They moved like a single organism — silent, efficient, each limb already knowing its job.
Carlo stayed behind one more hour, fingers flying over the laptop as he finished the shell-company transfers. He routed the paymaster's lease through layers of anonymous accounts, then forwarded the final keys and blueprints to Mostang's burner. He set up backdoor access to the warehouse network and planted a ghost process to give them eyes when they needed them. When he finally pushed the last file, he closed his laptop and looked at the group like a man who'd just sealed a door behind him.
Mostang handled the vehicles. Two vans — one low and nondescript, the other rigged with false panels and spare fuel — were parked in alleys they'd scouted the week before. He loaded crates of suppression gear, bolt cutters, and a handful of civilian clothes. His phone buzzed with three burner confirmations: routes, diversion timings, and a courier that would take any unwanted heat two blocks over if they needed it. He tucked the keys into his jacket, face set, ready.
Celeste packed cases of med supplies into the second van — morphine, sutures, tourniquets, IV kits — and labeled small kits for quick handoffs at extraction points. She checked each pack twice, then taped her name on the largest case as if signing for a patient she couldn't lose.
Diana drilled the exit plans into Kane again and again: entry window, server room, primary evac stair, secondary grate. They ran the routes on foot twice—silent steps, breathing counted. Kane's shoulders steadied each pass. He laced his boots, no longer roaring, only resolved.
Valeria and Emma walked the perimeter map together. Emma pointed at choke points and blind spots; Valeria nodded and spit on her gloves. "We go in, cut the ledger, burn the backups, and ghost out with nothing left but dust," Emma said. Valeria laughed once, low and ugly. "And take what's ours for the kids. Then light the match."
At dusk they layered up: civilian coats, gloves, bandanas. Face paint only where needed. Masks in pockets. Carlo handed Emma a small encrypted drive with pre-loaded routing data and backup keys. She slid it into her pocket and didn't look at it again.
They split into teams the way they had planned:
• Team A (in the front low-van): Emma, Valeria — entry and strike.
• Team B (in the second van): Mostang, Diana, Kane — extraction and perimeter.
• Support & med: Celeste and Carlo in the rigged van, monitoring feeds and ready for evac.
Keys in hands, engines breathing, they rolled out into the night in two quiet shadows. The city folded around them — unaware, indifferent. The paymaster warehouse sat three blocks from a bar, a laundromat, and a dead-end alley. It looked, from the outside, like any other converted yard: corrugated steel, a single dim security lamp, a camera that blinked red.
Mostang killed the van lights a block away. Carlo's ghost loop warmed the camera with a static, looping feed. The two seconds of darkness felt like a lifetime. Emma's heartbeat matched the engine hum. Valeria checked her knife, smiled, and mouthed a single word: "Now."
They moved — five ghosts slipping between parked cars, dropping into the shadows toward the door that would become their first incision. The hunt began.
They moved like a single thought.
Mostang dropped the rear ramp and the three of them melted into the night — quiet boots, soft breath. Carlo's loop held the cameras for now; the blinking red dots on his laptop stayed steady. Celeste's van idled two blocks away, med kit within a heartbeat.
Emma and Valeria reached the service door first. Valeria slid a slim prybar from her sleeve and worked the lock with the practiced impatience of someone who'd broken into worse places for less reason. The metal gave with a soft sigh. They slipped inside.
The warehouse smelled of old coffee, cheap tobacco, and paper money. Rows of cardboard crates, a folding table with a battered laptop, a wall of boxes stamped with courier logos — it looked mundane on purpose. The loud things were hidden: a rack of servers in the back, a metal cabinet locked with a padlock, a small safe bolted to the floor. This was the artery Vencor used to bleed the borough.
Carlo's voice, low in Emma's earpiece, was calm: "You have three minutes until the loop degrades. Two minutes if someone moves in range of the POE. Move."
Valeria flashed a grin that didn't reach her eyes. "Perfect." She shouldered in, knife clenched.
Emma went right, cutting a silent path to the server rack. Valeria took the guard path — the folding table — to overwrite any physical ledger as Emma worked. Mostang, Diana, Kane monitored the rear — ghosts on the perimeter — ready for noise.
