Chương 63: Chapter 62: Six Blocks

Nothing went wrong before nine, and Cecilia noted it the way she noted a payment arriving early. Pleasant. Unearned. Worth checking the arithmetic on. She took the stairs. The cage elevator ran when the grid felt generous and stuck between floors when it didn't, and forty minutes in it one afternoon in March had settled her opinion of the matter permanently. Rain came through Turin before dawn.

By nine the courtyard flagstones had dried in a long wedge from the carriage door to the wall, and Bianca's morning rotation stood in the dry part forming up, six of them, breath showing. Somebody had set a chair by the gate. Somebody else had put the Leonelli mark on the wall above it, badly, in a red that missed by a shade she could not stop seeing. She let them see her at the window and moved on before anyone felt obliged to straighten. The Palazzo woke in layers.

The apartments on three and four stayed quiet until half past. The kitchens went first, always, and the smell of them came up the service stair, barley and chicory roasted dark enough to lie about itself. Nobody talked before coffee. Even the youngest ones, the new ones who hadn't come from this life, learned by the second week. It was one of the few rules Cecilia never spoke out loud.

Even after the global distribution of luxury goods diminished and the stock of Italian coffee shrank, she'd sent runners out to make sure the family kitchens didn't run out, not once. People could think straight in the morning when the smell said they could. Her grandmother would have disapproved of the expense, the indulgence. Her grandmother drank orzo through a war and called it coffee out of politeness, the way she called everyone she didn't want to name in public those poor souls.

There was a point to her grandmother's position. Cecilia could see it. She didn't want it in her house. Above all of it, faint through the ceiling of the piano nobile, the attic. Chairs going back. A voice, then another over the top of it. Somebody laughing at half past eight in the morning. Her father built that floor for quantitative analysts and market men. It held quantitative analysts and market men for eleven years.

Now it held a nineteen-year-old with headphones and a wall map, an accountant with a variable audit, and a woman who annotated in three colors and would not be hurried. The chairs sounded exactly the same. She priced that as the single best return the family had taken in a decade and went down to see Ruggiero. He waited in the small salon off the boardroom because he refused the boardroom, which he called the aquarium, and which he had called the aquarium since before she could see over the table.

"Monferrato," he said, instead of good morning.

"Sit down first."

"I'll sit when I've said it." He sat anyway, heavily, one hand on the arm of the chair like he needed something to lean on, though she'd never known him to be weak or to lean on anything.

"Dario's growers won't take cash."

"Any of them?"

"Four of the six. And the four are the ones with the acreage." She turned that over. Cash held in Turin because Turin still had a market that priced in it and a family that made the price stick. Fifty kilometers east, in hills where the nearest thing to a bank was a locked drawer in a farmhouse and nobody's writ ran past the end of a private road, a stack of banknotes was paper somebody assured you had value.

Dario worked two sets of families out there and never once confused them in a report, which she counted among the reasons he had the job. The Langhe people sat south of the Tanaro, further out, Nebbiolo and hazelnuts and four generations of practice at being courted by buyers who came to them. The Monferrato families sat closer and east, mixed holdings, grain on the flats under the vineyards, and they had spent those same four generations being the ones nobody bothered to court.

"What do they want?"

"Salt. Seed. Ammunition, two of them, which I said no to before you could." He looked at her from under his eyebrows.

"And diesel."

"How much diesel?"

"More than they need. They're not stupid, Cecilia. Dario spent six weeks getting those families to sit down with him and they spent the same six weeks working out what we are. They've got grain coming off the flats and they know what grain is worth in September, so they're asking for the one thing that doesn't rot and doesn't lose value while they wait."

"And the wine?" Ruggiero's mouth did something between a grimace and a smile.

"Trading it down toward Asti for flour and lard, at a rate that would make you weep. Barbera off slopes their grandfathers cleared by hand, and it fetches whatever a man with a sack of flour feels like calling fair." He said it the way older men say things they have decided not to be sentimental about. She let it pass without comment, because commenting would have obliged him to be embarrassed about it. She went to the window.

