They had tried to move through the market like ghosts — low heads, quick steps. The stalls were full: old women selling bread, a man tinkering with a radio, kids chasing each other between crates. Sun struck off metal and plastic. It smelled like fried food and diesel and ordinary life.
Mostang's voice cut through the noise suddenly, flat and sharp: "Emma —"
He was looking down at something. Not at the crowd. Not at a face. At his palm.
A tiny metallic click. A tick.
Emma's heart stopped in a way she'd only felt in fights where she really thought she might die.
They all froze. The city kept moving around them, oblivious. Someone laughed at the booth selling candy. A baby cried. The ticking kept time like an awful clock.
Valeria's hand moved first — she lunged, fingers closing over a small cylinder that had appeared under a vendor's cloth. "Get back!" she snarled. "Move!"
People pushed away. Shouts. Panic. A woman dropped a basket of fruit and it rolled like a red moon across the cobbles. Mostang was already calculating exits. Kane shoved someone out of the way. Diana spun, scanning for other devices.
The cylinder vibrated in Valeria's grip. The metal casing was hot to the touch from the sun. The little digital timer read down in a tiny, cruel font.
"Don't throw it into the crowd," Emma snapped, voice raw. The world narrowed to that pulsing digital life. "We can't—"
"We'll die!" Valeria spat, panic ripping through her bravado. "We can't hold this here!"
Adrenaline had stripped their thoughts down to muscle. Emma grabbed the device from Valeria's hand, hard and sudden. "Don't—don't throw it public—" she barked.
For half a breath no one moved.
Then everything blurred: a hand slipped on sweat, a vendor screamed, someone shoved — Valeria's fingers flew up to snatch back the device, Emma's palm closed on it again, and the crowd fractured around them. In the panic the cylinder slipped from their grip.
Emma reacted. She flung it away — an instinctive toss toward an empty alley she thought she had clear. Time folded.
The explosion swallowed the sound. It was a single, terrible concussion: a thunderclap that knocked people off their feet, glass and dust and the metallic stench of burned wiring. Screams bloomed on the pavement like black flowers.
They ran. They ran before the smoke had even cleared, before anyone could know whose bag it had been, before hands could point and mouths could form the two words that would ruin everything: bomb… her.
They didn't stop until the hideout's metal door slammed behind them and they were inside a room that spun slower than the street. For a second there was only their breathing and the distant wail of sirens.
No one spoke. There was an inventory of ragged noises instead — Valeria gagging, Kane sobbing low into a fist, Mostang hitting the wall with his palm. Celeste moved mechanically to check wounds, but her eyes were raw and empty.
Emma leaned against the table and looked at her hands. They were trembling, smeared with dust and a little blood from earlier fights. Her face was a mask, and for the first time in a long time the mask fractured.
"It was on me," she said, the words flat, as if she were reading them from a list.
Silence cut through the room like a blade.
Mostang lunged for clarification. "What—what do you mean, on you?"
Emma tapped the inside of her coat with a finger and pulled out a strip of charred fabric and a small, mangled clip of circuitry. The hideout light made the scorched plastic glint like a guilty thing. On the fabric was a scorch ring, a smear, and the faint geometry of a clip that had been latched to the coat's lining.
"It was attached," she said. "Pinned under the lining. I must have had it on when I walked in from the park. I don't— I didn't feel it." Her voice went thin. "I threw it. But I was wearing it. It clipped to me."
Valeria stared as if she'd been slapped. "You're kidding." Her breath was ragged. "So you… you carried it?"
Emma's eyes were empty and very tired. "Someone put it on me," she said. "To make it look like I planted it."
Kane made a sound that was half-cry, half-anger. "They framed you. Vencor—"
"Or someone who wants us to look like monsters," Mostang finished, voice low, furious. "Either way, the crowd saw the blast — people died. We made people around us die."
Diana's fists were white. "We ran," she said, not as excuse but as fact. "We had to get away. They would have taken us. They would have done worse."
Celeste moved to Emma and touched the burn on her side with clinical fingers. "If that was strapped to you, we need to know who—who had access. Who could have done that without us noticing." Her voice broke on the last word.
Emma's face didn't change. Something inside her did. Her hair seemed to hang heavier; her shoulders dropped an extra inch. She had always worn actions like armor — that night, the armor felt like rust.
"It was supposed to be a message," she murmured. "Not just to us. To the public. To anyone who thought we were saviors."
Valeria swallowed. "They'll hunt us like animals now."
Mostang's jaw worked. "We disappear. We don't use public spaces. Carlo—get the feeds. See who placed the timer on her coat. If this is Vencor, it'll tie back. If it's a copycat, we find who had access to her route."
