Being inventory was harder than Cael expected.
He and Lira attended the Tuesday collection at the western margin's designated assembly point — a cleared lot behind a strip of shuttered restaurants. Thirty-odd civilians stood in a loose queue, holding their contributions like offerings at a temple where the god was a man with [Harm] and a clipboard.
The clean man was there again. Same jacket. Same clipboard. Same patient smile. He'd brought two new enforcers — younger, eager, the kind of muscle that hadn't been tested yet and wanted to be. They flanked the collection table with their arms crossed and their Permissions simmering visibly: heat distortion on one, a faint gravitational pull around the other's hands.
One of the new enforcers had a dog with him. A German shepherd, scarred across the muzzle, sitting at his heel with the rigid stillness of an animal trained to wait for a command it wanted badly to receive.
Cael carried three cans of beans and a bottle of ibuprofen. Lira carried a gallon jug of water. Her knuckles around the handle were white, and he could see the tendons in her wrists jumping — micro-tremors, involuntary, [Reinforce] trying to activate beneath the skin like a muscle she couldn't unclench.
They joined the queue.
"Don't look at anyone too long," Cael murmured. "Don't react to anything. We're tired. We're hungry. We're grateful for protection."
"I'm going to throw up."
"Save it for after." He could see her nails digging crescents into her palms beneath the water jug. She shifted the jug to hide it.
The queue moved. Each person deposited their contribution on the table, gave their name and location, and received a chit — a torn square of cardboard with a stamp on it. The chit entitled the bearer to one meal from the communal kitchen. One meal. For whatever they'd handed over.
When Cael reached the table, the clean man looked at him. Studied him for half a second longer than the others.
"Name."
"Cael Arison. Building on Vine, fourth floor."
Not his real location — the office building was two blocks east. But the apartment on Vine still had his name on the mailbox, and if anyone checked, the kicked-in lobby door and the empty fourth-floor unit would tell the story of someone displaced by the chaos.
"Awakened?"
"No."
The clean man's pen paused. He had a way of not-looking that was more attentive than most people's staring.
"You're sure about that."
"I'm sure. I wish I wasn't. Being Awakened seems useful."
The clean man tilted his head. His eyes dropped to Cael's forearm — the one he'd sliced open jumping through his apartment window on day one. The cut had scabbed over, but the scar was fresh and obvious, a diagonal slash across the skin that looked exactly like what it was: a wound from broken glass.
"That's a nasty cut," the clean man said. "How'd you get it?"
Cael's heart rate spiked. He felt it in his throat — the kick of adrenaline that came from being seen by someone who collected information for a living.
"Window broke during the Fracture," he said. "Flying glass."
"Broke, or you broke it?"
Two seconds of silence. The queue behind him shifted. The enforcer with the dog was watching. The dog was watching. Lira was three people back, and Cael could feel her tension like heat from a stove — if the clean man pushed one more inch, her [Reinforce] was going to flare and the camouflage would be ash.
"Broke," Cael said. "I was standing too close. Stupid."
The clean man studied him for one more beat — long enough for Cael to understand that the man didn't believe him, and short enough to signal that it didn't matter yet. Then the patient smile returned.
"Be more careful," he said. He wrote on his clipboard and handed over a chit.
Lira went next. Same questions. Same lies. She placed the water jug on the table, and when her hands released the handle, he saw the crescent marks in her palms — four on each side, deep enough that two had drawn blood. She folded her fingers closed before the clean man could notice. The dog at the enforcer's heel shifted as she passed, nostrils working, and Lira's forearms flickered — just once, just beneath the skin, a pulse of [Reinforce] so brief it could have been a trick of the light.
The enforcer glanced at her. Looked away.
They walked away with two chits and legs that wanted to run.
---
But the line hadn't been wasted.
While standing in the queue, Cael had been working. Not [Analyze] — not the full ability, not the diagnostic lines and stress patterns. Something subtler. He'd spent nine days training his eyes to function independently from his Permission, and now he used them.
The collection operation told a story.
The clean man — Cael needed his name — ran logistics. He answered to someone. The clipboard entries went into a leather satchel at his hip, and the satchel had a strap that was worn on the inside, which meant it was normally carried over the right shoulder, which meant the clean man walked long distances regularly. He was a courier as much as a collector. He reported to Voss in person.
The enforcers rotated in pairs. The same pairs. Not random assignment — trust-based deployment. Voss put established teams together, which meant his operation valued reliability over flexibility. Strong, but predictable.
The contribution table was sorted by category: food left, medicine centre, water right. The sorting was done by an unawakened civilian — a thin man in a grey hoodie who handled the items with the careful efficiency of someone who'd done warehouse work. He wasn't an enforcer. He was staff. Voss had non-combat personnel.
That mattered. Enforcers moved in paired formations and responded to threats in four-minute windows. But the operation's actual functioning — the logistics, the distribution, the record-keeping — depended on people like the grey-hoodie man. People who kept Voss's kingdom running not because they were powerful, but because they were useful.
People who might, under the right conditions, stop being useful to Voss and start being useful to someone else.
---
That night, Cael spread the map on the office floor and began the real work.
