The partnership lasted eleven hours before their first argument.
Lira wanted to hit the Boss's supply depot on Wren Street. She'd been tracking it for three days — a converted auto shop where the Boss's enforcers stockpiled food, medicine, and clean water seized from the surrounding blocks. Two guards on rotation. One Awakened, one not. Lira's math was simple: break through the door, neutralise the guards, redistribute the supplies to Elena's network and the families in the western margin.
"Tonight," she said. "Before the rotation changes."
They were on the roof of Cael's office building, sitting on opposite sides of a ventilation unit in the grey light of day eight. The crack in the sky pulsed above them — slower than yesterday, Cael noted. The rhythm was decelerating. He didn't know what that meant.
"No," he said.
Lira's jaw did the thing. The clench. "People are starving. Three blocks west of here, a woman is feeding her kids rice water because there's nothing else."
"I know."
"Then what's the problem?"
"The problem is that the depot on Wren isn't a supply cache. It's a trap."
She stared at him.
Cael unrolled the brown-paper map between them. Two metres of the Greymire District's new political reality, colour-coded and annotated in his tight handwriting. He pointed.
"The Boss moved his main stockpile two days ago. I watched the trucks. Everything valuable went north, to the basement of the municipal building — his headquarters. What's left on Wren is low-value. Expired canned goods, bottled water past its date. Useful, but not worth two guards."
"There are two guards."
"Exactly. Why guard something worthless? Because the Boss wants someone to attack it. He's had three raids in the last week. Small, disorganised. Each time, his enforcers responded within four minutes — too fast for coincidence. He's using Wren as a tripwire. Hit it, and his response team converges on your location while you're carrying supplies you can't drop and can't run with."
Lira looked at the map. At the patrol routes drawn in red ink. At the four-minute response radius marked with a dotted circle around the depot.
"You're sure."
"I watched the shift change for nine hours. The guards on Wren don't check the stockpile. They check the approaches. They're not guarding what's inside. They're watching for who comes."
She was quiet for a long time. The wind carried smoke from somewhere south — the hardware coalition's territory, where the internal fractures Cael had predicted were beginning to show.
"So what do we do?" she asked. Not happy about asking. Not used to asking.
"We don't hit the depot. We use the depot."
---
The plan took two days to build.
Cael walked Lira through it on the brown-paper map, and for the first time, she saw what his brain did with information. Not just collection — architecture. He didn't hoard data. He built structures with it.
"The Boss has a blind spot," Cael said. "His patrols cover a six-block radius from the municipal building. Perfect circle. Disciplined. But the rotation has a gap — fourteen seconds between the northwest patrol's return and the northeast patrol's departure. Fourteen seconds where the northern approach to his headquarters is unwatched."
"Fourteen seconds isn't enough to do anything."
"It's enough to see. On night one, I use the gap to observe his headquarters entry. Identify the guard complement, the door mechanism, the stockpile access. On night two, I use it again to confirm the pattern. On night three—"
"We hit the actual stockpile."
"No. On night three, we make friends."
Lira's expression was the one she wore when she suspected someone was being clever in a direction she didn't like.
"The Boss has twenty-three people in his operation," Cael continued. "Nineteen enforcers, four with Permissions. But not all of them are loyal. Three are scared. Two are resentful. One—" he tapped a spot on the map, a name he'd written in pencil "—is desperate."
"Who?"
"Greaves. Left-flank patrol, night shift. He's been with the Boss since day two, but his positioning has changed. First week, he was inner circle — close patrol, headquarters access. Now he's outer ring. Demotion. The Boss doesn't trust him anymore, and Greaves knows it."
"How do you know all this from watching?"
Cael hesitated. This was the part that made people uncomfortable. Not the seeing — the knowing. The way his brain took a hundred small observations and built a person from them without ever exchanging a word.
