They moved like men trying not to be seen. The ledger sat in Hunter’s vest like a heat-stone. It was real paper; real ink; names scrawled with numbers that smelled of money and rot. Cain felt it through cloth and muscle every time they crossed a street, every time a car passed too close. It was a weight that might topple towers or tip men into graves. Steve had carved a route through service tunnels, under market stalls and old pipes, places where the city forgot to listen. Above them, voices argued about taxes and theatre openings and small immovable tragedies. Below, coal and wire and greed kept the city upright. "We can’t just throw it on the net and watch," Steve said. His fingers hovered over a battered tablet, eyes bloodshot. "They’ll bury it before the dawn’s second shift. They have the lawyers, the bots, the money to scrub and cut and buy. We need places that can’t be bought—people, presses, a preacher with a deathwish." Roselle almost smiled. "We need teeth, not noise." Cain didn’t bother with metaphors. "We need leverage. Names picked with care. A hand that holds the wound open." Hunter nodded. "We pick a proxy. Make it simple, obvious. A face the council can’t ignore. Then we feed it to three places at once—one public, one private, one in a priest’s ear. Chaos multiplies the mistake." Susan lit a cigarette with hands that shook; the bandages at her ribs had been changed and rewrapped twice. "We do that," she said, smoke spilling. "And Daelmont answers with fire. They don’t negotiate; they punish. They’ll make examples." Chapters fırst released on 𝓷𝓸𝓿𝓮𝓵⟡𝓯𝓲𝓻𝓮⟡𝓷𝓮𝓽 "Good," Roselle said. Quiet. "Let them show their faces." They agreed on a name—one that sat in the ledger like a parasite on a ledger-line, someone respectable-cum-venal, a consultant who sold access to doors that never opened. It was the small, perfect lie inside the big machine: plausible, defendable, vulnerable to a public that still pretended to trust reputation. Hunter printed, Steve encrypted, Roselle carried. Cain watched them like a man watching old friends step toward a ledge. He kept thinking of the woman at the plant—her clipboard, the calm in her voice. She had called this a promise of endless war. He believed her then, and he believed her now. But he believed more that silence had made the city rot. They moved at dusk. The first press was a rag in the outer quarter—a printman who still believed in ink and sweat. He took one look at the spread and cursed with a poetry reserved for men who lost everything on account of honesty. He said he would run it past dawn. The second place was anonymous: a forum run by pirates and exiles, code-scratched and full of ghosts. Steve liked that ruckus. He fed the file and watched the bots pick it up and shout it in illicit corners. People with no faces began to point fingers at mustard-stained photographs, at receipts, at the consultant’s public smiling mug. The third place required a door and a favor. Cain stood in a church that smelled of rain and old prayers and handed a copy to a priest who had made a life of quiet kindness. The priest held the ledger and did not look surprised. He placed it on the altar like a lit candle and said words that did not belong to any god Cain had met. They were accusatory, close to scripture. The priest promised masses and questions. By dawn, the city had the file. By noon, the council had the tremor. By evening, men in suits wore forced smiles and names began to slither. It did not go quiet. It did not need to. Daelmont answered with a statement that smelled of legal counsel and cold iron. They denied. They called the document fabrications, then offered to cooperate with investigations. Their spokesmen were precise. Their PR team was surgical. They spoke of stability and continuity; they spoke of contracts and logistics. They promised calm. Mercenaries in soft boots began to appear in districts where they had not been the night before. Vans with black logos idled near council buildings. Subtle threats arrived like postage: small men who looked the same as every other small man in the city, but who stared at faces too long and asked about travel plans, about families, about debts. Cain expected as much. He expected the scraping and the politics. He expected men to take bribes and men to take bullets. He expected chaos to bloom. What he had not expected was the effect on faces that belonged to children and shopkeepers and the kinds of people who paid taxes. A stall closed a day early. Two markets reported fewer customers. A family sold their shop because someone with polished shoes had whispered about reconstruction and made the offer of a lifetime—one they could not refuse. The ledger had not only bruised Daelmont; it had shaken small lives into choices. Hunter read the news with a flattened look. "Collateral," he said, tasting the word like ash. "We knew. We wrote the note. We chose." Cain said nothing. He could feel the ledger’s teeth in his palm. He felt the line between necessary violence and needless ruin blur. The city, always hungry, shifted for new meat. The choices they made to force sunlight had made shadows somewhere else. Roselle cleaned her gun with a methodical precision. "They’ll come for us," she said. "Sooner than we think." "They will come," Cain replied. He found he did not fear them. He feared the price list after: who would pay what in losses and what they would count as acceptable. Pity was not a weapon. Mercy was not strategy. He had stopped believing in either. Hunter rubbed his temples. "We need allies. Not friends—alliances. People who can’t be bought with smooth talk or hard coin. Labor, unions, clergy who are already compromised, even. People whose blood on the line is less private." Steve scanned back through the fragments. "I can find pockets. I can hide nodes. I can make it harder to erase. But someone needs to hold the file, unspooled. We can’t centralize it." Susan looked at him as if he’d said something obvious and brilliant. "So we scatter it. Pieces that bind, pieces that burn if touched wrong."