FULL GEAR — CHAPTER 19: "Fury"
North Valor in the afternoon did something specific with its noise.
Herro had been in the city long enough to know the early morning version . The building settling, Rosa in the kitchen, the elevated rail line running its first pass on the eastern side. Daytime North Valor was a different proposition entirely. The streets had volume. The commercial district pushed sound outward from its storefronts. The transit lines overhead moved with people who had somewhere to be, and the neighborhoods between the major blocks carried the accumulated ambient noise of a city that had decided today was happening whether anyone was ready for it or not.
He had been on a mission with Hilda before.
He was aware of this. He had experienced it. He knew, from direct personal evidence, that she was capable and reliable and had — in a specific and unrepeatable moment at the end of the last one — put her hand on his wrist and brought it down.
She was still terrifying.
She walked slightly ahead of him in the way that Hilda walked — a half-step ahead, which was not intentional, which was just how she moved through spaces she considered navigable. Her ponytail was up. Her hands were in her pockets. She moved through the afternoon street with the particular quality of someone who had grown up in neighborhoods that looked exactly like this one and had learned early that the neighborhood moved differently depending on whether you moved through it with your head up or down.
Her head was up.
Herro's was also up, though for slightly different reasons.
He had been thinking about the mission brief since the common room. Package retrieval from a condemned high-rise in the Urban District. Night operation — they were heading out early to scope the approach before dark, which Hilda had explained in two sentences when he'd asked why they were leaving in daylight. In, retrieve, out. Nate had described the job in four sentences with the tone he used for things he considered settled. Lyra had looked at the brief for a long moment before folding it and handing it to Hilda without comment.
He had noticed that.
(She looked at it like it meant something she wasn't saying,) he thought. (Which is probably fine. She knows things we don't know. She usually looks like she knows things we don't know.)
He filed it.
Hilda stopped.
He almost walked into her, caught himself, and looked at what had stopped her. A vending machine on the corner — the tall, narrow kind that sat between a closed print shop and a pharmacy with its gate half down. The screen displayed the usual grid of drinks in the way vending machines displayed them, lit from behind, slightly too bright for the street around it.
Hilda pulled out her phone.
The screen she opened was not anything Herro recognized. A black and white crown with an eye in the center — simplified, clean, the kind of logo that had been designed by someone who understood that recognizable shapes outlasted elaborate ones. She held the phone toward the machine's panel and something shifted in the machine's interface, a small response, and a drink descended into the tray with a mechanical thunk.
She picked it up without fanfare.
"What," Herro said.
Hilda glanced at him. Read his expression. Held it for a second with the look of someone calibrating how much baseline knowledge to assume.
"Your phone," she said.
"What about it."
"Hand it over."
He handed it over. She worked quickly — found what she was looking for in under ten seconds, downloaded, passed it back. The same crown-with-eye logo sat on his screen now, waiting.
"C.R.A.," she said. "Citizen Registry Application. Everyone just says Cera." She opened her own app and held it beside his so he could see the layout. "For Family Units specifically. The Empire built it so there was an actual infrastructure for how units get paid and communicate and access the roster. Without something like this you'd have paper trails going through seventeen different offices for every transaction."
Herro looked at the icon. Then at the vending machine. "It works on vending machines."
"It works on anything registered to accept it." She said it the way she said things that were obvious to her. "Digital wallet. You load credits, you spend credits. The machine reads the application ID and processes it as a payment."
He looked at the app properly for the first time. The roster tab showed a simplified grid of Family Units — names, grades, regions, member counts. He scrolled. Kept scrolling.
"How many units are there," he said.
"Eight to ten per region, give or take. More in the bigger ones."
He did the math. "That's — there are five regions. That's at least forty units across the Empire."
"Terra is a big place with a lot of people." Hilda drank from the can she'd gotten. "And the Empire specifically wants to keep expanding its footprint everywhere after the war. More territory means more need for authorized units. More units means more infrastructure. Hence the app."
He was still looking at the roster. The names of units he'd never heard of. Regions he'd only been to one of.
"The Drayokami family built this," Hilda said, watching him.
"The who?"
She looked at him for a moment with the expression of someone deciding whether to be surprised.
