They moved through the eastern district like the city belonged to them.

Seven of them, all men, all armed with weapons that hadn’t been scavenged from apartments or improvised from whatever was available.

These were proper weapons which where military grade or even better. They moved in a tight formation that had the loose practiced efficiency of people who had been doing this together long enough that communication had reduced to hand signals and eye contact and the occasional low word.

The leader was at the front.

He was not a large man, not the way Gareth was large, not the kind of size that announced itself.

He was lean and unhurried with dark patches under his eyes and moved through the dead city streets with the particular ease of someone who had stopped finding it threatening a long time ago. His name was Cole and the people who had encountered his group in the past thirty days had generally not had the opportunity to tell anyone else about the experience.

A Stalker came out of a building doorway ahead of them fast and low and the man second from the left shot it twice without breaking stride, suppressed shots that made less noise than the Stalker hitting the ground, and the formation moved around the body without pausing.

Cole looked at the building on the north side of the block.

It was a warehouse with the loading bay door buckled and warped, the entrance gap dark. He looked at the Brute shaped depression in the warehouse floor visible through the gap and the scattered Rotter bodies around it and tilted his head slightly.

"Someone cleared this," he said.

The man beside him crouched at the entrance and looked at the ground. Boot prints in the dust and debris, multiple sets, and the chain marks on the floor and the crane position above and the particular pattern of a fight that had been won by people who knew what they were doing.

"Yesterday," the man said. "Maybe two days ago."

Cole looked at the warehouse. At the boot prints. At the Brute on the floor with the chain damage to its skull and the two bullet wounds at the neck junction that had finished it.

"Someone shot it," he said. "After the chain brought it down." He looked at the bullet placement. "That’s a precise shot."

"Two shots," the man said.

Cole looked at the shots again. Nodded once. "It’s a most likely a civilian. Military would have gone for the skull first." He looked at the boot prints leading south out of the warehouse. "They went south."

He looked south. 𝒻𝓇𝑒𝘦𝘸𝑒𝒷𝓃ℴ𝑣𝘦𝑙.𝒸ℴ𝘮

Six blocks south and slightly west, visible above the rooftops, there was a building that had something on its roof that hadn’t been there a week ago.

He had passed through this area four days ago on a scouting run and he remembered the skyline and the skyline had changed.

He looked at it for a long moment.

"Someone’s building," he said.

Nobody responded because nobody needed to.

Cole looked at the building for another few seconds and then looked at the boot prints leading south and straightened up.

"Let’s go see," he said and they moved.

---

Back on the sixth floor Michael was in the middle of calculating Tier 3 material requirements when the knock came at his apartment door.

He opened it to find Gareth leaning against the hallway wall with the easy expression and his arms crossed and the particular posture of someone who had been standing there long enough to have decided what they were going to say.

"Got a minute," Gareth said.

Michael looked at him and then at the hallway behind him.

It was empty.

Gareth had come alone which was either a good sign or a calculated one and with Gareth those two things were not mutually exclusive.

"Come in," Michael said and stepped back.

Gareth came in and looked around the apartment the way he always looked at spaces, trying to figure out the whole complex of the room.

She didn’t look up when Gareth came in but her shoulders moved slightly and Michael noticed and kept it at the back of his mind.

"Sit down," Michael said.

Gareth sat on the couch with his arms still crossed and his ankle over his knee and looked at Michael sitting on the floor across from him and something in his eyes adjusted to the fact that Michael always sat on the floor and had apparently decided a long time ago that the floor was where he was comfortable and wasn’t going to change that for anyone.

"My men did good yesterday," Gareth said.

"They did," Michael agreed.

"Three floors cleared. That Stalker on four wasn’t nothing."

"No it wasn’t."

Gareth nodded slowly. "So I’m thinking we talk about what comes next. Properly." He looked around the apartment again. "You’re building something here that needs more than four people to run. I’ve got five men who know how to handle themselves and I’ve got experience managing a group in this city for thirty days." He looked at Michael. "That’s worth something."

"It is," Michael said.

"So what’s the structure here." Gareth uncrossed his ankle and leaned forward slightly. "Because right now it feels like you’ve got us in holding rooms down the hall and that’s not a partnership."

"I said earn your place," Michael said. "Your men earned theirs yesterday. That’s step one."

"And step two."

"Depends on step three."

Gareth looked at him. "You’re going to make me ask."

"I’m going to let you say what you actually came here to say," Michael said. "Instead of the version you started with."

A short silence. Gareth looked at Michael with his jaw set slightly and then he almost smiled, the first genuine expression Michael had seen from him that didn’t have several other things living underneath it.

"Anya and Rei," Gareth said. "They’re my people."

"They were in your group," Michael said. "Different thing."

"Is it."

"They chose to come upstairs," Michael said. "You were there."

Gareth looked at Anya at the workbench. She still hadn’t looked up but her pen had stopped moving. "Anya’s useful," he said.

"She knows supply logistics, building layouts, load management. She was the most practically valuable person in my group." He paused. "I want her working with my men, not up here counting protein bars."

"She’s doing exactly what she’s good at up here," Michael said.

"She’d be more useful—"

"Gareth," Michael said simply and Gareth stopped.

The apartment was quiet for a second. Anya’s pen still wasn’t moving.

"She stays where she is," Michael said. "Rei stays where she is. That’s not a negotiation point."

Gareth looked at him and his jaw worked once and the easy expression was doing more work than usual to stay in place. "You don’t know what you’re talking about," he said. "I kept those women alive for three weeks."

"I know," Michael said.

"They wouldn’t have lasted a week without—"

"I know," Michael said again, the same tone, and the repetition of it landed differently to the first time and Gareth heard the difference and went quiet.

The silence between them had more weight in it than the previous ones.

Gareth looked at Michael for a long moment and then he looked at the window covering and then at the perimeter panel on the wall and then at his own hands and something moved across his face that was gone before it fully formed.

He stood up.

"Alright," he said and the easy expression was back, fully reconstructed, everything underneath it packed away. "We do it your way."

"For now," Michael said.

Gareth looked at him and the almost-real smile came back briefly. "For now," he agreed and walked to the door and let himself out.

Michael sat on the floor and listened to Gareth’s footsteps go down the hall toward 607 and then looked at Anya.

She was looking at him. Her pen was still in her hand and her expression was steady but her eyes were doing something complicated that she blinked away before it fully developed.

"Thank you," she said quietly.

"You don’t need to thank me," he said.

She looked back at her inventory. "I know," she said. "I’m doing it anyway."

[Bond Event — Held The Line: Anya. +1 Bond Point. Current BP: 5 — Anya.]

---