The alleyway house never really slept, too many pipes clanking in the walls, too many boots passing the threshold, too many secrets stacked under floorboards to let silence get comfortable. Morning found it washed in a thin grey bruise of light, the kind Boston specializes in: not dawn, not day, just the colour of old steel.
I went inside my designated office and pushed aside a spread of ration coupons, a coil of wire, and an empty flare casing I'd been using as a pen cup. On the desk: a single sheet of paper, wrinkled but clean on one side, a stump of pencil sharpened with a knife, and an envelope we'd cut from a manila folder and sealed along the edge with melted candle wax.
If I was going to say it, I'd say it once. Clean. Final.
I cracked my knuckles, flexed the ache out of my fingers, and started writing.
To the Firefly contact who left the message at Drop Three,
I received your note. I'm declining further contact for now.
Circumstances have changed. FEDRA scrutiny is high, and proximity alone creates risk I won't accept for my people. More importantly, your goals and methods don't align with ours. I prefer neutral ground, contained deals.
If you need something essential that preserves lives (medicine, filtration, heat), leave the specifics at Drop Three with a date. I'll decide case by case. No face-to-face meetings. No recruitment conversations. No "cells" contacting my runners outside agreed channels. If any of that happens, everything stops.
This isn't personal. It's operational. I won't be a banner, and I won't be bait.
On the bright side. "Smile, it could be worse." :)
—C.R.
I put the little line at the end to give them a lil heart palpitation, showing I will absolutely RKO them if they try some shit.
I read it twice. Then once more, slower, shoving down the urge to sand off the edges. Polite enough not to pick a fight. Hard enough that no one would confuse it for an invitation.
I underlined no face-to-face lightly, just once then set the pencil down and felt the room again: the muffled murmur of two voices at the hall corner, the wool-blanket scrape of a sentry repositioning near the front, the tinny click of a radio somewhere on low. Rusty had rewired our house lamps to chew less power; they hummed faintly, the sound you get from angry bees trapped in an old bottle.
I didn't sign it Cal. I didn't sign it Reyes. I signed it the way I sign anything that might end up on someone else's wall: initials and nothing more. People can make legends out of initials. They can't arrest initials.
I folded the page cleanly, slid it into the envelope, and dripped a pool of wax to seal it. It spread like blood on bandage. I pressed the base of the flare casing into it to stamp a poor-man's signet, just a ring, no symbol. An absence of a logo is a logo in a place like this.
"Message?" a voice asked from the doorway.
I didn't look up. "Yeah."
Lia leaned her shoulder against the frame, arms folded so tight it looked like she was holding something in place. She'd slept, but not well. None of us had, not after last night's rumours made the rounds, growing teeth and tails like stories do.
"Fireflies?" she said.
"Mm."
"You trust the runner?"
"As much as I trust anyone who likes living. Neutral guy works both sides, sells gossip for cigarettes, doesn't ask stupid questions."
"That's a lot of faith."
"It's a little faith," I corrected. "The rest is insurance."
Her eyes flicked to the sealed envelope, then to my face. "So we're not talking to them."
"I mean, we technically just did," I said. "On paper, I don't want to see those gunslinging, Molotov chucking lunatics on my front door."
She didn't smile, exactly, but the corner of her mouth tilted like it wanted to. "You know they'll try anyway."
"They can get shafted for all I care." I stood, slid the envelope into a canvas pouch, and slung it over my shoulder. "We make it boring for them."
I stepped past Lia into the narrow hall. The boards creaked like old men. Two of our guards shifted aside to give me room: Kev, who looked like he hadn't blinked since dawn, and Marta, who had the kind of stare people learn after too many funerals. Both nodded. Both carried long guns openly. We don't hide the fact that we don't hide anything.
In the main room, a pot of something almost-soup simmered on a camp stove. Somebody had tried to make the place smell like food instead of metal and wet wool. Tasha sat at the table with a field strip laid out: bolt, carrier, pins, springs, everything like a broken watch waiting to be told to tick again. She didn't say anything when I passed. But she watched me go, like she always does, the look that says I'll kill for you and do not make me prove it at the same time.