"His patrol route changed four days ago. People who get demoted walk differently — shorter stride, head lower, more frequent checks over the shoulder. He's eating alone. Last night, he hid food in his jacket instead of bringing it to the communal pile. That means he's preparing for the possibility that he'll need to leave."
He paused.
"Greaves isn't loyal. He's calculating. That makes him useful."
Lira was looking at him with an expression he was learning to recognise — the one that sat between respect and unease. The look people gave someone who could take apart their interior life from fifty metres away.
"You do this with everyone," she said. Not a question.
"Yes."
"Have you done it with me?"
"I told you what I saw."
"You told me what you chose to tell me. That's not the same thing."
She was right. It wasn't.
The silence between them was the kind that either builds a bridge or digs a trench. Cael let it sit. He'd learned — from customer service calls, from university politics, from the long silence after his mother's funeral — that the person who fills a silence first is the person who needs the relationship more.
Lira filled it.
"Fine," she said. "We do it your way. But if your way gets someone hurt, we do it mine after."
"If my way gets someone hurt, mine was wrong and yours was always the backup."
Something that wasn't quite a smile. Close enough.
---
Night one.
The fourteen-second gap was real. Cael slipped through the northern approach at 2:17 AM, pressed against the wall of a burned-out convenience store, and watched the Boss's headquarters for eleven minutes before the next patrol overlap forced him back.
Eleven minutes was enough.
The headquarters had a front entrance — guarded, fortified, obvious — and a service door on the east side. The service door's lock was a standard deadbolt. [Analyze] showed him the mechanism through the door itself: pin tumbler, five pins, third pin corroded. Pickable with a tension wrench and patience he didn't have tonight.
The stockpile was in the basement. He could hear the hum of a generator — the Boss had fuel, which meant he had power, which meant he had information. A radio, probably. Maybe a working phone.
Cael memorised the guard postings (two at the front, one at the service door, one roaming interior) and retreated through the gap.
Night two confirmed it. Same pattern. Same gap. Same guards. The Boss was disciplined but rigid — he ran his operation on a schedule that didn't vary because variation required the kind of strategic adaptability that brute-force commanders never developed.
Cael updated the map.
---
Night three.
Greaves was on outer patrol. Northwest route. Cael intercepted him at the far point of his circuit — the corner of Vine and Fourth, where the patrol route passed through a two-metre gap between buildings. No sightlines from the headquarters. No overlapping patrols for ninety seconds.
Greaves was bigger than Cael expected. Former construction, maybe — wide shoulders, thick wrists, the build of someone who'd carried heavy things for a living. His Permission was minor: [Grip] — a physical enhancement that let him lock his hands onto any surface or object with inhuman tenacity. Useful for restraining people. Not much else.
He saw Cael and went still.
"I'm not armed," Cael said. He was getting used to saying this. "I'm not here to fight."
"Then what."
"I'm here to tell you something you already know."
Greaves said nothing. His hand was on the wall — [Grip] primed, ready to lock down if needed. His eyes were the eyes of a man who'd been anticipating this conversation without knowing it would come.
"You're on outer patrol," Cael said. "Three weeks ago, you were inner circle. The Boss moved you because you hesitated during the raid on the pharmacy block. You didn't want to hurt the old man who was hiding in the back. The Boss noticed. Now you're out here, walking the edge, wondering how many more nights before 'outer patrol' becomes 'no longer necessary.'"
Greaves's hand tightened on the wall. The brick compressed slightly under [Grip].
"Who are you?"
"Someone who sees patterns. And the pattern says you have about six days before the Boss decides you're a liability."
"You don't know that."
"I know that the last person he demoted from inner to outer was gone by day eight. His name was Rolf. He had [Spark] — minor electrical discharge. The Boss told everyone Rolf left voluntarily. Nobody believed it."
Greaves was quiet. The ninety-second window was closing.
"I'm not asking you to betray him," Cael said. "I'm asking you to think about what happens when loyalty is a one-way street. When you're ready to talk, hang something white from the northwest fire escape on Vine. I'll find you."
