Night stays like a bruise over the river; the city's lights are dull pins. The yard feels smaller with every armed van we avoid and every node that goes quiet. Corin sleeps like someone who's given up counting and started stacking; Jeong hums while he tapes crates as if rhythm wards off panic. The ledger sits under my palm, warm from being held. Its pages are a map of promises and scars.
System: Alert — Elevated hostile activity near river warehouses. Suggested task: Deploy reconnaissance drones. Reward: 1,500 XP.
I tell the System to keep hunting for digits; the city needs human ears. Machines can log movement; people can decide what to save when it matters.
Hae‑In has a lead: a small yard near the old textile docks where a Trust front has been making furtive pickups. The courier who staggered in with the slit temple drew a crude map before he lost color in his cheeks. We can follow that, but the river moves patience and the Trust moves money. We go knowing the difference between being brave and being useful.
We craft the plan in the quiet hour before sleep. Two teams: one to shadow the docks and document, the other to reinforce likely pickup points further inland. Corin takes the guard detail with Amira and two vault hands; Hae‑In and I take the shadow run with Jeong tucked in like insurance. We move light because light draws attention.
The docks smell of salt and old industry. Crates stack like tired teeth and gulls argue with the floodlight. Echo Sight shows the route men use at night—steps eroded into a groove. When we slip into the shadow between warehouses, the motion lines make a neat path that someone meant to follow without thinking. The Trust likes efficiency; the Trust likes invisible hands.
We tail a pair of men who step like rehearsed actors into the yard. One wears a grey jacket with the austere crest; his partner carries a case that clunks like evidence and love. They move to a container with a lock that looks official enough to belong in a good catalog. Hae‑In signals and we keep quiet, planting cameras on pale poles and using an old fishing line to snag the container's padlock so it will give a soft, telltale sound when opened later. Documentation follows patience.
Later, after the men leave, Corin's team springs the line and the lock rolls. We watch from two blocks away as a van slides in under polite lights and men in plain jackets file the container's contents into its belly. Min's camera tags license plates; Amira logs faces. We do not approach. We gather what we can from safe distance—names, times, directions. Evidence is patient if you are.
The next morning Min cross-checks plates and traces an intermediary storage shed three neighborhoods over. It's small and has a daytime face as a salvage yard. At lunch, we plant the decoy we've spent a week building: a kit with plausible provenance, components staged to sing like a real fragment under the right tools. This time the bait is heavier in paperwork—fake custodial notes, a ledger scrap with a believable origin, a slip of a name that might pass a buyer's sniff. We seed the market so the Trust will sniff and move.
That evening, at the salvage yard, a delivery man walks in with the sort of careful smile men use when they've rehearsed guile. He asks about the item—a man of polite questions—and our contact, who owes us a debt of favors, points to the crate with a bored hand. The delivery man leaves a card that smells like a front. We watch him go and tag the plate. He's clean, practiced, and in a hurry to be useful.
At midnight the Trust moves again and this time they take the bait. Cameras pick up the men who come and the van that leaves. We follow until the vehicle parks in a long, anonymous lot and a handoff occurs. The recipient moves like a man who's been reading other people's wills for a living. We record faces, banners, and the way they treat boxes like sacrament.
Then something changes. The van takes a route we didn't expect—through a narrow service alley full of thrift stores with sleeping cats and a phone booth whose glass is star‑patterned with cracks. A shadow detaches from a doorway and crosses the van's path like a whisper. The van's driver curses into a sleeve and makes an evasive turn. For a heartbeat I think the night will hold. Then a car slides out with lights low and boxes in the back; the masked men jump out before the engine stops and move with a speed that smells like a plan.
We keep our distance, but the alley becomes a blur of motion and the sound of a scuffle—quick, efficient, and mean. A woman's cry cuts a line through the night; it's not the broad noise of panic but a high, brittle signal. Jeong moves before I can think—he runs and disappears into the fight, because courage does not always wait for permission. Corin answers a call on the radio like an oath and we converge.
We find a courier on the ground and two masked men standing over a crate. One of them looks up and I recognize the crest as something that trades in legality with a smile. The fight is short and ugly. Corin lands heavy and honest; Jeong trips and scrambles. The masked men push off and run, leaving the crate and a bruise we will bandage. We pull the courier to safety; he coughs and gives a ragged thanks. His hands shake around the crate like someone who just returned from a long debt.
Inside the box is what we hoped: nothing of value to the Trust, a decoy implode with fetid coils and broken glass. The point was never to hurt them; it was to buy time and document movements. We have photos, plates, and a list of intermediary stops. We also have a new pattern: the Trust moves deep into narrow streets where people sleep; they meet locals who trade compliance for small comforts. Our city is shaping itself into factions and everyone pays a price.
The woman who screamed is an older keeper who runs a shelter near the alley. She tells us, fist trembling, that masked men have started asking about "containers with provenance" and checking people's pockets for tags. "They say they reclaim what has been orphaned," she says. "They say the law is on their side." Her voice is a ledger line that means more than her words.
That night Hae‑In and I sit and sift evidence while Corin and Amira organize a route to pull the more fragile nodes out of public sight. We plan redundancy—copies of tags sealed inside unrelated objects, names whispered into trusted ears across neighborhoods, a redundancy network that makes a single raid worthless. The gardener thought in seeds and tags; we will think in webs and people.
On the roof, I open the ledger and write a new set of instructions in thick pen: Harden public nodes; seed redundancies; prioritize living keepers. The ink dries and I feel the small, awful weight of more names pressing at the edges of my sleep.
The System offers a reward for exposing procurement links. It clicks in my head like a reminder that algorithms count what people do not: paperwork, patterns, hits. I prefer the messy calculus of human choices. If we keep choosing people over profit, maybe the market will find less to buy.
The night ends with a minor victory and a small bruise: we gathered proof and averted a theft. We also learned that the Trust, or those who use its sigil, are willing to send men into alleys and scare women who keep the city's small mercies. The ledger grows by one line: expect violence where business fails. I close it, tuck it under my jacket, and go down to help bandage the courier's hand.