Glad the little resident psycho didn't change much.
At the back entrance, a young runner waited, thin, fast, forgettable on purpose. Gray knit cap, gray jacket, nondescript pack. He had the kind of face most people forget by lunch.
"You know the route?" I asked.
He nodded. "South wall, culvert ladder. No market roads. Drop Three under the fourth rung. No loiter."
"If anyone follows," I said, "you eat the letter or you burn it. You don't get cute."
"I don't get cute," he agreed.
I handed over the pouch. He slipped it under his jacket with a practiced motion, then tugged his cap down lower, as if anonymity were something you could tie under your chin.
I let him get one step into the alley before I said, "Rory."
He turned.
"Five minutes early to the ladder," I said. "Not on the minute. The clock is where people wait." I watched that click into place behind his eyes. Then I added, "And take a shadow. Second tail, far back. Never make a trip alone when it matters."
He hesitated. "Two runners draws attention."
"Two dead runners draws a lot more."
He swallowed, gave a tight nod, and vanished into the alley's gray light, moving like a rumour no one had said out loud yet.
I stood in the doorway a second longer, squinting up at the strip of sky visible between brick teeth. People say the Fireflies are about hope. But hope's just another ration, controlled by whoever's counting. Different badge, same leash. FEDRA wants obedience and quotas. Fireflies want belief and bodies. Both want you to stand in a line they drew.
I've done lines. School lines. Ration lines. Watch-detail lines. They always end with someone else telling you what you owe.
Footsteps behind me; I didn't have to turn to know they belonged to Cole. He can walk quiet when he wants, but in here he lets the floorboards know he's coming. It keeps people honest.
"You sure you want to poke that nest?" he asked, voice low.
"I'm not poking anything," I said. "I'm fencing the yard so that some lunatic doesnt get in."
He considered that, then tilted his chin at the door. "They'll test it."
"Of course." I shut the door and slid the bolt. "Maybe I will paint a smiley face on the front."
He studied me a second, weighing something I couldn't quite name, then gave one of those single nods he uses instead of speeches. "I'll add a second pair to the south culvert on rotation. Quiet eyes."
"Good," I said. "No heroics. Watchers watch."
He moved off, already calling names. I went back to the desk and stared at the pencil's bite marks. The letter's words ghosted in my head again.
I thought of Marlene's kind of speeches, the way she can turn a ration line into a rally if you let her. I thought of FEDRA officers who don't need speeches because a ledger does the talking. And then I thought of wall from that night, the heat of it, the way the message looked in firelight, and the part of me that had smiled.
Reputation's a lockpick and a tripwire. Sometimes the same thing, depending on which hand you're holding it with. Right now, ours keeps doors closed we don't want opened, and opens some we couldn't pry otherwise. But all it takes is one stubborn hand on the other side to slam it back in your face.
"Hey," Lia said from the hall, softer now. "You did the right thing."
"Which part?" I asked.
"Drawing a line." She leaned in the doorway, less armor around the eyes. "Everyone wants to own the kid with the miracle supply finding ability, FEDRA calls it logistics. Fireflies call it liberation. It's the same demand."
"I know."
"And you're not giving it to them."
"Over my dead body, and even then I'd probably turn into a runner and bite a motherfucker in the ass" I let out a breath I didn't realize I'd been holding. "But we'll sell it. Pieces. When it suits."
Her mouth twitched. "Spoken like a true capitalist."
"Spoken like someone who likes living indoors." I looked past her at the room full of people repairing gear, stirring soup, checking straps. "And keeping them alive, too."
We didn't say anything for a while. The house breathed around us. From the front room, somebody laughed, one of those too-loud, shaky laughs that means the body is testing whether it can still make the sound.
A runner's footfall pounded back down the alley twenty minutes later, too fast for trouble, fast for news. Rory slipped in, cheeks wind-bitten, cap wet with alley drip.