Via della Consolata below, a woman walking a bicycle with four jerricans strapped across the frame, none of them full, or she would not have managed the balance. Diesel in February had been something you complained about at a pump. Diesel in April went into a ledger with a lock on it, and it would stay there. The refineries that used to feed Piedmont sat down on the coast, and the coast had its own problems now, so the volume coming north was whatever it was and nobody expected more of it.

"What are we paying now?"

"Eleven to one against grain by weight. It was seventeen in March."

"It'll be six by August." She said it flatly, because it was flat. Diesel wasn't getting cheaper. Grain was getting dearer, month on month, the closer the growers came to a harvest nobody could yet promise, and a fixed liter of fuel bought less of a crop that scarce with every week that passed.

"Give them the salt and the seed at full ask. On diesel, offer half the volume, and offer it monthly through the harvest instead of up front." Ruggiero's jaw worked.

"They'll say no."

"They'll say no first. Then one of the four does the arithmetic on what happens if we stop coming in October, and he brings the other three round for us, and it costs us nothing to have him do it." She turned back from the window.

"Which one?"

"Bergesio. Out past Castelnuovo, on the near end of it."

"Why him?"

"Because he's the only one of them who asked Dario what happens if we stop coming."

"Then it's Bergesio." She let herself take the small pleasure of it, which lasted about as long as it took to set down.

"Give him the monthly terms alone, before the others hear a word of it, and let him think he pulled it out of us."

"Dario carries it."

"Dario carries everything out there. You give him the number and you let him choose the morning." Ruggiero grunted. He got up, but he stopped halfway to the door and looked back.

"Your father would have sent someone to stand in Bergesio's yard."

"My father would have got the grain."

"He would have got it once." That was his habit, too, saying a thing about her father like it hadn't occurred to him until it was out of his mouth. It probably hadn't, and he went through the door before she had to answer it. She stood in the salon a moment with the sound of his shoes going away down the marble. Upstairs, Matteo's revised protection templates sat in the tray on her desk, third draft, initials pending. She went through them with a pen. Clean work.

He tightened the failure clause, moved the arbitration language forward, added a definition of interruption that closed a gap she missed on the last read. The miss annoyed her slightly. The definition pleased her considerably more. On page four, she stopped and changed one word. Reasonable came out. Prompt went in. Reasonable is what a court decides afterward. There were no courts.

Prompt is what a man in a doorway at two in the morning can be held to by somebody standing in front of him, and every clause in the document had to survive that test or it was decoration. She initialed the corner and set it aside. Under it, Ivan's report. It had been on her desk since last month, and she still had not finished arguing with it. Small block capitals, no crossings-out. He gave conclusions the way some men gave receipts, and he never once padded a finding to make it look like more work than it was.

Six blocks. A rectangle with straight edges, in a city whose spawn behavior never drew a straight edge in its life. An area he said someone was suppressing below the normal ambient, for however many weeks now and counting, and who he couldn't name. The morning had cost her nothing. Ruggiero handled, Matteo initialed, the attic laughing at half past eight, and a wedge of dry flagstone in the courtyard where six people stood who would not have stood there in February.

It made the six blocks stand out the more sharply, a small black hole in the center of her board, with the kind of question attached that people didn't usually ask and still less often answered. Who are they? And what will it cost? Then the System's text came up over the page. CLASS ADVANCEMENT SCENARIO: AVAILABLE If you encounter this tale on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

THRESHOLD: LEVEL 20 (MET) TIER II EVALUATION LOCATION: AURORA NORTHEAST, SIX BLOCKS (BOUNDED) OBJECTIVE: RESOLVE THE ANOMALY COMPANIONS PERMITTED: ONE THIS SCENARIO WILL NOT BE OFFERED AGAIN Cecilia sat still. She let it settle in, like a hand against the skin. She had been ignoring it on purpose, waiting for a quiet day, but the quiet days hadn't arrived, and now it seemed the System wouldn't wait any longer. That felt like the shape of it, if the System felt anything.

