Lev Rosen - Depth

SHE HAD THE SHOT. It was lined up. She just needed to wait for the fog to clear. And it was going to clear in a moment. She could read the swirls of it, how it breathed and parted. New York City fog was lazy, like cigarette smoke.

A small vibration in her right ear. She clenched her jaw and waited. The fog didn’t clear. Her ear vibrated again. She sighed and whispered, “Phone ID.” A holo-projection beamed out from her earpiece, displaying a small screen in the corner of her vision. She glanced at it, and as she did the fog swirled open for less than a heartbeat, then closed like a lover’s kiss. She ground her teeth. Caroline Khan , read the display. “Answer,” she told the phone.

“I’m working,” Simone said softly. She was on a rooftop, four stories above her targets, and they were in a boat below her, but she was careful—voices could carry out here.

“I sent you a present,” Caroline said, her low voice smug. “You’re going to want to thank me.”

“You just made me miss my shot,” Simone said, “so let’s call it even.”

“No,” Caroline responded without a hint of guilt, “it’s not my fault you don’t turn your phone off while stalking.”

“Stalking is what people do for fun,” Simone said. “Following a cheating husband to get photos of him with his special friend is business.”

“Don’t try to convince me it isn’t fun for you, too.”

Simone rolled her eyes and squatted down, letting the camera hang low in her arm. She leaned against the railing enclosing the roof.

“Why am I going to owe you?” Simone asked.

“I sent some business your way. Attractive business.”

“The business, or the client?”

“The client is attractive, the business is lucrative and easy.”

“Is this going to be a long conversation?”

“Maybe,” Caroline said after a moment. “But only because I’ll be laughing a lot.”

“Can I call you later, then?”

“Just meet me at Undertow when you’ve got the money shot. Call if you still don’t have it by eleven.”

“Will do,” Simone said, rising back up and trying to point her camera in what she thought was the right direction. “Later.”

Simone touched the earpiece to turn it off. The fog rolled out for a moment, and the boat below her became perfectly clear. It was a floating restaurant, permanently moored, with a large, open deck made of wood, covered with tables and chairs. Fancy, too: white linens, low lighting, and waiters in tuxes. The couple she was looking for was sitting in a corner, far from the entry bridge. He, Simone knew, was Henry St. Michel, whose wife had hired Simone to tail him. She was a blonde and definitely not Henry’s wife. Most cheating spouses cheated with blondes.

She snapped a photo, her camera silently capturing Henry and The Blonde. The fog rolled back in, blocking her view. Simone looked at the photo she had just taken. They were sitting across a round table from each other. The Blonde’s back was to Simone, but Henry was fairly clear in the shot. He didn’t have a romantic expression; he had a nervous one. Simone zoomed on the camera’s display, taking a closer look at Henry. He was in his fifties, pudgy, balding, goatee, glasses. In the photo, his brow was furrowed into a stack of skittish creases. Simone aimed her camera again and waited for the fog to clear. When it did, she held down the release, taking about a dozen more shots before the fog closed around her. The images in her camera did not become any more romantic. They showed Henry taking an envelope out of his jacket and passing it across the table to The Blonde. She slipped it into her purse without looking inside. Then the waiter came over and took their order.

Simone rubbed at the back of her neck. Ms. St. Michel had only suspected an affair when she hired Simone. Her exact request was to find out what her husband was up to. From the look of it, it wasn’t an affair, but it was still suspicious. Even if the envelope was just cash, no one used cash anymore unless they had to, and passing it across the table in an unmarked envelope didn’t exactly make it seem aboveboard.

Simone squatted down and leaned on the rail again. She needed a shot of The Blonde’s face, but she couldn’t get it from this angle. She pressed a button, and the camera shrank down to the size of a business card, which she slipped into her trenchcoat sleeve. Then she stood and walked to the stairs at the other end of the roof, glancing out briefly before heading down.

She was on the roof of a twenty-four-story building, so the ocean lay four stories down, churning just below the twenty-first floor. The fog was thick, but she could hear the waves lapping at the other buildings around her, and the worn wooden bridges that connected them to one another and to the permanently moored boats that made up New York City. New York, city of bridges and boats. The green light of algae generators pulsed through the fog here and there, giving the view an eerie glow and, through it, the silhouette of the skyline bursting from the sea. It wasn’t the iconic skyline of the past—just the top, with wide plains of ocean between crumbling towers, and large boats floating low on the horizon, like a steel archipelago. Waves left streaks of yellowed foam like a sea chart against the buildings and boats. Everything smelled and tasted of salt.

Simone walked down to the twenty-first floor and stepped onto a bridge via a large window that had been converted into a door. Most of the city’s bridges clung to the buildings, wrapped around their exterior walls and branching off into “streets” that connected nearby buildings or boats. Sometimes the bridges were nice, well kept, wide enough for many people. Sometimes, they were like the bridge Simone was walking on now—creaking wood planks hovering over a hungrily lapping ocean. The banisters were splintery, so Simone didn’t touch them. Waves splashed at her ankles, but she had grown up here. She was used to it.

New York, though technically still part of the United States, had long begun to consider itself its own country, hundreds of miles from the Chicago coastline and the conservative, religious mainland. The Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial had been airlifted to Salt Lake City, but no one tried moving New York. All the other drowned cities, like DC and Boston, were graveyards now—spires and flat tops of buildings tilting out unevenly from under the water like old headstones. Not New York. Though some older buildings had been worn away by the waves, others, retrofitted and laminated in that technological wonder Glassteel, stayed where they were as the ocean rose, closing off the bottom floors as they filled with water. There were newer buildings, too, designed to withstand the water, and decommissioned boats clever entrepreneurs had bought and moored around the city. There were a million New Yorkers left, and they were stubborn. They built the bridges themselves, and everyone bought personal algae generators and desalination filters for their apartments, stringing them out the windows into the sea. They reassembled their city. They stayed.

Simone walked the bridges that took her to the boat-restaurant’s entrance, a well-preserved metal ramp that connected the bridge to the deck of the ship. The bridge here was wider and had a few lamps rising up and over it, like old street lamps, but with tubes that went down into the ocean to small algae generators that pulled the bright green stuff up and converted it to electricity. The railings were high enough, and solid metal, so the waves seldom splashed on the bridge in calm weather. A taxi-boat stand bobbed just down the bridge. This was a nice area. Well kept.