"Dropped," he said, breathless. "No tails."
"Shadow?"
"Confirmed," he said. "Twice around the block and a cut through the old laundromat just to make sure. No eyes. We're clean."
"Good." I clapped his shoulder once. "Go ahead and eat something in the kitchen."
Lia exhaled. "One fire damped."
"For now," I said. "Give it a week."
She didn't argue. She didn't have to. We both knew the pattern: you shore up one wall while another starts to bow. You choose which leak drowns you slowest.
I went back to the desk to put the pencil away and found myself staring at the comet-shaped burn again. Someone, once, had sat here and flicked a lighter long enough to leave a mark that outlived them. They'd probably thought it didn't matter. Little things never do—until they become the only things you can hang your memory on.
"Next?" Lia asked.
"Next," I said, "we make it boring." I ticked items off on my fingers. "Weekly drop with FEDRA stays quiet and small. Tunnel markets stay pop-up, short windows. No hero runs. Defensive patrols double near the north culvert. And we set decoys near two dead entrances. If anyone wants to watch us, let them watch a wall breathe."
"Got it," she said, already writing. "You're thinking about leaving, aren't you?"
"Maybe," I said. "Just not now."
If the Fireflies wanted a symbol, they could stencil it on someone else's wall, my wall is full.
We had orders to fill. And walls to keep standing.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
The weeks after the revenge burned themselves into routine, the kind of rhythm that didn't make headlines but kept the wheels of a shadow empire turning. The QZ didn't forget what happened, the crucifixions, the graffiti, but time dulled it into whispered reminders rather than shouted warnings. That was fine by me. Whispers worked better.
By late January, the alleyway house and the warehouse had become the main arteries for our operations, each one threaded into the other by tunnels that could swallow a dozen people at a time. We didn't advertise trade. People just… found their way to us. The right people.
It always started the same. A knock, sometimes a coded one, sometimes just the slow scrape of boots outside a tunnel entrance. A pair of my people would slide open the reinforced hatch, weapons ready, and someone a scavenger with a busted pack, a half-starved father, a FEDRA corporal out of uniform would step in out of the cold. The deals were never big; big drew eyes. These were careful trades, done in pre-arranged safehouses or the quieter corners of our territory, where no one passing by would think twice.
One night, it was Marta and Kev running the west tunnel checkpoint when a man came through with two cloth sacks. He kept his eyes on the ground until Kev told him to open them. Inside: preserved peaches in dented cans, a bundle of rifle cleaning kits, and a small stash of cigarettes. We weighed, counted, and swapped him for a box of 9mm rounds and a handful of water purification tabs and some other small things. No words beyond what was needed. He left lighter, but his hands were shaking with relief.
The next week, a different sort of customer came in through the southern access, two FEDRA officers, but not in uniform. Civilian jackets, plain caps. They smelled like the upper blocks, like laundry soap and recycled air. They didn't bother pretending they were there for anything but business. One handed over a crumpled envelope thick with ration cards, the other slid a small roll of fuel coupons across the table. In return, Rusty gave them a sealed pack of morphine syrettes and a crate of canned meat stamped with an expiry date that had passed two years ago but the seals were intact, and in this world, that was enough.
They didn't ask where it came from. They didn't care that I was sitting at the far end of the table, watching them over clasped hands like some half-grown crime boss. They just took the goods, nodded, and left the way they came. The transaction didn't last more than five minutes, but the air in the room stayed taut until they were gone.
That's how it always went. I never met anyone alone. Even for the smallest exchanges, I made sure at least two armed people were within arm's reach usually Kev and Donny who surprisingly has grown more reliable as of late, sometimes Cole if I wanted a bigger shadow in the room. The guns weren't always pointed, but the message was the same: you're in my space, on my terms.
The more the months rolled on, the more the safehouses took on lives of their own. One, a derelict rowhouse near the east wall, became the "garden spot" not because anything grew there, but because its back door opened onto a little yard hidden from the street, perfect for quick drop-offs and handovers. Another, an old tailor's shop, still had dust-covered mannequins in the window; people joked about the "seamstress" keeping watch.
