Cain waited until the city settled before opening Lila’s note again.
The paper had already gone soft at the folds from being handled too many times. Her handwriting cut across the page in narrow, impatient strokes that somehow managed to look annoyed even when reduced to directions.
It was an address, a time, and a merchant seal that Cain recognized immediately.
A crescent blade laid over a bundle of wheat.
He had seen the mark burned into crates at the skill point farm.
The people who built hell still needed logistics.
Cain folded the note and slid it back into his pocket.
The wardrobe was dim around him, lit mostly by the strange ambient light that permeated the space. It felt inhabited—blankets had been folded into makeshift bedding between hanging coats and armor stands. Lorian had arranged polished stones in a little circle beside a trunk for reasons nobody understood but everyone had quietly agreed not to disturb. Someone had cleaned the blood from the floorboards near the back wall. The dank smell of poor-quality health potion and damp fabric lingered in the air.
People had started treating the wardrobe like a place instead of a hiding spot.
That worried Cain more than he wanted to admit.
Takkar was awake in the far corner with his back against the wall and one arm wrapped loosely around his ribs beneath the bandages. Bill sat nearby, sharpening a knife that did not need sharpening, while the foxkin girl leaned over his shoulder offering deeply unhelpful advice about angles.
Rikta looked up from where she sat.
“You’re leaving again.”
Cain pulled a coat from one of the wardrobe racks and shrugged into it. “That tends to happen.”
“What a helpful answer.”
“I try.”
The foxkin girl smiled faintly at that, though it faded quickly when she noticed the expression on Rikta’s face.
“Is something wrong?” she asked.
Rikta rubbed tiredly at one eye. “Everything’s wrong. Care to narrow it down?”
Cain adjusted the gloves at his wrists and checked the fit of the hidden knife along his sleeve. Across from him, Takkar watched the preparation in silence for a few seconds before speaking.
“The people you asked for help asked for something back?”
“Looks that way.”
Takkar grunted softly through his nose.
Nobody here had expected charity.
Rikta lowered her gaze toward the folded blanket in her lap. “And if you refuse?”
Cain considered the question honestly.
“I don’t think we’re at the refusing stage yet.”
The answer sat poorly in the room.
Bill stopped sharpening the knife. “You trust these people?” he asked.
“No.”
“Then why work with them?”
“Because they already know we exist.”
Bill frowned slightly.
Cain could see the moment the thought settled into place for him. Lila and her organization already knew where the survivors were hidden, who he was associated with, and what he cared about. Or so they thought, anyway.
That alone shifted the balance of the conversation.
The foxkin girl drew her knees toward her chest atop the trunk she’d claimed as her seat. “You sound like you’ve already decided this is a bad idea.”
Cain fastened the last clasp on his coat. “Most plans involving hidden criminal organizations eventually become bad ideas. The important part is figuring out when.”
That earned a twitch at the corner of Rikta’s mouth.
“There’s the reassuring leadership we’ve all come to rely on.”
“I’m trying to maintain realistic expectations.”
“You’re doing a terrible job.”
Cain glanced around the wardrobe.
At the blankets.
The bandages.
The people trying very hard to look less frightened than they were.
“‘Realistic’ stopped being useful as a category a while ago.”
Nobody had a response to that.
The silence afterward wasn’t especially tense… it was just tired.
Cain rested one hand against the wardrobe handle and creaked the door open slightly.
Rain tapped faintly somewhere outside the doors. He could hear distant city sounds bleeding in through the narrow connection—wagon wheels against wet stone, muffled voices, the occasional bark of an order from a patrol farther down the street.
Cairel had grown quieter at night recently.
“If I’m not back by morning—”
“You’ll be back,” the foxkin interrupted immediately.
The certainty in her voice made him feel uncomfortable.
Children really were frightening sometimes.
Cain opened the door before anyone could continue the conversation.
