Chương 4: Chapter 3: Due Diligence

Cecilia came down at five-thirty. An hour later than she'd planned, and still early enough that the rest of the building was sleeping. Palazzo Valperga had changed while she wasn't watching. The front corridor had people sleeping along the wall on bedding she hadn't authorized, coats, and folded tablecloths from the dining room and, in one case, a curtain. The private dining room had been converted overnight, the long table shoved against the wainscoting to open the floor. She recognized most of the faces.

The two she didn't she noted for follow-up before midday. She walked the building in the order she always walked it. Floor by floor, perimeter to center. First floor clear. Second floor had three windows covered with tablecloths, which was poor execution and reasonable instinct, and she left them. One of the cellar access points hadn't been secured properly from the inside. She handled it herself before anyone was awake to explain it. The kitchen had coffee going.

She poured a cup and stood at the sink window looking at the narrow garden. The wall showed nothing. The sounds beyond it were quieter than yesterday's. Panic exhausted itself overnight. What came after it was slower and more deliberate and, in her experience, considerably more dangerous. She stood there until the cup was empty. Ruggiero came into the kitchen at six-fifteen. He crossed to the counter, assessed the room in the time it took him to get there, and poured his own coffee.

He leaned against the counter rather than sitting down, the way he always did.

"Perimeter," she said.

"Clean since three. Bernardo and two others are on rotation." He drank.

"Someone came over the garden wall at two a. m."

"Who?"

"One of our supply people from Mirafiori. A man named Frido." He set down his cup.

"He had a kitchen knife and a phone with an active System notification he hadn't touched yet. He was scared. He settled."

"The knife."

"I have it."

"The phone."

"Still with him. He was sitting with it in his hand when I left him." She considered. A man who'd broken into a building and stayed rather than move through the city had made his own calculation about conditions outside. She was willing to extend it some provisional credit.

"Have someone check what's on it before he leaves. Don't make a thing of it."

"All right."

"How many in the building who aren't on payroll?" He told her. Eleven, not counting the Espositos. Some were family of her people. Three were neighbors from the block who'd been let in during the first night when the noises from the street got bad enough that leaving them outside felt like an unnecessary risk to the people already inside. She filed the three neighbors as a category that needed a framework before it repeated itself.

"We need a protocol," she said.

"For who we take in and what we're asking in exchange. Get Matteo working on it this morning."

"I'll tell him." She rinsed her cup and set it on the counter.

"The building held well." It wasn't exactly a compliment. It was an acknowledgment that the work he'd done overnight was the reason she could stand here and think about the next thing instead of the last one. Ruggiero understood the distinction.

"It'll hold tonight too," he said.

"Bigger crowd on the streets now." That was going to be their primary friction point. The building was safe. Safety attracted people. They needed to be able to absorb the attention and turn it into something useful rather than let it become a mob or a siphon for resources.

"I'll speak to the Espositos," she said.

"Find out how their night was. Get me an update on Dario when he's in." Ruggiero nodded and left the kitchen without a word. The Espositos arrived at half past eight. Bianca brought them in through the side entrance off the alley. Francesca came through first, still in yesterday's clothes, holding herself with the steadiness of someone who had been performing composure for long enough that it had become automatic.

Micole followed with her jacket clutched against her chest in both arms, like she'd picked it up when things got bad and hadn't been able to put it back down. Cecilia was in the front office. She didn't stand.

"Sit down," she said.

"There's coffee if you want it." Francesca sat across the desk. Micole sat beside her and looked at the desk surface.

"You're safe here for as long as the situation requires it," Cecilia said.

"The arrangement between our families is unchanged. The context isn't." Francesca nodded. She'd understood the terms before she arrived, and had come anyway. That was something.

"My father," she said. Cecilia waited.

"He was in Brussels two days ago. He had a meeting in Geneva he was traveling to when it happened. We had a message from him Tuesday morning and then nothing after that. The lines were gone by the afternoon." She stopped herself from adding whatever else she'd been about to add and kept her hands flat on her thighs.

"We don't know if he made it to Geneva or turned back."

"Which hotel in Geneva?" Francesca told her. Cecilia wrote it in the margin of her notepad, drew a line under it, and closed the cover. Francesca watched her close it.

"Thank you," she said, carefully. Cecilia looked at Micole. The girl was still looking at the desk surface.

"Is she all right?"

"She'll be fine," Francesca said, in a way that closed the question.

"She can stay here," Cecilia said.

"Both of you can. You're not restricted to one room." She paused.

"Within the building." Francesca understood what within the building meant.

"Of course."

"Matteo will explain the terms in more detail. Movement, contact protocol, meals. Anything he can't answer, bring to me." She stood. Micole looked up for the first time when Cecilia moved toward the door. She had the reddened, dry look of someone who had been crying for a long time and had stopped because there wasn't anything left. She didn't say anything. Cecilia met her eyes for a moment, then left.

