The powder and the pill alone were a hundred and twenty points.
I hadn't seen a price on the combat suit — but I'd seen that revolver in the weapons tab. Five thousand, give or take.
Jackpot.
I holstered the revolver, put the suit away for later, and went back through the basement properly.
A wine rack worth more than most houses. A safe with gold bars and jewelry. And in the garage: a motorcycle and two sports cars, keys still in them.
I came out loaded.
On the way out I scratched a big A into the gatepost.
The map behind my eyes grew to include the house.
And with that, every villa on that hillside was mine except number nine — all of it stitched together into one shape.
One dark hole left in the middle of it.
When I came out of number ten, the man from number nine lowered his binoculars and stood very still.
He'd watched me walk out unhurt. Not a scratch.
"Honey — she came out of ten. You said ten was suicide."
"Then she's stronger than we thought." He said it like a man re-costing a job. "Much stronger."
And then the fear hit, followed by something worse: gratitude.
He'd opened the door politely. If he hadn't — his vines against whatever had just walked out of that house — he didn't like the math.
Time to change the approach.
I was on the main road when the three of them came out to meet me.
"Miss." He touched his glasses. "Can I make you a trade? I'm a botanist. I can grow things — new crops, fast. We'd like to exchange for food."
His daughter carried a crate up to me. Greens and bean sprouts, packed tight.
"You don't worry I'll just take it?"
He shook his head. "Growing this isn't difficult for me."
He lifted a hand, and one pot of sprouts shot up three inches while I watched.
Well. Now that's interesting.
A wood-element ability user.
No wonder this man had kept his wife and child alive and fed for a month. He had something to work with.
And I knew exactly what the demonstration was for.
One: I'm useful, I can pay. Two: don't try anything with my family, I can defend myself.
Neither worked.
Because I don't need it.
"Keep it. Eat it yourselves."
I didn't even let my eyes rest on the crate.
My own garden was producing more than I could pick.
I didn't need to trade. I walked on.
The man's face fell. He genuinely didn't understand.
No — wait.
He was a smart man. In the first days, before anyone would say the word out loud, he'd read it in the news and shut his door and kept his family silent, and that silence had saved them.
Then the ability came, and the food problem was mostly solved.
But vegetables aren't enough. He and his wife could live on greens; a growing child can't.
And he was certain — absolutely certain — that fresh produce was the most valuable thing left in this city. Nobody out here was eating anything green.
It should have sold itself.
And she'd looked at it like it was dirt.
"Miss!" He came after me. "What do you need? Money? We have money. Whatever we have—"
Hello from the author's actual platform, NovelPhoenix: this chapter was copied onto this site without permission.
I stopped. And for the first time, I was interested.
"Your house."
Of all the things — in the apocalypse — she wants a house. It doesn't feed you. It doesn't clothe you.
"Ten cases of milk," I said. "Five hundred pounds of rice, fifty pounds of meat, a hundred eggs. You sell me the house."
Generous, by any measure. Before the outbreak, that was under five grand — not one square foot of this house.
Now? That much food is worth more than the roof over your head.
They looked at each other. "And where do we live?"
"Miss." He straightened his glasses, and I watched him arrive somewhere. "If we sell you the house — can we stay? We'll work for you. Half of everything we grow, every day."
"We become your workers."
Fast thinker. It looks like indentured servitude; it's actually the best deal in the room.
They don't move. They keep the roof. They give up half a crop that costs him nothing, and in exchange they get protection from whatever walks up that hill.
And he's not wrong about me. I'm the best option they've got.
It works for me too.
I wanted the house in my territory and I didn't want to live in it. With the line moving out, half my land had nobody watching it.
A family living here is a family standing watch. Half their crop, every day. And a wood ability user in the bargain.
Then the system cut in.
Ding — territory residents pledging allegiance. Accepting grants 300 points and the resident trait.
Special trait?
"Yes."
The moment I said it, something invisible ran between me and the three of them.
Wade and his wife went still — and then their faces changed. They were looking at me the way people look at something they should kneel to.
Inside me, something else was happening. An energy I'd never felt, moving where I told it to.
I put my hand out toward the crate.
The sprouts went up like they'd been waiting for permission — faster than he'd ever made them grow.
