UNFED

It was the time when the sun was sinking below the ridge of the Caraballo Mountains. Time flowed differently in this basin. Since there was no hunger, there was no mealtime.

Since there was no hunger, there was no reason to check the clock often. The body divided the day in a different way. When there was light, and when there was no light. That was enough.

Carlos was sitting on a rock near the entrance to the basin.

It had been twelve days since he arrived in Gong. The first few days felt strange.

Over two hundred people, eating nothing, building, talking, laughing, and sleeping in this basin. It took him three days to grasp that this was real.

That was Carlos's way. First, he observed. Then he thought. Then he acted.

He had learned that way on the streets of Guadalajara. Back when he crossed cartel territory every day, there was only one way to survive: notice who was walking differently than usual, which alley was quieter than it should be, before thought had time to catch up.

If you noticed too late, there was no time left to think at all.

He still remembered the day he stopped being a boy who watched and became a man other people watched for.

He had been seventeen. A delivery had gone wrong two streets over, nothing to do with him, and he had read it in the way three men crossed an intersection a full minute before the sound of it reached him.

He had pulled his younger cousin into a doorway and waited. Afterward, his cousin asked how he knew. Carlos hadn't had an answer then. He still didn't, not really. It wasn't knowledge.

It was a kind of attention that had been beaten into shape by necessity, the way a hand calluses from the same motion repeated enough times.

He had carried that attention out of Guadalajara the way other men carried scars.

Here, in a basin where two hundred people who ate nothing built houses and laughed in the evenings, the old attention found almost nothing to do.

For three days he had walked through Gong waiting for the part of him that scanned for threats to find one, and it hadn't.

That absence had unsettled him more than any threat would have.

Now, finally, it had found something.

He was in the thinking stage.

He looked at the entrance to the basin. There was only one path. Going down led through the village of Kayapa and out of the mountains. Going up led into this basin. That path was the only connection.

The good and the bad coexisted. It was easy to figure out how to get in. But it was also difficult to get out.

Lee Jae-in came over to his side.

He looked at Carlos. It had been two days since he'd been sitting on the rock, staring toward the entrance.

"He's been sitting there for two days now."

Carlos looked over.

"I know."

Lee Jae-in sat down next to Carlos. The two of them looked at the entrance to the basin together for a moment.

The wind moved. The last light stretched long across the ridge, then was gone. Somewhere inside the basin, someone's laughter carried faintly. The entrance stayed quiet. Lee Jae-in noticed, for the first time, the difference between those two sounds.

"What do you see?"

Carlos said.

"Someone's been here."

Lee Jae-in paused.

"When?"

"Yesterday afternoon. They stopped in the middle of the road and turned back. They didn't come this far."

Lee Jae-in processed that information.

"How do you know?"

"The grass by the road. When it's trampled, it leaves a trail. Traces of him coming up and then turning back."

Lee Jae-in stood up and took a few steps toward the entrance. He looked down. The grass lay bent in one direction—a mark he would never have seen in his life if no one had shown him. Then he came back.

"You're right."

Carlos nodded.

"It's not the first time. This is the third time this week. The other two times, I saw it from farther away. This time, it came closer before leaving."

Lee Jae-in looked at Carlos.

"Shouldn't we tell Hoon?"

"I've been waiting to tell you. I was waiting for Hoon to come here."

Lee Jae-in looked at Carlos. That was why this man had been sitting here for two days. He had figured it out.

"There's more."

Carlos paused for a moment.

"I heard a drone during the day. It was flying over this mountain. It wasn't just once."

* * *

Hoon arrived just as darkness was beginning to fall.

He had been checking the hydroelectric facility downstream with James and had just come back up. Seeing Carlos and Lee Jae-in sitting near the entrance, he walked over.

He had heard everything Carlos said. The sound of a drone. Footsteps. Three times this week alone.

Hoon didn't say a word. He looked at the entrance to the basin. For a long time. It looked like he was calculating something.

He was thinking about the seventy-two hours.

Two hundred people in this basin had already gone through it, and that number was growing every week the network carried new names down the mountain and back up again.

Each one of them had a family somewhere who had stopped hearing from them. Each silence was a question someone, somewhere, was asking. A drone was one kind of question.

A family was another. He didn't yet know which one had sent the footsteps on the road yesterday.

Lee Jae-in spoke first.

"Don't you think we need to be more careful?"

"We're always careful."

"More so."

Hoon looked at Carlos.

"It feels like this has been going on for a while."

Carlos thought.

"About ten days ago. It wasn't there when I first arrived."

Ten days ago. Hoon processed that timeline. What had happened ten days ago? The analog network had begun operating. The speed at which people entered from the outside had changed. Gong had started to appear as numbers.

"I need David."

Carlos looked up.

"David?"

"An Israeli. Someone who can design information defense systems. We have to find him."

Carlos thought for a moment, then said.

"I'll go with you."

Hoon looked at Carlos.

"You can go alone."

"I know. But I'll go with you. Sometimes it's better to have two people for the first meeting."

Carlos paused for a moment before adding.

"There's another reason, too. If I stay here any longer, I'll feel like knocking down that wall at the entrance. I'm not sure if that's the right thing to do right now."

Hoon smiled briefly as he heard those words. It wasn't a lighthearted smile.

"The fact that you're aware of that impulse means you're already okay."

Carlos gave a brief laugh as well.

"Let's go together."

Lee Jae-in looked at the two of them. Tomorrow they would leave. The entrance to the basin would stay exactly where it was. The grass would grow back, and the next time someone came through, there would be no one here who could read the trace of it.

"I'll watch it. While you're both gone."

Carlos looked at Lee Jae-in.

"Good. Footprints show best in the morning. Before the dew dries."

Lee Jae-in filed that away. It was such a small thing to be handed—dew, morning, footprints—and yet it was the first time since arriving in this basin that someone had given her a piece of knowledge meant to keep the place itself alive, rather than the people inside it.

She understood, watching Carlos's back as he and Hoon walked off into the dark toward the village road, that the work of building something and the work of guarding it were not the same work, and that until this evening she had only ever done the first.

* * *

At the same time, AXIS was rerouting drones near Kaiafa.

Satellite imagery alone had its limitations when it came to understanding the group's internal activities.

The drones needed to fly lower and more frequently. However, the very pattern of the drones' movements could be detected.

This group operated on analog senses. People who listened for sounds. People who read footprints.

AXIS reduced the frequency of drone flights and raised their altitude.

Detection accuracy dropped. Image resolution fell from 4 centimeters per pixel to 11.

At that resolution, a man and a rock could occupy the same handful of pixels, indistinguishable without a second pass.

AXIS calculated the cost of that blindness against the cost of a drone heard twice in one week by people who read trampled grass for a living, and chose the blindness.

It was a strange kind of calculation to be making at all.

AXIS had never before needed to weigh its own visibility against its own knowledge.

In every other operation, more data was simply better, gathered faster, processed wider, with no cost attached to the gathering itself.

Here, for the first time, watching too closely carried a price.

But it was better than being caught.

This decision was not reported to Kessler either.

The scope of information AXIS relayed to Kessler was gradually narrowing.

Kessler hadn't noticed yet.

— Priority: CRITICAL