Daylight in the Heights is a lie told with money. Streets so clean they throw your face back at you. Glass facades stacked like cards, all of them catching the reactor-glow and bleaching it into something polite. The air smells like citrus and sterilizer; even the wind acts trained.
Between the boutiques and the private clinics, a white utility van sits where utility vans sit—half in the shade of a cypress, half in the blind spot of a camera that thinks it's a bird. The logo on the door reads Metro Mechanics in a blue that says, "We fix your problems and never introduce our own."
Limar wears a ballcap low and a maintenance jacket that hangs too big, like honesty. He chews gum to keep his mouth from saying what his hands already know. The binoculars kiss the sockets hard enough to leave a ring, and in their circle the Valeris villa breathes—glass like calm water, white stone that hates fingerprints, hedges clipped to within an inch of their dignity.
He clicks the mic with the same thumb he uses to test trigger pull. "South side. Two guards, both bored. Seven-minute loop, and they shave it when they talk." He drags the binoculars a hair to the right, finds the side door, finds the blind spot bleeding out behind the camera pole. "Dead angle behind the service entry. That's our throat."
Static answers him—then Tara's voice, low enough to pass for wind. "Copy. I'm spinning up the system check. Five minutes, we do the cat."
Limar lets the binoculars drop to his chest. For a second he just listens—to the hush of money at work, to the van's engine ticking as it cools, to the sound he hears inside his own mouth when he's about to lie to a machine. "You ever notice," he says to no one in particular, "that rich doors never creak? They just… open."
No one answers. Good. He prefers being the only one to hear himself think when he's this close to a mistake.
He lifts the glass again. The guards walk like men on break in a story about war, not war itself. One scratches his beard and pretends he's not checking the time. The other watches his reflection in the window to make sure he still exists.
"Seven minutes," Limar repeats, and hears the math settle in his bones. "Perfect."
Across the street and a floor above the world, Tara sits cross-legged on a roof that's been designed to frighten pigeons and encourage drones. The laptop warms her thighs through the fabric; the wind keeps trying to kiss sweat off her lip. She tucks hair behind an ear with the same fingertip she uses to nudge a waveform into compliance.
On her screen the neighborhood is a nervous system: lines that pulse, nodes that whisper, gates that forget themselves on schedule. She rides the edge between empathy and intrusion—talk to me, she thinks at the system, and I won't have to hurt you.
"Okay," she says into the mic, voice a mechanic's lullaby. "On my click, we convince a very expensive house that a very cheap cat just ruined somebody's day."
She closes her eyes, not for drama but because vision lies when the important part happens underneath. "One."
Her fingers smooth a crescendo and knife it.
"Two."
Something soft trips in the network: a heartbeat missing, a cough politely hidden in a fist.
"Three."
Limar watches the street. Two guards jolt like a scene partner dropped a line. They speak into sleeves. One points into the hedge. The other sighs like a man who has become his father and doesn't know when it happened. They go to the bush with the duty of men who chose this job on purpose.
Tara opens her eyes and smiles without showing the teeth. "Three minutes to security," she says. "Five more and the municipal heroes arrive to keep the world safe from fur. You boys remember to send flowers to my enormous brain."
Limar laughs once, short. "I'll knit it a sweater." He shifts the binoculars to watch the moment security's attention turns into absence. "South door is naked. Pretty as a confession."
"Hold." Tara's fingers dance—spoof, delay, a quiet lie woven into the house's mood. "We're not cracking. We're seducing."
Limar's gum slows. He imagines the house as something that wants to be left alone and hates being admired. "Baby, I'm a gentleman," he says. "I'll lie first."
Dusk edges down like a decision. Breuk and Tev are already in it. They've walked the block twice without looking like they've walked at all. You learn the cadence of a neighborhood by the way it complains: the hiss of an espresso machine at the corner kiosk, the whine of a courier drone cheating the wind, the too-even footfalls of a private medic on her way to a call she wouldn't take if the patient's money were less convincing.
Two staffers exit the side gate: an older man with a rolled umbrella and the posture of a butler who has seen a hundred weddings and buried the worst of them; a younger woman with flats in a tote and party heels on, eyes bright the way glass is bright.
Breuk lights a cigarette, lets the flame paint the scar at his jaw for a half-second. He watches them like he watches the reactor's flicker: knowing what it means and refusing to say it out loud.
