The collectors came on day eleven.
Three of them. Two enforcers Cael recognised from the civic centre patrols — the shaved-head man with the thermal ability and a woman he hadn't profiled yet — plus a third figure who walked between them with the unhurried confidence of someone delivering news that wasn't negotiable.
The third man was new. Taller than the enforcers. Clean, somehow — clean jacket, clean boots, clean-shaven jaw in a city that had stopped caring about grooming nine days ago. He moved through the western margin like he owned it, which was the point. He carried a clipboard. An actual clipboard, with paper and a pen, as if the apocalypse had filing requirements.
Cael watched from the second floor of a boarded shop front. Lira was beside him, crouched below the window line. Below, Elena's people were scattering — not panicking, but dispersing according to the quiet protocols they'd developed. Flag signals changed on the upper windows. Safe houses closed their doors.
The clean man stopped in the middle of the street and waited. He didn't shout. He didn't threaten. He just stood there with his clipboard and let the silence do the work.
After two minutes, people emerged. The ones who couldn't run fast enough or didn't have a safe house to reach. An elderly couple from the ground-floor unit. A woman with an infant. Two teenage boys who looked like they'd been eating less than everyone else.
"Morning," the clean man said. Pleasant. Almost warm. "I'm here on behalf of Voss Carriden. You may know him as the authority at the civic centre. He's formalising resource management in this sector."
Cael's jaw tightened. *Voss Carriden.* The Boss had a name.
"Effective today," the clean man continued, "all supplies in this district fall under centralised coordination. Food, clean water, medicine, tools, fuel. Anything you've stockpiled or scavenged. This isn't confiscation — it's contribution. Everyone contributes. Everyone receives a fair share."
The elderly man spoke. His voice was thin but steady. "And if we don't contribute?"
The clean man smiled. Not cruel. Patient. The smile of someone who'd given this speech before and knew how it ended.
"Then you're outside the protection zone. No patrols. No distribution. No medical support." He gestured at the street, at the smoke rising from three different fires on the horizon, at the eastern dead zone where the Hollow's silence was visible as a still, grey circle. "It's a dangerous world, sir. Contribution buys safety."
"Contribution buys a leash," Lira whispered beside Cael. Her forearms were flickering — [Reinforce] activating on reflex, responding to the anger she was tamping down.
"Don't," Cael murmured.
"They're shaking down civilians."
"I know. Don't."
"Two enforcers. I've taken worse."
"There are twelve more within a four-minute response radius. You saw the map. If you engage two, you fight fourteen."
She went still. The reinforcement faded. Not because she agreed — because the math was the math, and she hated that the math was the math.
Below, the clean man was writing names on his clipboard. The elderly couple handed over three cans and a bottle of bleach. The woman with the infant gave up two litres of water and a box of crackers. The teenage boys turned out their pockets — nothing — and received a look from the clean man that said their nothing had been noted.
"One more thing," the clean man said. "Any Awakened in this sector are invited to present themselves for assessment. Voss Carriden offers rank-appropriate positions in his organisation. Compensation includes priority rations, shelter, and protection."
*Invited.* The word did a lot of heavy lifting.
He turned and looked directly at the boarded shop front where Cael and Lira were hiding.
Not at the window. At the building. A general scan, the kind a professional surveyor does when assessing a street. But his eyes lingered half a second too long on the second floor.
"We should go," Cael said.
They went.
---
Back at the office building, Cael updated the map.
Voss Carriden's territory — he wrote the name in block capitals, replacing "the Boss" — had expanded again. The tribute system extended his effective control without requiring additional enforcers. Civilian compliance did the work for him. Pay tribute, receive protection. Refuse, face the wilderness.
It was a protection racket dressed as governance. The oldest power structure in human history, running on new fuel.
"He'll find us," Lira said. She was pacing. She paced when she couldn't hit something. "The clean man — the one with the clipboard. He was cataloguing. Not just supplies. *People.* He'll notice which buildings have Awakened and which don't. He looked right at us."
"He looked at the building. He didn't see us."
"Today. What about tomorrow?"
She was right. Voss's system was designed to surface exactly what Cael and Lira were trying to hide: capability. Every supply run, every movement pattern, every interaction with Elena's network left traces that a competent intelligence operation would eventually read.
Cael looked at the map. At Voss's expanding yellow territory, which he now re-coded to orange — actively threatening.
"We can't hide forever," he said. "But we can control what they find."
"Meaning?"
