POV: Juniper "Juno" Reyes
Juniper Reyes didn't believe in heroes.
Or at least, she didn't believe they wore capes. They wore keyboards. They wore passwords. They wore anonymity like armor.
At 17, she'd already cracked more layers of Manhattan than most people would in their entire lives. And she hadn't even graduated.
She sat in the back of a busted café in the South Bronx, her hood up, earbuds in, sipping lukewarm coffee like it was her badge of honor. The place was practically empty—only her and an old man who never stopped talking to his pigeons out front.
Perfect.
Juno's laptop was ancient on the outside and god-tier on the inside. It hummed like a secret. Wires protruded from its shell, customized ports blinking like tiny eyes. A sticky note on the screen read: "Remember to breathe, dumbass."
Her fingers flew.
Lines of code scrolled like poetry.
7:22 PM – South Bronx, Manhattan
She was in.
Somewhere deep inside a military-grade firewall, navigating like a phantom.
It wasn't for fun. It never was.
The landlord of her building had jacked the rent again. Two families evicted. One grandma had a seizure on the stairs when she found the notice.
And then she found out he had government contracts. Protected. Hidden.
But not from her.
She was looking for proof. Not to sell. Not to leak for clout.
Just enough to send it to the right activist groups. Get the man crucified in the court of public opinion. Maybe even in the real one.
That was her creed: justice through exposure. Truth through precision.
But as she dug deeper, she found something she wasn't supposed to see.
Operation: BLACKSTORM
She paused. Heart quickened. Clicked.
A database opened. Dozens of folders, all marked CLASSIFIED. Satellite scans. Energy signatures. Coordinates.
Manhattan.
She frowned.
This wasn't just some slumlord corruption.
This was military-grade science.
One folder opened to a line of code she'd never seen before. It wasn't just code. It felt alive. It pulsed.
Then her screen went black.
Every device in the café shorted.
The lights cut out.
She yanked off her earbuds.
Everything was silent.
Before the Explosion
The café owner shouted something from the back. Power outage? Grid issue? Juno's laptop was fried.
Except—it wasn't.
The screen blinked.
One line appeared in green:
WE SEE YOU
Then came the static.
A ringing so high-pitched it wasn't sound anymore—it was data screaming.
Then, 8:00 PM.
The glass windows bent inward.
The walls warped.
Juno felt like she was inside a hard drive being rewritten.
And then the world broke.
After the Explosion
She woke up to the café burning.
Not flames—static. Digital embers, blue-white, flickering in the air like broken pixels.
She was on the floor, her back arched, veins glowing faintly like old LAN cables.
Her laptop sat beside her, screen shattered, but still on.
Lines of code spilled out of it, like blood from a wound.
Outside, the city screamed.
Sirens. Helicopters. Fires. Screams.
The explosion hadn't been contained. Buildings were damaged. Streets cracked. A bridge had collapsed in midtown. Dozens were dead. Hundreds injured.
And no one knew why.
Juno staggered outside, barely conscious.
She collapsed.
Hospital
She woke up in a hospital bed.
White lights. Beeping machines. Her laptop had been confiscated.
A nurse said she'd been found with strange burns. "Electrical?" someone guessed.
She couldn't explain what had happened.
She didn't try.
She stayed quiet, got discharged two days later, and disappeared.
Day Five – The First Slip
She was in a train station.
Crowded. Noisy.
Someone bumped into her. Picked her pocket.
She spun, anger flaring.
"Give it back," she hissed.
The thief ran.
She shouted again, louder: "I SAID GIVE IT BACK!"
Something inside her snapped.
A power surge blew through the terminal.
Screens cracked.
Ticket booths shorted.
The thief fell mid-stride, dazed, clutching his head as sparks danced from his phone.
Everyone screamed.
Juno stood frozen.
She hadn't meant to.
She hadn't even tried.
Testing the Limits
Juno didn't go home. She went dark.
She found a basement in Chinatown with WiFi and power.
Then she tested.
Took a deep breath.
Touched her finger to a phone.
And disappeared.
Not in body.
In consciousness.
Her mind flooded through the circuits like lightning. She was inside the phone. The texts became veins. The photos, rooms. She could trace metadata like scent trails.
She snapped back into her body, gasping.
She wasn't just hacking anymore.
She was the hack.
She tried again.
This time, a city cam. She blinked, and her vision changed. Bird's eye. Pedestrians in motion. She could filter time. Freeze it. Watch a single man light a cigarette and rewind it just to see how his hand shook.
Digital-Spirit Merge.
She laughed. But it wasn't joy.
It was terror.
Moral Dilemma
She didn't tell anyone.
Not even her sister.
Because when she touched the city's financial grid, she realized how easy it would be.
To empty offshore accounts.
To erase debt.
To change grades. Health records. Criminal histories.
To give people the lives they should've had.
But at what cost?
She tried once.
A woman had been evicted unjustly. Juno rewrote the lease. A minute later, another family lost their housing. Balances shifted.
The code demanded equilibrium.
Rewrite one thing, and something else broke.
Just like luck. Just like reality.
Was it justice if you rewrote the world without permission?
Was it control or corruption?
She didn't know.
Final Scene
Three days later, she returned to the café.
It had been condemned. Caution tape everywhere.
She stood at the edge of the wreckage and whispered: "Restore."
The air shimmered.
For one second, the café returned to life.
Pigeons flew.
The espresso machine hummed.
The old man laughed.
And then it flickered and died again.
Not real.
Just a ghost in the data.
Juno Reyes turned and walked away.
She wasn't sure if she was a person anymore.
But she was watching.
She was everywhere.
And somewhere in the circuits of Manhattan, she had left her name:
jReyes_01: I SEE YOU TOO