Carlo's fingers already flew across his keyboard. The monitor filled with raw video frames and timestamps. Outside, the world rotated toward chaos: news alerts blinking, civilian feeds lighting up with horror.
Emma listened, but she wasn't in the room anymore. The reveal — that the device had been clipped to her — had changed the axis inside her. The small mercies of earlier actions (orphanages funded, people fed) felt like paper in a storm.
She closed her fist until the knuckles showed pale.
Valeria's voice was small. "We can fix this. We'll help the victims. We'll make this right."
Emma's laugh was a soft, hard thing. "Fix it?" she echoed. "We just handed them a reason to hate us faster than they had before."
Diana stepped close, putting a hand on Emma's shoulder. "Then we do it honestly. We bring help openly. We cover it. We own it." Her look was fierce. "We don't run."
Emma turned her face toward her friend, and for a sliver of a second something fierce and animal came through. "Then we start by proving who put that on me."
Mostang's tone was flat and terrible: "We don't have time for guilt-fits. We have forensics, feed logs, a city full of witnesses, and alarms in Vencor's system. Carlo — pull every camera on that route, every vendor feed, every contact. If someone pinned that to you, they left a handprint or a signal. We find it."
Carlo nodded, fingers a blur. "I'll tear the city apart. But if Vencor did this—it's a bigger step. He's not just hitting money. He's framing people."
Emma's eyes found the small strip of charred fabric in her hand again. She folded it into the palm and held it like a compass that had just been knocked from her steadiness.
Outside, the distant sirens grew louder. Inside, White World split the work: aid for the wounded, damage control, criminal forensics, and a cold, patient hunt for the one who had made their name into a murder weapon.
They were hunted now — by the city, by the law, and by someone clever enough to pin a bomb to a coat without anyone seeing. Emma felt the edges of herself harden into something new.
"She did this to make a face," she said finally, voice a blade. "They made me the face. We make them pay by taking that face off their mouth."
They moved into action. But the thing that had changed was not a plan: it was Emma. Her eyes were quieter, emptier. The little kindnesses, the charity, the soft things she'd allowed herself — they felt suddenly distant, almost vulnerable. The bomb had done more than kill on the street; it had put a price on her hands and a line through herd of small mercies she'd let herself keep.
They worked while outside the city loudly decided whether White World were saviors or monsters. Inside, the team patched wounds and mapped cameras and promised themselves the truth.
And Emma, holding the singed cloth, understood that from now on every step she walked might be a mine — literal or reputational — and that she would have to become something colder to survive a world that had learned to make saints into scapegoats.
-----
Emma sat on the couch in silence, the flickering blue light from the TV washing over her pale face.
The remote hung loose in her hand, thumb frozen mid-press.
BREAKING NEWS: Explosion in central market — dozens dead, many injured.
The voice of the reporter cracked faintly through the static. The screen changed — images of chaos, smoke, fire, and twisted metal.
Then came the sound. The cries. The sirens. The trembling camera footage.
The words "terrorist attack" and "suspected criminal group" flashed on-screen.
Emma didn't blink.
Her reflection trembled faintly in the black edges of the TV screen.
Bodies were being carried out on stretchers.
Blood smeared across white tiles.
A doll — half-burnt — lay on the ground beside a broken fruit stand.
Her lips parted, but no sound came out.
Valeria stepped in from the next room, a bandage wrapped around her shoulder. "Emma—"
She stopped mid-sentence when she saw what was on the screen. Her voice died.
The news anchor spoke again:
"Authorities suspect the involvement of a newly emerged organization known as White World. Eyewitnesses claim to have seen several individuals fleeing the scene moments before the blast—"
Emma's grip on the remote tightened until the plastic cracked.
Her own reflection stared back at her in the TV's glare — calm, cold, and unreadable. But behind her eyes, something flickered.
Her voice came out quiet. Flat.
"…It's my fault."
Kane, sitting nearby, looked up instantly. "No. No, Emma. You didn't—"
She cut him off, still staring at the corpses on the screen.
"If I hadn't thrown it. If I'd just—held it longer, found a way…"
Valeria clenched her fists, guilt washing over her too. "We both grabbed it. We both—"
Emma shook her head slowly. Her voice was distant.
"No. It was on me. I was the target… the bomb was mine. And I still threw it."
No one said anything. The TV kept playing. The camera zoomed in on a child being carried away by medics — her small arm limp, blood on her sleeve.
Emma's breath hitched for just a second. The image stabbed deeper than any blade.
That little girl… looked like the one from the garden.
Her jaw tightened. The silence in the room grew heavy.
