607 was the furthest apartnt from Michael’s and Gareth liked that about it.
He closed the door behind him and stood in the space and looked at his four n arranged around the room. Damon was on the windowsill. The two bat n, whose nas were Fetch and Caro, were on the floor. The fifth man, younger than the others, barely twenty, who everyone called Wren because nobody rembered his actual na anymore, was sitting on the kitchen counter eating sothing from a wrapper.
They looked at him.
"Well," Damon said.
"He said no," Gareth said.
Damon nodded once like that was the answer he’d expected. "Politely."
"Politely," Gareth confird. He walked to the window and looked out at the street below and the city beyond it and the building’s exterior wall visible at an angle from this window, the reinforced gate at the bottom, the watchtower platform visible at the roof edge. "He’s smarter than he looks."
"He doesn’t look smart," Fetch said.
"That’s what I an," Gareth said.
Damon turned the chain over in his hands slowly. "What’s the play."
"The play is we wait," Gareth said. He looked at the watchtower. "He’s building sothing. Whatever he’s using to build it, however he’s doing it, it’s real and it works and it’s going to keep getting bigger." He paused. "Right now he needs people. People that can clear floors and run supplies and do the things that four people can’t do alone." He looked at his n. "That’s us. That’s our value right now and he knows it and we know it and as long as that’s the dynamic he holds the cards."
"So we change the dynamic," Caro said.
"We wait for the dynamic to change itself," Gareth said. "It always does." He looked at the watchtower again. "Sothing’s out there. I can see it in the way he looks at the city. Sothing he hasn’t dealt with yet that’s bigger than what we’ve seen so far." He turned from the window. "When that cos he’s going to need more than he has."
Damon looked at him. "And then."
"And then we’re not guests anymore," Gareth said simply.
The room was quiet for a mont.
Then Wren on the counter said "what about Anya" without looking up from his wrapper and Gareth looked at him and Wren looked up and whatever he saw in Gareth’s face made him look back down at his wrapper and not say anything else about it.
"Anya stays where she is for now," Gareth said. "We don’t touch that. Not yet."
Damon was watching him carefully. "And Rei."
Gareth looked at the wall in the direction of Michael’s apartnt and the easy expression was doing nothing because there was nobody in this room it needed to perform for.
"Rei stays where she is," he said. His voice was flat and asured and had sothing underneath it that sat differently to the thing underneath the easy expression. "For now."
Damon held his gaze for a second and then looked at the chain in his hands and didn’t say anything else.
Fetch looked at Caro. Caro looked at the floor.
Wren ate his protein bar very quietly.
---
The pulse caught them at four in the afternoon.
Michael was on the watchtower running the extended sweep when the signatures appeared at the edge of the nine block range moving west through the eastern district with a speed and coordination that was nothing like Rotter movent. Seven of them, tight formation, moving fast and clean through streets that still had scattered horde remnants in them and not slowing for any of it.
He watched them on the pulse for two minutes.
They were good. Whatever they were running into on those eastern streets they were handling it without breaking formation and without the kind of chaotic movent that said things were going wrong. Smooth and directed and heading west.
Heading toward the building.
He pushed the range as far as the Tier 2 relay would stretch and tracked the formation and did the math on their speed and direction and ca out at about forty minutes before they were close enough to see the building properly.
He looked at the watchtower he was standing on, visible above the roofline.
They’d already be able to see it.
He went down.
---
Sera was in the hallway when he ca off the stairwell and she read his face before he said anything.
"Problem," she said. Not a question.
"Maybe," he said. "Seven people moving through the eastern district. Fast, coordinated, heading this way."
She straightened slightly. "Survivors."
"Ard survivors," he said. "The way they’re moving through those streets, whatever they’re running into out there, they’re not struggling with it." He paused. "They’re good."
Sera looked at him. "How long."
"Forty minutes before they’re close. Less if they pick up pace." He looked at the apartnt door. "Get everyone upstairs. Tell Dr. Kang to keep the clinic door closed. Maya stays off the watchtower."
"And Gareth’s n."
Michael looked down the hallway toward 607.
"Leave them," he said. "For now. I need to see what these seven want before I start moving pieces around."
Sera looked at him with her eyes slightly narrowed. "You’re going to let them co to the building."
"I’m going to let them co to the gate," he said. "Different thing."
She held his gaze for a second and then nodded and moved and Michael went back up to the watchtower and watched the seven signatures move steadily west through the dead city toward everything he’d spent thirty days building.
At the edge of the pulse range, eight blocks southeast, the unidentified signature was still sitting exactly where it had been since last night.
Still patiently waiting.
Michael looked at it and then at the seven moving signatures and thought about the particular feeling of two different problems arriving at the sa ti from different directions and what the blueprint for that situation looked like.
He didn’t have one yet.
He was going to need one.
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