"Meaning we give them something to see. Something boring. Two unawakened survivors, scraping by, contributing just enough to avoid scrutiny. We attend the next collection. Hand over supplies. Be visible. Be ordinary."
"You want us to pay tribute."
"I want us to be invisible inside his system instead of invisible outside it. Outside, we're suspicious. Inside, we're inventory."
Lira's hands were fists again. She caught it. Unclenched. The effort it cost her was visible in her shoulders.
"I don't kneel, Cael."
"This isn't kneeling. It's camouflage. There's a difference."
"Is there?"
The question sat between them like a knife on a table. There was a right answer and an honest answer and they weren't the same.
"I don't know," he said. "But I know that getting into a fight with fourteen Awakened because we're proud is the kind of decision that ends with both of us dead and the people we're trying to help worse off than before."
She turned away. Looked out the window at the Greymire District — at the smoke and the silence and the crack in the sky that pulsed overhead like a second heartbeat.
"My father used to say things like that," she said quietly. "Practical things. Logical things. 'Don't fight back, Lira. Don't make it worse. Just be small and it'll pass.' He was wrong every time. It never passed. It just got easier for him."
Cael didn't respond. Couldn't. Because she wasn't wrong, and his argument — however tactically sound — had just landed on the exact scar it shouldn't have touched.
The silence stretched.
"I'll go to the collection," she said finally. "I'll hand over cans and stand there and be inventory. But the first time one of them touches someone who can't fight back — the first time it stops being a shakedown and starts being violence — I'm done pretending."
"Okay."
"That's not negotiable."
"I know. I wouldn't negotiate it."
She looked at him. Searching. Whatever she found was apparently sufficient, because she nodded once and went downstairs.
---
That evening, Cael visited Elena.
She was in the laundry room — her unofficial headquarters, where the pipes still worked and the concrete block walls muffled sound. Three of her people were sorting supplies: canned food on one shelf, medical supplies on another, water in a row of mismatched containers against the wall.
"They came to your sector," Cael said.
"They came to everyone's sector." Elena didn't look up from the inventory list she was maintaining in a school notebook. "Voss Carriden. We've known about him since day three. Some of my people used to work at the civic centre before the Fracture. They say he was already running an operation — not Awakened, just intimidation. Loan sharking. Protection money from the shop owners on Vine."
"He was a criminal before the Fracture."
"He was an entrepreneur before the Fracture. The Fracture just promoted him."
She set the notebook down. Looked at Cael with the flat, practical gaze of a woman who had survived enough to distil survival into a process.
"What do you want?"
"An alliance. Formal. I'll share everything I've mapped — patrol routes, territorial boundaries, resource locations, Fracture Zone patterns. In exchange, your network gives us shelter access and supply lines."
"And what does your girl bring?"
"She's not my girl. She brings the ability to protect your people if protection becomes necessary."
Elena considered this. "We've survived by being small."
"Small works until the territory shrinks. Voss is expanding. The Hollow is expanding. The hardware coalition is cracking. In two weeks, there won't be a margin to survive in. You'll be inside someone's territory whether you choose to be or not."
"So I should choose yours."
"I don't have a territory. I have a map and a partner who punches hard. But I also know where every patrol walks, when every guard sleeps, and which of Voss's people are already thinking about leaving."
Elena picked up the notebook again. Flipped to a blank page. Wrote something.
"Greaves," she said.
Cael went still.
"Don't look surprised. I've been running networks since before you were born. I know about Greaves. I know about the woman on Coster — her name is Marta, by the way. And I know he's been stealing food for her since week one. What I need to know is whether you can do anything useful with him, or whether you're just a boy with a map who thinks patterns are the same as plans."
Cael took a breath. Recalibrated. For the second time in a week, someone had been ahead of him.
"Patterns aren't plans," he said. "But plans start with patterns. And right now, I have better patterns than anyone else in this district."
Elena studied him. Five seconds. Ten.
"Tuesday," she said. "Bring your map. Bring your girl. Don't be late."
She went back to her inventory.
Cael left the laundry room and walked into the Greymire evening. The crack in the sky was dimmer tonight — quieter. The hum had dropped a quarter-tone, like a machine losing power.
He didn't know what that meant either. But he added it to the list.
The list was getting long. The answers were getting scarce. And somewhere in the district, a man named Voss Carriden was building a kingdom out of fear and canned goods, and he didn't know yet that the most dangerous person in his territory was a twenty-two-year-old with no combat ability who was very, very good at seeing where things break.