The metal spine of the billboard was slick as hell.
Joshua's sneaker skidded half an inch when he landed on it, one hand snapping out on instinct, fingers catching cold frame before his weight could slide wrong. The backpack on his shoulders slammed into his back with a hard thunk. Cash. Hard drives. A backup phone. Little ugly pieces of another ugly man's life.
He stayed low for one second, rain tapping his hoodie, chest working.
Then he looked back.
Three floors up and across the narrow dark cut between buildings, the penthouse windows still glowed warm and expensive. Floor-to-ceiling glass. Gold light. White curtains. Art on the walls that probably cost more than his whole building back in the Bronx. Mateo Valdés liked that kind of shit. Clean money on the surface. Rot underneath.
Joshua stared at the windows another second.
"Yeah," he muttered. "Cry about it."
The city spread around him in wet black and chrome.
Midnight traffic still moved below like the street didn't owe anybody silence. Headlights smeared across the avenue. A bus hissed at the curb. Somewhere farther down, somebody was yelling out a car window, voice bouncing off glass and stone. Manhattan never really shut up. It just changed which kind of noise was winning.
Joshua pushed up from his crouch and moved along the billboard frame, balanced easy, shoulders loose now that the hard part was over.
Well. Mostly over.
He reached the wider section behind the giant ad panel and ducked into shadow. The perfume model on the front side of the billboard smiled down at the avenue like she had no idea a Dominican kid from the Bronx was behind her with half a predator's digital life in his bag.
Joshua dropped the backpack off one shoulder and unzipped it.
Rubber-banded cash.
Two encrypted drives.
One smaller black drive.
Backup phone.
Memory cards.
He touched each one fast, checking by feel more than sight.
Still there.
Good.
Rain ticked off the billboard skin overhead. Wind pressed his hoodie lightly against his arms, enough to remind him he was high up, wet, and one bad move from making tomorrow's local news in a way he personally wouldn't enjoy.
His phone buzzed in his pocket.
Joshua pulled it out.
Zuleyka: You coming back tonight or not
Zuleyka: Answer me
Zuleyka: And don't lie either
He stared at the screen, rain dotting the glass.
A second buzz.
Tory: U dead?
Tory: Or u still out here moving like batman wit no salary
Joshua snorted once through his nose.
Then another text came in.
Tory: Hit me when u done
Tory: I'm outside anyway
Outside anyway.
Of course he was.
Joshua typed with one thumb.
Joshua: I'm good
Joshua: Give me a minute
He erased that.
Typed again.
Joshua: On my way
Sent.
Then Zuleyka again.
Zuleyka: Adriel still up asking for you
Zuleyka: So what's good
Joshua looked over the edge of the billboard.
The avenue below looked fake from up here. Too far. Too clean in shape. Like if somebody reached two fingers down from the sky they could pinch whole lanes of traffic between them.
He typed slower.
Joshua: Tell him go to sleep
Joshua: I'm coming
He stared at that one too.
Then sent it.
He slid the phone back into his pocket and zipped the bag.
On the roof behind him, air units hummed low and steady. Water ran in little silver lines along the gravel and down the lip of the building. There was another jump ahead of him if he wanted the cleaner route home. Not too bad. Wider than comfortable in the rain, but not bad. His body had already mapped it out.
He stepped back from the billboard edge and rolled his shoulders once.
Under the hoodie, around his neck, the long cloth sat warm from his skin. He touched it without thinking. Thumb rubbed the fabric once.
Then his hand dropped.
Not now.
He took one step.
The street below kept doing too much.
Sirens far off.
Music thumping from somewhere he couldn't see.
A couple under an awning arguing like they were the only two people left in New York.
Then, all at once, the city changed.
Not a blackout.
That would've made sense.
This didn't.
Every screen Joshua could see cut at the same time.
The giant ad below him.
The store displays across the avenue.
A tower screen farther up the block.
A sports bar television through a second-floor window.
A bus-stop panel.
A bank lobby monitor.
A phone in some guy's hand down on the sidewalk.
All of them.
Same time.
Same image.
Joshua froze.
Across the avenue, a fifty-foot cosmetics ad vanished and became grainy live footage of people he'd never seen before standing in some dark place that absolutely was not Earth.
The street reacted in pieces.
A woman below stopped walking mid-step.
A driver leaned out his window.
Somebody yelled, "Yo, what the fuck?"
Joshua's eyes narrowed.
The footage shook like handheld, except wrong. Too clear and too dirty at the same time. About thirty people. Maybe. Some standing. Some stumbling. One screaming already. Light falling from somewhere high and broken. Concrete. Metal. A darkness behind them that didn't feel like ordinary darkness.
No logo.
No news banner.
No prank title.
No explanation.
Just live fear on every screen in the city.
One of the people on the feed turned, face white with panic, and Joshua felt something weird and ugly slide down his spine.
This ain't a stream, he thought.
Below him, the whole avenue was slowing.
Cars.
People.
Noise.
Like the city itself had leaned toward the screens.
His phone buzzed hard in his pocket again. Then again. Then again.
He ignored it.
On the screen, one of the strangers started crying, "Where are we? Where are we?"
Another was backing away from something off-frame.
A man in a suit on the sidewalk below Joshua laughed once. Not because it was funny. Because his brain didn't know what else to do.
Then all the hairs on Joshua's arms stood up.
The feeling came first.
Not pain.
Not sound.
A violent wrongness.
Like the exact second before a foot lands somewhere it shouldn't.
Joshua spun—
—and the city was gone.
No fall.
No light tunnel.
No time to brace.
One breath on a Manhattan rooftop with rain on his hoodie and stolen cash on his back.
The next—
concrete under both feet.
Cold air.
A smell like wet metal, dust, oil, old mildew, and something stale enough to feel trapped.
Joshua's head jerked up.
The backpack was still on him.
His hoodie too.
His phone gone dead in his pocket.
And around him—
people.
A lot of them.
Too many voices at once.
"What the fuck is this?"
"Where are we?"
"Yo—yo, where's my wife?"
A child crying.
Not a child, Joshua realized a second later.
A grown woman.
The place around them looked like a shopping center somebody had gutted and left to rot under a parking structure.
Broken escalator ahead.
Shuttered storefronts.
Concrete ramps disappearing into dim levels.
A tram rail line overhead, dead and black.
Emergency lights weak in the distance.
The ceiling too high in some places and way too low in others.
Joshua turned slow, eyes moving.
Twenty-nine other people.
Maybe thirty with him.
Different faces. Different clothes. Different ages. Different kinds of fear.
And above them, bolted crooked into a support beam where no sign should've been, old dead letters flickered once in a failing wash of red:
SOUTH GATE CENTRE
Nobody had their phone light on.
Nobody was calling out to the city anymore.
Nobody was laughing.
Because the worst part wasn't where they were.
The worst part was what they were all starting to understand at the same time.
They had been the people on the screens.
And somewhere, very far away, the whole world was watching.