Sometimes, the buyers were familiar faces runners from the independent camps outside the wall, people I'd seen in the market years ago when I was just another hungry kid. They came in ones and twos, carrying packs that clinked or rattled depending on what they'd scrounged. In exchange, they left with antibiotics, tool parts, or the occasional luxury: real coffee, salvaged from some pre-outbreak hoard and traded sparingly, at a price.
Other times, the customers were strangers, but not without introductions. Nobody just walked in cold; someone always vouched for them, and even then, they'd be searched twice before they got within ten feet of a trade table. Word about us had spread far enough that I didn't need to push for business. The work came to me.
The Fireflies kept their distance at least directly. I spotted watchers now and then, across the street from a meeting spot or lingering near a tunnel mouth. They never tried to get close, but their eyes followed. Maybe it was curiosity. Maybe they were measuring. Maybe they were pissed that I didint buy into the whole bullshit about "following the light" or some shit.
Either way, my people always made sure they knew we'd seen them. Tasha, in particular, had a knack for it; once, she caught a glimpse of a tail while escorting a trade contact and stared them down with her rifle from fifty feet until they turned and walked away.
It wasn't paranoia. Every group in this city wanted to know where we kept our food, our medicine, our guns. Every group wanted to know how far they could push. But after the depot raid, none of them wanted to be the ones to test us first.
On the rare occasions I did the handovers myself, the process was always the same. No chairs, no tea. Stand across the table, count the goods, make the swap, and let them go. A smile if I liked them. Silence if I didn't. That way, nobody got comfortable, I mostly delt with Robert and Meredith. I could trust Meredith even if she can be too much sometimes and me and Robert surprisingly hit it off so I am not as apprehensive of him.
Some time later the routine had become so steady I could tell the day of the week by the faces that came through. The Monday crowd was mostly scavengers from the market quarter. Wednesday was the favoured day for the off-duty FEDRA boys, the ones who didn't want to risk being seen making backroom deals on the weekend when more eyes were around. Fridays drew the desperate people who'd run out of something essential and were willing to pay double before the week was over.
It wasn't just about moving goods anymore. It was about building lanes, habits, patterns that made our network invisible until you tripped over it. The kind of thing you could only get with time, and we'd bought that time with blood.
Still, I never forgot that it could all vanish overnight. One bad deal, one wrong word, and someone would be knocking on my door with more than a sack of canned peaches. That's why, no matter who came to trade, I made sure they walked away thinking the same thing:
If I cross this kid, it won't end well for me.
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The first time we noticed them, it was almost nothing, a silhouette at the edge of a puddled street, the kind that looks like a trick of broken glass and moonlight until it turns its head.
They didn't come close. They never did. Firefly coats and scarves, or maybe just people who wanted to look like Fireflies. They hovered where light bled out, watching. Not probing our doors, not leaving marks, just… taking us in. Making us a problem to solve later.
I swear I am going to run out and start blastin.
Word of the first sighting spread fast through the warehouse: a whisper passed from guard to runner to scav team, each retelling trimming the details until what was left was clean as a blade. "Eyes on North Span. Three minutes. No approach." We logged it, pinned it, forgot it on purpose. Then it happened again.
So I added a new board.
We'd already filled two with duty cycles, scav shifts, and intake ledgers. The third was just a map—stitched together from old street plans, hand-sketched tunnel lines, and memory. I nailed it to a support beam near the command desk and color-coded the pins: red for confirmed Firefly markings, blue for ambiguous watchers, black for unknowns we couldn't classify. Tasha called it "the rumour constellation" and drew a tiny grinning skull in the corner, for luck.
Some time later, there were already six pins.
They were smart about it, whoever they were. Never two nights in a row. Never the same angle twice. One evening a shadow on a balcony overlooking the shipping yard ruin; two mornings later, footprints at the mouth of an access tunnel we hadn't used in days, the kind of narrow boot tread you only see on people who still wear proper laces. Noah started circling sighting zones on a clear sheet of plastic taped over the map, his pencil flicking with that quiet, surgical energy of his.
