Empire City

by Matt Gallagher

  Mia adjusted her sports bra and glanced at her watch. A mile in, which meant her warm-up was over. She lengthened out her strides.

  She turned north along a waterfront path, moving into the bike lane to dodge fallen tree branches and loose rocks. Other than the occasional taxi striking through the predawn and a man in rags watching the city from a bench, she was alone. The wharf across the river jutted out like a broken jawbone, suggesting a past when its docks did more than shuttle around office workers and tourists.

  The city changed like a photo album, slowly and slowly and then all in a rush. Repair shops became delis. Parking garages became art studios. In the water a flotilla of coast guard barges that’d been restored as restaurants and pubs drifted to and fro. Steel and glass high-rises gave way to the architecture of the last century, rowhouses and squatty brick apartments. The streets narrowed, a few dotted by tidy cobblestone. The waterfront path leveled off, though Mia kept her strides long. She knew an incline awaited. She wanted to meet it in force.

  Sunrise arrived somewhere between miles three and four, stained-glass clouds chipping the sky. Mia passed a vomiting young man in a sport jacket too large for him. Probably an intern for one of the banks, she thought, before turning around to make sure it wasn’t one of hers.

  “Call in sick!” she shouted. He raised his fist and managed a weak “Defy!” before purging again. The motto of the old radicals’ caucus in Congress. Funny, Mia thought.

  Another mile on, Mia ran into a short concrete tunnel. The tunnel lay underneath an abandoned railway line. Sunlight filled it with a fierce yellow shine. Around ten feet long, the sides and top of it had been covered in graffiti, dozens and dozens of circles of different colors and sizes. Just about every inch of available concrete had been tagged, leaving a sort of rainbow mosaic. Each of the circles contained three arrows pointing down and to the left. The job was fresh—Mia could tell by the tint to the spray paint. She came to a stop in the center of the tunnel, her breaths sharp but controlled. She rubbed a hand against a small purple circle. It smeared across her palm.

  I know what this is, Mia thought, looking at her palm, then at the purple circle, sifting through her mind to place where. It took a few seconds, but she remembered a course in modern European history at Dupont, and this shape and question from the final exam.

  The antifascist sign, she thought. From Nazi Germany.

  A gust swept through the tunnel, and Mia smelled storm from the night before. She fought off the urge to shiver. It was going to be a cold summer day.

  * * *

  Most mornings Mia turned around and headed home on the same pathway, but the tunnel had spooked her. She pushed east and then south instead, running the sidewalks. The light and the city rose slow, together. A medley of urban noise was beginning to tune and it sounded mostly like construction din. There was order within the mayhem; one just needed to know the refrains. Mia did. She made it back to her apartment building on time, stopping only to remove her running leg before showering and dressing for work. She was back out her front door sixteen minutes later.

  The air had turned and smelled of humid dew. Mia decided to walk through Vietnam Victory Square. Under the gaze of the Four Legionnaires sculpture, a couple of kids had waded into the fountain, laughing while splashing water at each other. Across from them, a tour group stood in front of the grand white marble wall with the simple words: “Praise to the Victors/In Honor of the Brave Men who went forth to Vietnam/1955–1981.” The guide was explaining why the inscription stopped there, despite the insurgency continuing after in parts of the north. He was stumbling through the history and Mia wanted to intervene. Because wars have to end, she thought. Just tell them that.

  Coffee-charged angst and white-collar id crackled along the streets, bankers and lawyers and digital communications associates hustling to be at their desks before the workday siren sounded. As she turned onto Wall Street, Mia passed the brownstone Trinity Church she attended every month or so. She’d considered herself an atheist since her tour to Albania, but she still appreciated the ceremony of church and the sense of renewal it allowed for. Her family had fled to America in 1620 for that ceremony and sense of renewal. She wouldn’t give up that heritage for something as banal as not believing.

  Then there was Jesse. “Jesus’s heroin needle,” he liked calling Trinity’s Gothic steeple. The church’s adjacent cemetery, where a slew of American founding fathers and Union generals from the Civil War rested? “A yard of goy bones.”

