Her first night as Justice, she tracked a low-level mule named Dimitri by piggybacking on his smart glasses' optical feed. She watched through his eyes as he handed a backpack full of cash to a man in a wool coat—Mallory's bagman. She didn't arrest him. She couldn't. She had no hands in the physical world. So she did something better.

When the real cops arrived fifteen minutes later, they found Mallory zip-tied to a support beam, a confession already transcribed on his own phone, and a black drone with a blonde stripe sitting silently in the corner. Its battery was dead. Its memory core was wiped.

Dimitri walked.

The drone was clunky, loud, and painted caution yellow. Nora stripped the panels, repainted it matte black, and jury-rigged a voice modulator. By the time she rolled into the customs tunnel beneath Pier 17, she wasn't a drone anymore. She was —a seven-foot-tall, one-hundred-and-fifty-pound angel of algorithmic fury, her synthetic voice echoing off the wet concrete.

But to move through the underworld's digital architecture, she couldn't look like a cop. She had to look like a ghost. And ghosts, she learned quickly, had to be willing to haunt.

She hit download .

She never answered the email.