"They're testing approach vectors," he said, mostly to himself. "No pattern yet. They're learning the terrain."
Alexandra added a second plastic overlay—a transparent grid with quarter-hour blocks around each pin. "If they're logging our rotation, I want our rotation to be wrong whenever they look."
So we changed the rhythm.
Guard posts went from eight-hour blocks to six, then to five on the outermost positions—enough to break the predictability without burning people out. I added a roving pair that drifted without a schedule, communicating in a set of dumb little hand signals we'd borrowed from Joe's team and reworked: thumb tap for "linger," index trace for "pass behind," two-finger sweep for "double back." Rusty complained, then ran the drills with everyone twice, muttering about "muscle memory or die."
The watchers stayed distant. They wanted us to react, and we did, but on our terms. We didn't flare lights, we didn't shout challenges. The tunnels breathed and we breathed with them.
A month slid past like that. On good days, the map collected dust. On bad nights, we added two pins instead of one.
The closest we got to a confrontation came on a rain-smeared Thursday when the city smelled like wet metal and old bread. Tasha had volunteered for the late-late one of those dead hours where the QZ feels like it's holding its breath and took her spot two levels up from the alleyway house, on a fire escape that screeched if you even looked at it wrong. She brought the marksman rifle with the thin ammo reserve, a coil of wire, and a piece of chalk.
"Quiet," she'd whispered into the radio. "Nothing moving but rats and regret."
"Copy," I'd whispered back from the stairwell landing, because if Tasha was awake, I was awake. "Stay bored."
It didn't last. Ten minutes later, her voice came through steady, but pitched lower.
"Movement. Eastern tunnel grate. Not ours."
I was already moving when she finished the sentence. Down the stairs, across the narrow hall, out the side door that hissed against its mis-hung frame. Noah was on the opposite roofline with a pair of cloudy binoculars, not enough to make out a face but plenty to track posture.
"Single figure," he murmured. "Light feet. Not scav gear. Not heavy."
"Firefly?" I asked.
"Could be. Or someone pretending to be one."
The figure eased up to the grate, a gloved hand sliding along the lip. They didn't try to force it. They simply listened, head tilted, counting breaths. Testing whether anyone was dumb enough to react to the test.
Tasha did.
The wire was already looped around the landing rail. She flicked it down, fast and clean, and let a tin can tumble two stories to clatter off the curb.
It was nothing a child's trap, a noisy ghost but it snapped the watcher's head up. He froze for a second, then turned smooth and melted into the dark the way people only do when they've practiced. No stumble, no panic, just gone.
"Don't follow," I said, even though I knew she wanted to. "Let them wonder why we didn't chase."
She didn't answer. A minute later she muttered, "Left a mark."
"What kind?"
"Simple one." The radio crackled as she adjusted. "Chalk line near the grate, low. If you don't know to look, you won't see it."
A message for whoever came next. Not to us to them. We found it afterward: a faint, slanted stroke an inch above the concrete, the mark of someone training their friends.
I stared at it until my eyes hurt. Chalk washes away. Patterns don't.
We scrubbed the line and moved the grate.
After that, sightings accelerated. We had weeks where nothing showed; then we had three nights in a row where blue pins bloomed like bruises along the south side of the map. Alexandra started treating the sightings like we treated incoming shipments fully logged, cross-referenced, annotated, I swear she must have been born among paper, logistic and spreadsheets. I thinks she is Lia's role model with how much she shadows her.
"Look at the spacing," she murmured one afternoon, dragging her pen between two pins. "They're careful, but they're not patient. This isn't reconnaissance for an immediate assault. It's information-gathering for… a dossier."
"On me," I said, god fucking damnit.
She didn't argue. "On us. But yes."
So we tightened again.
