The passcode attempt screen allowed five tries before the lockout.
Travis gave himself four.
The Coney Island photo's metadata was accessible without unlocking — date stamp on the image read July 4, 2019. Hughie Campbell's birthday was July 4th. He'd caught that detail years ago, reading the show like it was reference material, which was exactly what it had been. He typed the eight-digit date format first. Wrong. Six digits next — 070419. Wrong. Four digits, the year: 2019. Wrong.
He sat on the shelter cot at 7 AM with one attempt remaining and reconsidered his assumptions.
Not the date of the photo. The birthday itself. He typed 0704 and the phone opened.
The lock screen dissolved and Robin Ward's entire digital life spread out in front of him.
He didn't feel anything he had a name for. He put that in a drawer and started working.
The contacts took twenty minutes to evaluate. Acquisition Sense didn't register digital assets — it was built for physical objects, the material world, things with weight and market value. But Travis's logistics brain operated on the same principle as the ability, just using different sensors. A network was a network. You mapped the nodes, assessed the throughput, identified the highest-value connections, and figured out what moved between them.
Robin Ward had three hundred and fourteen contacts. Of those, perhaps sixty were in the New York art world — gallery owners, curators, artists, a handful of people who seemed to function as social connectors. She had a banking app showing $3,200 in savings. She had an email thread with a Brooklyn landlord suggesting she'd been two weeks from signing a new lease. She had a recurring calendar event on Thursday evenings labeled Hughie - dinner with a heart emoji that Travis deleted from his mind as irrelevant and could not entirely delete from his mind.
He transferred forty-one useful contacts to his burner — a $12 prepaid Nokia from a bodega three blocks from the shelter, purchased with the shelter-theft money at 6 AM. Robin's useful contacts were now his useful contacts. Her phone, wiped and factory reset, went into a storm drain on East 9th Street by 8 AM.
[+15 MP — SYSTEMATIC EXPLOITATION: VICTIM'S DIGITAL IDENTITY]
[CURRENT MP: 197 | CORRUPTION INDEX: 5.5%]
The New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue opened at nine. Travis was in a chair at a window terminal by nine-fifteen with a printed borough map, a ballpoint pen he'd found in the shelter common room, and the working memory of every episode of a television show that wouldn't air for another year and change.
Meta-knowledge, as it turned out, translated reasonably well into a resource map.
He started with what he knew as fixed points: Vought Tower was the hub, the center of every material and political network in this city for his purposes. The Seven were nodes — each one a nexus of corporate interest, media attention, and controlled information. The Boys were forming right now, somewhere in this city, Butcher pulling his team together in the wake of his wife, the machine warming up. Compound V was moving through supply chains Travis couldn't access yet but could begin to trace through the shipping sector if he got himself into the right warehouse.
That was the key insight his logistics training kept returning to: every powerful organization in this city moved physical things. Medical supplies, server hardware, catering contracts, construction materials. Vought didn't run on charisma — it ran on procurement. And procurement left trails in the physical world, in warehouses and freight manifests and loading docks, visible to anyone doing ordinary work at the right company.
He drew lines on the map. Vought Tower at the center, ringed by subsidiary companies he could remember, with arrows indicating likely supply chain relationships. He added names, dates — the rough shape of canon events coming in the next eighteen months like a delivery schedule he was reading backward from the destination.
Translucent in three weeks, roughly. He marked that. A-Train and Compound V scandal building. He marked that too.
It was, he recognized, deeply strange to be planning around events that hadn't happened yet while sitting in a public library in 2020 wearing a borrowed shelter sweatshirt and working with a ballpoint pen because he hadn't purchased a notebook yet.
He purchased a notebook on the way out. Four dollars at a pharmacy, and Acquisition Sense spent the entire transaction trying to redirect his attention to the pharmacist's wallet.
The temp agency on 34th Street placed him in three hours.
That part surprised him — he'd expected friction, the particular resistance of institutions to people without documented recent history. But his résumé was real: twenty years of logistics experience, distribution management, supply chain optimization. The work history was attached to a name he couldn't verify, referencing companies he'd worked for in a life that no longer existed on any database accessible to a midtown Manhattan temp agency, backed by phone numbers belonging to Robin Ward's professional contacts who he'd briefed with a two-sentence voicemail the previous evening presenting himself as a contract worker who'd lost access to his previous employer's HR system during a company restructure.
People believed logistics explanations. Logistics was plausible and boring and nobody wanted to dig into it.
The foreman at the warehouse on West 29th was a compact man named Delray who walked fast and talked faster and assessed Travis's forearm strength with a single glance before assigning him to the unloading bay. The work was physical in a way Travis's Chicago life hadn't been for years — cases of boxed product moving off trucks and onto pallets, four hours of it, the kind of labor that clarified the mind by removing everything except the weight in your hands and the next case coming.
He was good at it. The other men noticed. Delray noticed.
"You've done this before," Delray said during the break, not a question.
"Different context." Travis drank the water from a paper cup. "Same principle."
Delray gave him the afternoon shift as well, which meant eight hours and a check at the end of the week, which meant a traceable income and a plausible reason to be in this part of the city regularly.
He noticed the shipping manifests at hour six.
Rack of them, clipped to a board by the dispatch window, outgoing deliveries listed by recipient. Most were retail chains and food service suppliers. Three were flagged with a corporate logo he recognized — a stylized V in corporate blue, a subsidiary name beneath it that his memory supplied as a Vought International holding company, two steps removed from the parent but absolutely present in the chain.
There it is, Travis thought, with the clean satisfaction of a man who has correctly identified a bottleneck in a supply network.
He didn't take the manifests. He read them for thirty seconds during a water break and committed what he needed to memory and walked back to the unloading bay and moved four more pallets.
[PASSIVE OBSERVATION LOGGED: VOUGHT SUPPLY CHAIN CONTACT]
[+3 MP]
The System rewarded even looking.
By the time the shift ended, Travis had $82 in earned wages to come at week's end, a foreman who considered him reliable, and a working theory about which three companies in lower Manhattan were feeding Vought's logistics operation from the ground level. He ate a bodega sandwich — roasted chicken and something vinegary on a roll that cost four dollars and was, factually and without qualification, the best thing he had tasted in the entirety of his new existence, possibly the entirety of both existences combined. His body was hungry in a straightforward, insistent way that demanded acknowledgment, and the sandwich provided it, and for thirty seconds on a West 29th Street sidewalk, nothing was calculated.
He was just a person eating lunch.
Back at the shelter before curfew, he pinned his library-printed map above his cot with four pieces of tape he'd borrowed from the common room bulletin board. Vought Tower at the center in ballpoint pen, subsidiaries branching outward, canon event dates marked in the margins in a notation system that looked like inventory tracking to anyone who might glance at it.
He stepped back and looked at what three days of work had produced: a resource map, a cover identity with earned credibility, forty-one contacts from a dead woman's phone, and a direct line of sight into the corporate supply chain of the most powerful and dangerous organization in this city.
The System pulsed once, warm and patient.
Travis reached out and adjusted the corner of the map where the tape was lifting.
The warehouse shipped three times a week to Vought subsidiaries, and next Monday he was going to be the man checking those manifests.
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