"Enough to keep them alive, not enough to make them comfortable. Each building gets ten meal packs and five liters of water per week. That's survival rations, not a feast. They want more, they bring me something valuable. Information, labor, materials. Everything has a price.""And if a building refuses to cooperate?" Danny knew the answer before he asked."Then that building gets nothing. And the building next door gets double." Sean smiled the way a man smiles when he knows exactly how people work. "Hunger is the greatest motivator ever invented. Within a week, every building will be fighting to prove they're more useful than the one next to them."Danny stood up and grabbed his jacket from the back of the chair. "I'll start with Building 3. They're the weakest and the most desperate. If I can get them organized, the others will follow.""Take Cora with you." Sean nodded toward the hallway. "Not for protection. For intimidation. Nobody argues with a woman who can put a bullet throug

"I know it's not." Jessica's mouth twitched, almost a smile, but not quite. "He also thinks the electrified wire barrier is your only perimeter defense on the east side.""It's not.""I know."Sean studied her face. She was giving him everything without being asked twice. No hesitation, no bargaining, no attempts to leverage the information for better treatment. She was broken in a way that made her perfectly useful and completely empty at the same time.He almost felt sorry for her. Almost."Here's what we do." Sean pulled a fresh sheet of paper from the notepad and started writing. "You go back to Victor and you keep feeding him information. But from now on, you feed him exactly what I tell you to feed him."Jessica watched his pen move across the paper. "You want me to give him false intelligence.""I want you to give him a masterpiece of false intelligence." Sean's eyes gleamed with something between amusement and cruelty. "We exaggerate the defenses in areas that are actually wea

Sean pulled a steel case from his spatial dimension and set it on the workbench. Inside, arranged in foam cutouts, were twelve glass vials of clear liquid, three syringes, a digital thermometer, and a laminated instruction sheet covered in chemical formulas written in Sean's own handwriting."The beast virus." Sean opened the laminated sheet and spread it flat on the bench. "In my previous life, it started spreading fifty seven days after the first mutations appeared. Airborne transmission through contact with mutated animal blood, saliva, or fur. Once infected, a human's body temperature spikes to a hundred and six degrees within twelve hours. Organs start shutting down within twenty four. Death within seventy two if untreated.""And this serum?" Danny pointed at the vials."Antiviral base components. Not a cure, but a vaccine. If you take it before exposure, your body develops resistance within forty eight hours." Sean uncapped the first vial and held it up to the light. "Each batch

The community group chat exploded within the hour. Building representatives were flooding Danny's phone with messages. Panic. Terror. Demands for weapons, for walls, for Sean to do something.Paolo Greco from Building 3 sent a message that read: "Three of our people are dead. We have nothing to fight these creatures. Mr. Miles, we are begging you."The representative from Building 6 was less polite: "If you don't help us, we're all dead by the end of the week."Sean read the messages, set the phone down, and looked at Danny."They want weapons." Danny already knew where this was going."They can't have weapons for free." Sean leaned back against the kitchen counter. "Free weapons create armed idiots. Armed idiots create problems bigger than wolves.""So what's the price?" Danny folded his arms."Jewelry. Gemstones. Whatever they've been hiding in their pockets and their mattresses since the freeze started." Sean's eyes gleamed. "Every building pools their remaining valuables. Jade, di

The blizzard hit Ridgewood at two in the morning, turning the world into a white wall of screaming wind and ice. Visibility dropped to zero. Sean's surveillance cameras became useless, showing nothing but static and snow.That was when Drake made his move.Danny burst into the kitchen at six AM, his phone in his hand, his face carrying the expression of a man who had just swallowed something poisonous."They took Building 8." Danny set the phone on the table. "Syndicate soldiers. At least twelve of them. Came through the south perimeter during the blizzard while every camera was blind. They've barricaded the entrances and they're holding forty residents hostage on the third and fourth floors."Sean picked up the phone and read the message Drake had posted in the community group chat. He read it once, slowly, then read it again."Surrender your villa, your snowmobiles, and your spatial storage." Sean read the words out loud, his voice flat and dry. "He doesn't know what my spatial dime