They left before sunrise.Ethan, David, Kaelen. No Miller — Miller was needed at the tower with Holt's people still circling the perimeter. No Seraphina — her natural cold made her easy to track in enclosed spaces. Just three people moving through the South District in the dark, which was enough.David led. He'd mapped the South District relay signals during his broadcast tower operation and had the layout of the Water Authority building in his head before they left. He moved the way he always moved — low, efficient, using the sides of streets instead of the centers, pausing at junctions to read the space before crossing.Kaelen moved behind Ethan like a weather system that happened to be following someone.The South District was quieter than the North. Fewer displaced hunters, fewer displaced anyone — the South had been primarily residential before the apocalypse and the residents had mostly stayed, which meant the streets felt inhabited rather than contested. People in windows. Ligh

They got back to the Holt Tower just after seven in the morning.Miller was waiting in the lobby with his notepad open and the expression he got when he had information that wasn't good and had been waiting to deliver it. Ren stopped just inside the door and took in the building — the survivors moving through the corridors, the makeshift operations setup on the ground floor, the general organized chaos of three hundred people living somewhere not built for it. His face went through a few things but he kept quiet."Report," Ethan said."Holt's crowd is down to eleven people outside," Miller said. "He left around four this morning, came back at six with food. Sharing it with them." He flipped a page. "He's not going anywhere.""What else?"Miller looked up from the notepad. "Jin picked up an S-Class signal about an hour ago. Coming in from the north. Moving fast."Ethan looked at him. "How fast?""Fast enough that Jin said it wasn't traveling on foot." Miller closed the notepad. "He's o

Voss came back from the cache site with ash on his jacket and a look on his face that Ethan had seen before — the specific expression of someone who has been working hard to fix something and just watched it get undone in under a minute.He walked into the lobby, looked at Ethan, and said nothing for a moment."How bad?" Ethan said."The cache had enough food for sixty people for two weeks. Medical supplies for thirty." Voss put his hands in his pockets. "All of it gone. And when I got there, half the people who depended on it were already being told by Holt's people that you ordered it destroyed to consolidate the food supply under your control.""How many believed it?""Enough." Voss looked at the floor. "My people built trust with that community over two weeks. Holt erased it in twenty minutes." He looked up. "He's good at this.""Yes," Ethan said. "He is."David was leaning against the far wall listening. Mara had stayed near the stairs. Miller came in from outside with his notepa

David found the holding address in twenty minutes.A warehouse on Kellner Street — two blocks from where the fires had been. Vale had leased it six months before the System activated under a maintenance company name that didn't exist anymore. David had walked past it three times during the arson investigation without flagging it because it looked exactly like what it was supposed to look like — an empty building with a padlocked shutter and no reason to pay attention to it.He brought the address back to the lobby and Ethan took six people from Voss's group to verify it.The warehouse had food for roughly four hundred people for three weeks. Medical supplies. Generator fuel. All of it organized on shelves in the back section behind a false wall that looked like loading bay infrastructure until you pushed it.Vale had positioned this weeks ago. Maybe longer.Ethan stood in the warehouse and looked at the shelves for a moment.Three moves behind. Finding this was catching up on one of t

Ren decoded the second and third messages by morning.They were longer than the first. More specific. Vale had laid out Holt's position three in detail — not as instructions, more like a briefing. He'd told Holt exactly what Ethan's weaknesses were, how he made decisions, what would make him react badly in public. He'd profiled Ethan the way you profile a target before a campaign, using months of relay data and behavioral observation to build a picture of someone he'd never met.Ethan read all three messages sitting at the table on the third floor while the tower woke up around him. Miller brought coffee at some point — actual coffee, from somewhere, which said something about how seriously Miller took mornings."Vale told him about the Mana Battery ritual," Ethan said when Miller sat down.Miller looked at him. "Holt's own ritual.""Vale described it in detail and told Holt that if it ever came out publicly, Ethan would use it to discredit him." Ethan set the tablet down. "So Holt's