the counter, a signature, and he was back outside before the doors could decide to stick.

  Now he was trying to outrun the sky.

  The wind was making the street trees shiver like they were bracing for impact. Loose trash skated across the asphalt in frantic little spirals. Ahead, Michigan was a mess of brake lights and hazard blinkers.

  “At every turn, I swear,” he said through gritted teeth.

  Helios vehicles were everywhere. Vans, bucket trucks, SUVs with rooftop beacons, entire little clusters of orange vests orbiting open panels and half-dead signals like they were performing emergency surgery on the city. Cones chewed up lanes. Steel plates covered crater-like holes in the road. A bucket arm hung over an intersection like a mechanical praying mantis.

  Rook slowed, swore, and cut into a side street without signaling, because what was the point of manners when the grid was dissolving.

  He threaded alleys behind shuttered storefronts. He hopped a curb to bypass a line of idling vehicles trapped behind a work crew. Every shortcut he’d learned from years of riding came back like muscle memory: back cuts, service drives, that one strip of broken pavement behind the dollar store that technically wasn’t a road but still got you through.

  The dropoff was in a squat office building. A security guard buzzed him in with a look that said you picked a wild day for errands.

  Signature. Photo. Done.

  Back outside, the wind hit him again like a shove.

  He yanked his phone off the mount with fingers that suddenly felt clumsy and checked MetroRun.

  The New Center job was still there.

  “Don’t you disappear on me,” he muttered, and hit ACCEPT so fast his thumb almost slipped.

  He shoved the phone back onto the mount, dropped into a harder gear, and aimed north.

  Halfway there, the sky finally stopped pretending. Rain came down in a blunt, heavy sheet, slamming the pavement hard enough to bounce. Thunder cracked close, too close, followed by lightning that flashed again and again like the clouds were taking photos of the city.

  Wind kept punching from the side, turning his bike into a kite with anxiety. The front wheel wobbled. Water slicked the road. His e-assist motor stuttered under the strain, and Rook hunched low over the bars, jaw tight, fighting to stay upright while the storm tried to slap him sideways into traffic.

  “Alright,” he growled into the rain, blinking water out of his eyes. “I get it. Message received.”

  The pickup was at a pharmacy near Jefferson and Beaubien.

  He ducked under the shallow overhang of the pharmacy entrance with a spray of water coming off him like he’d just climbed out of a river. The automatic doors jittered half-open, then committed with a tired whine.

  Inside, the air-conditioning hit him like an insult.

  The fluorescent lights overhead buzzed with a thin, stressed tone. Half the customers were dripping onto the tile, clutching paper bags like they were holding life support.

  Rook stomped water out of his shoes and made for the prescription counter, blinking rain out of his lashes.

  “Pickup for Vega,” he said.

  The tech looked up like she’d been bracing for him specifically. Her ponytail was frizzing from humidity and static. A little “HELLO, MY NAME IS” sticker had peeled halfway off her scrub top like it was trying to escape.

  “I assume you’re with MetroRun?” she asked.

  “Against my better judgment,” he said.

  She pulled a smaller insulated box from a stack marked PRIORITY and scanned it. The box was taped like they didn’t trust the laws of physics anymore.

  “Lot of you today,” she said, sliding it across the counter. “MetroRun’s getting a workout.”

  “We’re all about gains,” Rook said, voice dry. “Little cardio, little existential dread.”

  She snorted, but it didn’t have any joy in it. More like a pressure release valve.

  Behind her, a guy in the back, maybe a pharmacist, maybe someone who’d just accepted his fate, was arguing with a computer.

  “No, I don’t care that it’s ‘optimizing,’” he said. “I care that it’s wrong.”

  The tech flicked her eyes that way and lowered her voice slightly.

  “Kid back there asked if Helios can ‘turn the storms off’ now,” she said. “Like it’s a setting. Like they’ll slide a little bar from ‘catastrophic weather’ to ‘light drizzle.’”