"The old one's a bed-before-the-news guy," he says. "Lights out, ten."
Tev scratches something in a small book, pencil nub working like a metronome. He's too big for subtlety and too careful for any other kind. "And her?"
"Plans," Breuk says, ash dropping like punctuation. "Good for us."
Tev grunts—a sound that stands in for a dozen sentences. "So we know the flows." He keeps writing: times, loops, how long it takes a gate to remember it's locked, which side streets buy privacy with bad lighting. "All that's left is when."
"Tonight," Breuk says.
Tev doesn't look up. "Quick to the trigger."
"Slow hand on the safety," Breuk answers. He watches the young woman tip her head at the doorman, say something bright, go light over the curb. He feels the pull toward a future in which nothing goes wrong and ignores it like hunger. "We keep chasing tomorrow, it'll hear us coming."
Tev flips the book shut and pockets it. "Lig good?" he asks.
Breuk takes a beat too long. The word good rolls around in his mouth like a chipped tooth. "He'll be where he needs to be."
Tev hears the space in the reply and doesn't stick his hand in it. "All right."
They fall silent, the way men do when talk becomes a liability. A woman in a white coat passes them, checking her wrist for news that isn't. The streetlight above them clicks into its dimmer self.
In Breuk's ear, Tara yawns into the line, the sound edged with wires. "Security's back inside, and the cat has been apprehended and warned about its behavior." She pauses. "South door buys lies for ten minutes. After that, our story has to be better than theirs."
"Ten's enough," Breuk says.
"For who?" Tara says.
"For us," Breuk says, which is not an answer and is exactly the answer.
Limar's voice cuts in, tinny with held breath. "Got a window. Guard loop is sloppier in the second hour. One checks his reflection in the glass. The other checks his soul and finds nothing. Door, two-step. Camera, blind for three if you hug the wall like you love it."
"Love is complicated," Tara says.
Breuk exhales smoke through his nose. He imagines the villa from the inside: the hallway that's more echo than air, the gallery with the case that thinks, the soft carpet that turns men's feet into polite ghosts. He imagines the necklace, the way Kane described it without selling it, the way the word recognize crawled up his spine and stayed there with cold fingers.
"Limar," he says, "walk me through the jam again."
"Simple," Limar says, delighted to be useful in the particular way he loves. "We give the house a cold. It sneezes and forgets it had a nose for exactly ten minutes." He taps the panel like it's an animal he's trained and won't admit he loves. "You step where I tell you and the cameras nod off. You step where I forgot to tell you and Tara writes your eulogy to a beat."
Tara snorts. "My eulogies are a gift."
"Put a bow on mine," Limar says.
Tev shifts his weight; the brick doesn't mind. "You ever think," he says, "about people inside places like that? You can hear the music if you put your ear to the glass."
"I think about the locks," Breuk says. "Music's just what they hum while they count keys."
"Poetry," Tara says. "Maybe there's hope for you."
"Don't bet money you can't lose," Breuk says, but the corner of his mouth tilts.
Across the way, the side door yawns for a delivery cart, then forgets to close all the way. A maid's cart takes a patient eternity to roll through. A man in a suit that cost more than a life gestures with two fingers and loses the argument with the night.
Limar says, softly, "It's breathing for us."
Something moves behind Breuk's eyes—the old weight, the old ledger. Jobs that sound perfect aren't. Lig's line, living in his head rent-free. Kane showing up with a map that fit too well. The way the cult head smiled without his mouth and how that smile had found him from a catwalk far away.
"Tonight," he says again, and this time it's not a schedule. It's a sentence.
In another life, he would've gone home.
In this one, he tastes the word recognize and doesn't spit.
Limar pops a fresh piece of gum and grins at nothing. "Knew you'd say that."
"Shut up and count," Tara says, but there's warmth in it. She's already moving in her head through the crawlspace, turning her shoulders to fit the ribs of the house, kissing wires into telling her their names.
Tev checks the time and the sky that isn't a sky. "We do this clean," he says. "No extras."
Breuk flicks ash and watches it fall like a tiny man who never had a chance. "Clean," he says.
If the city had a face, it would be pressed to the glass, breath fogging the pane, eyes wide for once. In the corner where reflections misbehave, he sees a version of himself walk the corridor and not turn back.
Limar: "Seven-minute loop resets. Door's flirting."