"We need to get those provisions now!" Vesper snarled, slamming her hand against the wall, taking half a step before her legs nearly gave out under her.

Vesper's vision pulsed at the edges, as if someone were squeezing a molten ring tighter and tighter around her skull. Heat bled from the implant cradle at the base of her neck, radiating along the curve of her spine, until even the roots of her teeth seemed to throb. She pressed the improvised travel‑pillow (one modified to replace the stuffing with bags of ice) against the hot metal. Cool rivulets trickled under her collar; she huffed in quick, shallow breaths.

"I'll send someone to look for more food, but the temp alarm went off. Vesp, I am cutting you off," Quinn said, the synthetic baritone echoing through the static.

Before she could protest, the call and every color-coded status feed winked out at once. The sudden silence was deafening, leaving her ears ringing.

Without the data flow propping her up, she swayed and thunked shoulder‑first against a concrete wall. A single weak bulb overhead hummed in sympathy. She blinked until tears cleared, then drew a long breath that tasted of dust and cheap disinfectant. "Dammit, Quinn," she whispered, forcing her vision to focus on the scuffed floor grid rather than the swarm of phantom widgets still trying to paint themselves across her retinas.

Processing cycles freed, the neuralink surged ahead on its own like an engine finally unburdened. Feeding off of the information on the cache, a three‑dimensional low-poly overlay of their slice of Fourth District sprouted in her peripheral thoughts: blocky apartment stacks and streets spread out in every direction. Warning beacons erupted across the model like a pox infection. They were a thousand and one problems that needed to be dealt with. Fires breaking out, drones getting shot at, provisions getting stolen, evacuation corridors jammed…

It was a still picture, no longer updated due to the lack of a connection. The reds were darker where the problems pushed into catastrophic. So far they'd managed to avoid anything going black, but the close calls were coming in more frequently.

Getting cut off was the worst move, and she'd make sure to strangle Quinn if they survived this whole mess.

Vesper needed to get back in.

"I am plugging back in," she announced to the empty corridor, voice sharper than she intended. She fired an access request. The reply floated back in cold text:

Thermal‑safety lock active.

Try again in forty minutes.

Q.

"It's your damn fault your network needs so much processing!" She shouted at the empty room.

She tried anyway, hammering the same route Quinn had just sealed. All she earned was a spike of white noise and a renewed flare behind her eyes. Gritting her teeth, Vesper peeled the ice‑pack away, inspected the dent her own tension had left in the slushy filling, and stomped deeper into the bunker. Corridors narrowed into storage aisles stacked high with bar‑coded crates. Green paint denoted medical, yellow marked power cells, blue carried the black‑and‑white logo of Quinn's tracking rigs. Everything rattled to the bass rumble of distant generators.

Footsteps echoed somewhere ahead. Instinct sent her reaching for the local security camera feed; the implant answered with a thin squeal of protest and a fresh warning pop-up. She discarded the impulse and planted herself in front of an armored door just as it hissed open, reaching for her gun until she realized who was approaching. "Quinn sent you," she said, accusation pre‑loaded, at the sight of their perpetually grease‑smudged ripperdoc. "Others need the help. Go patch them up or whatever."

"I can give you a check‑up on the way," Angus replied.

His chrome forearm segmented apart, instruments whirring to life with a clatter that never failed to unsettle her as they reached out towards her head. The urge to jump away was there, but she ignored it in favor of angrily marching forward, letting the doctor trail along.

"You were a few degrees shy of cooking real gray matter," he said as he retracted the aug-limbs.

Vesper snorted, a sound half laugh and half dismissal. "What are the odds I would've fried the last six years out of my head?"

"Keep this on," he muttered. With practiced gentleness, he replaced a new ice‑pack against the back of her skull, tugging the straps snug against her neck while they started up the narrow metal stairs. "I assume there is a reason for 'six years' specifically?"

"I will spare you the drama." Vesper tried to make it sound offhand, but her voice was heavy.

"Don't." Angus's reply came quick and flat. His weathered face held the same look he wore over an open chest cavity: concern framed by grim resolve. "It's bad for your health."

A distant klaxon vibrated through the concrete. She tried not to think of what had made the alarm go off this time around. Maybe the generators were finally kicking the bucket.

Vesper looked away, tongue pressing an anxious ridge into her lower lip. Growing up in Fourth District meant tripping over corpses the way uppers tripped over electro-scooters; death rarely bothered her. The idea of getting eaten by a monster, though, felt different today.

"Bear asked me to move to the Paws' fortress." She admitted.

"They have room?" Angus's brows lofted for an instant before comprehension flattened his tone. "Only for you, then."

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"And a handful others at most," she answered, chewing harder on her lip. Was it an insult, a bribe, a lifeline? The thought spun like broken glass in a dryer, useless and loud. She forced herself back to the present. "Give it to me straight, doc. How're things looking?"

"At the rate we're going, I doubt we'll have enough to keep everyone fed for more than a day. If we ration it. It'll be one long hungry wait." He adjusted the strap of his satchel as they stepped into a junction lined with overhead pipes that sweated condensation.

"What about the doomsday preppers?" Vesper risked another network handshake and felt the implant reject her with the digital equivalent of a slap. "Any caches left behind?"

"They were the first to bug-out. If they left stashes, we haven't found them." Angus's prosthetic fingers drummed on metal as he spoke, the servos clicking a ragged lullaby.

Manpower, credits, hours; always one missing, usually all three. Story of her life, really. Every time she opened the gang ledgers, the same quiet devil whispered about heavier ways to balance accounts, and every time she shut the file before the idea finished forming.