We put Kev on "shadow split" the practice run where a patrol would separate for ten minutes, leaving one person completely visible while the other cut a half-block behind, eyes open for tails. Twice, he caught shadows that thought they were being clever, slipping into recessed doorways and peeking out between torn curtains. Twice, he let them see the muzzle of his rifle pointed casually at the sky and the armour plate sitting snug under his jacket. Twice, they drifted away.
We added a stupid little ritual to our tunnel entries: a different three-note whistle each night, a different plastic token hanging in the entry offset a red bottle cap, a bent key, a loop of wire. Lia called it "the kindergarten test." If someone couldn't tell us the token and the notes on command, they didn't come in. People grumbled. People got used to it.
When weeks turned to months, the watchers did something new they got bolder, but not closer. Instead of one figure, we'd get a pair. Instead of a pin at midnight, we'd get one just after dawn, when we thought we were safe to yawn and stretch and pretend we were normal. Sometimes the pins were clustered. Sometimes they arced around the alleyway house like the invisible fingers of a hand.
"Firefly cells don't waste this much time unless they've been told to wait," Noah said one night, shrugging into his jacket for another sweep. "Or unless they're not sure what they're looking at."
"They're sure," Tasha said from a corner, eyes flicking to me and away. "They're weighing whether it's worth bleeding, or its not Fireflies but someone else."
I didn't disagree.
We had our own eyes, too. Meredith's runners brought back thin strings of gossip half-true in the way everything is half-true now. "Some of them think you're a FEDRA plant," she told me over a ration bar one week, amused in that way she gets when the world ties itself in knots for her to unwind. "Others think you're exactly what you look like. No one knows which scares them more."
"How reassuring," I said.
"Relax," she replied, patting my shoulder like an indulgent aunt. "You terrify them either way."
Not everyone outside carried Firefly colours. Twice, we spotted faces we recognized from independent crews scav groups who'd bought from us before, now lingering across the street with too-clean boots and eyes that wouldn't stay still. One afternoon, Rusty opened a side door and nearly walked into a skinny man in a patched coat bending over our drain like he was admiring the rust. The man flinched, muttered something about "wrong turn," and bolted. Rusty didn't chase him. He just came back inside and tightened the tools on his belt with a look I'd learned meant he would kill if he had to and sleep after.
The map filled and emptied, a tide of plastic pins. We moved them when a week passed without repeat sightings; we pushed them aside to make room for new ones. The board began to look less like a plan and more like a history of near-misses.
"Paranoid is policy now," I told the crew during one of our cramped, standing-room-only check-ins. "Rotate more. Pair more. If you're alone, you're wrong."
No one argued. Even the ones who hated orders didn't hate these. Fear does that—makes structure feel like a blanket instead of a cage.
One night, after a run that came back cleaner than it had any right to, I sat alone at the map with the room half-dark and listened to the warehouse breathe. The pins glinted where light caught them. I traced the red ones with my fingertip—confirmed Firefly marks. They were fewer than the blues, but they mattered more. They were proof that whatever "minimal contact" I'd asked for had been heard and politely ignored.
I added a new note to the corner in chalk: IF THEY'RE WATCHING, IT'S BECAUSE THEY'RE WAITING.
"Waiting for what?" Lia asked from the doorway, surprising me. She'd padded in barefoot, a cup of something warm steaming in her hands.
"For me to trip," I said. "Or for someone else to make the first mistake."
She was quiet a long moment. "Then don't trip."
"No shit, really? I wont then."
She stepped up beside me and tapped two of the pins that formed a crooked line from the south market to the old depot block. "They're mapping our edges. Not our centre. That means they don't know where exactly our territory is. Or they do and they're not ready to touch it. Either way, we keep the edges noisy and the centre quiet."
I nodded. "Tell Noah. He likes turning my paranoia into geometry."
She smiled, small and tired. "Already did."
The watchers never stopped. But they learned what we wanted them to learn: that we moved faster than we should; that our guard cycles weren't lazy; that we had enough bodies to man posts and run carts and still send someone to tell a scav team when to duck. And maybe they learned something else that we didn't flinch.