"Drayokami," she said again. "High nobility. Central Terra. One of the oldest families in the Empire — they've been sponsoring Family Units and building infrastructure for the Imperial system since before either of us were born." She tilted her head. "You're from South Terra and you don't know them?"
"I'm from the countryside," he said.
He said it quickly. Then immediately wished he'd delivered it with slightly more confidence because the fact of having said it quickly made it sound worse than it was, which it wasn't, it was just a fact about where he had lived and he didn't know why it felt like something to be embarrassed about.
Hilda studied him.
"Homeschooled," she said. Not a question. Just the conclusion arriving.
"Until middle school."
A beat.
Something in her expression shifted — not mockery, not the sharpness she used when she was being deliberately cutting. Something closer to something he wasn't entirely sure how to name. She looked at him for another moment and then made a sound that was not quite a laugh but lived in the same neighborhood.
"You're basically a homeschooled country kid."
"Is that—"
"I'm not making fun of you." She started walking again. "At the moment."
He fell back into step beside her.
"The Drayokami family," she continued, returning to the app without transition, "built C.R.A. specifically because the donation model was chaos before it existed. Family Units depend on citizen support to survive. The Empire doesn't fund independent units — no noble sponsorship means no institutional budget. Which means the only money coming in is what the public decides to send."
"How does that work through the app."
She held up her phone. Her profile tab was open — a photo that managed to look simultaneously official and deeply unamused, which Herro suspected was not an accident — and in the upper right corner, a number.
₡80
He looked at it.
"Eighty," he said.
Hilda looked at her phone. Her expression moved through three things in approximately one second, ending at something that could only be described as personally betrayed by the number eighty.
"That can't be right."
"It says eighty."
"I know what it says—"
"It's right there—"
She snatched the phone back. He had a half-second before she did to see the section below the credits — a review tab, populated with citizen comments left after interactions with Ironhide members. The word mean appeared twice. Abrasive once. Would not approach again once.
She saw him looking.
She closed the app.
"The donation channels," she said, in the voice of someone firmly returning to the subject, "work two ways. Citizens can send Credits directly to a specific member — if you did something visible, rescued someone, showed up in a situation people witnessed, the credits go to you specifically. The Empire taxes those at eight percent." She kept walking. The afternoon street moved past them. "Or they can donate to the unit pool, which goes to Lyra's account and gets distributed to operational costs. Pool donations get taxed at five percent — the Empire's way of pretending they're encouraging unit cohesion."
"So individual credits are yours but the pool is shared."
"Individual credits are yours after tax." She said it with the emphasis of someone who had learned the distinction the hard way. "The system is set up so popular members pull more individual donations, which gives the Empire a visibility metric. Units with members who have high individual credit streams look better on the Imperial roster. Which matters for which jobs you get offered."
Herro looked at his phone. His own profile was sparse — newly registered, no photo yet, no reviews. A credit balance of zero.
"Nate explained all this to you?" he said.
"Nate explained it approximately one thousand times." She said it with the flat certainty of someone who had been on the receiving end of those explanations and had retained the information purely through repeated exposure. "Eventually it stuck."
The afternoon street continued around them. North Valor doing what North Valor did — noise, movement, the transit lines above casting their regular intervals of shadow across the pavement. Still hours before dark. Still hours before the high-rise.
Herro looked at his phone one more time. Zero credits. No reviews. A profile that existed and said nothing yet.
He put it in his pocket and kept walking.
There was a short silence. Not the comfortable kind. The kind that had a specific shape to it — the shape of someone deciding whether to address something or simply move past it by force of will. Hilda, from what Herro had observed, was very good at the latter.
"They're wrong," she said.
He kept his expression neutral. "About which part."
"All of it."
"The abrasive one seems—"
"I said all of it."
"Right."
She put the phone in her pocket with the precise energy of someone putting a matter to rest indefinitely. The afternoon street continued around them without comment.
Herro looked at his own profile. Sparse. Newly registered. No photo, no reviews, no balance. Just a name and a unit affiliation and the suggestion of a person who had technically arrived but hadn't done anything with it yet.
(Zero credits,) he thought. (No reviews. Nothing.)
Zero.
