Chương 29: 26. Tax Collectors

"The first generation after the Wave will discover what people are capable of when no law walks the streets. Some of what they discover will be worse than the creatures." - Codex of the Long Watch, Watcher's Commentary Tax Collectors There were five of them. Three men, two women with scavenged weapons: a claw hammer, a garden machete, a cricket bat with nails through it, two kitchen knives. They walked through the northern gap in the barricade like they owned the apartment block. Arthur stepped past Geoff.

The Bullguard Shield was up though the crowbar stayed at his belt. The leader was the bat man. He was the biggest, loudest of the group, holding the nailed cricket bat across his body like a sceptre. The woman to his right held the machete with flat eyes and a loose grip that said she'd already used it. The other three looked like backup. Though backup with blades could cause trouble of their own.

"You should leave," Arthur said. The bat man's attention snagged on the shield and on the faint blue glow that lived in the Bullguard's surface. His smile was the kind that could have been charming once, before discovering that without law, other people's fear made everything free.

"Nice kit. We're here for food. Hand it over and we'll be on our way."

"There are empty shops on every street. You don't need to take from people who've got nothing."

"Who said anything about nothing? They've got tins. Medicine. Blankets." The bat man's smile widened.

"We've been here before. Haven't we, Geoff?" Behind Arthur, Geoff said nothing. The silence of a man who'd given up supplies twice already and hated himself for it. The bat man shifted his weight and waved the bat in front of him.

"You think we want to do this? There are things out there that eat people. This is how you stay alive lad. You take what you need and you keep moving." Arthur heard the fear underneath the performance. The man was terrified like everyone else. He'd just decided to terrify others to calm his own. But that didn't matter right now as the woman with the machete was circling right, while one of the others with a kitchen knife was drifting left, toward the area where the mother sat with her sick child.

"Walk away," Arthur said.

"Last time I'm saying it."

"Or what? Shield Boy's going to -" The machete woman moved first. Fast and direct with a lateral swing aimed at Arthur's unshielded side. Arthur pivoted triggering Structural Reinforcement, and caught the machete on the Bullguard. The force rebounded up the machete's blade and the woman's wrist snapped backward. She screamed. The bat man came in swinging. After fighting two guardians all of this felt a little too trivial. Arthur caught the swing, the nails shrieking against the shield's surface.

The man's momentum carried him forward. Arthur drew the crowbar and hit him. A forged steel bar driven by 17 Strength into a ribcage that was not built for the force. The bat man folded. He went down and he didn't get up. The flanker with the kitchen knife had committed to her angle toward the mother and child. Donna's Reflex Acceleration read the trajectory before the woman finished her first step. The flat of the Conduit-Edge Axe caught her forearm. The knife spun into the dark.

Donna's follow-through was a kick to the knee that dropped her. The woman with the broken wrist was staggering back. The man with the claw hammer looked at the leader on the ground and ran. The youngest raider, barely twenty, dropped his knife and followed. Four seconds. It took four seconds to make this party of thugs run in abject panic. Arthur released the Reinforcement. The paving beneath his feet was cracked in the same radiating pattern as the marble in Temple Church.

He looked down at the leader of the group. He was not breathing. His brain was doing what it always did, reading the failure. Catastrophic structural collapse of the thoracic cage. Unsurvivable. He'd known the force would be lethal and he'd hit him anyway, because the flanker was moving toward a four-year-old, and the bat man was between Arthur and the angle he needed to cover Donna's approach from the two other goons behind the bat man. He'd made a structural decision about a man's life.

The weight of it arrived slowly, it wasn't crushing like he had read in books. He knew if the child or Donna or Steve were in danger he would do it again without hesitation. The weight was more like an acknowledgment of the fact that he was willing to do certain things that he would not have thought possible before the world changed. Donna was beside him, close enough to reach but not touching.

The way she'd been on the rooftop after Greenwich when the weight of what they were becoming had pressed down on both of them.

"He was loading the next swing toward Geoff, after he hit your shield" she said.

"The bat was already shifting to a horizontal arc. If you hadn't dropped him, Geoff would have a nailed cricket bat across the temple." This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

"I know."

"Then stop carrying it like you had a choice." Arthur looked at her.

"You don't carry yours?" he asked.

"I carry all of mine. I just carry them where they don't affect my grip." She turned to the disarmed flanker who was still clutching her forearm and shoved her toward the exit.

"Take your friend with the wrist and go. Come near this camp again and I won't use the flat." People were huddled around the courtyard looking at them and whispering. Geoff's mouth was working but no sound came out. The woman with the sick child had pulled her daughter close, and she was looking at Arthur with an expression he'd only ever seen directed at firefighters and soldiers. Then came the notification. THREAT NEUTRALISED ETHER ABSORBED: 38 INTEGRATION: 318 / 470 The same as always clinical and automatic.

