The two short pulses meant come look at this and not we need help and there was a difference that Michael had learned to read in the quality of the signal, the spacing between the two pulses, the interval that said urgent versus the interval that said significant.

This one said significant.

He came around the corner into the second block south and found Sera’s team stopped in front of a building that had been a mid sized supermarket before everything ended.

The shutters on the front were half down and the interior beyond them was dark and the pulse was showing him something inside that he was still trying to categorize when Sera appeared from the shutter gap and looked at him.

"Inside," she said.

He went in.

---

The supermarket still had stock.

Not the front sections, those had been cleared in the first days the way every accessible shelf in every accessible building had been cleared, people taking what they could carry in whatever direction felt safer than the one they’d come from. But the back sections, the stockroom and the cold storage area and the wholesale storage along the east wall that was behind a locked door that the panic hadn’t stopped to deal with, those were largely untouched.

Michael stood in the stockroom and looked at the shelves and did the math.

Canned goods in quantity. Dry goods. Medical adjacent supplies, bandages and antiseptic and over the counter medication that Dr. Kang was going to have a response to.

Two chest freezers against the back wall that were not running but were sealed and had been sealed since the power went which meant the contents were either frozen solid still from the insulation or had transitioned to preserved by the cold storage atmosphere and either way were worth checking.

He pulled up the supply tracker Anya maintained and looked at current stock levels and looked at the shelves and felt the particular satisfaction of a problem solving itself.

"How did you find it," he said.

"Maya," Sera said from behind him.

He turned around.

Maya was at the locked door on the east wall, the one that led to the wholesale storage, looking at the frame with her eyes moving across the structural points the way they always moved across things she was reading. "The ventilation configuration on the exterior," she said without looking up.

"Supermarkets with wholesale storage have a specific external vent pattern for the stockroom humidity control. I saw it from the street." She found the hinge point she was looking for on the door frame and looked at it. "This one’s easier than it looks. The lock is the original retail grade. The shop override tool handles it."

Michael bought the override and it appeared in his hand and thirty seconds later the wholesale storage door was open and the shelves beyond it were full and Maya looked at the contents with the expression of someone whose calculation had come out correct.

"Good call," Michael said.

She looked at him. "I know," she said.

---

He sent Yuna back to the building for the duffel bags.

She went fast and returned faster with four bags and Anya’s revised priority list that Anya had apparently anticipated would be needed and had sent along without being asked which was the most Anya thing that had happened all week.

They loaded for twenty minutes. Sera organized the process the way she organized everything, efficiently and without unnecessary discussion, and Cole’s man who had come south with Sera’s team lifted the heavy stock with the practiced ease of someone who had been moving materials for three days during the wall build and had developed an opinion about the most efficient way to do it.

Maya supervised the structural integrity of the load distribution in the bags which was not a thing anyone had asked her to do and was also genuinely useful because two of the first bags had been packed in a way that would have failed the weight distribution on a two block carry and she caught it before they moved.

Yuna was at the chest freezers in the back.

She’d pried the first one open and was looking at the contents with her nose turned slightly away and her eyes assessing and Michael came over and looked with her.

"Frozen still," she said. "The insulation held." She reached in and pulled out a vacuum sealed package and looked at it and looked at Michael. "This is real meat."

He looked at it. It was real meat. Vacuum sealed, properly labeled, frozen solid.

"How much," he said.

She counted. "Enough for a real meal," she said. "A proper one. For everyone."

He looked at the frozen packages and thought about Yuna making food from ration components before sunrise and the particular good of her cooking and what she could do with actual ingredients.

"Take all of it," he said.

She was already packing it carefully with the focused attention of someone who understood exactly what they were holding and wasn’t going to be careless with it.

---

They were loaded and moving back toward the building by noon.

The bags were heavy and the two block carry required rotating who was taking the heaviest load and Michael took the first rotation on the largest bag with his shoulder that Dr. Kang had told him twice not to use as a primary and used it as a primary and told himself he’d deal with the consequence later.

He pulled up the comm pulse and checked the other zones.

Gareth’s zone showed two pulses, the check in signal that meant the zone was clear and the team was holding position. Clean. On schedule.

Cole’s zone showed nothing which meant Cole was in the middle of something or the zone was clear and he hadn’t checked in yet and either way Michael trusted Cole’s zone to be whatever Cole said it was.

He sent two pulses back to Gareth meaning acknowledged, continue.

They reached the building and the gate opened on the twenty second cycle Anya was managing from the lobby and they came through and Michael closed it behind them and stood in the courtyard with four heavy bags and the particular feeling of a morning’s work that had produced something real.

Anya was in the lobby with her clipboard already updating the supply numbers before the bags were unpacked.

---

Vote!!!!