“Tell Wang Gen the trade comes first. We can talk about evolution after.”

One minute of thought to arrive at the answer. He didn’t want extended contact with people who represented potential threats, but the evolution discussion itself was something he genuinely wanted. The sequence mattered: diesel in hand meant he could leave whenever he chose. Conversation before the transaction inverted that.

Li Laotou and Wan Quan headed back toward the city south. Their payment for the errands — substantially better than a day’s scavenging, for considerably less effort and risk — had apparently been enough to make them reliable.

Night settled over the complex.

A crescent moon, the cut angle sharp and clear in the cloudless sky. He sat in the cargo section with the ant larva container beside him and let himself feel, briefly, the distance between where he was and where he’d been two weeks ago.

The small river bend. The stillness. The field-force storm running quietly, the only sounds the larvae eating and Variant 1 moving around the vial. Stars he could actually see.

The presence of other people had a weight to it that solitude didn’t. Not bad exactly — the information was useful, the interactions produced things he needed — but heavier. Every conversation required calibration: who was this person, what did they want, what were they capable of, what happened if they decided he was more valuable to them disassembled than intact.

The larva that was still eating turned toward him.

It had no eyes. The sensory organs it was developing were functional within its particular biology. But the Active bond transmitted something across the gap between them regardless, and the quality of what it transmitted was consistent and warm in a way that had nothing to do with the apocalypse.

I have ants, he thought again, with slightly less ambivalence than the first time he’d thought it.

The pupa in the corner had fully hardened. Amber-brown shell, no longer showing the gel-transitional quality. Whatever was reorganizing inside it was doing so in the dark.

“Two ants would be fine,” he said to no one in particular.

He designed the directional antenna through the first part of the evening.

The router’s stock antenna was an omnidirectional whip — broadcasting the signal sphere in all directions, which was exactly what you wanted in a home environment where the access points were scattered around a building and exactly what you didn’t want in an environment where you needed maximum range in one specific direction.

A parabolic directional antenna, pointed at the sky, would concentrate the outgoing signal toward the drone’s communication module and concentrate the incoming signal from that same direction — effectively multiplying the usable range by the ratio of the parabola’s focus gain against omnidirectional scatter. He’d measured the current ground-level range at 30 meters. A well-designed directional antenna aimed at 60 degrees elevation could plausibly produce 150 to 200 meters of vertical transmission distance, depending on how efficiently it was built.

He was halfway through the design specifications when the camera feed caught movement.

Someone approaching the vehicle from the south perimeter, moving carefully, checking sight lines.

Shen Cong picked up the Activity-infused Type 64 and watched.

The armor-side shooting port opened without a sound.

The approach was cautious but not threatening — no weapon visible, no sudden movements, no companions evident in the immediate area. The person reached the front of the vehicle and knocked on the armor plating.

“Huang Laobei, are you in there? Are you awake?”

They know my name.

“Who are you?”

“I’m with the Shadows. I have information to share.”

The Shadows. The third faction. The one pursuing Zhang Tianshen’s group for reasons described by Zhang Youhai as a vendetta.

“What information?”

“Zhang Tianshen’s people are planning to move against you. He’s already discussed it. You should be careful — he doesn’t pull back from anything once he’s decided.”

Shen Cong had been expecting something along these lines since watching Wang Dong’s too-clean exit from the afternoon’s negotiation. Zhang Tianshen walking away from a valuable trade because of a pricing disagreement would have been unusual behavior under normal circumstances. Walking away because he’d decided on an alternative approach was much more consistent with the profile Zhang Youhai had described.

“You have people outside?”

“My captain came with me. He wants to speak with you.”

Shen Cong watched the messenger signal to someone further back in the complex’s shadow. The gesture was visible on camera and the messenger had mentioned it honestly before making it.

Points for transparency.

“Send him.”

Twenty-five, maybe twenty-six. Slightly built toward softness rather than hardness — the body type of someone who’d been sedentary before the apocalypse and hadn’t fully recalibrated to field conditions. The mutation wasn’t immediately visible, which the surviving mutant population had presumably learned to be cautious about, but the Active radiation was present and recognizable.

Shen Cong assessed from the camera feed before opening anything.

The Captain — Zhang Youhai had called him that without explanation; apparently no other name was in circulation — stopped at the vehicle and made his case directly:

“I know you talked with Wang Dong today. Zhang Tianshen’s going to move on you — probably tonight or tomorrow. I came to warn you, but I also want to work together.”

“You have diesel?”

“No. But Zhang Tianshen does. Help me take him down, and you keep the diesel.”

“Why would I believe you?”

“Check with the scavengers. Ask them about Zhang Tianshen. Ask them about Zhu Haifeng.” The name came out without preamble — apparently he’d decided that claiming the title but not the name was no longer sustainable. “I’m not hard to verify. Zhang Tianshen killed a friend of mine and what his people did to that friend’s girlfriend is something I can’t put down and walk away from. He’s holding women at the Sanhe Village camp. This isn’t a business proposition — I’m telling you what it actually is.”

A beat.

“There’s no conflict between us. You want diesel, I want Zhang Tianshen gone. Those aren’t the same goal but they point the same direction.”

Shen Cong looked at him through the camera for a long moment.

He thought about what he knew about the city south power structure. Three factions, two of them in active conflict, one trying to maintain a monopoly on the southern district’s resources. A Dragon Slayer operation against him tonight or tomorrow would be consistent with Zhang Tianshen’s operating profile — the man had been pushed out of the main district for conduct that presumably included exactly this kind of thing.

He thought about what Zhu Haifeng was offering versus what he was asking for. The information about the planned attack was either true or manufactured to manipulate him into a conflict. If true, he needed to prepare. If manufactured, he needed to understand what the actual goal was.

He thought about the women at Sanhe Village that Zhu Haifeng had mentioned, and what that implied about what was happening there, and what he thought about it.

“I’ll listen,” he said. “Keep talking.”

(End of Chapter 64)