I pack a small cloth bundle for her—dried meat, grain, a tiny jar of oil. She accepts it carefully.
“Same time in three days?” I ask.
“If I can.”
“That’s the spirit.”
She glances nervously at Varek again before slipping out the side door.
The moment she’s gone, the room feels quieter. I lean against the table. “You scare people.”
“They are cautious.”
“You’re a two-metre-tall alien war commander with horns.”
“Yes.”
“Exactly.”
He studies the shelves again. “You help many.”
“Someone has to.”
The Queen’s system is designed to grind people down slowly. Food shortages, punishments, exhaustion, and enough suffering to keep everyone obedient.
So the rebellion does what it can.
Sometimes that means battles. Other times it means smuggling weapons. And sometimes it means porridge and bread.
It turns out revolutions run on logistics.
Varek picks up the coil of wire from the crate and turns it over slowly in his hands, the metal catching the morning light that filters through the cracked warehouse windows. He tests the weight of it with his fingers, assessing the thickness the way a soldier evaluates armour.
“You repaired the eastern gate hinge,” he says.
“Yesterday.”
He lifts his eyes to mine again, hard and steady. “It was damaged during the last transfer?”
“Yep.”
Varek waits, patient as stone, clearly aware that the answer I gave him barely scratches the surface. He has a particular talent for silence—the kind that stretches just long enough that you feel compelled to fill it.
Eventually, I sigh and lean back against the worktable, folding my arms. “Eight weeks ago,” I say. “That was the last successful run through that route.”
The shift in his posture is subtle but unmistakable. “Eight.”
“Yeah.”
Saying the number out loud leaves a sour taste in my mouth.
Eight weeks is a long time when people are trying to escape.
The eastern gate isn’t really a gate anymore. It used to be part of the canal lock system back when this district still moved cargo through the waterways, but the city expanded and the routes changed. Now it’s just an old maintenance barrier buried deep in the tunnels beneath the warehouse district—an iron frame set into a narrow stone corridor where several of the canal passages converge.
It looks like it hasn’t been touched in decades, which is exactly why it works. The Queen’s guards don’t patrol places that appear abandoned.
Unfortunately, abandoned infrastructure has a habit of collapsing when you need it most.