She went through it for architecture, which is where she went with everything. Seven lines. Six of them parameters. The fifth doing the work. Resolve. Her own class descriptor used that verb on the first night, in a room where three options hung in the dark in front of her face and she took the one that sounded like her father's business. For those who resolve what others cannot. Three months on, the System handed her word back to her and drew a box around six blocks of Aurora.

If that was the shape of its sense of humor, it was humor of the sort that paid in advance and asked for nothing else. The kind she respected, when she encountered it. She stood. Her jacket went on without thought. The pistol at her belt and the small one behind her waist, because you never went anywhere empty now, not if you valued what time you had left.

She went down to the Palazzo cellar, now the System Analyst Division's workroom, because they spent eighteen of the twenty-four hours a day there, and there had not been a reason to make it a temporary arrangement. Luca's eyes found her the moment she opened the door, the way they did. The others took another beat, Ermilio and Lorena from one desk, Iris and Giulia from the workbench at the far wall, where something mechanical was half-assembled on the surface. Ivan wasn't there.

Probably on the roof, the way he went when the walls pressed in too close.

"We have a thing," she said, before anyone asked. The pause, the little collective stillness before they all moved at once. She'd noticed it early, in the first days when they hadn't learned her timing, that they shifted around Luca. The shape of his silence set the tempo, the same way Ruggiero set it on a walk, Bianca on an approach. A quiet kind of command. She could see the value in it. It kept them tight without being loud about it.

"What thing?" Luca said, turning the screen toward him and putting his back against the desk, like the position let him face her and the System both at once. Which, probably, it did. Cecilia leaned on the doorframe, crossed her arms.

"My Individual Scenario prompt just went up. A Tier II class evolution, and the target is Ivan's rectangle." Luca blinked once. She could almost see the cascade of his thinking, from System mechanic to implication to Ivan's findings and back again.

"How soon?"

"Now." She let the smile be dry.

"It didn't schedule."

"Did it say why?" Ermilio, from his side of the desk, already pulling up the density map. He'd have it in front of him inside of thirty seconds. The man was efficient with other people's questions, if nothing else."'Resolve the anomaly.' It doesn't give a reason. I'd call that an incentive."

"The six blocks?" Giulia said, putting her tools down, wiping her hands. She said it quietly, but she wanted an answer. They all did. Ivan had shown them the rectangle. None of them could look away from it for long, which Cecilia counted among the better qualities they'd brought into the family with them.

"Yes." She shifted against the frame, took her weight off her arms, stood upright.

"So. How much do we know about it?" Luca didn't hesitate.

"We have the perimeter and the internal density read, but we don't know the cause. Ivan thinks it's a class-based suppression effect. No confirmed hostile encounters. We don't have anything on who's inside. I keep trying to build a model that explains a flat interior with a hard boundary and no gradient, and the model keeps requiring a class none of us have documented." She nodded, waiting for the part he hadn't said.

"It's held stable," Luca went on, when it was clear she wasn't going to speak.

"For three weeks, which means whoever's in there is organized. The perimeter is disciplined, and the lack of ambient noise suggests they're either hiding or hiding something." Cecilia turned her eyes on Ermilio. He had the map open, Ivan's rectangle in red over Aurora's streets, the density lines already recalibrating. He'd do the thing she'd asked him for without asking, because he trusted that she'd ask for what she wanted. He'd come a long way from the first month.

"How long will you need?" she said to Luca, when it looked like he wasn't done with his thinking. He looked up.

"What are we doing?"

"I'm going to see who's inside. You're coming with me." Iris stood up straight from the bench.

"No. No, absolutely not." Cecilia glanced at her.

"I'll hear the objection."

