The figuring out happened in the lobby because Michael wasn’t bringing Gareth’s five men upstairs until he knew what upstairs was going to look like with them in it.

He sat on the lobby floor with his back against the wall resting easily and then looked at Gareth standing across from him with the easy expression and his hand near the holster and thought about the arithmetic Gareth was running and ran his own alongside it.

Eleven extra people. Five of them were Gareth’s men who moved seemed to have good skills and possibly useful. Two of them were women who had been in a situation he wasn’t going to name out loud yet but understood well enough.

Four of them were his own people who were upstairs right now and didn’t know any of this had happened yet because he hadn’t had a chance to tell them.

Dr. Kang was going to have thoughts about this.

Sera was going to have more than thoughts.

He looked at Gareth. "How long have you been in the city."

"Since the start," Gareth said. "We were in the warehouse district when it hit. We stayed mobile for the first week then found a location and held it."

"What location."

"An office building six blocks east." He paused. "We lost it four days ago. A horde came through and we couldn’t hold the lower floors."

"So you’ve been moving since then."

"Looking for somewhere worth stopping." He looked around the lobby. "Found it."

Michael looked at him steadily. "This isn’t a takeover."

"Never said it was."

"You implied it in the warehouse."

Gareth smiled. "Circumstances change."

"They do," Michael agreed. "So here’s how this works. You want to stay, you stay on my terms. This is my base and it’s going to be run by my rules. Everyone in this building pulls weight and nobody takes anything that isn’t theirs and nobody touches anyone who doesn’t want to be touched."

He let that last part sit.

Gareth looked at him with a smile still on his face. "Specific rule."

"Specific building," Michael said.

The chain man was leaning against the gate behind Gareth and he looked at the floor when Michael said it and the two bat men looked at each other and looked away and Gareth’s face twitched underneath the easy expression.

"You’ve got opinions about how I run my group," Gareth said.

"I’ve got rules about how people behave in my building," Michael said. "Your group is in my building."

A long quiet moment pass and the perimeter panel pulsed amber on the wall. Outside the city was doing its usual sounds, distant and continuous and indifferent.

"And if I don’t agree with your rules," Gareth said.

Michael looked at the gate behind him. "Then the gate opens from the inside."

Gareth looked at the gate then at Michael and Sera who was standing three feet to Michael’s right with the axe in her hand and the particular stillness she maintained when she was ready and not advertising it.

He then turned towards Shin near the stairwell door and Maya who had found a position that covered the room without looking like she was covering the room.

He did the arithmetic one final time.

Then he looked back at Michael and the easy expression settled into something that was almost respect, not quite, but adjacent to it, the expression of someone who had found the edge of something and decided not to push past it today. 𝕗𝐫𝐞𝕖𝕨𝐞𝗯𝚗𝕠𝘃𝐞𝚕.𝐜𝗼𝚖

"Your rules," Gareth said.

"My rules," Michael confirmed.

---

He took Anya and Rei upstairs first.

Gareth’s men stayed in the lobby with instructions that Sera delivered in a tone that made the instructions feel less like instructions and more like facts about the building that they would be wise to accept and the chain man in particular accepted them with the expression of someone who had been revising his position on several things since the warehouse and was nearly done with the revision.

The apartment door opened and Dr. Kang was on the other side of it with the expression of someone who had been waiting for a long time and had a list of questions ready.

She looked at Michael then at the two women behind him and the at state of all three of them, the scrape on his shoulder visible now that the adrenaline had finished hiding it, the cold storage bags, the general shape of people who had been through more than a hospital run.

"Sit down," she said, to all three of them, and they immediately complied seating down immediately.

Anya looked around the apartment trying to take in her new surrounding, taking inventory of everything, the reinforced windows, the storage unit, the workbench, the clinic through the open doorway, the lights running on actual power, and her expression did something complicated that settled into something quieter.

Rei sat on the edge of the couch and looked at her hands.

Dr. Kang crouched in front of her first. "Are you hurt."

Rei shook her head.

Dr. Kang looked at her with the precise clinical attention she gave everything and then looked at Michael over Rei’s head and he gave her a small nod that carried more information than it looked like and she received it and turned back to Rei.

"You’re safe here," she said simply. Just a fact. The way Dr. Kang said most things.

Rei looked up at her and something in her face moved.

Maya had appeared from the barracks doorway and was looking at Anya with the open curiosity she applied to most new people before her social awareness caught up with her instincts. "You came from the warehouse."

"Yes," Anya said.

"You operated the crane."

"Yes."

Maya looked at her for a second. "That was smart."

Anya looked at her like smart was not a word that had been applied to her recently and wasn’t sure what to do with it. "It was the obvious solution."

"It really wasn’t," Maya said. "Most people would not have looked at a warehouse crane and thought yes this is how we deal with a Brute."

Anya almost smiled. It was small and careful and looked like it hadn’t been used in a while.

[Bond Event — First Welcome: Anya. +1 Bond Point. Current BP: 3 — Anya.]

Michael stood in the middle of his apartment and looked at six women in his living room and then at the Blueprint Interface in his vision and then at the barracks capacity and then at the SP balance.

Two thousand three hundred and forty SP.

He needed to build.