"Don't spiral about it," Hilda said." you have had like what? two missions and one was impromptu"
He looked at her. She still wasn't looking at him.
"I wasn't—"
"You were doing the thing."
"What thing."
"The face thing. You do it when you're thinking about something that bothers you but you've decided not to say it out loud." She adjusted her cap with one hand without breaking stride. "It's very obvious."
He processed this. Then, carefully: "You've been paying attention to my face."
A pause that was slightly too long.
"You're new," she said. "Watching new members is basic situational awareness."
"Right."
"It is."
"I didn't say anything."
She shot him a look. He returned it without expression. She faced forward again.
(She's been paying attention to my face,) he thought.
He did not say this either.
The horizon was orange at the edges and dark above it — the specific gradient of a sky that hadn't fully committed to night yet but was getting there.
Herro looked at it. Then at the distance still between them and the Urban District. Then at Hilda, who was walking with her hands in her pockets and the particular forward momentum of someone who had already done the math and was done discussing it.
"We've been walking for like an hour," he said.
"And a half."
"Why are we walking."
Hilda stopped.
She turned around and looked at him with the expression she used when something was so obvious that being asked about it was faintly offensive. Then she turned back toward the horizon and pointed at it.
"We are," she said, in a tone that was technically informative but occupied the same register as mockery, "poor."
Herro stared at the horizon. Then at her. "What does that have to do with—"
"Do you know anything about Terra."
"I mean—"
"Five regions," Hilda said, already walking again. He fell back into step beside her. "Central, North, South, West, East. You're from South. I'm from South. You know South. You probably know North Valor a little bit by now."
"Some of it."
"Each region has about ten cities. Each city has districts. Most districts are named by direction — South District, West District, Urban District, whatever. Sometimes they get more specific names when there's something worth naming them after." She glanced at him sideways. "Since you're from the country, this is probably confusing."
"It's a little confusing."
"Simple version: Terra is big. So big that going from one district to another takes hours, and going between cities takes most of a day on a good train line."
Herro processed that. "So from the Ironhide building to the Urban District—"
"Takes about two and a half hours walking. Longer if you don't know the route." She adjusted her cap. "The train would get us there in twenty minutes. But the train costs money. Lyra took the car, because Lyra does whatever she wants. So." She gestured at the street ahead of them. "We walk. If we keep pace we'll arrive when it's dark, which is when the dead-zone authorization actually applies anyway. So it's not entirely a disaster."
She paused.
"Did I dumb it down enough for you."
Herro kept his expression neutral. "It's certainly on some level."
Hilda made a sound that was not quite a laugh and kept walking.
He fell into her pace. The neighborhood around them had shifted in the last hour — the commercial blocks with their lit storefronts had given way to something more residential, then to something more industrial, the buildings getting shorter and older and further apart in the way that things got when the city stopped trying to impress anyone. The street was quieter here. The elevated rail line overhead was still running but empty, the transit cars moving without passengers in the particular uselessness of a schedule that kept going because stopping was more expensive than continuing.
He looked at Hilda.
She walked the way she did everything — like the ground had her permission to be there. Her ponytail moved with the motion of each step, that slight natural swing that she had clearly never thought about and would probably find annoying if someone pointed it out. She was watching the street ahead with the alert, casual awareness of someone who had grown up in neighborhoods where that kind of attention was just how you moved. Not tense. Not performing vigilance. Just — present.
The crop top. The cargo jeans. The white sneakers. Her arms loose at her sides rather than crossed for once, the industrial streetlights doing something to the chrome quality of her skin where Heavy Metal sat just beneath the surface, dormant and available.
(She's actually really pretty,) he thought, one of the most organic thoughts he had in weeks.
"Why are you staring at me."
He blinked. Her eyes were still forward.
"I wasn't—"
"You were."
"I was looking at the street."
"The street is in front of us." She still hadn't looked back. "You were looking sideways. Which is where I am."
"Whatever."
"Yeah." The corner of her mouth moved. "Whatever."
They walked another half block in silence. The streetlights were coming on in sequence ahead of them — the automatic trigger of sensors registering the light level dropping, the city's infrastructure responding without anyone deciding it should.
"Hey," Herro said. "How do you feel about Lyra."