He stepped back into the shadows.
Greaves didn't move.
That was wrong. Cael had modelled this moment — the beat of silence, the calculated hesitation, and then the walk. Resume patrol. Process. Contact later. That was how frightened men in failing hierarchies responded to escape offers. He'd seen the pattern in corporate restructurings, in university politics, in every system where loyalty curdled.
But Greaves wasn't walking.
"The food I hid," Greaves said, still facing away. "That wasn't for me."
Cael stopped retreating.
"There's a woman on Coster. She's got a kid. I bring her supplies when I can manage it. Skim a little off the runs." His hand was still on the wall, [Grip] locked in, like he needed something solid to hold onto. "I didn't hesitate at the pharmacy because I went soft. I hesitated because the old man in the back was her father."
Cael's carefully modelled profile of Greaves — the scared enforcer, the calculating survivor, the man who'd betray his boss to save his skin — tilted sideways. The data hadn't been wrong. But it had been incomplete. Greaves wasn't just running from something. He was protecting someone. That changed the math entirely.
"I don't need your white flag system," Greaves said. "I need to know if you can keep her safe when this falls apart. Because it's going to fall apart. I figured that out two weeks before you did."
He walked on. Exactly on schedule. As if the last thirty seconds hadn't happened.
Cael stood in the dark, recalibrating.
He'd read the what correctly. The direction, the loyalty fracture, the approaching break. But he'd been wrong about the why, wrong about the timeline, and wrong about who was ahead of whom in the calculation. Greaves had been playing his own game before Cael had even started watching.
Note to self: the map is not the territory. The pattern is not the person.
He filed it away. It stung more than it should have.
---
Back on the office roof, Lira was waiting. She sat with her legs hanging over the edge, looking at the crack in the sky. The reinforcement on her forearms flickered faintly in the dark — a nervous habit, like someone cracking their knuckles.
"Well?"
"He's thinking."
"Is that enough?"
"It's the beginning."
She pulled her legs up. Crossed her arms. The reinforcement faded.
"I don't understand you," she said. "You could have asked me to go down there and *make* him talk. Two minutes. No damage, no lasting harm. Just enough pressure to get an answer."
"And then he'd tell us what we wanted to hear instead of what he actually knows. Coerced intelligence is unreliable. He needs to come to us because he wants to survive, not because he's scared."
"You sound like a textbook."
"I sound like someone who spent three years arguing with insurance companies. You learn that threats get you hung up on. Questions get you transferred to someone who can actually help."
The ghost of a smile again. Closer this time.
They sat on the roof and watched the Greymire District breathe its broken breath. Somewhere in the eastern dead zone, the Hollow expanded another fraction of a metre. Somewhere in the Boss's headquarters, Greaves was lying awake, counting the days he had left. Somewhere in the western margin, Elena's network was trading blankets for batteries and pretending the world hadn't ended.
"Cael."
"Yeah."
"If this works — the Greaves thing. If we actually get inside information. What then?"
He looked at the map. At the twelve zones. At the colour codes and patrol routes and fault lines.
"Then we find the cracks. And we use them."
Lira looked at her fists. Unclenched them.
"I'm better at breaking things than building them," she said.
"I know. That's why I'm here."
She looked at him. Something adjusted behind her eyes — not trust, not yet, but the space where trust might eventually go if he didn't screw it up.
"Don't analyse me when I'm talking to you," she said. "I can tell when you're doing it. Your eyes go flat."
"Okay."
"I mean it."
"I know. I'll try."
"Trying isn't the same as doing."
"No," he agreed. "But it's the step before."
She almost smiled. Didn't. But almost.
Day eight ended. The crack in the sky pulsed its slow, decelerating rhythm overhead. And two people who had no business trusting each other sat on a roof in the dark, looking at a map of a world that had broken, trying to find the shape of what might come next.