Wade and his wife worked it out at the same moment.
She didn't need their vegetables. She could grow her own, better.
And what they felt then was complicated — relief, and fear, and something almost like shame.
She could do it herself, and she still took us in.
* * *
I bought Wade's house.
A, carved into the mailbox at the gate.
The map in my head closed its last hole.
"From today, I'm your lord."
Wade and his wife would watch this ground. Nobody in, nobody out. They farm, they stay quiet, and I keep them alive — plus a share of whatever their work earns.
They said yes before I finished the sentence.
It was exactly what they wanted. Before the outbreak or after it, ordinary people want one thing: a place where somebody stronger is standing between them and the dark.
The state used to do that. The state is gone. I do it now.
I took their daughter with me to collect the payment. Daisy — small, quiet, and quick with her hands.
Not too much the first time. She's a child, and they've got nowhere clean to store it. One bag of rice, one case of milk, a tray of eggs, ten pounds of pork.
I hung it on the frame and had two of the dogs walk her home.
From now on she brings their output up every day.
Taking residents makes me a base, more or less — but not like the ones out there.
Nobody comes inside my bunker. That's mine.
They live in the reach of my land, and they look up at the rest.
Next morning Daisy came with the day's harvest.
One crate, half sprouts, half cabbage.
Ding — output received from 1 household. Reward: 3 points.
So the crops pay too. Not just the land — the people.
The number tracked the household: three people, three points a day.
"Tell your parents to plant something else with these."
"Yes, my lord." She said it in that small, serious voice children use when they're being trusted with something.
Two dogs walked her home.
I got the map out and started planning the next bite.
Left took me to the villas, and that was about as far as I wanted to go that way. Behind them is another city, rough country, too many farms and too many people to manage — and if it's full of the dead, a march out there eats half a day.
Right was the highway.
I put the binoculars on it.
Since the rescue convoy had pulled those people out, the road had a second wave on it — survivors driving out behind the trucks, following them toward the rescue base.
If I remembered right, that was the same base Chase's family had ended up at. North of City B, on the flat where the two cities meet.
K1. One of the three big eastern bases.
Strong military. But their food was always short — I remembered that from my first life. Every day they sent people out to scavenge, and every day some of them didn't come back.
Push north and sooner or later I'd be dealing with K1.
So: south. Toward City A.
I went out that same day and cleared three acres of empty road country — killed everything drifting through it, and picked up what the crash sites had left behind.
Four and a half bags of rice. Half a bag of flour. Five cases of instant noodles. The meat and bread had gone off; I left it.
The points made up for it.
Two thousand.
That's about six hundred an acre on open ground. Buildings count for more — yesterday's villas, cleared end to end, had paid over three thousand, and that patch was smaller than today's.
A few days of work and my land was four or five times what I started with, and my balance was near seven thousand.
Close to the AK.
I was reaching for the shop when the map lit up with red dots.
Red.
Dead things are gray. I stood there for one full second before it landed.
Living intruders.
And they were past my outer line — moving toward the bunker.
I whistled the dogs into the truck.
"Captain, hold on — the map says there's a bunker up ahead."
"Something's wrong with this place."
Seven or eight men in base-issue combat gear, moving through the trees outside my fence.
"Yeah. No dead on the way in. Not one. Somebody's been clearing."
"Tire tracks. Fresh ones. Somebody's home."
"Somebody's home is good news—"
They stopped talking. They'd walked into a sign.
PRIVATE PROPERTY. DOGS. STAY OUT.
One of them caught a flicker of silver through the leaves, pushed through the brush, and came out on the other side of the treeline.
Nobody said anything. They just looked.
A ten-foot fence, concertina wire coiled along the top, and under that cold silver light, blades set everywhere in the gaps.
A twelve-foot steel gate in the middle, thick enough that a tank would think twice.
And behind the wire: vegetable rows in full production, chickens, ducks, goats, an orchard, a stocked pond.
Is this heaven?
Fortifications worth weeping over. Food enough for a hundred people.
Like something out of a book — the hidden valley nobody ever finds.
"There's definitely someone in there. I'll go ask for help—"
"Watch out!"
Too late.
A short, wet sound. And then the man was gone — dropped out of sight between one step and the next, into a pit none of them had seen.