Cold night air rolled in, carrying the smell of rainwater and chimney smoke.
He stepped out into a narrow alley near the lower market district and closed the wardrobe behind him. The massive armoire vanished a second later, leaving only wet brick and drifting mist where it had stood.
The city stretched around him in muted shades of lantern-gold and rain-dark stone.
A pair of guards crossed the far end of the street without noticing him, their cloaks damp and their shoulders tense beneath polished armor. Somewhere nearby, a drunk was singing badly enough to qualify as a public disturbance. Nobody sounded particularly enthusiastic about stopping him.
Cain pulled his hood lower and started walking.
The route from Lila’s note led him west toward the old grain district, where the warehouses crowded together so tightly that some of the upper floors nearly touched overhead. Water dripped steadily from sagging gutters, carrying soot and dirt into the narrow channels carved along the sides of the street.
The crescent-blade symbol appeared exactly where the note implied it would: scratched low into the corner of a boarded storefront, small enough that most people would never notice it.
Cain kept moving.
Another mark appeared farther ahead beside a rusted drain cover. Then a third, half-hidden beneath fresh chalk near a collapsed section of wall.
The route twisted away from the main roads gradually, steering him through side passages and service alleys where the city’s noise dulled into something softer and more distant.
Lila’s people were clearly careful.
The markings weren’t designed to look mysterious. They naturally blended into the city unless someone already knew how to search for them.
The final marker brought him to a narrow passage between two old storage buildings. The alley sloped downward slightly, and the rainwater gathered there in shallow streams that reflected fractured strips of lanternlight.
At the end stood a plain wooden door painted the same color as the surrounding wall.
Cain studied it briefly before knocking in the rhythm written into the note.
There was a pause.
Then the sound of bolts shifting somewhere inside.
The door opened a few inches.
A woman with cropped dark hair and a scar along her chin looked him over through the gap. Her eyes lingered on the place where he’d hidden a dagger for half a second before moving away again.
“You’re late.”
Cain glanced toward the rain-dark sky overhead. “That seems difficult to prove.”
“It’s still true.”
She opened the door wider and stepped aside.
“Inside.”
The room beyond had probably been an office once. Shelves lined the walls, most sitting empty except for dust outlines where ledgers or boxes had recently been removed. A narrow table occupied the center of the room beneath a hanging lantern whose light wasn’t quite bright enough to reach the corners.
Three other people waited inside.
None of them looked comfortable.
Cain took that as a good sign.
The woman shut the door behind him and crossed to the table. “You’re here for transport.”
A wrapped oilcloth bundle rested near the lantern.
Cain approached slowly, studying the room as he moved. One man stood near the shelves pretending not to watch him. Another sat in the far corner with one hand tucked inside his coat. The third looked young enough that he still hadn’t learned how to hide nervousness properly.
Cain stopped beside the table.
“Records?” he asked.
“Copies.”
“Of?”
The woman’s expression flattened. “You ask a lot of questions for someone doing recovery work.”
“And people become evasive when the questions I ask touch on important information. Strange how that keeps happening.”
One of the men near the shelves snorted despite himself.
The woman ignored him.
“Payment routes, shipping logs, and proxy agreements.” She tapped the oilcloth package once with two fingers. “Things powerful people would prefer stay buried.”
Cain rested one hand lightly against the table.
The package looked ordinary, which was probably intentional.
“How buried?”
She held his gaze for a moment before answering.
“Enough that several people started destroying the originals when you raided the farms.”
Cain glanced toward the others in the room again.
The young man especially looked like he regretted being present.
“So you made copies before the originals were destroyed?”
“We did.”
“And now I’m moving them somewhere else.”
“Yes.”
“Why me?”
“Because you’re difficult to rob.”
Cain blinked at the answer that sounded surprisingly honest. Then he picked up the package carefully. There was more weight to it than paper alone should have accounted for. Something solid rested beneath the folded layers of oilcloth.