The same format as the foxes in the alley. The same format as the rats in the Printworks. Counting with the same undetached precision every creature they'd killed since the sky changed. Archie's geometry brightened. A fractional pulse, the processing spike that accompanied new data.

"Ether yield from a human host is approximately three point two times the yield from comparable-mass Ether-fauna at equivalent ambient saturation." His voice was flat. It was the voice of something that had watched this happen before.

"The differential reflects passive Integration accumulation. Humans are efficient receptacles." Arthur stared at the notification. It hadn't flagged the kill as different. Hadn't distinguished between a mutated monster and a human. His brain told him he should have more of a reaction to this revelation but his hands were still steady. That was the part that would keep him up at night, the steady hands. The system counting the Ether while his pulse barely shifted.

Steve was standing very still looking at the notification.

"Thirty-eight," he said. Quiet enough that only Arthur and Donna heard.

"From one person. Three times what the rats gave us."

"Every person alive is absorbing Ether. Every survivor with the genetic compatibility. Whether they fight or hide. They're all integrating. Of course the more you fight the more quickly you will progress," Arthur added.

"What's stopping someone from deciding that killing people is faster than killing monsters?" Steve whispered. He looked at Archie. The geometry hovered above his left shoulder, invisible to every pair of eyes in the camp.

"Nothing," Archie said. The reply sat there between the three of them. Steve finally spoke.

"Sixty people in this courtyard, Arthur. Sixty. None of them fighting but all of them absorbing. If someone with a weapon and no conscience walked in here and -" He stopped. He didn't need to finish. They were standing in the answer. Donna cut in, "File it. We deal with what's in front of us."

Arthur could see it behind Steve's eyes, fear of a future where every survivor camp, every refugee group, every huddle of unarmed civilians was a reservoir to be drained by anyone strong enough and ruthless enough to do the draining. * Geoff approached them. The wariness was gone, replaced with gratitude.

"What do you need?" People brought things. Arthur could read the difference: the offerings came freely. Food they'd been hoarding. A medical kit. A pair of hiking boots. The instinct was older than language: these are the people you want on your side. Geoff came up and asked if they were staying.

"No," Arthur said and his face fell. Arthur knew what Geoff was thinking. Four seconds of violence had shifted the camp's odds substantially.

"I'm sorry. We can't stay," Arthur said.

"But I can tell you something worth more than us being here. The creatures, the monsters, when you kill them, you absorb energy. The blue text tracks it. It is not a hallucination. The more you fight, the stronger you get. Stop avoiding them. Start hunting the small ones. As a group. Together."

"You're telling me to go pick fights with monsters."

"I'm telling you that hiding has a shelf life. The things out there are getting stronger. You need to keep pace." He paused.

"Start with the rats. They're fast but they're fragile. Five people with weapons, in daylight and in open ground. Don't chase them into buildings and don't split up. Kill one and you'll feel the difference. Then you'll understand." Geoff was quiet for a long time.

"My daughter's in Lewisham. She's twenty-three. Works at a school. I haven't been able to -" He stopped and then started again.

"If we get stronger. Can we get to Lewisham?"

"You can get wherever you need to go," Arthur said.

"But not by hiding behind walls." Geoff nodded as did several others behind him. Arthur had given them a goal, something to aspire to, a way to stop hiding and start becoming more. Donna did a last check around the perimeter and walked off nodding to Arthur and Steve. They followed. Behind them, the camp was changing, people were talking and planning. The weight of the apocalypse that sat on them was redistributing. They walked, each in their own thoughts.

Arthur was thinking about transit platforms and unknown destinations and a dead man who'd been worth thirty-eight Ether. And a flat in Bermondsey with a lease that wouldn't expire for eight months, and a coffee mug on the counter he'd forgotten to wash, and the fact that nobody would ever know. The Thames was violet in the fading light. The Embankment waited. THE ETHER ATLAS: FIELD NOTES OF STEVEN PARR London, Day 3 THE HUMAN VARIABLE The system gave us 38 Ether for a human kill. A fox gives 12–15.

A rat gives 8–10. The Printworks amalgamation, a genuine dungeon boss, gave 85. A single human being, passively absorbing ambient Ether for two days without fighting anything, was worth more than three foxes. Archie confirmed the multiplier: 3. 2 times the yield from comparable-mass Ether-fauna at equivalent ambient saturation. His word, not mine.

"Receptacles." Humans are efficient receptacles. I wrote the number down. Then I wrote what it means. Every living survivor is a battery. The system does not distinguish between a creature and a person. The notification was identical. Same format. Same font. Same clinical blue. Arthur asked what stops someone from deciding that killing people is faster than killing monsters. Archie said "Nothing." He did not elaborate. I have been thinking about Archie's silence for three hours.

He could have said "The system penalises human kills." He could have said "Candidates who harvest humans are flagged." He could have said anything that closed the door. He said "Nothing" and he stopped talking. The door is open. Someone will walk through it who isn't us. Probably someone already has.