Chương 66: Chapter 65: Pickup Group

The door pulled shut behind Cecilia and left him sitting on a crate in a dead tabaccheria with five strangers and a table full of salami wrappings, and for a while nobody seemed to know what the correct thing to do next was. Luca expected that. He expected it to last about ten seconds, and it went on for closer to thirty.

The tall one with the pipe solved it eventually by standing up, walking around the table, and collecting the greaseproof paper into a loose bundle that he then held, because there was nowhere in the shop to put rubbish anymore and evidently there had not been for some weeks. He looked at the bundle. He looked at the corner where a bin might once have stood. Then he sat back down still holding it, which struck Luca as the most relatable thing anybody in the room had done all evening.

"You can put it under the table," the short one said.

"That's what we do."

"That's what you do. I've been saying since May that somebody should carry it out to the yard once a week, and every week somebody agrees with me, and then it's the following Sunday and the pile is bigger."

"It goes in the pile because there is nowhere else in the building for it to go."

"There shouldn't be a pile at all. That's my whole point and you know it's my point." They ran the argument the way people ran an argument they had already had at least six times before. Nicolò listened with a long face, then reached over and took the bundle from the tall one without getting up, dropped it into a black sack at the side of the room that Luca hadn't seen until that moment. The argument died with the bundle. Luca sat quietly, hands in his lap, not smiling but feeling the impulse to.

It was a family, or as much of one as they could be, under the circumstances. That, at least, was something he understood. The girl in the beanie spoke to him without preamble.

"You're going to have to say why you stayed, because right now it looks like she left you here to keep an eye on us, and if that's what this is, I'd rather we all knew it and got on with the evening." He thought about giving her the version that was strategically true, which was that a group under pressure will tell a low-status stranger things it will never say to the principal, and then he thought about what Iris would do in the room if she was sitting on his crate, and he said the other version instead.

"She didn't leave me here, I asked. She was surprised, which I'll be honest was quite satisfying, because she isn't surprised very often and I don't usually get to be the one who does it." The green eyes stayed on him. He thought he might have seen the start of a smile in the corner of her mouth, which felt like a good start.

"And I stayed because I thought if there's any chance we might work together tomorrow, you should know who you'd be working with. The Leonellis have been called a lot of things in the last few months. We're not most of them."

"What are you?" The girl on the crate asked it from behind her sweatshirt. Luca realized she had barely looked at him directly the whole time.

"I'm not the person you'd talk to if you wanted to be a street soldier. We have people for that. Dario. Ruggiero. People like that. I'm a systems analyst. I used to read the financial markets. Now I read the System. That's the department I run, inside the family." Nicolò folded his arms, tilting his head back against the chair, eyes half-closed like the light was getting to him.

"You're the numbers guy."

"Yes." It didn't feel like enough, but saying more would be padding, and that wasn't what they needed.

"Cecilia brought me on because the System is its own kind of market. It gives out resources, sets prices, rewards people who work out how it moves. My job is to work it out. We do well when I'm right." He stopped, not sure how the sentence should land, or whether it sounded as arrogant as he feared. Nobody jumped on it.

"So what," the beanie girl said.

"She brought you in, and then you recruited all the other geeks?" It was meant to needle, probably. Luca smiled slightly.

"No. That part's just coincidence, really. Most of my people came in through the door I did."

"What door was that?"

"They knocked on my door and gave me an ultimatum." He looked at her steadily.

"Not the most diplomatic recruiting method. It works well enough when there isn't time for the pitch."

"And you're all right with that?" Nicolò opened his eyes again, pushed forward in his chair.

"They showed up and threatened you, and you're working for them because they said they'd be nicer to have on your side?" Luca met his eyes and didn't flinch.

"If you want to know whether I'm sitting here under duress, I'm not. The deal was my work and expertise in exchange for security, resources, and a degree of autonomy I wouldn't get anywhere else. The way I saw it then and see it now, the alternative was hiding out and hoping nobody with bigger numbers found me first." It wasn't a complete picture. He knew that.

The gap in it, where the acquisition lived and Iris still wasn't settled, wasn't something he wanted to open up to people he might have to walk away from at the end of the day. It wasn't theirs, and it didn't belong here. But the truth he gave them wasn't wrong, either. It was enough.

"And the other members of your team feel the same?" the tall one asked. His voice was softer than Luca expected. The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

"They do." The room held that, like they were weighing it for a trap. It wasn't one, so he left the weight on the table.

"I don't get it," the beanie girl said finally.

"You've got skills. You've got a setup. You don't need the mafia." It came back to the label, in the end. Luca took his time before he answered.

"It depends on what you mean by 'need.' You don't need an umbrella until it rains. You don't need to pay taxes until the government asks. And if the government collapses, the taxes stop mattering." Nicolò tilted his head, listening harder now.

"I could have kept working in a bank and playing with spreadsheets. It wouldn't have made me relevant. The world's changed. Being right in the old way isn't the thing that keeps the lights on anymore." He looked at each of them, slowly.

"You think you're staying ahead because you've got a secret that nobody else knows. But that only lasts as long as you're small enough not to notice. Eventually someone with more reach than you is going to see the shape of what you're hiding, and they're not going to be offering a partnership. Cecilia is." He could feel the pushback building, the instinctive refusal to be sold on the thing they had all already agreed they weren't signing up for.

