Nygen Heights sat on the far side of Vord City.

The district did not have a clean beginning. There was no grand sign announcing its boundaries. Buildings simply became older. Sidewalks cracked. Storefronts acquired metal bars. Streetlights became less reliable.

Then, somewhere along the way, the city stopped repairing things altogether.

Nygen Heights was what happened when poverty lasted long enough to become architecture.

Rows of brownstones lined narrow streets, many divided into apartments decades earlier. Some remained beautiful beneath the neglect—arched windows, carved stone lintels, iron railings, narrow stoops.

Others leaned toward neighboring buildings like exhausted bodies holding one another upright.

Boarded windows appeared beside occupied ones.

Vacant buildings stood beside crowded apartments.

Graffiti covered brick walls beneath faded murals.

Corner stores operated behind thick plexiglass.

Pawnshops remained open late.

Laundromats glowed through the night.

Street vendors knew which corners belonged to whom.

Children learned early which alleys shortened the walk home and which ones were never worth the risk.

Police entered Nygen Heights in groups.

They rarely lingered.

Ambulances came when called.

Eventually.

Everyone living there understood the difference between those two statements.

And yet Nygen Heights was not empty of community.

People knew one another.

The woman downstairs accepted packages for half the building.

Someone’s grandmother watched children from her window.

Shopkeepers extended credit they pretended wasn’t credit.

Neighbors noticed unfamiliar cars.

They noticed unfamiliar men more.

Nygen Heights survived because the people abandoned by Vord City had become very good at keeping one another alive.

That was why Dai Mercer stayed.

55th Street and High

Dai lived at 55th Street and High Street, in a worn brownstone wedged into the dense heart of Nygen Heights.

The building looked like somewhere a sensible person would avoid.

Dai considered that useful.

Cracked steps led to the entrance. The mailboxes had been vandalized more than once. The entry panel worked selectively. Metal bars protected nearby storefronts, and the pawnshop down the block had enough security cameras to monitor half the intersection.

Inside Dai’s apartment, the neighborhood changed.

Everything had a place.

The floors were clean.

The locks worked.

Food remained in the cupboards.

Extra blankets were folded away.

Money existed where someone could reach it quickly.

A bag could be packed in minutes.

Dai understood something Vord City’s wealthier residents rarely needed to learn:

Safety was not a feeling.

It was preparation.

Years earlier, when Dai and Femi were younger, Dai had pushed Femi’s wheelchair through the halls of a children’s hospital.

Now, when Femi needed somewhere to disappear, there was only one place in Vord City she trusted enough to seek.

Nygen Heights.

Dai.

Home was too generous a word.

Refuge was better.

Six blocks from Nygen Heights stood one of Vord City’s stranger contradictions.

The Hidden Fantasy Hotel belonged to the glittering version of Vord.

Its guests arrived beneath an illuminated entrance and stepped into a world designed to make the city outside disappear. Polished floors. Expensive fixtures. Uniformed staff. Private rooms. Formal events. Kitchens operating with the precision of machinery.

Six blocks.

That was all that separated it from Nygen Heights.

Six blocks between people paying for luxury and people deciding whether rent or food mattered more that week.

Dai Mercer crossed that distance regularly.

She worked at Hidden Fantasy as a housekeeper.

Her uniform made her nearly invisible to the people occupying the rooms she cleaned. She changed sheets, emptied wastebaskets, replaced towels, polished bathrooms, and quietly learned what wealthy people left behind when they believed no one important was watching.

Later, Femi would cross those same six blocks.

Except Vord City would not know her as Femi.

It would know her as Mira Dell.

Mira worked in the Hidden Fantasy kitchens as a chef.

A kitchen suited her.

Knives struck cutting boards.

Pans hissed.

Orders appeared.

Meals disappeared.

Communication could happen through movement, timing, memory, and hands.

Work began.

Work ended.

No one needed her history to plate dinner.

At the hotel, Mira Dell could become another employee moving through service corridors.

At Dai’s apartment, she could become Femi again.

And between them lay six blocks of Vord City.

Six blocks she learned intimately.

Every alley.

Every bus stop.

Every storefront.

Every place she could turn if someone followed her.

People sometimes described Vord as divided between rich and poor.

It wasn’t.

The two cities occupied the same streets.

A luxury tower could rise above a tent encampment.

A chauffeured car could stop at a light beside someone carrying everything they owned.

A hotel guest could spend more on one evening than the woman cleaning the room earned in weeks.

The wealthy did not live somewhere else.

They lived above.

That was Vord City’s defining image:

Glass towers glittering overhead.

Human beings sleeping beneath them.

For Femi, that contradiction made the city useful.

Ravenside knew her.

Wolfwater remembered her.

Helix knew the way she walked, the food she cooked, the room she slept in, and the silence she carried.

Vord knew nothing.

A woman could step off a bus with very little money and disappear among millions.

She could become another face passing beneath a broken streetlight.

Another employee entering through the service doors of an expensive hotel.

Another woman climbing the cracked steps of a brownstone at 55th and High.

Another name written on a work schedule.

Mira Dell.

Six blocks from Dai Mercer.

Hidden inside one of the largest cities in the country.

Above her, Vord glittered.

Below, the forgotten continued living.

And somewhere between those two worlds, Femi disappeared.