New York at three in the morning isn't the city depicted in the guidebooks. It's a crust of spent neon, a metallic heartbeat echoed in the drawers of cheap hotels and empty subway entrances. In Soho, electric blinds lower like eyelids over shop windows, and the old brick buildings retain the warmth of the days as if preserving whispers. Outside it was drizzling-that fine rain that never cleans anything-and the reflection of a laundromat sign stretched out in the puddle in front of the doorway; inside, on an eighth-floor apartment with a rusty fire escape, there's an apartment with too many screens and too little order. Ethan Cross lived there. The place smelled of stale coffee and electricity. A swing-arm desk lamp cast a tiny glow that tried to compete with the main screen: a pale, vivid rectangle where lines of text moved like fish on the shore. There were at least five monitors: one for email, another for old terminals that no one had named in years, another for the connection map-that mesh Ethan liked to look at when nothing physical satisfied him-and two more where windows were recreated with tabs that seemed to multiply of their own accord.
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