They settled where the barge rocked slow and steady—muffled and private. The hatch sealed with a clank that swallowed the docks. Inside, the air smelled of oil and salt, of old plans and new lies. Lights came up on a string, too dim to read by but enough to keep the dark honest.

Cain put his blade on the bench and watched the city through the viewport. Smoke etched the horizon like a wound. He did not look at the others. He did not need to. They were all here because he had chosen them.

Susan unrolled a bandage and rewrapped her ribs. She moved like a woman learning to live with new limits. "We have food for three," she said. "Ammo for five. Maybe six if we pick clean."

Roselle checked the pistol again, then slid a folded list across the bench. Names on paper. Addresses. Posts to burn. "This is where we start," she said. "You said finish."

Hunter had already opened the drive Steve had snagged from the flagship's console. He did not trust the thing; he trusted what it could say. Lines of code, maps, a ledger of payments that smelled like the men who moved money in the dark.

Steve watched him work like a doctor watching a wound. He kept his hands from shaking. The machine spat truth in cold blocks. The Daelmonts ran things through trusts and shell boards, through offshore curtains and merchants who used graveyards for bank accounts. Names tied to factories, to docks, to governors with clean hands and hungry mouths.

Cain read over Hunter's shoulder. Each line made the plan simpler: cut one tendon and the body faltered. He looked at the list Roselle pushed back across the bench. "Find the money. Make the trace. Burn the turnout. Not for revenge. For leverage."

Hunter's face did not change. "Leverage buys time. Time lets others move. Time lets them hide." He tapped the drive. "We have accounts that route payments through three banks in three cities. Cut those lines and their fleet is only a fleet. It becomes a cost."

Susan snorted. "We aren't accountants. We're not bankers. We blow things up."

"You burn a tree a hundred times," Cain said, "and the roots still hold. Roots are money. Kill roots and the tree falls. We break their bank, not their hulls."

The plan did not need speeches. It needed motion. They catalogued tasks with the speed of people who have done this before. Roselle would ghost along the shipping logs and the docks, find the courier nodes that still moved paper. Hunter would use the drive to follow the money through ledgers the Daelmonts thought were private. Steve would dig for access—backdoors, shadow servers, the kind of ghosts only a tech plow can find. Susan and Cain would handle the hands—those who moved, not those who signed.

"Small and brutal," Cain said. "No parades. No pleas. Just cuts. Quiet ones."

They moved out before dawn. The barge drifted and they left faint prints on water that would hold no testimony. The city watched them go and did not ask questions. It was the kind of silence that meant the world still believed in rules.

They split at the bone of the river, the way men make themselves invisible. Roselle took a skiff and rolled between warehouses that still smelled like the old market. She spoke to dockhands who were all debts and broken promises. She slipped payments into the hands of boys and girls who still needed bread and not the kind that came stamped with a surname. Her hands were quick. Her fingers were clean.

Hunter and Steve moved like thieves into a finance building no one bothered to lock. A junior clerk with a single bad marriage sat on the lowest rung and took their money with a nod. Hunter fed him a story of survival. The clerk fed Hunter a token in return—a passcode. It opened a door to a back office where paper became ghosts and ghosts became numbers. Hunter watched the lines move, the way a surgeon reads arteries.

They hit the first node at midday. Cain and Susan walked into a private loading yard where crates were weighed and ledgers kept in the invisible ledger of muscle. Cain let the cards fall. A few shots, patrols distracted, a crate opened and inside were false goods, boxes labeled for charities but engineered to carry the wallets of the small men who kept Daelmont's cash moving. Susan turned a valve and the crate expired into smoke. It was quick. No glory. The boys who ran the dogs scattered and prayed. Cain felt nothing at the prayer.

The hits came in like rain. Small, precise, and surgical. A courier in District Four disappeared with the ledger that kept routes. A bank's shadow account foundered after Hunter inverted a checksum the hackers who worked for the Daelmonts had left open like a throat. A shipping broker discovered his accounts were empty and thought at first that the world had turned. He did not understand what had been taken because what was taken was not his face or his titles but the quiet revenue that lubricated the whole machine.

They tasted a new thing in their mouths: momentum. With each ledger emptied, with each courier stopped, a murmur rose. Not of protest. Of calculation. Someone somewhere was recalculating the price of staying loyal.

Cain sat on the prow of a half-burned barge that night and watched a city that still thought itself intact begin to fraction. The Daelmonts answered with shows: convoys that moved like thrones, armored teams that flashed their insignia and shouted threats. They made shows for the cameras that had not yet been turned off. They paraded the guns and told the public that chaos would come if order was not obeyed.

The public watched and made no answer. People went back to work. They queued for soup. They covered their windows. They measured danger the same hour they measured wages.

But in the dark, quiet rooms like the one on the barge, men and women wrote lists. They chose sides neither for glory nor for fear but because they had to choose something. Cain had created a wound in the machine that would not heal easily.

"You think they'll come for us?" Susan asked that night, voice steady enough but with the rasp of pain.

Cain did not turn. "They will. They always do."