"Do you think it was a mistake? Clinging to the founders' code?" Her voice echoed while they entered the garage section, swallowed by the drone of exhaust fans.

The bunker deserved its title. Built a century prior as a waystation between New Francisco and the badlands beyond, it had weathered monsters, corporate wars, and a collapse before the Saints reclaimed it. Cement arches framed rusted roll‑up doors tall enough for eight‑wheeled desert haulers. Now those haulers were gone, replaced by a tide of civilians pressed shoulder to shoulder. A thousand families clustered around suitcases, gangers herded them into rough lanes, and everywhere rose the sour scent of stress, sweat, and unwashed bodies baking under flood lamps. There was barely any room left, and yet it was not enough.

"You're asking the wrong person," Angus spoke softly, squeezing her shoulder with his good hand.

"But you're a ripperdoc." Vesper frowned. "You're saving lives left and right, surely-"

"It's precisely because I'm a ripperdoc that I'm the wrong person to answer your question," he shook his head, squeezing tighter. "If I ever stopped to wonder how many lives I could be saving, if I'd done something differently, taken bigger risks… I'd go insane." There was something in his eyes that sent a chill down her spine, something… desperate. She flinched at the tightness of his grip, and Angus hastily let go. "Sorry."

"Everyone's tense," she tried to wave it off, but her hand gently squeezed the grip of her pistol to reassure herself it was still there. Her gaze turned to the crowd again and grimaced. "How many do you figure are safe?"

"Five percent. If we're lucky." He answered with a deathly stillness.

Scattered through the crowd, Saints in patched jackets handed out waxy paper cups of water and ration bars that looked like pressed sawdust. Children clung to those cups like prize tickets. An elderly man fell to his knees near a pallet stack, too weak or too frightened for the climb, and two recruits hurried over with a stretcher improvised from salvaged fencing.

"All this time, I kept biting more than I could chew. And now it's coming to bite us back."

Some people had evacuated, others likely found good places to hide, and the Saint's base was a stronghold, it would hold well enough until help arrived. But that was barely a drop in the bucket, the gang's territory had at least a hundred times more people who had no real hope of surviving when the monsters hit.

The Saints' territory was far larger than it had any right to be with their headcount and available firepower. It'd been a mix of respect for the name, and a mountain of elbow-grease, sweat, blood, and promises. Keeping it all together and afloat had taken several miracles, and now people were going to die because of it.

Her only scrap of comfort was knowing that the handful of names she cared for most were either behind these concrete walls or already in the third district. Everyone else blurred into a ledger of numbers she could not balance no matter how many times she did the math.

Vesper set her jaw. "Fighting would be so much easier than this mess." The words escaped before she could swallow them.

Every girl in the district had asked the same question at least once while staring down some nightmare alley. What if I woke up a meguca tomorrow? She remembered joking about it with Bea back when "Bear" didn't exist and she was just another sweaty bike courier. Then Bea went to sleep and opened her eyes with the strength to bulldoze through a wall and the city changed its tone around her forever. Somewhere in Vesper's skull the idea still smoldered: if the lottery ticket had landed in her hand instead, would things look different today?

She winced once she realized she'd been losing herself in memory lane. Vesper forced her focus into the neuralink's command line, and tried another handshake with Quinn's network. The gatekeeper still barred every door she actually needed, but a single live channel blinked insistently at the top of her queue as if someone had paid premium credits for the privilege.

Axel's stream.

Vesper rolled her eyes so hard it nudged her headache. She recalled sending him off to "try and tackle the riots and broadcast in the emergency frequency" as a Hail Mary. The feed would surely show him parkour across rooftops or bowling looters through storefront glass.

Instead, the image resolved into Axel standing on an overturned vending coffin like a preacher on a homemade pulpit. The white bone mask robbed his face of emotion, yet the voice booming from a scavenged loudspeaker held the entire block in place, a hundred civilians frozen on the spot.

"You are now Group forty‑nine," he announced. "Red tags, you are Grunt team, you carry materials. Blue tags, you are Technical team, you wire power and bolt plates where they belong. Green tags, you are Food and weapon's team, you scavenge for anything edible, and any firearms that aren't made of plastic. Map, please."

Two teenagers in threadbare hoodies lifted a portable projector toward a wall that still carried the ghost of a corporate mural. A neighborhood schematic flickered into life. Axel's laser pointer danced across the image, tracing a perimeter around a sagging building block.

"That is the cleaner's building. You will turn that structure into a bunker. Reinforce windows, clear lines of fire, sandbag the stairwells. Work as if that address will be the only roof between you and the horde. Questions?"

There was a tentative pause as one of the Green tags raised their hand. "And… if we don't?"

"You get the black tag, which is Combat team." He paused, no one needed further explanations of what that implied. Satisfied with their silence, he nodded. "Your KPIs are coverage, cohesion, and kill zone visibility. We do not build art, we build survival. Give yourselves a fighting chance. And smile if you still have teeth."

Vesper gaped at the screen while Axel pressed a bracelet of purple plastic into the hand of a wiry woman, declared her foreman of "Group forty‑nine," and strode away toward the next cluster of bystanders who had not yet realized they were part of an impromptu militia.

Then, the stream glitched and went black.

"What?" She checked diagnostics, and she was still connected to the stream.

Quinn's voice came through the channel, choppy and full of static despite the meters of concrete separating them from the outside. "They've started the jammers."

It'd been a longer time coming than they'd anticipated, yet it stung all the same.

There was only one word that came to mind.

"FUCK!"

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