A Glitch in Reality - Chapter 0020

Morning arrived mercilessly. The San Diego sun was already tearing across the horizon when Jack closed the apartment door, and the heat pounded against the cracked asphalt of the port neighborhood like an open punch. The room was left behind—walls stained with dampness, worn linoleum, the lingering smell of fried eggs and sea salt—but the weight Jack carried in his chest did not.

He adjusted the backpack strap on his shoulder, feeling the rough fabric against his freshly shaved skin. He glanced one last time over his shoulder: the maps taped to the walls, the sofa where Kevin slept when the night dragged on too long, and the corner where the Tuxedo Elite rested, folded with almost military care. A silent promise between four damp concrete walls.

Kevin was already waiting outside, leaning against the hood of the Camaro with the engine idling—the low rumble of an animal accustomed to waiting. He had traded his usual sweatshirt for a short-sleeved shirt that stretched over shoulders broader than a week ago, sturdy jeans, and a baseball cap pulled down. The effects of the Buta Buta no Mi were subtle, but undeniable. His brown eyes gleamed with that impulsive loyalty they always had, but there was something new there too—determination, or perhaps appetite.

“Ready?”, he asked.

Jack got into the car without answering. What was there to say?

The paper map rested on the dashboard—one of those cheap printouts Kevin had unearthed from one of his father’s drawers, all folded and marked with pen: approximate coordinates, alternative routes, distance estimates. In 2002, without reliable GPS and unwilling to leave digital traces, paper was the only safe option. Jack ran his finger along the folds as the Camaro sped through the streets of the port district, between trucks loaded with containers and workers with sleepless faces.

The city flashed by: peeling facades, gang graffiti, the distant glow of the Pacific. Each block took them a little further away from that apartment—and closer to something that didn’t yet have a clear name.

Almost an hour later, the asphalt gave way to back roads. The back roads gave way to dirt tracks. The Camaro rattled over the rocks, kicking up clouds of ochre dust that seeped in through the windows and clung to sweaty skin. The air was dry, hot, heavy with grass and dirt—unlike the damp salt of the port. Kevin kept one hand on the steering wheel and the other drumming on the gearshift, his shoulders tense.

“My father always said that Uncle John had off-the-books contacts,” he said, his voice hoarse over the engine’s rumble. “But I never thought we’d use one of these.”

Jack didn’t answer immediately. His eyes were fixed on the open landscape unfolding beyond the windshield—low hills, sparse vegetation, nothing that needed a name.

“Isolation is what we need right now,” he finally said. “With you practically tearing down walls and Gacha demanding more money… that apartment has become a trap.”

The property appeared at the end of the dirt road like something you didn’t want to be found. A tall, rusty metal fence, barbed wire on top, a rusty sign with “No Entry” in red letters almost faded by the sun. The gate was ajar. Outside, an old, sturdy pickup truck, and on the hood, a man.

Ice John.

Gray hairs peeking out from the brim of a battered cowboy hat. A faded plaid shirt, dusty jeans. A thick cigar between his teeth, the smoke rising lazily in the still air. He looked like he’d been there for hours, or perhaps decades—the kind of man places expect, not the other way around.

They got out of the Camaro. Kevin waved with an open hand, informally. “Uncle John! Good to see you.”

The man turned slowly, took the cigar from his mouth, and exhaled a thick puff that smelled of tobacco and the earth itself. A smile slowly spread across his tanned face. “Kevin, kid.” His eyes scanned his nephew’s body from head to toe. “Look at that. You finally got out from behind the screen.” A long drag. “I always said video games didn’t get you anywhere.”

Kevin gave an awkward smile and scratched the back of his neck. The compliment came wrapped in old grievances, and they both knew it.

John then turned his eyes to Jack. It wasn’t a quick glance—it was an assessment. Slow, calculated, the kind of look of someone who has conducted business in enough gray areas to know the difference between ambition and trouble.

“You should be the partner.” Another drag. “The one setting up the new business.”

“That’s it,” Jack replied. “We need space. Privacy. No eyes around.”

John raised a thick eyebrow and crossed his arms. “And for that you need a place off the record.” It wasn’t a question. He looked at Jack for a second that was far too long. “If it’s illegal, you can’t count on me.”

“It’s nothing illegal,” Kevin said quickly, stepping forward. “We need space to work on a project. No neighbors complaining, no police showing up because of noise. That’s it.”

John looked at his nephew. “Does your father know about this?”

The question fell simple and heavy like a stone into a deep well. Kevin looked away for half a second—enough.

“I haven’t had a chance to talk to him yet. But I’ll sort it out.”

John nodded slowly, exhaling spirals of smoke through his nose. His eyes returned to Jack one last time before climbing to the fence, to the shed visible in the distance between the low hills—a large, reinforced, isolated structure.

Jack heard the mention of his father and felt a familiar tightness rise from his stomach to his throat. His own parents—debts, gratuitous violence, years of passive neglect—were a ghost that still haunted every decision he made. ” I’m not going to put Kevin’s life at risk because of what my parents carry.” His jaw clenched for a second. Neither of them noticed.

