Joan Rhodes, who had just been promoted to a Steward again and was only advising on defense and ensuring the city remained calm, did her very first thing: she closed the last Taste-Guard base down.
That place was in the Ossuary District which was full of bone tombs and haunted by old nobles' ghosts. The guards there were really the old ones. They even still polished their bug armors and were nostalgic for the simple and tough times of the Chain when it used to be ruled by the old ones. Their boss, a serious guy named Vanc, gave Joan a stiff salute when she showed up with her cane and robot hand.
"Captain," he said.
"Just Joan now," she responded, remaining calm. "The Stewards decided to move all base stuff to fixing things and building new stuff. We know you did your job well. It's done now."
Vanc clenched his jaw. "Our job is to guard people from chaos and bad ideas. The chaos is extraordinarily bad now. And the bad idea... is the government."
"The actual bad ideas now are being hungry and things falling apart," Joan said while looking at him directly. "We fight that with shovels and seeds, not shock sticks. You can drop your weapon and grab a tool. Or leave. But this bone fort," she indicated the scary fort, "is going to house bridge builders."
He was definitely struggling in his mind. His heart was with the old rules but his eyes were showing the changed world. His soldiers, behind him, were also torn as they looked him and Joan, the fake hand on her cane, indifferently and stubbornly.
Joan didn't command them. She presented. She told them the Ossuary base plan would be the HQ for the new East Spine Aqueduct job. They would employ their discipline and city smarts to come up with the plan, not to guard. They would get food, a place to live, and feel like they were doing something real.
The same choice she had made in the Maw was also here but this time it was smaller. Stay with the old safety idea and see things fall apart, or do the dirty, tough work of creating something new.
Vanc turned his eyes to his men and then to Joan's fake hand on her cane. He didn't see her judging him but that she was tired of making hard decisions.
"Where do we get shovels?" he asked, sounding rough.
One week later, Benny came to the Ossuary District. The bone-fort's gates were open. Taste-Guard signs were removed. Inside, instead of guns, there were water pipe plans and tool handles were being fitted with mushroom grips. Vanc was arguing with a Symbiote builder on how much weight the old bone can hold.
He saw Benny and nodded.
Monitor, he said. The old church's vibration is causing the foundation to deteriorate. Can you… feel things… and tell us what's shaking it?
Benny shut his eyes and listened. He did find it—a light, sad hum from the memories attached to the saint bones buried there.
"It's sadness," he said. "Sadness from the old rituals. It's making the stone… sad. Unstable."
Vanc frowned and then sighed.
"Fine, so we don't blow it up. We… what? Make it feel better?"
"Maybe," said Benny. "Or we work with it. Put it in the foundation. Make the water pipe a reminder of that sadness, so it has a place to be."
It was a strange, spiritual idea, but that was the way things were done now. Vanc, the old soldier, rubbed his chin. "A foundation that remembers. Okay. Tell your mom we need a sadness expert. And more mushroom glue."
The last base was no longer there. It had been transformed into a worksite with a problem and a conversation. Defending the city was not about walls and weapons anymore. It was about, for example, keeping the water flowing and preventing the stones from being broken by sadness. It was a quieter, tougher kind of brave. And Joan Rhodes, who was slowly walking through the busy site with her mushroom hand on a plan table, understood it was the only kind that mattered now.