Night stills like a held breath. The Trust's stumble at the meeting echoes through corridors we can't see—donors whisper, procurement timetables wobble, and the city's rumor mills gurgle with delight and dread. The ledger is heavy with new entries and heavier still with names that mean more than ink. We have bought time, not truce.
System: Alert — Retaliation probability increased. Suggested task: Reinforce coalition safehouses. Reward: 2,500 XP.
We listen to the people instead. Plans this close to the bone need more hands than ideals. Corin organizes patrols into overlapping shifts; Hae‑In runs rapid encryption of Ja‑Yeon's list into everyday goods; Min rewires old radios to pick up unusual frequencies. Jeong trains as courier in earnest, his hands quieter now, his smile thinner but steady.
The Trust's counters come in measured stages. First, legal pressure intensifies—certified letters and administrative notices aimed at vaults and shelters, claiming temporary custody of "unregistered stabilizer components." The language is polite and lethal in its intent to freeze our movements. We respond with counters: filings, community testimonies, and a low‑key public campaign that frames the network as civic stewardship. The ledger grows a political spine.
Then the darker moves begin. Two keepers' homes are ransacked in the night; nothing vital is taken, but the act is a message. A courier goes missing for a day and returns hollow‑eyed, his satchel rifled and the content replaced with crude forgeries. The Trust learns to make fear feel bureaucratic. It is the kind of cruelty that plans to erode resistance by attrition.
We tighten. Nodes move deeper into living networks—childcare centers, shelters doubling as libraries, a seamstress who hides tags inside hems for people she trusts. Redundancy becomes ritual: name, safeword, route, and a fallback song sung by more than one person so that if one keeper is taken, memory has more than a single voice.
Then the direct strike we feared: a raid on a peripheral vault. It is swift, timed to a false report about a decoy transfer. Men in dark jackets and unmarked badges force their way past a thin perimeter and smash lockboxes. They leave with a handful of tagged items and a bureaucratic receipt taped to the safe like a stamp of legitimacy. Amira curses like a prayer and then lists everything taken with a precision that keeps panic at bay.
We move fast. Corin, two vault hands, and I trace the chain through license plates and safe houses. The trail leads to a riverfront storage the courier had named in a whisper. We don't charge in. We document—photos from distance, a mapped route, a pattern of off‑hours pickups—and then set a counter that is not about revenge but about escalation control.
That night we stage a recovery: not a raid but an ambush of a sort the Trust won't expect. We intercept a pickup at a neutral transfer point where paperwork would shield them. The exchange is quiet—voices low, hands practiced. We step from shadows with evidence, witnesses, and the kind of inconvenient logbook that makes a clean crime messy. Instead of guns, we bring cameras, a journalist who will not blink, and legal affidavits filed in advance. The masked men balk when a camera clicks where they expected blind complicity. They shove and curse and for a breath the city's ugly muscle is revealed as something human and loud.
We reclaim some of what was taken: a handful of tags, a crumpled note, a fragment that hums faintly and smells like soil. We do not celebrate loudly. Each recovery costs sleep and risks more attention. The ledger gets new lines—contacts to thank, storage adjustments, a blunt entry: Expect full frontal response.
Ja‑Yeon's face is thin when we meet her. She did not want to be at the center of this, and yet here she is—stubborn as a root. "They know where some of the network was planted," she says. "That's why they hit the vault. They're testing how quickly we hide." Her hands fold around a cup of tea like it's a talisman. "We must make our people harder to find, not just our things."
We start moving people rather than objects: rotating keepers through safe houses, arranging faux‑illnesses to keep some at clinic beds, and inventing errands that spread redundancy naturally. It is humiliating and humane work—cajoling, promising, and insisting that help exists. The ledger's margins fill with small human inventory: who will keep what song, who knows which safeword, which child holds a line of a lullaby that proves identity.
The night the Trust escalates in force, we are ready enough. They come with uniforms and paperwork that pretend to be righteous. They hit a sheltered teaching center where Ja‑Yeon once stashed two tags. The raid is noisy, cruel, and public—designed to intimidate. The center's director plays exactly the role we rehearsed: a bereaved guardian who calls for witnesses, an explanation, and the right legal forms. We flood the area with people who can attest to the center's civic role; neighbors who would otherwise keep quiet stand and speak. The result is messy for the attackers: a larger scene, more attention, and a higher reputation cost than the Trust would have budgeted for.
The ledger grows a new tone: we must win hearts even as we block hands. Public sympathy becomes a defense as valuable as bolts and locks. We keep seeding small truths—stories of parents who needed help, of vendors who chose stew over sale—not to manipulate but to remind the city that memory protection is kin to civic care.
But victories are brittle. A courier we trusted is unmasked as a mole. He disappears before we can confront him. The betrayal stings not because of the lost item but because trust has been the scaffolding holding the gardener's network together. We mourn simply—hold a small vigil for the small things that made us brave enough to act—and then adjust routes with the clean cruelty of necessity.
Amid the chaos, a figure approaches the yard: an elderly archivist, face like a ledger in itself, who brings a thin packet and a look that says she has lost patience with the Trust's polite violence. "I can help," she says, and places a sealed list on the table—carefully censored, annotated with provenance notes we can use in court. She offers documents that trace procurement officers to a set of hidden donors who, if exposed, might make the Trust tremble in public. It is a gift wrapped in danger; the ledger eats it like a man woken hungry.
We plan an exposure that is surgical rather than theatrical. If the Trust can use law as muscle, we will use evidence to make legality a weapon against them. We synchronize testimony, prepare anonymized transcripts for the press, and line up sympathetic auditors who owe favors for old kindnesses. This is not a spectacle; it is a slow, coordinated starve of legitimacy.
The ledger closes that night with a slow, fierce line: Protect people. Expose donors quietly. Make procurement expensive in reputation and money.
We are tired. We are pulled tight across a moral loom that tests how much courage we can afford. The city watches and votes with its silence and its shouts. For now, we hold. For now, the gardener's network breathes. For now, names stay with names.