The four men had spent over a week trying to learn something useful about the group on the twenty-first floor, and had come away with almost nothing.
The gate gave them nothing to observe — no windows, no predictable rhythm, nothing but a locked door that stayed locked no matter how long they waited in the stairwell below it. What they'd learned instead had come from watching the group move through the open water, out on supply runs, where the sealed floor's careful secrecy didn't apply.
"They go out every three days, give or take," Marcus said, crouched beside the tall man near a collapsed overpass overlooking the flooded intersection below. "Same five people, usually. Sometimes four. Boat, or the small speed craft the redhead pilots. They hit stores nobody else has picked clean yet, and they're good — fast, coordinated, barely stop moving the whole time they're out."