"I object." Iris's jaw tightened, which made the sharpness of her features sharper, made her look older.

"This is an unverified hostile space with unknown occupants and no exit plan. It is also an evolution scenario for you. We should reconnoiter first. You do not walk into an uncontrolled environment with only Luca as support. We don't know what's in there." Cecilia nodded, not to the objection but to the shape of it. Iris did what Iris did. She made a point of care. Sometimes the point was more important than the content.

"You think it's a trap," Cecilia said.

"I think it's a bad idea to assume it isn't."

"You're right." The words settled it. Iris relaxed by fractions, though she still didn't look happy about it.

"But it doesn't change the scenario terms. The System wants the anomaly resolved. I can't do that by staying out. If it's a trap, it's one the System laid. That means it's passable, if you play by the rules."

"The rules being?" Lorena asked, quiet. Cecilia looked back at Luca.

"One companion. No time limit. The anomaly. It didn't say resolve the people inside. It said resolve the anomaly." Luca nodded slowly.

"It's giving you an out. You can do the job and walk away. You don't have to eliminate the crew. That's—" He stopped, looked like he wanted to finish the sentence with better, but the word wasn't true.

"That's a significant restriction. The System is telling you what you're allowed to do."

"That means the threat level isn't total," Cecilia said, watching the pieces click for them.

"Whatever is in there, the System doesn't consider it lethal enough to make this an elimination run. It wants me to see what it is."

"If the crew is holding the perimeter with a class we haven't catalogued," Iris started, "that suggests they've been evolving outside the city's visible player base. You can't know their level or capabilities. You might walk into a Tier II suppression specialist with combat abilities."

"You're right," Cecilia said again, and let the agreement hang until Iris heard it the second time, the way it was meant.

"But the System knows their level, and it's still sending me in. That means the math is on our side."

"The math?" Iris folded her arms. She did it to make a point of being angry. Cecilia appreciated that kind of honesty. It saved time.

"The scenario is a test of my class." She let the sentence sit, let the logic of it draw them all in, the way she would draw it in from Bianca, if Bianca hadn't been out securing the city.

"Fixer isn't a combat class. The System knows that. I know that. It wouldn't set a test I couldn't pass by using the tools it's given me. If the fight's impossible to win with a Tier I class, it won't make me win it. It'll make me fix it another way." Luca's head tipped forward slightly, the way it did when she said the thing he hadn't let himself assume. Ermilio stopped scrolling on the map. Even Giulia looked like she'd caught the drift.

"That," said Iris, flatly, "is not a sound basis for risk assessment."

"It's the basis the System gave me." Cecilia uncrossed her arms.

"I'm not ignoring your concern. But I'm not going to ignore what the System is offering, either. If it wanted me to fight, it would've told me to fight. It said resolve. That's the path. So I'll walk in as a Fixer, and I'll walk out when the job's done. You all get the perimeter. If something goes sideways, you're the way out." The silence held. Nobody looked happy. Nobody disagreed. Iris sighed, the long, deliberate exhalation of a person giving up ground to win something later.

"Fine. But why does it have to be Luca? Why not Bianca?"

"Bianca's holding the Quadrilatero," Cecilia said, with finality, because that settled it and she wanted it settled.

"I want the Analyst Lead in this scenario. The anomaly is his finding. I need what he knows about it." She could see Luca absorb the choice, the way it settled his shoulders, put a quiet edge in his face that wasn't fear but wasn't far off. He'd been the Analyst Lead for months. The promotion didn't come from her, not officially, but they all knew where it came from, and the acknowledgment made him stand a little straighter.

Iris, on the other hand, narrowed her eyes, the protective sibling kicking in behind the Analyst.

"Can I talk to you for a minute?" Iris asked, with enough weight behind it that it wasn't really a question. Cecilia gave a slight nod and turned toward the hall. Luca moved to follow. Iris shook her head at him. He stopped. Cecilia almost smiled at the exchange, but there wasn't time, and it wasn't funny, exactly, though she appreciated the pattern. The hall outside the cellar room was stone-walled, lit with old fixtures someone had never replaced with something brighter.

