Chapter 1080: Stars of Steel (2).
They left the tunnel with salt in their mouths and ash in their clothes. The service corridor spat them out behind an old warehouse, the air sharp with diesel and the aftertaste of smoke. Above, the city moaned—sirens knitting into the skyline, searchlights cutting slow, methodical arcs. Below, the water still slapped at the ruins of the pier like a thing testing new teeth.
Cain tasted iron and old promises. He kept his blade out of habit, not because he fancied blood, but because the world still moved in positions of advantage and threat. The wet steel felt honest. It told him when something would take and when something would give.
Susan leaned against a wall, breathing like a bellows. Her ribs tightened with every inhale; still, she laughed once—short, dry—because laughing had fewer obligations than crying. "They’ll call us terrorists," she said. "Or heroes. Depends on who writes the reports."
"Neither," Cain answered. "We’re a problem. Problems don’t get banners. They get solutions."
Hunter crouched with his back to oil barrels, crossbow ready, eyes scanning lanes like a man who catalogued exits in his sleep. Roselle checked the blades at her hip, wiping salt and blood with precise motions. Everyone moved from memory—muscle remembering how to survive. The city remembered, too; it would punish them for it.
Steve’s voice came through, ragged and wired. "You bought time. Too many eyes are on the harbor now. Fleet’s repositioning. They’re calling in closer. You need to move, Cain. The Grid is rerouting drones to every corridor into the docks."
"We move," Cain said. "But not blind."
He had what the city lacked—a refusal to waste force. They did not scatter and hope; they stacked advantage. He laid the plan without rhetoric: a short sprint into the freight yards; a handoff to Leah’s crew at the old elevator shaft; a diversion work Steve would set on the north grid. Each step was a lever to pry open a future the city hadn’t banked on. Each move had margins.
They cut through alleys slick with tide and the oil-sheen of broken engines. Men in uniforms passed on raised platforms, their faces grey with city-sanctioned indifference. Cain watched them like teeth watch bone. They marked him with glances—thin, suspicious—and then looked away. The city’s muscles were awake, but not coordinated yet.
At Leah’s yard the gate snarled and then gave. Her people were scarce, skin and attitude like carved timber. She’d lost men to the first wave and gained others to the second; loss rearranged her face into something harder to read. She kissed his cheek with a bluntness that said more than comfort.
"Looks like you fed the sea," she said. Her voice was flat. "And it bit back."
"We made it bleed," Cain said. "Same thing, most days."
They rode in a truck that smelled of old coffee and concrete dust. It moved through service routes Leah had stolen from maps: tunnels under the rail lines, passages that kept them out of grid-sight for minutes that might become hours. Steve queued feeds like lullabies for sleeping systems—small delays, false positives, enough to confuse the patrols. The city’s nets closed in layered folds, but their seams were predictable. Cain found seams with his eyes.
They spent the ride sharpening plans. Susan pressed a map into the dim light and traced a path: warehouses that still had intact generators, a subway spur with the wrong schedule, an abandoned textile mill with a roof that could host signal jammers if they rigged the right coils. "You want to sit a gun on a roof and call the tides?" she asked.
"You sit on a roof and call the pieces," Cain said. "You call the right names; people come. You break the right things; they bleed. You hold the rest back until the tide is dry."
Roselle’s jaw worked. "And who fills those names? Who stands on those roofs?"
"We do." The sentence was small but it held weight. It was not bravado. It was ledger. People would keep showing up because in the end the city required choices—easier ones for its administrators and terrible ones for everyone else. They would force a choice.
They hit the mill under an orange moon. It smelled of wool and old sweat. The roof gave them view and voice. Steve put up the jammer—a crooked thing that sang low and mean—but it worked, carving a dark bowl into the Grid’s ear. For the space it held singed silence, drones blinked like lost insects and orders came delayed, late by heartbeats. Heartbeats were all Cain needed.
Leah’s crew spread out through the slums like careful hands. They carried cases of rigged signalers and supply sacks. They were not subtle. Subtle was for those who wanted permission. They wanted results and they took them.
Below, the city thinned, citizens stirring toward whatever comfort their feeds served: the glow of sanctioned news, the clink of late markets, the rumble of work that would not stop for anyone’s monsters. The world had a habit of resuming its rhythms between disasters.
Cain climbed the mill’s ladder to the gable and felt the wind where it could find him. He looked at a skyline crosshatched with the scaffolding of control towers and thought how many hands worked to hold truth tight. He thought of Peter and Declan and the ragged edge of those who’d died defending the simple act of moving on without being told how to feel. He had no illusions about heroics. He had ledger. He had memory.
Steve’s voice came thin over the jammer: "They’re tightening. Three columns—naval, private security, municipal. They’ll sweep the river in waves. You’ve got maybe two hours before they close the net."
Cain watched a patrol move like a silver line on water and decided, quietly, the next job. "We burn their lines of sight. We collapse a camera ring at the power hub, open a corridor at Kiln Street, and take the tram lines for the next phase. Nobody dies in the moves unless they choose to stand there."
Roselle opened her mouth, then smiled a small, private smile. She understood the math of risk. She’d been reading risk longer than most. Her silence turned to action as she checked her blades and prepared to drop like a shadow.