Emma's hands were quick and clinical. She clipped a data tether to the main switch, felt the hum of electronics under her fingers. Carlo had already sent the override keys; the mainframe answered with a soft green light. Logs scrolled; entries bled onto the screen. Paymaster transfers, shell accounts, drop schedules. Emma scanned the ledger like a surgeon finding weak veins. She flagged the accounts Carlo had named: the ones that fed the lieutenants, the transit accounts for weapons, the pay lines that kept the mercenaries fed.
A muffled cough in the back made Valeria spin — a lone night clerk, headlamp off, crouched by the safe, hand over his mouth. He looked terrified, a child in a man's body. Valeria's blade flashed; the man went down with a tight groan, unconscious but alive. Emma barked through her teeth: "No killing. Bag him. Move."
Carlo's voice: "There's a secondary node in the safe. I can pull the ledger out, but I need physical access to the safe contents to get the encryption keys."
Mostang's whisper crackled: "We're on it. Diana, Kane — smoke and exit ready?"
Diana was a shadow at the back door; Kane had two eyes on the alley. "Ready," came the curt reply.
Valeria worked the safe; bolts clicked. The drawer opened to reveal a small hard drive and a paper ledger scrawled in shorthand. Emma swore softly — the physical ledger had the names they needed: drop points, phone hashes, a list of the men paid for last week. She grabbed the paper and the drive, sealing the drive into an evidence bag with gloved hands.
Carlo began to pull funds remotely as soon as the drive was online in his systems. He routed millions in micro-transactions through the shell accounts Emma had pre-identified, splitting and scattering transfers into charities, clinics, orphanages. Progress bars crawled. Emma watched numbers move like tiny victories.
"Almost — reroute delay showing suspected trace attempt," Carlo warned. "We have fifteen seconds until Vencor's monitoring spikes."
"I'm setting charges on the servers," Valeria said, voice low. "Nothing left for them to rebuild from."
Emma nodded, hands steady. She placed small shaped charges where the drives connected, wrapped in fabric to contain the blast to electronics. "Celeste — be ready for shrapnel injuries if anything goes loud," she whispered.
The loop flickered. A camera in the back room, a blind spot they hadn't seen, blinked and refreshed. Red light came alive on a feed Carlo hadn't looped — someone was walking into a side corridor.
"Compromise," Carlo snapped. "You've got maybe seven seconds."
Diana's shout cut through: "Go! Now!"
They moved. Emma slotted the drive into her coat, Valeria slammed the safe shut, and the two bolted for the rear exit as Mostang and Diana covered. Kane swept a wide arc, pulling patrols away with smoke grenades and a low cascade of blanks that bought them breathing room.
Two men in heavy vests spilled into the main floor — mercs, eyes hard. Valeria met them like a furnace: she closed distance and brought them down with brutal, efficient blows. Emma took one, twisted, and sent him into a stack of boxes that folded like paper. It was tight, messy, true combat — fists, knives, the gut-level noise of bone and breath. Kane, wide-eyed but fierce, dropped a man with a single accurate strike he'd learned the night before.
Carlo screamed in Diana's ear: "They're rerouting — a trace is pinging East! Get out!"
Mostang was already dragging open the back door, engine sounds rising. Celeste's van idled, lights off, a silhouette waiting.
Emma cut the last cable with a wirecutter and slammed a charge panel. "Make it count," she whispered, and she moved.
They spilled out into the alley — rain-slick, hunger-cold. Tires screamed. The van launched forward. Mostang shouted for speed. Diana vaulted in, then Kane, then Valeria; Emma slid in last, the drive hot in her palm. Carlo slammed the laptop shut and slid into the front passenger seat with Celeste, fingers already pinging for a remote detonation.
Behind them: a heartbeat of silence. Then the warehouse detonations were surgical and white — a crunch of metal, the shuttering scream of servers frying, controlled fire that chewed through racks and left the place a ruin of wiring and smoke. The charges took the servers, the safe, the paper ledgers; flames ate the logs and the smoke took the scent of evidence into the night. Carlo's routing confirmed the transfers completed and the backup nodes wiped.
Mostang didn't laugh. He exhaled hard and kept driving until the warehouse was a silhouette, then a drain of orange, then a line of dull smoke.