The reports came in through the morning by foot and by two motorbikes Dario had running the district perimeters since before dawn. The Wi-Fi had been live for nine minutes at seven o'clock and was gone again. The landlines were worse than yesterday, which she hadn't expected. Cecilia sat in the front office, Matteo across from her, his pen moving, and Dario worked the doorway, relaying intelligence as it arrived.

"Aurora first," she said.

"Bad night." Dario leaned against the doorframe.

"A looting situation on one of the main corridors got past anyone managing it by around ten p. m. Then the noise drew something in. Whatever hit the north end around midnight, it wasn't people."

"The rail crossing."

"Write it off for foot movement. Vehicles, if you're lucky."

"Crocetta."

"Neighborhood blockade, same as yesterday. Residents this time, not criminals. They've got the block between Via Sacchi and Corso Vittorio sealed with cars and at least a dozen people who look like they've been awake since Tuesday and are past the point of being polite about it." He shrugged slightly.

"They're organized. I don't think they're going to bother us, and I don't think they'll last two weeks." Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit. Matteo wrote something in his folder without looking up.

"Barriera di Milano." Dario's expression shifted into the register it went to when the news required more care.

"One of our facilities had two attempts last night. First by a group with a car jack and no weapons. They gave up once the door was spotted and someone stepped out the side with a rifle visible."

"You don't have to wait for that part to go visible," Cecilia said, "next time it matters."

"I'll pass that along."

"And the second group," Matteo prompted.

"More interesting. Two hours before first light." Dario ran a hand through his hair.

"They knew the doors, and the routine. Came in while the person on guard was shifting position to watch the street, got to the basement steps before he clocked it." Cecilia set her pen down.

"Ours?"

"Unknown."

"You've got a camera." It wasn't a question. They had cameras everywhere useful now.

"The feed was dead when they passed it." He met her look.

"A lot of electronics have been going bad at strange intervals, in case you didn't notice."

"I noticed," she said.

"What stopped them?"

"I did," Dario said.

"I was there, running back from an unrelated detour. They went down. One survived."

"And you've spoken with him," Matteo said.

"Not a useful talk," Dario said.

"He didn't know much more than what we saw. He'd been part of something for less than a day. No real intel to leverage. What was left, I kept."

"The location?"

"Cleared it. They weren't local."

"And he wasn't," Cecilia said. The precision was important. If they weren't local, the problem didn't come with the district. It came from a point of origin she wanted to identify.

"Was the survivor local?" Dario shook his head.

"North. The Piedmontese was bad. He wasn't comfortable answering when I pushed it. The accent's not quite right. They were on a job. Just not a big one."

"Let it ride," Cecilia said. It wasn't an escalation. It wasn't a pattern yet.

"Prioritize the two-block radius." Dario nodded and turned back toward the door. She could see the set of his jaw under the curve of his ear. He'd decided what to think about it. She trusted his judgment in that regard and would leave it for the moment. He opened the door before he spoke.

"One more thing."

"I was beginning to think you were done."

"Have you selected your class?" Dario asked.

"If not, you might want to soon." Cecilia felt the message surface briefly at the corner of her vision. She let it drift back.

"I already have," she said. Dario tilted his head slightly.

"And?" Matteo looked up at that but didn't say anything.

"Fixer." She picked up her pen again.

"It's what I already am, after all." A short flicker of a smile came and went on Dario's face. Then he stepped out into the corridor and pulled the door behind him. Bianca came in at ten past ten with a phone extended and said, "Read this," and nothing else. She'd been running the network intervals, or had found the pattern of them, or had been waiting for a specific window with the patience she brought to everything that required patience. It didn't matter which.

It only mattered that she was holding out a phone that had signal. Cecilia took the phone. The thread was on a gaming forum. Partially cached. Formatted plainly, written quickly, from a user with a thirty-month activity history and an avatar that showed a cropped photo of a hand rolling dice on felt. She read the opening paragraph and then read it again, slower. The author had taken apart the class selection interface from first principles. There was a flowchart in the margins of the message.

A class whose one-line summary emphasized immediate function without referencing a direction of growth was communicating something about its ceiling, and the placement of conditional language in a one-line descriptor told you whether the class was a starting point or a destination. They'd identified two selection patterns in the first hours of visible forum data and explained why both were suboptimal from the architecture of the descriptors alone. She read the third paragraph.

They'd laid out what the right question actually was. Not what class sounded powerful, but what class had the best chance to break through the ceiling. They'd built it in terms that applied to any person reading it with sufficient attention. They hadn't said what they'd selected for themselves. They'd just provided the methodology for making the right choice. Those who understood it on the first day would control the environment in the first week. She sat with this for a moment.