  And he’s all mine, Mia thought. Trinity was an option for their wedding, though her family wanted it held in Connecticut. One more decision that she needed to make, and soon.

  Mia’s bank was located in the Westmoreland Plaza, a mass of skyscrapers bundled together at the end of the island. As she neared it, a vast, bright fire engine came into view, its lights twirling and flashing like a hallucination. A row of police barricades separated the vehicle from the street, uniformed officers turning away confused citizens trying to get to work. Mia joined the crowd.

  “No one’s allowed in the plaza today,” a cop was saying, not for the first time. “And yes, that includes you.” His eyes lingered on Mia’s blouse, and she stared at him flatly until he looked away. Her grandmother had taught her how to do that on her fourteenth birthday. It worked in Empire City boardrooms just as well as it had in aircraft hangars along the far edges of the world.

  “Ms. Tucker.” A man shaped like a square wearing a rumpled dress shirt and overlong tie called to her from a corner of the barricades, close to a large bronze globe. It was the security director of her bank. He looked wired to Mia, even eager.

  “Ms. Tucker,” he repeated. “The office is closed today. Your father sent out a message to everyone—work from home, as you can.”

  “Hadn’t checked my email yet.” This didn’t make any sense. The office, as far as Mia knew, had never closed. Finance didn’t “work from home.” That was for other people, other jobs. “What’s going on?”

  “I shouldn’t say,” he said, in a tone that suggested he very much wanted to.

  “Mum’s the word,” Mia promised. “I’ll be finding out, anyhow.”

  “A threat,” the security director said, his voice low and hushed. “Whole plaza. Homeland marshals got it last night.”

  “Oh.” There’d been a few lockdowns in Empire City over the years, for both real and false alarms, but Mia couldn’t recall any of them shutting down a main cog of the Finance District. “Must be some kind of threat.”

  The security director looked out the corner of his eye to make sure no one else was listening, then pulled out his cell phone and read.

  WITH FIRMNESS IN THE RIGHT AS GOD GIVES US TO SEE THE RIGHT, LET US STRIVE ON TO FINISH THE WORK WE ARE IN, TO BIND UP THE NATION’S WOUNDS, TO CARE FOR HIM WHO SHALL HAVE BORNE THE BATTLE.

  MAYDAY, MAYDAY. FROM THE ASHES, HOLY REDEMPTION.

  “Mean anything to you?”

  Mia shook her head.

  “The first part’s from a speech Abraham Lincoln gave. Used to be the motto of the old Veterans Administration. The second part… I don’t know. The distress signal or something.”

  Mia contemplated that. “There’s a Council of Victors office down here. Some crazy’s angry about the colonies again?” She tried not to laugh but couldn’t help it. “It all needs to be taken seriously, of course. But shut down the plaza?”

  The security director shrugged. “Federals think it means something. The Mayday thing, especially.”

  “I see,” Mia said, wondering if this was the Bureau’s emergency, and if so, why Jesse hadn’t said anything to her. He worked intel analysis, not counterterrorism. Though he hadn’t always been behind a desk.

  Mia texted him a simple “?” as she walked home, feeling a little apprehensive and a lot aimless. She owed an IPO risk assessment to her department head by the end of the day, a transaction report to a client by the end of the week, and a regulatory review to her father by the end of th
e month. She’d traded in the stakes of investment banking for the tedium of compliance, a decision that had benefited her both personally and professionally. Still, she felt little remorse when she arrived home and turned on the television instead of sitting at the kitchen counter. The thing about compliance was that it was always there. It would wait. It always did.

  The threat on Westmoreland Plaza had reached the news, sort of. It was being reported as a gas leak. “Empire Energy and Grid workers have identified the leak’s source and shut it off,” the newscaster assured the screen. “Repair is under way.”

  Typical media, Mia thought. Passing along spoon-fed lies instead of actual journalism.