  Rook signed the screen with a finger that still felt numb from gripping wet handlebars.

  “And?” he asked. “Can they?”

  She gave him a look like he’d just asked if the building had a secret hatch to Narnia.

  “Told him we’re not that far gone,” she said. “Yet.”

  “Give it time,” Rook said.

  He glanced down at the label on the box. MEDICAL. No cute branding, no “thanks for supporting local.” Just blunt necessity.

  He tucked it into his pack and cinched the straps tighter than usual. Everything felt heavier in the storm, like the air itself had switched to a higher difficulty setting.

  As he turned to leave, the fluorescents flickered once, quick, sharp, and the whole store did that collective human thing where everyone pretends they didn’t notice.

  Rook noticed.

  Outside, the rain was even worse than it had been a minute ago, and the wind had found a new angle. It shoved at him hard enough that he had to brace a foot on the curb.

  His phone hiccuped in its mount as he swung a leg over the bike.

  The MetroRun map froze for a second, then caught up like it had been slapped awake.

  DROPOFF: OFFICE - NEW CENTER

  “Here we go,” he muttered. “Now the adventure truly begins.”

  The e-assist motor hummed when he started moving, but it had a slight lag to it, like it was thinking real hard about each revolution, like it wanted to file a complaint with Helios and wasn’t sure where to send it.

  Rainwater sheeted off his helmet and down the back of his neck. The street turned glossy and treacherous, every painted line a potential slip. Cars crawled with their hazards on, wipers going full speed and still losing. Some drivers were cautious; some were offended by caution and used the storm as an excuse to drive like the rules were optional.

  He cut through downtown because the straight line was faster, and faster mattered when the sky was throwing hands.

  On Woodward, half the block-facing billboards were out. One giant screen tried to show a Helios spot, glitched, then became a blocky mosaic of colors like a dying fish tank, then went black with a soft little pop. The wet street reflected the failed image like a ghost that couldn’t hold its face.

  A bus sat stalled at the curb, hazard lights blinking through the rain. The digital route sign over the windshield read:

  NO DATA

  It looked less like a message and more like a prophecy.

  A man in a suit was swearing into his phone under an overhang, hair plastered to his forehead. His tie had given up and was hanging limp.

  “I don’t know, Jason,” he barked, pacing in a tight circle. “The building just lost the elevator and you’re worried about the projector—”

  He broke off mid-rant, holding the phone out like it had betrayed him personally.

  “Hello? Hello? Are you—”

  Rook didn’t hear the rest. The wind ate the words and replaced them with a fresh crack of thunder.

  At the intersection near the arena, the traffic lights did something weird. They flipped from normal cycles to an all-red flash pattern, then froze like they’d forgotten what their job was.

  Drivers hesitated just long enough to collectively decide, Screw it, and then the intersection became suggestions and bravado. A horn blared, long and angry. Someone yelled out a window. Nobody could hear anyone.

  Rook skirted the mess by hopping up onto the curb, tires bumping hard, and cutting behind a line of food trucks that were trying to pretend this was still a business day.

  One truck’s generator sputtered and died right as he passed, the exhaust note choking off into silence. The fans cut. A man inside swore long and creatively in two languages, leaning out to kick the generator like violence could restart combustion.

  “Bad day for commerce,” Rook called, rain slapping his cheeks.

  “You think?” the guy yelled back, hands spread wide as if asking the sky to square up.

  Rook pushed on, climbing toward New Center with his thighs starting to burn. The storm made every block feel longer. Wind gusts came in pulses, like something huge breathing over the city.

  By the time he reached New Center, the clouds had gone from dark gray to bruised-black. The rain was so dense it blurred the edges of buildings. Lightning flickered behind the skyline, making the old structures look briefly flat and paper-thin.

  He swung toward one of the old Kahn buildings, marble lobby, heavy doors, a place that still believed in itself. He skidded under the overhang, locked the bike and hustled inside.

