The city presses in like a fist that knows your name. Weeks of small defenses have a way of making one thing clear: attention breeds pressure. Corin says the broker's patience turned into irritation and irritation sharpens into action. The ledger sits open with a dozen tiny instructions—no trades, keep gardener secret, watch the Trust—and my hand is starting to ache from writing plans that feel like prayers.
System: Alert — Elevated risk detected across coalition routes. Suggested task: Increase patrol cadence. Reward: 1000 XP.
I slide the System's alert into the wastebasket of my attention and listen to human voices instead. Hae‑In convenes the coalition earlier than planned. Amira and her vault crew stand like a wall, Min's eyes are tired but precise, Sook folds her hands into pockets that have given out blankets and bandages. We are small and stubborn.
Min shows the new ledger entry on his tablet—chains of procurement we mapped now have broken links. Prices for fragments spike in market chatter; a front office closed overnight; a Trust courier failed to show. Somebody's making the cost of acquisition volatile, and volatility invites violence. We tighten routes and add decoys, but tighten and decoy cost energy that frays small groups.
We split the city into quadrants and assign shifts. Jeong takes a midnight watch with a pair of vault hands and a radio that squeals loyalty when the signal catches. Corin coordinates the daytime checks. Hae‑In and I run discrete probes—small, legal‑feigning acts of pressure to see whether the Trust leans on middlemen or makes its own hands dirty.
On the third night a courier we trail drops a package at an unmarked door and is waved in with a keycode that matches a Trust front. We follow at a distance and watch the door swallow the courier. The men inside move with trained politeness; this is not amateur theft. It's procurement with an office attached. We record license plates at a distance and follow the pattern back to a warehouse on the river—an address with no public face and several polite excuses for being there.
That same night our yard is visited by a messenger: a single envelope with no signature. Inside, in heavy printed type, a single line: STOP PUSHING. THE TRUST DOESN'T LIKE HURT AS A LOSS.
Corin slams the paper onto the table and the yard's conviviality curdles. "They think threats are strategy," he says. "They'll test you to see how much you'll pay in fear."
Hae‑In replies, steady as a metronome: "They threaten what they can't immediately buy. We make that expensive."
The next day the market feels tenser. Vendors watch faces for longer; someone pockets a ledger scrap they swear they "found" and then refuses to share it. The Trust's pressure is not only direct. It creates ripple effects—ordinary people deciding that secrets are too valuable for their hands and choosing to sell what they have instead of trust a stranger to protect it.
We lose a node that week. It's small and blunt: a depot near the tram line wakes to find the gardener's tag gone and a new stamped receipt taped to the bench—PROPERTY CLAIMED BY TRUST PROCUREMENT. The note is bureaucratic in a way meant to bruise—formal language substituting for force. The vendor who used to keep tokens there tells us someone in a suit offered a price and a promise. He took the money because his child's school needs winter shoes. The ledger's margin is full of apologies we can't cash.
I go to the vendor's stall that night and hand him a pocket of the yard's funds with no speeches. He looks at me like a man allowed to be practical and grateful at once. "We do what we must," he says. I don't argue. The ledger teaches that saving faces and saving people are different trades.
Hae‑In traces the procurement chain and finds more than bureaucracy—she finds coercion. Some sellers were given offers that carried implicit threats: sign, sell, disappear. Others were given care and then told the cost would be repayment later. The Trust isn't just buying fragments. They're buying compliance.
We push back in the ways we know how: we flood the market with unusable decoys that waste procurement hours, we reroute courier lines through suspicious neighborhoods to break patterns, and we let rumors of increased scrutiny leak to former middlemen. Each action is small and surgical, and each action costs sleep and goodwill.
Pressure creates mistakes. A minor courier — trusting in a friend's face — handed a fragment over to a man he thought was a safe buyer. He called in a panic when the buyer turned out to be a broker with a Trust crest hidden in a pocket. We moved fast: Jeong and two vault hands intercepted on a bridge where the courier had arranged the exchange. They reclaimed the fragment without blood but with a threat passed in urgent whisper. The courier cried afterward like someone who had been lucky and hated how much luck felt like an obligation.
The Trust escalates indirectly as well. Notices appear in the public squares—legal notices about "orphaned property" and "unregistered stabilizer components" framed as civic housekeeping. The language is designed to sweep our work into legality and strip it of moral color. Amira calls the notices "legal hammers." We keep our heads down and file counters—small legal motions, quiet paperwork that smells like expensive ink.
At dawn my ledger holds tight to one new line: Protect people, not just things. We can't be moralists if the people around us are hungry. The line changes plans; it complicates budgets.
We arrange a modest relief fund—food parcels tucked into crates that pass through the vault channels—paid for by salvage runs and bad jewelry sold for the cause. The yard becomes a place where people come for practical amends as much as strategy. It's small and blunt and it keeps trust alive in the market like a counterweight.
Pressure also brings allies. A mid‑level procurement manager at a Trust front—someone who liked the idea of small mercies—tips Hae‑In about a shipment route. She asks for anonymity and an assurance that leaking helps people keep names rather than make a profit. We promise. The shipment info lets us observe a chain and then quietly complicate it; we slow a pickup enough for the law to take an interest—procedurally, not dramatically. It's legal pressure, slow but effective. The Trust loses time and a small bit of face.
Time, in this city, is a currency. We buy it when we obstruct and spend it when we protect. Each purchase leaves a score in the ledger and a soreness in our bones.
The final test comes one night the sky is a flat, uncertain gray. A group of men—clean suits and men who look less refined—descend on an informal safehouse where a small cluster of fragments are hidden. They move early and with a sheen of official-looking badges. The house's keeper calls us frantic; we move faster than the blink of an eye. Corin and I arrive with three vault hands and two coalition members who know how to lock doors and make polite threats that feel like promises.
The confrontation is messy and quiet. Men with Trust crests produce paperwork that smells of legal dictionaries and intimidation. We present counterorders—archival claims, custodial affidavits—papers tied to keepers who can document provenance. The men with crests bristle. There's a standoff where papers become swords and legalese becomes a language of blunt consequence. In the end the Trust men back down because the paperwork isn't a bluff and because a public scene would do them worse reputational harm than a lost crate.
We win that night because we have more than grit; we have slow, boring competence. The ledger's margins are smudged with urgency and our signatures are small and precise. We keep the fragments.
When the dust settles Corin looks at me and says, quietly, "They'll try different things. They always do."
I nod and write one more command in the ledger: Be ready for escalation; protect people first.
The System offers a congratulatory ping with a reward I didn't ask for. I ignore it and fold the ledger into my pack. Outside, the city breathes and the river runs as if nothing changed. We know better. Pressure will come again because power hates being redirected. But for tonight the coalition holds, and people sleep with fewer borrowed nightmares.