The city tastes like iron this morning. Rain has scraped the dust clean but left a sharpness behind, the kind that sits in your teeth. Corin moves like someone who's counted risks and finds a few more; Jeong is quieter, as if the last week taught him what luck demands. The ledger is a fist of paper in my pack and the stabilizer fragment lives under oilcloth like a small, hot thing that could burn us if we mishandle it.
System: Alert — Hostile escalation probable. Suggested task: Defensive posture; redistribute assets. Reward: 1,200 XP.
I ignore the cheery numeric reward. Upgrades don't warm people; they just make the losing easier to schedule.
Pressure breeds brittle choices. The Trust tried polite law and procurement. When paper failed, the market tried coercion. Now something sharper comes: men who don't bother with paperwork because their employers prefer results to records. We get a report at midday—Corin's contact at the docks saw unmarked vans taking crates without manifest, and a courier who should have checked in went dark after taking an odd assignment.
We tighten watches and recalibrate routes. Hae‑In pulls Min and me into a quick map room; she has a kettle and a way of making charts feel like funerals you must attend. "They're testing the net's seams," she says. "If they find a seam, they'll pull hard enough to make the fabric tear."
"Then we reinforce seams," I say. Saying it feels like pressing a splint to a crack.
We split tasks. Corin runs physical patrols; Hae‑In coordinates legal and archival disruptions; I run field decoys and do listening runs. Min works machines like a man who believes in small miracles. Jeong—stubborn in the best possible way—starts training as a courier, learning to smell fear and move around it.
That night the yard gets a visitor we didn't expect. A courier staggers in, bleeding at the temple and a thin trickle of blood on his collar. He clutches a bundle wrapped in oilcloth like a prayer and collapses on Corin's workbench. His eyes are scared and lucid. He managed to pass a fragment into our hands before he was boxed.
"He says they came in masks and took his route," Jeong reports between breaths. "Said they were reclaimers. Said they work for people who think they own memory."
The man's fingers curl around the oilcloth and he coughs. Corin presses a rag to his temple and lays him on a pallet. We patch him as best we can. He won't talk much—trauma keeps the mouth honest in the wrong currency—but he tells us enough: a location where the vans gather, a warehouse near the river with a loading dock that never lists on public registers, men who don't ask questions and men who answer to a symbol he saw branded on a crate lip. The Trust's laurel lock? Maybe. Maybe someone worse. Names blur when you're frightened.
We don't sleep much. We move fast on the courier's tip, because violence is the sort of thing that refuses patience. Corin organizes a small intercept team—two vault hands, Jeong newly trained, and me. We take a night van and park in the shadow of rusted pylons near the river. The warehouse sits like a mouth in the industrial dark.
When the vans roll in they are too many and too quiet. Men move like practiced hands; they carry nothing we can use for proof without getting ourselves killed. Min's camera gets a few frames through a gap—license plates, crate marks, and a stamped symbol half-hidden by grime. We follow the convoy at a distance as they thread through service roads to a Trust-affiliated warehouse in another quarter. The trail is long and expensive, which is the point: procurement that looks casual is often backed by a budget that can buy silence.
On the return route, a van brakes sharply in front of ours and a man steps out wearing a mask we recognize from a rumor—a faceplate stamped with a stylized lock that looks like the Trust's crest made cruel. He doesn't shout at first; instead he lifts his hand and shows a card. Cards in this city are threats that wear ties. "You shouldn't watch what's not yours," the masked man says. His voice is low and even, a courteous blade.
We make a choice fast. Jeong drops backwards into shadow and runs. Corin floors the van into a gap between crates to block the road. The masked man doesn't flinch; instead he smiles a small smile like someone who has learned to prefer leverage over haste. He tells us the Trust is tired of interference. He offers a price for the ledger's cooperation—an offer that is not about money so much as placement and secrecy. An invitation to be useful in a way that costs less in violence and more in renunciation.
I taste the implication: give up certain nodes, let the Trust take "orphaned property," get a quiet life in return. It's a price many in the city take when they are tired enough. I keep my mouth shut because negotiating is dangerous when there's a man with a mask counting on your desperation.
We refuse. There is a cheapness to refusal when something wears a tie and smudged steel, but refusing buys other things: ethics, messy consequences, and the knowledge that our hands are our own. The masked man warns us—soft and final—and leaves with van doors slamming like closing chapters.
After they go we don't celebrate. We stack defensive lines and reroute couriers, and the ledger gets new entries in my hand: Expect reprisals. Harden drops. Move nodes to human safes. We sleep in shifts because caution is made of small habits.
A week passes where the city's gears grind louder. More vans, more masked men, and a signaling pattern that feels like escalation. The Trust, or someone using its symbol, grows impatient with legal work. They test what happens when force replaces invoices.
Pressure bends people. We lose another node—this one a clinic near an edge neighborhood where the gardener's tags were thin and small. The keeper of that node—an old woman named Mir—refuses at first to give up her pots. They take the tags and leave the clinic in a bill of paperwork that feels like theft dressed as regulation. Mir weeps and the yard buys her a crate of provisions because recompense is the only medicine we can offer.
The fractures multiply in small ways: couriers go missing for days and then return with blank stares; vendors who once left small tokens now pocket them and bow their heads when asked why. Fear is a contagious economy.
And then, the fracture that matters for me: one night, alone with the ledger, I trace the margins and find a smudge where ink should not be. My memory blinks and returns a face I can no longer name—an image, a corner of laugh, a hand placing a tag in soil. It's quick, like a struck match, and then gone. The ledger trembles under my fingers; the missing name slides across my mind like a boat that keeps going even when you think you have tied it down.
Hae‑In finds me on the roof and asks if I'm all right. I lie in the honest way that keeps stories from becoming burdens. She takes the ledger and runs a thumb over the smudged edge. "They're getting closer," she says. "And they're more interested in people than in parts now."
"What if the gardener is hurt?" I ask. The thought is small and sharp enough to hurt.
"Then we find them faster," she says. She gives me a look that holds both exhaustion and a ferocity I have come to respect. "We don't bargain in names."
That night we set new plans: harder routes, more human safes, and an effort to move the gardener's known tags into places only living hands recall. We also prepare for the worst—a contingency to scatter the ledger's knowledge across trusted people, redundant memory to make a single capture meaningless.
The city keeps breathing like a thing that refuses to be broken. The Trust presses; we press back with small, expensive resistance. Fractures show where the fabric can tear, but also where it can be mended if enough people stitch together.