  The lobby smelled like stone and old money and a faint hint of damp wool. The security guard behind the desk looked bored in the way only someone with a chair and a tiny empire can look bored. His radio sat on the counter like a pet.

  Rook shook water off his sleeves.

  “Delivery,” he said, holding up the insulated box.

  The guard nodded toward the reception desk as if Rook were a problem someone else should handle.

  The receptionist took the box with both hands, eyes lingering on the MEDICAL label, then on Rook’s soaked face.

  “Can’t believe you’re out there during all of this,” she said, gesturing at the chaos outside the lobby doors.

  “Somebody has to do it,” he laughed. “Better it be me.”

  She handed him the proof-of-delivery screen while shaking her head.

  “It won’t be letting up any time soon,” she said. “So please be safe out there.”

  Rook signed and took his proof photo.

  “First and foremost, ma’am,” he said with a smile.

  As he slowly walked towards the lobby doors, he checked his balance while he still had a moment under a roof.

  METRORUN BALANCE: $127.89

  PENDING: $32.75 (processing)

  The pending amount felt like a sun ray shining through the angry sky. But it still didn’t feel like enough. It never did. The numbers were a moving target that always ran faster than him.

  On his way back out, his phone vibrated again, sharp, insistent, like it had something to prove.

  METRORUN SERVICE ALERT:

  Due to ongoing network and infrastructure disruptions, MetroRun will be suspending new job assignments in your region effective immediately. Active deliveries should be completed as safety permits.

  Below that, in bright corporate optimism that now read like a threat:

  THANK YOU FOR BEING PART OF THE METRORUN FAMILY!

  Rook stared at it, rain tapping the glass doors like impatient fingers.

  “Family my ass,” he said.

  Outside on West Grand Boulevard, the storm did something eerie.

  For a few seconds, the rain eased just enough that the world felt too clear. The wind dropped. The usual distant roar of the Lodge was muffled, like someone had thrown a heavy blanket over the city’s mouth.

  It wasn’t calm. It was the kind of quiet that makes your skin tighten, because you know the next hit is coming.

  Half the traffic lights along the boulevard were stuck mid-cycle. One flashed yellow in all directions like a warning that didn’t know what it was warning about. Another was completely dark, just a dead box hanging over the intersection.

  Rook swung onto Second, aiming himself back toward downtown and, eventually, Vernor. After a day like today, his couch and a change of clothes beckoned him.

  He’d barely cleared the first block when his phone buzzed again, a different vibration, shorter, urgent. The kind that meant someone official wants you to feel small.

  HELIOS GRID ALERT - UPDATE

  Multiple corridors are experiencing disturbances due to weather. Crews are responding, but some customers may experience extended outages.

  He barked a laugh that came out wrong.

  “Your crews are spread thin it seems like,” he said to the rain.

  He cut south, following Cass toward the core, and that’s when it felt like the city hit its breaking point.

  It didn’t happen like in movies, with a neat line of darkness sweeping in from one horizon to the other.

  It was messier. Meaner. Like the city was being unplugged by someone who didn’t care about order.

  One block of streetlights flickered and died while the next stayed lit. A gas station sign sparked and went black, buzzing faintly as it surrendered. A storefront’s neon sign went out mid-flicker, leaving only a wet, dark window that reflected passing headlights like nervous eyes.

  A billboard that had been trying to be reassuring, Helios logo, clean lines, went into a spasmodic loop of logo, static, logo, static, then froze on a single broken frame where the sun mark was half-missing, like it had been bitten.

  Somewhere behind him, a substation blew.

  He didn’t see it. He felt it: a low, concussive whomp that thrummed up through the bike frame into his feet. The air flashed a brighter white for a fraction of a second, heat lightning, but wrong. Too close. Too mechanical.

  Four car alarms immediately started howling in panicked harmony.

  Traffic reacted like you’d expect: badly.