He'd attended the collection to be seen — to become inventory, a face on a list, a name attached to a false address. But he'd also attended to observe, and observation was where his brain sang.
He drew a new layer on the map. Not territorial boundaries. Not patrol routes. Personnel.
Voss Carriden's operation, as far as Cael could reconstruct it:
Command: Voss himself. [Harm] + [Accelerate]. C-rank by Cael's estimation, though he hadn't seen Voss use [Accelerate] yet — that was extrapolation from the way his enforcers left corridor space around him, as if he needed room to move fast. Leaders who don't need space don't get given space.
Inner circle: Four Awakened enforcers from day one. The quiet one on his left — the one Cael had flagged as *higher threat than his rank suggests* — remained the most dangerous. The quiet one didn't posture. Didn't flex. Stood still and watched with the patience of someone who'd been violent professionally before the Fracture gave it a name.
Outer ring: Eleven more enforcers, mostly D-rank, hired or coerced over the past week. Mixed quality. Some were genuinely loyal. Some were Greaves — waiting for the math to change.
Support staff: At least seven non-combat personnel. Logistics, cooking, cleaning, record-keeping. The grey-hoodie man was one. These people weren't prisoners, but they weren't free either. They stayed because the alternative was worse.
The clean man: Unknown rank. Possibly unawakened. Possibly hiding it. His role was administrative — the face of Voss's system, the voice that made extortion sound like community service. He was the most important person in Voss's operation that Voss probably didn't realise was the most important person. Remove the enforcers, and Voss could recruit more. Remove the clean man, and the system lost its veneer of legitimacy.
Cael stared at that last entry.
Don't remove. Recruit.
He didn't write it down. The thought sat in his stomach like a swallowed stone. What he was building — the map, the profiles, the Greaves contact, the Elena alliance — had a name. If Voss Carriden's operation was a government, then what Cael was doing was treason. And treason, in every system Cael had ever studied, had one punishment.
He thought about the three bodies outside the convenience store. The woman with the wedding ring and the can of corn.
Voss didn't need a reason to kill. He only needed a suspicion.
Cael looked at the map. At the patrol routes and the personnel profiles and the network of lines that connected Elena's people to Greaves's intel to Marta's apartment on Coster Street. If any of it was discovered — any single thread — Voss would pull it until the whole web came apart. And the people attached to the web were not data points. They were Elena. They were Greaves. They were a woman and her child on Coster Street.
His hands were shaking. Not [Analyze] tremors. Just fear.
He folded the map. Hid it behind the ventilation duct. And sat in the dark with the weight of what he was doing pressing on his chest like a hand.
---
Lira came back from Elena's with news.
"Greaves hung the white flag."
Cael looked up. "When?"
"This morning. Elena's people spotted it. White shirt on the northwest fire escape, Vine Street."
On his terms. Not the white flag system Cael had proposed — the one Greaves had rejected. A white shirt, not a cloth. On a different fire escape, not the one Cael had specified. Greaves was signalling that he controlled the communication channel. That this was his decision, his timing, his ground rules.
"He wants to meet," Lira continued. "Tomorrow night. Same corner. Vine and Fourth."
"Did Elena set this up?"
"Elena says she's been talking to Greaves for a week. She's the one who convinced him we're worth meeting."
Of course she had. Elena had been three moves ahead since before Cael drew his first map. He felt the familiar sting of being outpaced and swallowed it.
"His terms?"
"One: Marta and her son are protected. Non-negotiable."
"Done."
"Two: he doesn't defect. He stays inside Voss's operation and feeds information."
"Smarter than flipping. He's more useful inside."
"Three." Lira paused. "He wants to meet you alone. No me. He said — Elena's words — 'the fighter makes me nervous. The one who sees things is the one I need to talk to.'"
Cael nodded slowly. Greaves had profiled *him.* An enforcer with a [Grip] Permission and a warehouse worker's education had looked at Cael's operation and correctly identified that the value wasn't Lira's fists — it was Cael's brain.
*The map is not the territory. The pattern is not the person.*
He kept learning that lesson. It kept stinging.
"I'll go alone," he said.
"I don't like it."
"I know."
"If he's setting a trap—"
"He's not. He's protecting Marta. Everything he's done since day one has been about protecting Marta. People who betray their protector for a trap don't hide food in their jackets — they hand it over and call it loyalty."
Lira looked at him. That measuring look. The one that was slowly, over nine days and twelve arguments and one smashed window, evolving from suspicion into something she probably wouldn't call trust but which functioned identically.
"Okay," she said. "But I'm on the roof of the building across the street. If I hear anything wrong, I come through the wall."
"Through the wall."
"Through the wall."
He almost smiled. The first time in — he couldn't remember. Before the Fracture, probably. Before the insurance call. Before the lukewarm coffee and the spreadsheet and the sky breaking open.
"Deal," he said.
Tomorrow. Vine and Fourth. Greaves. The first crack in Voss Carriden's wall, and Cael hadn't even had to put it there. It had been there all along — in a man with strong hands and a soft spot, hiding food in his jacket for a woman whose name Cael hadn't bothered to learn.
He added Marta — Coster Street to the map. In green.
Some cracks aren't weaknesses. Some cracks are doors.