Gongjia Village had been empty. The AN/PPS-15A scan showing dense movement signatures at Liushui Bay had redirected him — wherever the survivors had relocated after the lake dried up, that complex was currently occupied. He’d driven to the roundabout expecting to find a scavenging camp and found a tax collection in progress instead.

The shoulder-spine mutant was Wang Dong, according to Zhang Youhai’s description. Third member of the Dragon Slayer faction’s mutant core. Shen Cong filed the identification and hit the horn.

Two short notes. Polite. Unambiguous.

Wang Dong rode over, circled Vajra once, and looked for something approximating a window or door. Found the general shape of the vehicle but not the access points.

“Friend — got a minute?”

The cargo-side hatch opened. Shen Cong put his helmeted head through the gap, the Type 64 pistol visible in his gloved hand, and conducted a rapid inventory through the visor’s lens.

Eight people total. Wang Dong: mutant, sidearm on the hip. Bald one beside him: another sidearm. Remaining six: bladed weapons and iron bars, one compound bow on the back of the tattooed one. No visible bone-gold weapons. Possibly concealed firearms I haven’t located yet.

He said nothing. The silence expanded.

Wang Dong’s people exchanged glances. Wang Dong himself kept his expression comfortable, which was the expression of someone who had learned to project comfort as a tactic.

He tried: “Friend — passing through from outside the area? Welcome to Juchao District. Name’s Wang Dong. We’re all disaster survivors here, just making do. You want to come down, have a drink, make some connections?”

While he talked, his eyes moved — fractionally, the kind of eye movement you learned to make when you’d been in situations where overt signaling was dangerous. He was cuing his people.

Shen Cong noted it.

Possible hostile intent. Proceed accordingly.

“I know who you are,” Shen Cong said. “Wang Dong, Dragon Slayers. I’m not from outside — I just haven’t been living in the city. I know the current situation. Skip the drink. I have material from the Yinping area to trade. Are you interested?”

Wang Dong’s comfortable expression became a genuinely interested one, or a better performance of genuine interest. “Trading, absolutely. What do you have?”

“Cigarettes and liquor.”

“And what are you looking for?”

“Diesel fuel.”

Wang Dong looked at Vajra. The diesel requirement was self-explanatory once you’d seen the vehicle.

“Diesel’s a difficult one,” he said. “Want to come to Sanhe Village? Our material’s stored there. We could look at what we’ve got, see what works.”

“I’m on a schedule,” Shen Cong said. “If you want to trade, contact Zhang Tianshen. Tell him to come here with an offer. I won’t wait long — I can take this to Wang Gen or the Shadows instead.”

He closed the hatch.

The engine engaged. Vajra turned toward Liushui Bay.

Wang Dong called after him: “Come to Sanhe Village with us, it’s easier—”

Vajra’s rear cleared his sight line on the turn.

The bald man — Dawei — was already talking before Vajra was out of earshot.

“Three-Brother, what’s the play?”

“Go back and tell Big Brother. Dawei — you, Xiao Zhao, Junzi, circle around and watch him. Don’t do anything. Wait for orders.”

“Should we warn the scavengers to keep quiet?”

“He already knows our operation. Let it go. Just watch him.”

Dawei nodded. He watched Vajra’s back end disappear around the complex corner, making sounds of admiration under his breath.

“Shame we can’t just take it.”

“Think, then talk,” Wang Dong said. He mounted his motorcycle.

What he didn’t know: the AN/PPS-15A’s effective range was a kilometer with radiation-induced degradation, and three people breaking off from a group and making a wide arc back toward his position was exactly the kind of movement pattern the radar was designed to detect.

Shen Cong watched them on the display.

Three moving to observation positions. Four returning toward the city. Consistent with standard contact protocol for unknown potentially hostile parties.

He wasn’t surprised. The behavior was what he’d expected and planned for. Showing Vajra to a Dragon Slayer lieutenant and announcing a trade offer without accepting any of their proposed venue changes was a specific move designed to produce exactly this response: they’d report up the chain, the leadership would come to evaluate, and he’d have his first look at the actual power structure of city south in person rather than through Zhang Youhai’s secondhand account.

The three observers he could see on radar and ignore. They couldn’t penetrate Vajra’s armor and they wouldn’t try until they had authorization.

He drove into Liushui Bay.

The residents emerged cautiously from the rubble floors above ground level. Twenty, then thirty, then more — watching Vajra settle into the open area at the complex’s center with the careful attention of people who’d learned that unexpected arrivals in vehicles were frequently tax collectors.

Shen Cong ran his assessment from the camera feeds before opening anything.

Old Li was in the crowd.

The whole group was — Zhang Youhai beside him, Ma Laosan with visible facial bruising from Wang Dong’s collection visit twenty minutes earlier, the other four he recognized from the Yinping observation sessions. They’d moved to Liushui Bay when the lake dried up. Which meant they were here, and they were the known quantity in an otherwise unknown crowd.

He opened the side hatch.

“You — the white-haired older man. Come here. I have questions.”

Old Li pointed at himself. Confirmed. Took a step toward the vehicle.

Ma Laosan grabbed his arm and stepped in front of him, putting himself between Old Li and Vajra. The bruising on his face was fresh and the body language was protective rather than hostile — a man who’d already taken one beating today was willing to take another one before letting someone else get hurt.

“Whatever you have to say, say it from there,” Ma Laosan said. The voice was shaking slightly but the position held.

Shen Cong looked at him through the helmet visor and felt something revise upward in his assessment of these seven people.

“I’m not going to hurt him,” he said, keeping his voice flat. “I have questions. That’s all.”

He’d been aware, since before the apocalypse, that there were two versions of interactions with strangers: the version where he projected warmth and openness and hoped the other person was trustworthy, and the version where he projected nothing and let the other person decide whether to engage. The second version produced worse initial impressions and better outcomes. He’d learned this empirically over twenty-two years of being mostly wrong about people.

Post-apocalypse, warmth was an additional liability he couldn’t afford.

What he needed was a representative. Someone the scavenger community knew, someone credible in both directions — trusted enough by the survivors that they’d deal with him honestly, and visible enough to the factions that he’d be recognizable. If anything happened to the representative, Vajra would respond with sufficient force to make the lesson permanent. That was the structure of the arrangement, and it was better for everyone if it was understood clearly from the start.

Old Li gently moved Ma Laosan aside and approached the window.

(End of Chapter 59)