“Destination?”
The woman slid a second folded slip across the table.
Cain opened it.
It pointed him to the lower canal district, to an old dye warehouse near the river bends.
He knew the area vaguely from passing through on a G-rank quest. From memory, he recalled that it had a lot of flooded basements and rotting support beams. It was the kind of district where abandoned buildings stayed abandoned because even thieves didn’t trust the foundations.
“You people really know how to pick welcoming locations.”
“You’re being paid to carry something through the city, not enjoy yourself.”
“You guys are being paid?”
The young man in the corner spoke suddenly. “We shouldn’t keep it here much longer.”
Everyone looked at him.
He swallowed immediately afterward, probably realizing he had just spoken without permission.
The woman’s expression tightened. “Marric.”
“People are already asking questions,” he said anyway. “The guilds know records existed.”
Cain’s attention sharpened.
“The guilds?”
Marric glanced between them uncertainly. “The Merchants and the Mercenaries. Somebody from the Adventurer’s Guild showed up asking about shipment manifests yesterday.”
The room grew quieter.
The woman crossed her arms. “And why am I only hearing about that now?”
“They left without getting anything…”
“That wasn’t the question.”
Marric lowered his eyes.
Cain watched the exchange with interest.
The woman looked back toward Cain.
“You have until third bell to complete the transfer.”
“And if someone’s already tracking the records?”
“Then avoid them.”
He slipped the destination note into his coat beside Lila’s instructions.
“You make this sound very straightforward.”
“It was supposed to be.”
That answer lingered strangely in the room.
He studied her for another second.
“You expected this to stay contained.”
“We expected those farms to still be around for another month,” she replied. “Everyone’s adapting.”
A few days ago, that sentence would have sounded purely practical.
Now it carried something uglier beneath it.
The farm had been destroyed. The city had reacted. Networks were shifting to compensate.
People were already reorganizing around the damage.
Cain looked down briefly at the package in his hands.
Records.
Routes.
Payments.
It was the defining characteristic of human civilization: human suffering translated into logistics clean enough to archive.
In other words: supply chains.
The woman moved toward the door and unlatched the first bolt.
“Anything else?”
Cain looked up.
“One thing.”
She waited.
“The records.” He adjusted the package beneath his arm. “If they’re dangerous enough to move in secret, why not expose them?”
Nobody answered immediately.
Rain ticked softly against the walls outside.
Finally, the woman shrugged once.
“Because information like this gains value when it changes owners.”
Cain stood there for a moment after that. Then he nodded slightly and headed for the door.
The rain had strengthened by the time he stepped back into the alley.
Water ran in thin streams along the edges of the stonework, carrying mud toward the lower streets. Somewhere farther off, bells rang faintly across the city.
Second bell already.
Cain pulled his hood lower and started toward the canal district.
The package rested heavily beneath his arm with every step.
Every name inside it represented someone who had believed distance made them safe. People high enough above the farms that they probably never smelled them, never heard the screaming, never looked directly at the cages unless they were inspecting investments.
And now those names were moving quietly through the city in an oilcloth under his arm while hidden organizations decided who deserved to own them next.
The canal district appeared gradually through the rain.
The streets widened there to accommodate cargo wagons, though years of neglect had left much of the stone uneven and half-flooded. Abandoned warehouses lined the waterway with dark windows staring blankly out toward the black river.
The dye warehouse sat near the far bend exactly where the note promised it would.
It had boarded windows and a sagging roof. One door hung slightly crooked on rusted hinges.
Cain slowed beneath the overhang of a nearby awning and studied the building carefully.
The rain muffled most sounds, but Trap Perception stirred anyway, pulling gently at the edge of his awareness.
Something thin stretched across the doorway.
Wire.
He crouched slightly, following the angle with his eyes until he found the anchor point near the frame.
Interesting.
Someone inside was nervous enough to prepare for visitors.
Project Knightfall 