Cecilia leaned against the opposite wall and let Iris choose the space.

"What," Iris said, her voice low but sharp enough to carry, "is your actual problem?" Cecilia waited.

"You don't take unnecessary risks. That's not how you operate. You could've sent Ruggiero and Dario in, but you're going in yourself with Luca as backup. This is about proving something, and I don't think it's about the System." She hadn't planned to have this conversation here. Not today. But Iris had earned the answer.

"If the scenario didn't exist," Cecilia said, "I would've sent Bianca and Dario to crack the perimeter and find out what's behind it. It would've taken days, and they'd have come back with a fight, or a body, or a crew that decided to work for us under threat. The System gave me another way."

"That's not what I asked."

"It's the first half of it." She let the words fall with enough weight that Iris paused.

"The second half is the anomaly itself. Ivan's finding isn't just a density blip. Someone's been sitting on that space for weeks, hiding from the rest of us. Hiding from the city, with a class that can push ambient below what our own people can manage, in an area that's been scavenged by outsiders for days and we didn't see the shape of it until Ivan mapped it."

"So what?"

"So that kind of skill is valuable. Whoever they are, they're ahead of us on something the System doesn't talk about openly. That's leverage I want in this family. If the System wants me to walk into that space alone and bring the job out the other side, it's not just an evaluation of my class. It's an opportunity to recruit someone who's hiding things I need."

"And you don't think sending someone else might get you that recruitment?" Iris's arms stayed folded. She hadn't dropped the argument.

"Or do you just not trust Bianca and Dario to manage it without making an enemy where we could have a new resource?"

"I trust Bianca and Dario implicitly," Cecilia said, evenly.

"But the scenario limits me to one companion. If I send Bianca, the fight gets finished fast and nobody talks to anyone. And I've already put too much on Dario's plate with the supply lines out of the city." She could see Iris still pushing against it, so she let her face soften, just enough.

"If it's the wrong read, I'll pay for it. But I'll make sure Luca isn't the one who pays. You don't have to worry about that." Iris didn't answer. She stood there, looking at the floor like it would give her something else to be angry about, then finally shook her head, once, tightly.

"You're not wrong about the leverage. I don't disagree with that part. But this isn't just business. It's my brother you're taking into a scenario you can't fully model. I want to know that means something to you." The quiet in the hall went heavier. Cecilia met her eyes.

"I've never once made Luca carry a weight he couldn't bear. I won't start now." It wasn't an apology, and it wasn't a concession. It was what she could offer that Iris would accept, because it happened to be true. The small nod Iris gave back told her she'd hit the right place.

"I'll hold you to that," Iris said, finally dropping her arms.

"You can. And it's not like I'm going in there completely blind on who could be behind it. I was going to give you all my read on who they were before you interrupted." Iris gave her a look, but there was something almost like amusement behind it now.

"Fine. Who?"

"They're more likely to be gamers than a local syndicate." Cecilia shifted, pushing off the wall.

"Old-school criminals aren't what you'd call methodical. They'd have drawn attention before now. But gamers, especially if they're Theorycrafters or System-focused players, they know how to work inside the mechanics and keep themselves off the radar. That's the shape I'm seeing in the perimeter. It's clean, structured, too methodical for street crews. It feels like someone's playing by the rules the System gives you." Iris blinked, her face smoothing out as she followed the line.

"Wait. You think this is another gaming group? Like us?"

"I think they might be a different breed of it." Cecilia started walking back toward the workroom.

"I want to find out which breed. Now do you understand why I want Luca with me?"

"Yeah," Iris said, trailing after her.

"But I'm reviewing the plan before you leave."

"It's all your team's work," Cecilia called over her shoulder.

"That makes you the lead reviewer."