Hilda's head turned toward him. Not the full look — just the quarter-turn, the kind that communicated huh without actually saying it.
"Huh?"
"Just — as a leader. How do you feel about her."
Hilda faced forward again. Considered this with the specific weight she gave questions she hadn't expected.
"Not much," she said finally. "Beyond that she's strong." She paused. "I didn't get recruited, you know. I came on my own. Rosa was already there and I decided I was tired of South Valor, so I showed up." A beat. "She let me in. Didn't ask a lot of questions about why." Another beat. "That's about all I needed from her."
"But as a leader—"
"She's a lazy, chain-smoking pain in the ass who'd rather find a bottle than a mission report," Hilda said, with the flat delivery of someone describing weather. "When she's actually awake and paying attention she's the scariest person I've ever been near. The rest of the time—" she shrugged one shoulder "—I basically run things."
Herro looked at her. "Wouldn't that be Nate? He handles all the operations—"
"Nate is great at operations when everything is going according to a plan that already exists." Hilda's voice was not unkind about this. Just precise. "When something breaks, when someone needs a decision in ten seconds, when the plan stops existing — Nate freezes a little. He gets it together, but it costs time. And time costs things."
Herro thought about Nate. The notebook. The documentation stack. The way he organized chaos into columns and subpoints and contingency clauses. The way he'd looked when they'd arrived home from the precinct and Dean had said the words several additional reports.
(Yeah,) he thought. (That tracks.)
He didn't say it.
"You're less nervous than usual," Hilda said.
He looked at her. She wasn't looking at him.
"Am I."
"You walked in circles for the first week and a half. Jumping at stuff. Doing this thing with your shoulders." She demonstrated with a brief, exaggerated flinch that was probably accurate and definitely annoying. "You're not doing it right now."
"I'm doing better."
"Is it because you beat Grey." She said it with the tone of someone who was absolutely teasing him but maintaining plausible deniability about it. "Did beating a grown man make you more of a man. Is that what happened."
Herro opened his mouth.
Closed it.
"I was under the impression," he said carefully, "that you didn't like me."
Hilda turned her head and looked at him for a full second. Blue eyes, steady, the expression she used when something was supposed to be a question but was functioning as a statement.
"What gave you that idea," she said.
She faced forward again. Her ponytail settled. The streetlights ahead continued to come on in sequence.
"I don't know," he said. "Maybe the kick to the head you launched at me the first day we met."
Hilda's chin came up slightly.
"Whatever," she said.
They kept walking.
The Urban District announced itself the way forgotten parts of a city announced themselves, not with signage or transition, but with a gradual shift in the quality of everything. The storefronts that had been shuttered gave way to buildings that weren't shuttered so much as simply finished. Older concrete. Less street maintenance. The transit junction overhead, its arches visible against the sky that had finished going dark while they'd walked, threw a shadow that the lights below didn't fully answer.
And there — three blocks ahead, against the full dark of the sky — the high-rise.
Twenty-something floors. No lights. The specific quality of a building that had been left rather than closed. Not empty. Just abandoned in the precise way that abandoned buildings were different from empty ones.
Hilda looked at it.
Herro looked at it.
"Package is on the fourteenth floor," she said. "We go in, we find it, we come back out."
She said it with the particular efficient simplicity she used when she was covering something. Not lying. Just — framing. Saying the operational fact at the center and letting the edges of it go unsaid, which was different from lying but produced a version of the same effect in the person receiving it.
He noticed.
He filed it.
(She's been doing that since the common room,) he thought. (The same look Lyra had when she handed over the brief. The same look when Hilda read it. Everyone who's seen this paper has that look and they all decided not to explain it and I'm about to walk into that building.)
He looked at the building.
Twenty-something floors. Dark. Waiting.
"Right," he said.
The night had settled over North Valor fully by the time they reached the entrance. The high-rise rose in front of them — silent, dark, its entrance accessible through a door that had long ago stopped being locked in any meaningful way.
Hilda pulled the door open.
The darkness inside was immediate.
"Don't touch anything you don't need to touch," she said.
She went in first.
Herro followed.
The following series of events that happened in this mission would set the entire next year of Herro's life in motion.
To describe this mission in one word —
it would be.....FURY