This is New York. In a courthouse downtown, a custodian is mopping a hallway and pretending not to notice that the lights in the third-floor offices of Nelson & Murdock are still on. A young lawyer with a cane he doesn't always need is working through a stack of cases. He'll be there a while. He usually is. In Harlem, a man with unbreakable skin is sitting on the stoop of a building he doesn't own, talking to a kid he's known since the kid was born. The kid is fifteen and angry and wants to know why he should stay in school. The man with the unbreakable skin is taking the question seriously. He always does. In the Village, a woman in a leather jacket is pouring whiskey into her coffee and looking at a case file she's been looking at for three days. The case is about a missing girl. The case is going to break her heart. It always does. She drinks anyway. She works anyway. Somewhere overhead, a man in a red and blue suit is moving between rooftops, eating a hot dog from a vendor he overpaid because the vendor's daughter was sick last week. He's tired and has not been home in two days. He'll go home soon. He keeps saying that. In Chinatown, in a back room above a restaurant, an old woman is pouring tea for men who do not drink it. Her smile is patient. Her business is older than the building. In a penthouse on Park Avenue, a very large man in a very expensive suit is reading reports about a city he believes he owns. Most of it, he does. A siren goes by, two streets over, and nobody on the block looks up. A bodega clerk changes the channel. A train rumbles under the pavement. Somewhere a phone is ringing that no one will answer. Eight million people live in this city. Most of them will go about their lives today without ever knowing how close the dark gets. A few of them — vigilantes, victims, witnesses, the desperate and the determined — will be at the center of what happens next. Somewhere in those eight million, there is you.