On a brittle morning when frost crusted the puddles under the collapsed skyway and breath came out in little dragons, Tasha came off a graveyard shift with a cut on her palm and a sharpness in her eyes that meant she'd almost done something irreversible.
"Someone was at South Vent," she said, holding up the bloody hand like a trophy. "Wanted to pry it. I made sure they won't come back."
"What did you do?" Kev asked, half-curious, half-wary.
She tilted her head and gave a full, ear to ear smile. "Whispered in their ear with a knife."
Effective I guess.
I glanced at the map. Another pin for the constellation. Another story for the board.
"We keep going," I said. "We keep the pins on their side of the street."
The watchers stayed watchers. The weeks layered over each other slow, steady slices of routine glued together with suspicion and small victories. We didn't chase them. We just made sure every time they looked, they saw a hundred eyes looking back.
At night, when I couldn't sleep, I'd stand in front of the board and try to imagine the hand moving the pins on theirs. Did they have a kid doing it? A quartermaster? A true believer? Did they argue about whether we were a threat worth the powder it would take to put us down? I hoped so. Arguing wastes time.
On the day I added a black pin unknown faction, unknown intent Lia handed me a fresh strip of chalk.
"Running out?" she asked.
"Of chalk?" I said, managing a smile. "Never."
"Of patience?"
I looked at the constellation and thought about the tunnels breathing, about the people who had learned to keep their shoes by the door and their rifles oiled because watchers don't always stay watchers.
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Weeks bled into months, the chaos of the raider retribution fading into a sort of tense calm.
In that time, the faction grew. Not fast or massive, but steady and in small numbers. New blood trickled in a scav here, a disillusioned FEDRA grunt there, a lone survivor with nothing left to lose. Cal never advertised for recruits; people simply found their way in, drawn by whispers of safety, food, and a leader who wasn't afraid to hit back twice as hard, of course all were vetted and were shadowed in secret to see if they are spy, we got around 7 would be spies like that.
As for what happened to them, take a wild guess.
Though the latest additions came through the System.
[Mission Completed]Title: Clear the CacheObjective: Secure and retrieve supplies from a collapsed maintenance sub-level in the northern QZ.Rewards: +350 EXP | +1 Scavenger Rank Credit | +5 Summon Tokens
It had been a small job, barely a footnote in their schedule — a collapsed corridor, a rusted-out storage space with a few crates of tools, ration tins, and sealed boxes of gauze, though there were 2 stalkers in there, good thing we sent out an armed group of 6.
The Summon Tokens materialized in his inventory, and within the hour, the faction swelled by five more bodies, all of them looking as lost and bewildered as any other summons.
Three were clearly standard recruits: scavenger-types with a knack for quiet work. One was a medic, instantly valuable. And the last… was different. They had a sharp, calculating look in their eye, the kind of gaze that took in a room and cataloged every possible threat and exit. Cal didn't even need the System's faint "Special Designation" tag to know they'd be important.
That bump in numbers also pushed him over the edge:
[Level Up]Level: 25 (+3 System Points, +1 Scavenger Rank Credit)Unlocked: Tier 3 Summoning Pool – Access to higher-grade personnel and specialists.
The growth was measurable now. With over 100 members, the faction could operate in shifts that no longer left gaps in coverage.
The warehouse and alleyway house had been reinforced with barricades and firing slits along the outer wall. The skyscraper site was split into sectors: scavenging zones, storage zones, and work zones. The alleyway house became an administrative hub, its narrow rooms turned into offices, armouries, and map rooms.
Every two weeks, a FEDRA supply drop went like clockwork: Cal's people would cart crates of scavenged medicine, ammunition, and tools through back alleys and tunnels to a hidden drop point. In return, they'd get ration cards, fuel coupons, and the occasional "favour" like a blind eye turned to an unsanctioned salvage run.
On alternating weeks, abandoned buildings on the QZ outskirts transformed into black-market stalls. Independent survivors would slip in, barter quietly, and leave before drawing attention. These markets weren't about profit; they were about influence, creating a network of people who owed Cal's group, or at least respected their reach.