He waited for it, and when the street girl said it, he already had the answer ready.

"You don't know what she's really offering."

"No," he agreed.

"But I know she wants the same thing we all want, and she's built something that's already working while we're still sitting here wondering how we're going to get to tomorrow. Maybe I can't convince you, but you don't have to take my word for it. Go to the Quadrilatero. Walk it for a day and look around. Then come back and tell me she's offering nothing." That shut the conversation down hard enough to feel final. The silence lasted longer this time. Nobody took it up. Luca stayed on his crate and waited.

After a while, the girl in the beanie leaned back, resting her hands on the arms of her chair.

"All right. So you're here to talk business, but you've also got something you want to ask us, and we both know you didn't get the time to ask it in front of your boss." She said it calmly, like it was obvious, which of course it was. The fact that they were having this conversation at all was because she was curious, or because she didn't trust anything she couldn't get out of him before he left. Either way, she was driving now. He gave her a small, honest smile.

"I want to get to know you first. It's not an interrogation. I'd just like to know what you do. What kind of team this is. If there's going to be another conversation tomorrow, it'd be good to go into it with some context." That, at least, they seemed to accept.

"Also," Luca said, "I don't know any of your names, so that might be a start." They gave them, in the end, and it took longer than it should have because two of them tried to do it at once. The short one was Elia.

He put his hand across the table to shake, and then explained, without being asked, that he was in the fourth year of a three-year chemistry course at UniTo, and that this was not his fault, and that the department had been badly run, and that one of his professors had set two exams on material he had never once taught and had done it knowingly. Luca had the impression this defence had been mounted before, possibly to a parent. The tall one, Tommaso, came next.

Civil engineering at the Politecnico, third year, and every summer since he turned sixteen in his uncle's scaffolding yard, which he mentioned mainly to explain why he ended up the one holding the pipe. He talked slowly and stopped when he was finished, which was a thing Luca had stopped expecting from people. Nicolò was Nicolò, and gave a course title and a year that Luca privately doubted. The girl in the beanie was Marta, and she gave the name and nothing after it.

From the crate against the painted window, nothing at all. She sat on her crate against the painted window with the flat thing still under her arm, and Tommaso, after a pause, said "Sofia," on her behalf, and she did not correct him or acknowledge it.

"Physics," Elia added.

"Second year. She's better than all of us at everything, which we've made our peace with."

"Elia," Marta said.

"He's going to work it out. You can save the trouble." Elia glanced back at Luca.

"We all play in a tabletop group together, which we have continued doing every Wednesday since the apocalypse. You don't stop a good campaign just because civilization falls apart." They talked for a long time about nothing that would ever appear in a briefing. Luca had gone through the same kind of process with Ermilio, Lorena, Giulia, and Ivan after Cecilia recruited them, though with less urgency and better coffee. There's no shortcut to knowing how a group thinks, so he let the talk wander. They were students.

He had come in assuming something more complicated, and nothing more complicated existed. Five people who were at university in Turin when the System hit, who didn't want to go back to whatever homes they'd left to get there.

"Foggia," Elia said, when Luca asked.

"I went back once, and it wasn't a home. You want to see how much it matters that you studied economics in Turin? You try it from the province where they farm the crops. I don't want to hear another thing about my mother's pension. It's over."

"Nuoro," said Tommaso.

"And it wasn't even Nuoro, really. We lived outside it, in a village, but there's no work and there's no point pretending." Marta came from Borgo San Paolo. She had seen her family on the eleventh of May and said nothing else about it at any point in the evening. Nicolò came from Novara, which he still referred to with a dismissive curl of his lip that seemed to cover all of northern Piedmont. Sofia, Elia said quietly, was from Trapani.

Luca made a note of the distance they'd put between themselves and their origin points, and what they thought they'd put behind them by coming. There was no simple rule to how much it helped a person cope. But he made the list and stored it away anyway.

"Have any of you heard from home?" Elia shook his head. Tommaso stared at the floor. Nicolò made a small sound, not quite a laugh.

"I called my brother last week, for all the good it did. I didn't get past hello before he started lecturing me about the government's relief programs, like the government is coming to save anybody who isn't on the front page. He thinks if we wait long enough, someone's going to put everything back how it was. He's wrong." Nobody disagreed. That felt significant.

"We all still talk," Marta said.

"To our families, I mean. I don't know why. It doesn't make it easier." It might make them harder to move, Luca thought, but he didn't say so. Not tonight. Instead, he said, "How did you meet each other? I mean, before all this. I'm guessing it wasn't the Wednesday night games."

"No," Nicolò said.

"Sofia and I were already in a game together, and we dragged Tommi in when we found out he lived next door. The other two we got out of a post about new players for a campaign that's still running."

"On Reddit." Elia shook his head.

"On the RPG forum, and then it moved to a private Discord. You meet someone on the internet and play a campaign together, and three years later they're sitting on your couch eating salami you got from a gangster's errand boy. It's ridiculous." The smile he gave with it made Luca want to like him, and not just because Elia was right, it was ridiculous.