  In national news, the president had announced his run for another term at the Freedom Infinity island base in the Mediterranean. Surrounded by soldiers, expeditionary privateers, and legionnaires, he argued that the nation’s war on terror took priority over the traditions of the republic. He cited FDR and World War II and Nixon and Vietnam. Mia wasn’t sure about that but she also thought that the hysteria about him becoming an American tyrant was too much. Things hadn’t always been this divisive, she believed that. She thought of General Collins’s offer again.

  At the World Court, the Abu Abdallah trial limped into its thirty first week. After the Balkan witnesses had been killed with ricin pens, the man had gone on a hunger strike, falling into diabetic shock that led to a medically induced coma for the health of the brain. He’d been woken weeks later, claiming his name was Bjorn van der Hoedemaker from the small Dutch town of Volendam. Most doctors were certain he was lying, but that hadn’t stopped the wild protests of innocence during proceedings. The tribunal was openly mulling a mistrial and Arabia had requested he be extradited there.

  “What a dang mess,” the newscaster said, punctuating with a smack of the lips.

  Something hard and solid thumped against the kitchen window. Mia muted the television and heard trilling. Outside the window, a stunned bird was regaining its feet on the back of the air conditioner Jesse had installed for the summer. She considered it a waste of money and electricity and refused to run it when she was home. Their last power bill had revealed her beloved held no such inhibitions.

  The bird was small and light brown and didn’t appear seriously injured. It blinked at her through the pane with jade dark eyes. Mia figured it a sparrow and was still admiring it as she remembered how much her stepmother Linda loathed sparrows for what they did to other birds in her flower garden. “Piranhas with wings,” Linda had called them. Which was dramatic. Still, Mia had seen the fallout of a sparrow’s presence: the pecked-out brains of a mother chickadee on their front lawn remained her most fixed memory from second grade.

  Mia glimpsed the progressing nest wedged between the bottom of the air conditioner and the window ledge. Something needed to be done.

  She fetched a broom from a hallway closet and was working out how to open the window and chase off the sparrow when the still-muted television screen glowed like a halo with BREAKING NEWS. That got her to stop and watch. The superhuman profile of Pete Swenson got her to find the volume.

  “A railroad train crashed at the transportation hub in the Old Navy Yard district during morning rush, injuring more than sixty people and disrupting the commute for thousands more,” the newscaster said.

  “The train was midtown-bound, coming in from the far townships. Officials say the train rammed into a bumping block as it pulled into the Old Navy Yard terminal around eight forty-five a.m., knocking the lead four carriages off the rails.

  “First responders were aided by three very unlikely bystanders—the Volunteers, home on leave from the Mediterranean. Here, in an exclusive cell phone video filmed on scene, you can watch them pry wounded citizens from gnarled train carriages, helping treat their injuries…”

  It was them, wearing shorts and T-shirts instead of commando uniforms. But it was them. Pete, pulling apart a metal carriage window to make an opening. Flowers, disappearing in the corner of the video, reappearing a few seconds later holding an injured citizen in his arms. And Dash, so skittish when Mia had known him, racing around the platform, delivering supplies to the paramedics.

  That month in Germany seemed a long time ago. Because it was a long time ago, Mia thought. From another life.

  Still, she couldn’t help but notice Pete. A pretty man, she remembered. Not pretty enough to make up for the rest of it, though. No one could be.

  The cell phone video ended and the newscaster reappeared on the television. “The Volunteers left before our reporters could interview them,” he said. “A War Department spokesman said that they are aware of the incident and the Volunteers’ courageous efforts.

  “The cause of the accident remains unclear. According to a railroad official speaking on the condition of anonymity…”

  Mia turned off the television. She returned to the window, but not to sweep away the sparrow’s nest. That could wait. She just wanted to look out at the morning.

  She understood why the three Rangers could use their powers and why she couldn’t. The reasoning was sound. Yet the urge to fly again was ferocious. It’d never gone away, but like an unreachable itch, she’d been able to ignore it. Until recently.

