Kaine watched the dot twitch on his screen like a heartbeat. The little chip he'd slipped into the toy pinged with polite regularity — a meek, obedient pulse on a map he knew better than the backs of his hands.
Each ping trimmed the search radius until the location settled, stubborn and precise, at the edge of a district he'd only ever skirted on his charts: a single, stubborn purple blotch marked Hell's Kitchen.
Purple. The color code had no place on his palette. Green meant safe; orange meant manageable; red meant active infection. Purple meant anomaly. An unknown. An exception. It irritated him in a way he catalogued the way other men felt hunger: as a problem that required a solution.
He stuffed the phone back into his pocket and stepped into the rain. The alley behind McNagi's smelled like fryer oil and old paper, the city's refuse steaming in the cold. He pulled the hood of his jacket up and walked. His shoes hit puddles with soft precision. Each step carried the same silent purpose: follow the pulse until it meant something.
The city opened and closed around him in familiar sections — shopfronts, subway entrances, bodegas with flickering neon. He moved faster than most pedestrians but slow enough to seem ordinary.
Cameras blinked overhead; he kept to shadow where he could. Surveillance was a variable he preferred to reduce, not eliminate. It made his options cleaner.
As he crossed from Queens into the island's interior, the light changed. The noise thinned. Hell's Kitchen did not announce itself. It waited. Buildings leaned together like people who had shared too many secrets.
Streets ran tight and narrow. Shop awnings sagged. A deli's radio played an old jazz record that sounded wrong, as if time in this neighborhood had been set to a different beat.
The tracker led him down a block where graffiti layered like sediment — tags, political slogans, symbols half scraped away. He noticed small differences: fewer luxury cars, more boarded windows, a cluster of mailboxes with new locks.
The heat map on his paper charts had always shown this area as outlier only because of the vigilante presence. Unique people worked here, the data insisted. They were the reason most of his calculations avoided the neighbourhood: unpredictable actors. Emotional variables. Noise.
He didn't flinch. Variables were not excuses. They were data.
The dot stopped in front of a nondescript brownstone with a fire escape that doubled as a ladder for urban ghosts. A metal awning drooped above the door. He watched the woman who owned the tracker climb the stoop and disappear inside.
She moved like someone practiced at keeping small parcels from notice: head down, shoulders tight. A courier. A handler. Her route confirmed a node in the pipeline that the manifest from the van had hinted at.
Kaine crouched in the doorway shadow, the rain soaking his cuffs, the city breathing around him. He observed the building like a machine, inspecting a new part. The stoop led to a foyer.
The foyer led to a narrow hallway. Hallways led to floors with apartments. Apartments held people who paid protection and men who collected for invoices. Somewhere inside, the supply chain that fed New York's gun market threaded through paper and cash and muscle. Tonight, one of its threads ended here.
He didn't move. He didn't need to. His eyes recorded entries and exits. A teenage courier with a backpack slid out five minutes later. A delivery truck idled across the street for two minutes and then left.
A man with sleeves rolled and a shaved head came and went, carrying nothing, speaking to no one, palms empty but hands that had clearly known things. The building's rhythms were small and disciplined — a short, efficient choreography. Possibly the product of an organization that liked control.
He tapped his phone and overlaid a new layer on his map: movement patterns, ingress, egress, timestamps. He gave each actor a probability score in his head: courier 82% connected to pipeline; truck 71% drop vehicle; shaved-head man 59% enforcer. The numbers lined up in quiet satisfaction.
But beneath the analysis, a thought he hadn't allowed himself yet settled like a cold stone: Hell's Kitchen was not mapped because of the unique people. They were the unknown that had become the neighborhood's defense. Purple meant neither safe nor unsafe. Purple meant contested ground.
Contested ground meant complications. Complications meant risk to efficiency. Risk required mitigation.
Kaine set the phone back in his pocket and pulled a thin black wire from his bag. He set two small devices — acoustic pick-ups — near the stoop where rain would muffle the placement and the janitor's cart might hide any footprints. They were crude and temporary, but they would give him patterns: who used which door, who whispered in the stairwell, when a particular tenant left for work. Information would make purple into orange. Orange into green.
He worked quickly, the kind of speed practiced until it became a rhythm. The devices were in place before the next footfall, before the man with the shaved head returned. Kaine watched him pass, and the man's shoulders didn't twitch. He glanced at the stoop and then, for reasons Kaine could not immediately account for, he slightly flattened against the building and watched Kaine as if measuring.
A different variable appeared: the feeling of being watched in a place where he expected to be the watcher. It should have bothered him. It did not. It was data.
He folded into the alley, melting toward the shadows with the same methodical grace he used in combat. The city swallowed him. On his map, the purple blotch pulsed for a heartbeat and then, under his new layer, began to subdivide: routes, nodes, windows of activity. The colours tasted different already. "Wait...that's a grammatical error, colours lack taste, Kaine..."
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[Auther: I forgot to post on monday, so the previous chapter was just sitting there, I didn't post double but feel free to think of it like that.]