The crucifixion site was long cold, but its legend lived on.
Mothers hissed warnings to their children: "You'll end up like the wall-man if you steal."
Drunk scavengers dared each other to walk past it at night.
Even FEDRA guards occasionally muttered about "that kid" with an almost superstitious wariness, upside is the higher up officers that used to look down and bully my parents have suddenly stopped. Who would have thought that me being important even to the main HQ and crucifying some bastards would have that effect huh?
People understood that Cal's faction wasn't chaotic. They didn't lash out blindly. If you crossed them, they would find you, plan, and act with methodical cruelty.
Also, paranoia became standard policy:
Tunnel entrances were guarded and rotated daily.
Patrol routes changed every few hours.
New sentry nests covered blind spots.
Salvaged security cameras and motion tripwires were rigged to alert guards, even made more of the crude bottles and tins on a wire
Every system had a backup, every guard post had overlapping lines of fire. The enemy wouldn't get a second chance to strike first.
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It started small.
Kev was on the late watch over one of the smaller storage sheds, the one tucked behind a crumbling stretch of brick wall near the eastern tunnels. When I found him later that morning, he was crouched next to the door, tapping the toe of his boot against the metal.
Pry marks.
Thin, shallow, not enough to force the lock, but enough to tell me someone had tried.
"They weren't in a hurry," Kev said, rubbing his thumb along the scraped paint. "Took their time until they saw me coming."
"See them?" I asked.
"Shadow moving between the buildings. Could've been anybody. Could've been nobody."
It wasn't enough to act on just a scratch and a maybe. But it was the first scratch we'd seen in weeks.
The second was after a storm.
Rain had washed the alleys into slick, muddy streams, and the tunnels had run with brown water that stank of rust and old sewage. When the morning patrol went to check one of the tunnel entrances, the one hidden under a collapsed loading dock — they found footprints.
They weren't ours. Too wide a stance, too heavy a tread.
The prints looped around the entrance in a slow half-circle, then doubled back the way they'd come. Whoever it was never tried to get in. They'd just… looked.
I had Donny measure the size. Bigger than any of our regulars. Boots, but not FEDRA-issue.
"Could've been scouting," Rusty muttered as we stared at the marks in the muck. "Could've been bait."
Either way, I didn't like it.
The third time, it was almost clever.
Tasha came back from a tunnel sweep with a bundle under her arm — a neat package of preserved rations, tied with string. She'd found it sitting just inside the mouth of one of our lesser-used access points.
The second she set it down in front of me, I caught the smell.
Chemical. Bitter and sharp, hidden under the tang of the wax paper wrap.
I didn't need the System to tell me not to eat it. I just told Tasha to burn it.
She hesitated, it looked like food, after all. Real food. But one spark later, the bundle went up in a hiss of smoke that carried the same bitter tang.
Poison.
We never figured out if it was meant for us or meant to frame us, but the point was the same: someone had gotten close enough to leave it.
From then on, I stopped pretending this was nothing.
I changed the rotation schedule. No one stayed on the same watch more than two days in a row. Patrol routes were altered daily, and I doubled the guard during trade runs, again.
At night, I'd stand in the warehouse over the big map pinned to the wall — the one with chalk marks, string, and little scraps of paper. Every time we spotted a stranger hanging back on a street corner or caught wind of someone asking too many questions, I marked it with a pin.
By the end of the month, there were too many pins.
One night, Rusty stood with me by the map, his arms folded.
"Maybe it's nothing," he said.
"Maybe," I said, "or maybe it's just them getting ready."
"Next time it's not gonna be loud, huh?"
I glanced at him. "No. Next time it'll be quiet. Careful. And by the time anyone notices, we'll already be bleeding."
He grunted at that, no argument.
We didn't say it out loud, but both of us knew what was coming: the next big problem wasn't going to announce itself with a shout or a gunshot. It would slip in through the cracks, the little gaps in our watch.
The kind of problem you only caught if you were already looking for it.
And now, we were.