  If I did it—then they’d know. People would see a flying lady in the sky. Well, she thought, so what? Then they’d know.

  Mia was thinking again about a quick spree through the sky when the landline rang. They tended not to answer it—who used a landline, other than telemarketers and grandparents?—but it was a local number. Someone from work calling for instruction, she thought. Or to vent.

  A deep voice blitzed the receiver. “Mia Tucker.”

  “This is she.” She waited for the caller to identify himself. Nothing came. “With whom am I speaking?”

  “My name’s Roger Tran.” The man coughed into the phone and continued. “I’m with General Collins’s exploratory team.”

  “I see.” She waited and again nothing came. “As I told the general, I’d like to help out, as I can.”

  “We’re hoping to talk specifics. You wouldn’t be free today.”

  Mia thought about the IPO risk assessment that was due. “I could do the early afternoon,” she said.

  After hanging up the phone, Mia began restructuring her day. Something else tugged at her, though. The landline number. It was unlisted, she was sure of it. And it hadn’t been on the business card she’d given the general. She was sure of that, too.

  She heard Jesse’s voice in her head. “Agency spooks, though.”

  * * *

  They met in an isolated tower made of black glass at the nub of West Street. The tower housed a global investment firm notorious for hostile takeovers that Mia’s bank, among others, still blamed for bringing about the overregulatory Finance Reform Act (since overturned). Mia’s grandfather had once called the firm “the Barbarians at the Gate” (first to other city power brokers, eventually on the record with the Wall Street Journal), so it was unsurprising that Mia had never before set foot in the building. A large, abstract interpretation of a morning sky greeted her in the lobby. Above the painting hung portraits of men and women in military uniforms, their young, lean faces a collage that spelled out V-A-L-U-E-S.

  As part of its image rehabilitation, the global investment firm had hired thousands of combat veterans and opened a Warfighters Institute dedicated to medical research. Mia’s prosthetics came from a design that originated there, something that even impressed her grandfather, however begrudgingly.

  An assistant escorted Mia through security to a trim, narrow office on the sixth floor. “Mr. Tran will be with you in a moment,” the assistant said. She was alone but couldn’t shake the sense of being watched. The office’s lone window didn’t open to the outside but instead overlooked the inner atrium of the building. Mia peered into the bowels of the old enemy and found people in business clothes hustling to meetings with manila folders and laptops. She turned her attention to Tran’s desk, still feeling
that unknown watcher upon her.

  Three photographs faced outward. In the first, a man in a navy suit and tie knotted in a power Windsor stood with a blank-faced woman with their hands on three smiling children, in front of a new suburban house with a green lawn. He had neat black hair and a craggy face, something that became even more pronounced in comparison to the next photograph: a skinny Vietnamese soldier cradling a long rifle in one hand and a helmet with no strap in the other. The same man with the same sense of self, Mia decided, separated by thirty years and a life. Something between fresh and worn emerged in the third photograph, Tran in military dress blues holding up his certificate of citizenship next to a beaming Lieutenant Colonel Jackie Collins.

  About fifteen years back, Mia figured, doing the math in her head. Tran wore the crest of the International Legion on his shoulder and a Purple Heart on his chest. A hard path, the Legion, and a hard life. All for the chance—just the chance—to become a citizen.

  “Spill blood for America.” The voice behind Mia was measured and flat, startling her from the photo with the Legion’s motto. “That day happened because of General Collins. I owe much to her.”

  Tran took a seat behind his desk, and gestured for Mia to do the same across from him. He wore a similar navy suit as the one in the family photograph and a tie again knotted in a power Windsor. She expected a bit of preliminary small talk but he launched straight into campaign matters.

  “All of this is hypothetical. Exploratory,” he began. “Lehman Brothers. We’re looking for an introduction to the chair.”

  “I see.”

  “Can you provide that?”

  Mia didn’t know much about politics, but she knew this wasn’t how things were done in her world. There was a grace to the ask, a decorum. “You don’t have that access?” She raised her palms toward the atrium. “This is a connected place.”