  At the intersection of MLK and Cass, the lights died mid-green. A car that was bound to cross hit its brakes instead. The SUV behind it didn’t.

  The crunch of metal on metal snapped through the storm like a jaw clenching.

  Rook swore, yanked his handlebars, and shot up onto the narrow sidewalk just in time to avoid being part of the pileup. Water sprayed up from the curb in a dirty arc.

  “Holy fuck!” Rook yelled, voice hoarse. “Just let me get home in one piece.”

  He jogged over to Woodward and coasted down to the I-75 overpass and stopped, breathing hard. Rain hammered the concrete. Wind shoved at him from the side. His hair, what wasn’t plastered to his skull, stuck to his forehead like wet string.

  From up here he could see a slice of Downtown through the storm’s curtain.

  He watched a strip of Woodward go dark in segments, streetlights winking out, one, two, five at a time. The QLine tram shuddered to a halt, its interior lights flickering like a heartbeat losing rhythm. Passengers inside became pale silhouettes pressed to glass.

  Farther off, to the southeast, the Helios regional tower stood with its crown still blazing stubbornly against the ruined sky. The name, too small to read from here, but unmistakable in shape, gleamed in clean corporate white, like it was exempt.

  “Of course you’re fine,” Rook said to it. “Cockroaches and branding.”

  His bike’s e-assist motor stuttered beneath him.

  He felt it in the pedals: a brief loss of resistance, a hiccup, then the motor dropped out entirely. The bike became what it had always been underneath the marketing, heavy metal, and his legs.

  The handlebar mount holding his phone vibrated once, then went still.

  The MetroRun app froze mid-refresh. The little spinning wheel stopped spinning.

  Then the whole screen went black.

  Rook blinked at it, rain running down his nose.

  He tapped the screen.

  Nothing.

  He held the power button.

  No battery icon. The phone sat there like a piece of glass that had never heard of electricity.

  He stared at it for a second too long, like if he stared hard enough it would get embarrassed and start working again.

  A question rose in his throat, dry and useless, and died there.

  The hum changed.

  He hadn’t known how much he’d come to rely on it, the layered, invisible vibration of a powered city. The interstate roaring underneath. The constant low thrum of transformers on their pads. The buzz of streetlights and signs and compressors and fans and all the tiny machines doing tiny jobs that added up to “civilization.”

  There had been blips before. Dips. Brownouts. A few seconds of wrongness.

  This was different.

  The whole soundscape stepped down at once, like someone pulled a fader on reality.

  For a moment, there was a weird, naked clarity.

  Rook could hear his own breath, harsh in his ears. The rain’s hard hiss on asphalt. The faint rattle of a shopping cart somewhere below, pushed by nobody or by somebody who didn’t matter anymore. The slap of someone running on pavement out of sight.

  Then, one by one, the last holdouts went.

  The lights in a nearby office tower flicked off in cascading rows, whole floors winking out like a dying grid of teeth. The billboard that had been trying to decide between Helios and static finally chose nothing. The crown of the Helios tower, bright a second ago, flickered wildly, a stutter, a full blaze, then a jagged, ugly dim as letters died out of sequence.

  H–

  –LI–

  –S

  Only two of the letters stayed on, buzzing faintly like they were too stubborn to die.

  Rook stood on the overpass with his dead phone in his hand, his dead assist motor under his feet, and listened as the last remaining hum bled out of the air.

  No screens. No signal bars. No MetroRun pings.

  Just rain. Wind. Human voices in the distance, suddenly loud enough to matter.

  Somewhere down on Vernor, Malik was probably sitting in the dark with his mom, listening to the same sudden quiet, trying to pretend it was temporary.

  Rook swallowed.

  “Okay,” he said to the empty air, to the dead phone, to no one. “New problem.”

  He swung a leg back over the bike and turned it toward home, muscles doing all the work now, riding into a Detroit that suddenly felt a lot bigger, a lot older, and a lot less interested in keeping anyone safe.