They didn't celebrate. They breathed. They checked gear, patched small cuts, counted heads. People in the van were alive. The ledger was in Emma's pocket; Carlo had copies that now lived in a dozen caches across secure shells.
Carlo spoke, voice ragged but fierce: "Money's gone to the charities. Ledgers we took are clean copies — the originals burned. Vencor woke up with empty accounts and a warehouse full of fried hardware."
Emma didn't smile. She looked out at the city, at the faintly lit streets, and thought about the market, about the bomb. She had done good and violent things in the same night; that calculus still tasted like iron.
She turned to the team in the van. "We did what we came to do. We took their money and we took their ledger. We gave it back." Her voice was low, flat, absolute. "Now we vanish."
They drove into the night — not as victors but as engines moving on to the next wound they had to stitch or open. The city slept unaware, and in the quiet pockets Carlo had bought for them, White World prepared its next move.
-----
They rolled into the new hideout — a squat brick building on the edge of an industrial stretch, lights low, the smell of oil and old paper. Carlo and Celeste unloaded gear while Mostang killed the engine and scanned the shadows. Valeria stretched, cracking her neck, already turning toward the door with a grin that didn't reach her eyes.
Kane stayed in the van a beat longer, staring out the window. Something in the alleylight had caught him — a spray-painted mark on a dumpster, half-hidden under grime and old posters: a crude glyph of a fox with a missing eye. At first it was nothing. Then it stacked into a memory that shoved everything else out.
He went very still.
Diana noticed first. "Kane?" she asked, voice even but cut with concern. She leaned in, close enough that he could smell the rain on her jacket.
Kane's jaw worked. The words came out raw, clipped: "It's them. The ones who… the ones who took Mira." His hands curled on the edge of the seat. "The gang who used her. The crew that killed our parents. They stamp this on their runs. I've seen it—seen them—everywhere they make people into money."
The van dropped into a silence thicker than any before. Valeria's grin died. Mostang's brow furrowed. Even Carlo paused mid-unload, the laptop under his arm forgotten.
Diana's face went hard and sharp. She put a steadying hand on Kane's shoulder. "You sure?" she asked softly.
Kane's eyes were wet but burning. "I remember their locker tags, the way they tie the scarves. I remember the laugh. I remember Mira's name tattooed on a sleeve." His voice broke then and steadied into a quiet, dangerous thing. "They left marks like this on the laundry carts and on the backs of trucks. I've wanted them dead for as long as I can remember."
Emma, who had been checking the drive's integrity near the doorway, looked up slowly. For a second her face registered nothing but the soft blue of the monitor. Then the calm that always came before decisions folded back across her features.
She crossed to the side of the van, looking at the symbol like a chemist testing a compound. "This changes things," she said quietly. "Not because we want to hunt one gang for one wrong — but because if they're part of Vencor's network, taking them out disrupts supply, cash, and leverage."
Valeria spat on the ground. "You want revenge," she said to Kane, but the sentence carried a different tone — one that acknowledged the edge inside him.
Kane stood abruptly, anger flaring into motion. "I want them gone," he said. "Nothing else."
Diana squeezed his shoulder. "We do it with a plan. We don't let grief make us blind."
Mostang lit a cigarette and watched the alley. "We'll scope them. If they're tied to the pay lines we just nuked, they'll be weak. We take them in small numbers, fast. No staged headlines. No civilians."
Emma folded her arms, jaw set. "We will not become what they are. But we will take what's theirs — money, networks, and names. Carlo, pull any hits on that glyph. Cross-reference ring patterns and truck routes. Valeria, you and I run recon. Diana, keep Kane close. Don't let him run ahead."
Kane swallowed, nodding, rage cooling into focus. "I won't screw this up."
They moved with a new edge — it was anger and grief woven into discipline. The glyph on the dumpster had become a map: a trail to follow, a thread in Vencor's weave. Tonight, White World wouldn't just strike banks and servers — they would start cutting out the rot that fed those servers.
Kane stared one last time at the paint, lips moving as if speaking to the memory of everything he'd lost. Then he pulled his jacket on and followed them into the hideout, a small man with a very large, burning purpose.
Chapter end