Chapter 15: The Mission Zara Shouldn't Lead

The reassignment order came through a tributary labor office in the way most bad things came through tributary labor offices: paperwork. Three pages of it, routed through Marcus's bribed contact at the utility assignment registry at 7:14 on a Thursday morning, formatted in the Kree administrative standard that had replaced federal documentation nine years ago. Clean columns. Sequential numbering. An effective date of Saturday.

Marcus read it twice before he picked up the handset.

Zara was there in eleven minutes. She had been running a checkpoint timing drill with two of the newer runners in the Sullivan corridor, and she arrived still wearing the overlay jacket she used for that kind of surface work, the one with the Kree waste management logo on the breast pocket that Vasquez had fabricated eighteen months ago. She didn't take it off. She read the document standing up, which was how she read things she already knew were going to require immediate action.