She had made the same analysis the night before, alone at her desk. She'd reached a compatible conclusion by a different route. Theirs was more rigorous. And they'd done something she hadn't: they'd generalized it, framed it in terms that applied to the entire city's selection problem rather than their own. Someone writing for themself wouldn't have written it that way. She read the thread one more time. It was dated yesterday at eight-fifteen p. m.

It had been written at least two hours after most of Turin had lost consistent access to the Internet, and it had been posted to a niche forum on the chance that the people who needed it would find it before the window closed. The author was trying to help people who had a chance of being useful. She handed the phone back to Bianca.

"Find out who they are," she said. Bianca nodded once and left with the phone. Cecilia found Matteo in the hall. She signaled for him to follow her to the back office, a smaller room that had been a storage closet until she'd had it converted into a space for private discussion. She closed the door and leaned against it. He stood in front of the small table in the center of the room and waited.

"You've been talking to your contacts," she said.

"As much as the signal allows."

"What are they saying?" Matteo hesitated, which was unusual.

"The situation is... fluid. The national government has no unified plan. The Prime Minister is in Rome, the Defense Ministry is operating out of a secondary location. There are rumors of infighting over protocol and jurisdiction."

"Infighting," she repeated. He nodded.

"Which is the optimistic interpretation of what's happening. The less optimistic is that there is no effective chain of command left above the regional level." That was a problem she didn't intend to solve.

"And the city?"

"The Mayor's office attempted to implement a curfew last night. It was announced through loudspeakers at one a. m. and largely ignored. Police presence is diminishing. Some precincts are fully staffed. Others have walked off." That was what the initial chaos covered. The first wave of public response had obscured how quickly local command structures were eroding. The second wave wouldn't be so generous.

"The military," she said.

"Uncoordinated. Some units are securing key infrastructure. Others are relocating outside the metropolitan area. There's no clear strategy."

"And no one is talking about the System."

"No." Matteo adjusted the cuffs of his shirt, a motion that usually preceded a statement he found unpleasant to make.

"It appears to be intentionally excluded from official communications." She considered that. She'd been assuming the absence of System-specific policy was an oversight caused by the speed of events. That was a mistake. If they were avoiding it deliberately, the explanation was worse than incompetence.

"They don't understand it," she said. Matteo's expression didn't change, but he didn't argue.

"Which means they'll focus on the parts they do understand," she continued.

"Territorial control. Asset protection. Population management in the traditional sense. They'll treat this as a natural disaster with a political dimension rather than a fundamental change in what power looks like."

"That's my assessment," Matteo said.

"How long before they realize their approach isn't working?"

"Too long." She nodded.

"What are our advantages?" He didn't need to think about it.

"We understand the value of flexible hierarchies. We can adapt faster than a bureaucracy. We already have informal networks in place. We're not constrained by legal frameworks that no longer apply."

"And our disadvantages?"

"We lack resources. We don't have the legitimacy of state authority, even if it's failing. We don't have the scale to compete with larger organizations if they decide to move in." She straightened from the door.

"Those can be managed. The first one, faster than the others." He looked at her for a moment, then gave a small nod.

"You have a plan."

"I have a direction. We need to identify and absorb the people who can make the right choices now, when the cost is low. I may have found someone who can help us do that."

"Who?" She summarized the forum post and Bianca's assignment to track the author. Matteo listened without interrupting. When she finished, he said, "You want to recruit from the gaming community?"

"I want to recruit someone who can identify talent before it's obvious. This thing is shaping up to be like a game with permanent consequences. The people who understand that today will rule it tomorrow."

"And if they don't want to be recruited?" She looked at him evenly.

"Then they'll understand we can't afford for them to be working for someone else." Matteo was silent for a moment.

"It's a risk."

"It's the only play that makes sense. The System gave us a window. It's closing. We'll use it." He nodded.

"What do you want me to do?"

"Continue monitoring the official channels. If the government stabilizes, I need to know before they tell anyone else. If they don't, I need to know which pieces are salvageable."

"Understood."

"One more thing," she said.

"Start building a list. Anyone in our network who knows someone who plays professionally. Tournament-level games, competitive guilds, anything that requires System-style thinking under pressure."

"How many?"

"As many as we can verify in forty-eight hours. And find out where the best players in the city used to gather. Arcades, gaming cafés, meetups. I want to know where they'll go when they realize the people who know what's happening are the ones who've been training for this their whole lives." Matteo looked at her for a moment longer than necessary, then nodded.

"Consider it done." He left. Cecilia remained in the room. The city was dividing itself into those who were waiting for someone to tell them what to do, and those who were figuring it out themselves. She had no intention of waiting.