Mostang looked away. "We can't change what happened. We find who did this. We prove who's behind it."
Emma didn't respond. She just stood there, eyes locked on the screen — on the chaos she was now being blamed for.
The anchor's final words before the segment ended echoed through the room like a verdict:
"White World… now the most wanted organization in the city."
The screen flicked to black.
Emma whispered, barely audible, "They turned me into a monster."
Then, quieter still —
"…and maybe now I'll become one."
Emma folded the map shut with a slow, deliberate motion. The hideout was tight-lit and grimy; the air still tasted of smoke and the afterimages of the news clip. Everyone had stopped pretending the market blast could be erased. They were hunted now — by headlines, by cops, by Vencor. They had to change the narrative and the city.
She laid the map on the table and looked at each of them in turn. No speeches. No theatrics. Just the old, cold business of logistics and violence.
"We move together," Emma said. "No more lone runs. No more 'I'll be back.' We hit their infrastructure, their money, their safe places. We make their world collapse from the inside."
Carlo pushed a chair forward and unhooked a laptop. He'd already been working the ledgers from last night; his face was pale but steady. "I can buy shells," he said, voice flat. "Ghosted accounts, vacant warehouses, undercut front companies. I can make property transfers look clean on paper — at least long enough for us to use them. But once we touch their money, they'll know and they'll come harder."
Mostang flicked ash onto the floor and met her eyes. "We need places we control. Not rented. Not obvious. Carlo gets us legal cover; we put people in, then use them as staging."
Valeria cracked her knuckles. "And then we…?" Her grin was dangerous but practical. "We close shop. Burn the warehouse. Leave nothing but their ghosts."
Emma's jaw tightened. She didn't offer technical details — method was not the point. The point was the target list. She tapped the map twice: three neighborhoods, two named lieutenants, a distribution depot, and one paymaster warehouse that moved cash for half the borough.
"We won't just blow holes in their walls," Emma said, voice low. "We will erase the things that let them feed their men. Supply lines. Ledgers. Phones. One sweep that unravels the next raid. If we have to turn a building into rubble to make sure documents, servers and evidence are gone — that will be part of it. But Carlo will make sure the money we take goes to the people they hurt. The rest is for taking them off the grid."
Diana stepped up. "I'll take point on extraction. We train civilians out, pull victims out, seal exits. No collateral. If there's a chance to rescue someone rather than kill, we take it."
Kane's hands were already shaking with the thought of action. "I'll run perimeter. Keep civilians away. I won't be reckless."
Mostang grew serious. "I'll handle logistics — people, wheels, back routes. Carlo, you get the property transfers quiet and secure. Valeria and I do the on-site entry. Celeste, you prep med evac and triage. Diana covers exfil. Kane ghosts."
Carlo looked up. "If I buy places, I can also plant backdoors in their networks. Give us eyes. When they move cash, we'll know. When they move men, we'll know. Then we decide whether to strike or to cut them off. That's where the real power is."
Emma watched the faces around the table — every one of them holding a wound, but not broken. She let herself feel the thing she rarely let surface: purpose.
"Rules," she said finally, voice cold and simple. "No civilians harmed intentionally. No mutilations. No replacing one king with another. We destroy their power, not make a new throne for some thug to sit on. If anyone crosses that line, we end them. No exceptions."
Valeria's grin dimmed to a hard line of agreement. Mostang nodded. Diana's jaw set. Kane swallowed and looked down. Carlo's fingers hovered over the keyboard, the tiny hum of his machine the only sound for a breath.
Emma folded the map again and slid it into her coat. "We start tonight: reconnaissance on the paymaster warehouse, then Carlo buys the shell in the east yard. We move within a week. We'll bring supplies for rescued people, routes for anyone who needs to vanish, and money for the orphanages — more than we already gave. We don't ask for forgiveness. We make amends through action."
They began to move into the roles she'd assigned like a small army filing into formation: quiet, efficient, grimly hopeful. Outside, the city didn't stop humming. Inside the hideout, White World — battered, named, and dangerous — began building their next blow: a surgical dismantling of Vencor's ecosystem that would leave holes in his empire and food in the mouths he'd starved.
Emma paused at the doorway as the group dispersed and looked back once, at the team she'd pulled together from ash. The grief from the market explosion sat like a coal in her chest, hot and bright. She let it burn into something colder.
"Do it clean," she told them. "Do it loud enough that Vencor hears the fall — but precise enough that the city knows who we stole back for them."
They moved out into the night to prepare. The plan was dangerous. The cost would be high. But if there was one thing Emma had learned, it was how to make storms focus — and how to survive them.
Chapter End