“Boys.” John threw the cigar on the ground and crushed it with his boot. “If you want to start something real, the parents come first. Especially you, Kevin. Family is capable of helping.” Long pause. “This land is off the records. So there’s no way any of this can reach me. But I want you to talk to your father before I have to.”

Kevin nodded. Seriously this time.

“And how much would the rent be?” Jack asked.

John smiled slowly. The smile of someone who has given their number before and knows what comes next.

“One hundred thousand.”

The silence lasted exactly two seconds.

Kevin and Jack looked at each other. Their jaws dropped at the same speed.

“We have ten thousand,” said Jack, his voice hoarse.

John chuckled softly—not cruelly, almost paternally—and patted Kevin on the shoulder. Then he walked over to the pickup truck, leaned over the seat, and returned with a simple wrench in his hand. He tossed it to Kevin without warning. His nephew caught his breath with reflexes he hadn’t possessed three weeks earlier.

“Then I suggest you guys get the rest.” John opened the car door. “You can stay on the property in the meantime. And as for the difference…” he paused, his hand on the roof of the cab, “…consider it a gift from your uncle.”

The pickup truck’s engine roared. Dust. Silence.

Kevin looked at the key in his palm. The metal was warm.

“How are we going to get ninety thousand?”

Jack stood still for a moment. His green eyes fixed on the fence, on the shed beyond it, on the unmarked expanse of hills. The sun beat down on his back.

“You already know how,” he said. His voice was low, without drama. “It’s better that the next target has more than just drugs and fifteen thousand dollars.”

Kevin scratched his chin. A slow smile began to form.

The two stood there, facing the fence, the key between them and ninety thousand dollars to go before the next step. The path was concrete, dangerous, and already decided before either of them even opened their mouths.

…

The still heat held them captive for a moment longer than either of them would admit. Jack’s green eyes met Kevin’s brown eyes, and in that silence fit everything that hadn’t yet been said aloud: the ninety thousand that were missing, the promise Kevin needed to make to his father before Uncle John had to make it for him, the warm weight of the key now hanging between his friend’s thick fingers. Then the moment passed, the way moments that don’t ask for words pass, and the two turned together to what awaited them on the other side of the fence.

The shed stood there, silhouetted against the white, dusty sky at the far end of the property.

Kevin went ahead. Impatience had been simmering in him ever since he got out of the Camaro, a physical agitation his body was still learning to control, and it needed somewhere to go. He bent down before the fence padlock, a cumbersome piece of rusty steel the size of his fist, and out of old habit searched the key for the right fit. He didn’t even need to use it. His fingers closed around the padlock almost without thinking, there was a dry snap, metal giving way where it shouldn’t, and the shackle broke as if it were made of bread dough. Kevin looked at the twisted piece in his palm, then at Jack, his expression torn between embarrassment and laughter.

“I forgot,” he said, his hoarse voice scraping against the back of his throat, a permanent mark left by the fruit.

He threw the broken padlock onto the ground and pushed the gate. The sheet of metal was wide, heavy, fastened to a buried track that time had eaten away at, and it jammed with a sharp groan within the first few inches. Kevin steadied his feet, leaned against it, and pushed again. The gate slid open all at once, scraping the dust in a long arc, and slammed against the jamb on the other side with a bang that echoed across the empty ground before fading into nothingness. Flocks of small birds took flight from some dry bush and disappeared toward the hills. There was no one left to hear. That was the point.

They returned to the car. Jack pulled open the door, sat in the passenger seat, and tossed the crumpled map onto his lap—now useless, because their destination was in plain sight. Kevin started the engine; the Camaro’s rumble was loud and out of place in the quiet, and they sped along the dirt track that cut across the property. The land opened up dry on both sides, an arid expanse of cracked earth and low, straw-colored grass, without a single perimeter fence, without a post, without a single exposed pipe. Nothing to suggest that anyone had lived or worked there in the last two decades. The city was far away, indeed. San Diego was a faint blur on the horizon behind them, and the only reminder of the ocean was a faint smell of salt that the wind carried from time to time, almost erased by the dust and the parched grass.

The warehouse grew larger as they approached, larger than seemed possible. From afar it was the size of a large barn. Up close it was something else entirely. The sheet metal walls rose high, stained with rust in long chains that dripped from the bolts as if the metal had been weeping for years. The gabled roof stretched for a length that seemed to drag on, dotted with square skylights, many cracked, some boarded up. The structure had something honest and old-fashioned about it in its proportions, lacking any of the flourishes of modern construction, just volume and function, and Jack recognized in it the kind of work that is no longer done. Concrete at the base, beams that were surely riveted raw steel, walls that seemed designed to outlast anyone who built them. It must have been one of the first industrial warehouses erected in that part of the county, from the time when the port was still learning to be a port and the surrounding land wasn’t worth enough to become anything else.

Kevin stopped the Camaro about ten meters from the entrance and turned off the engine. Silence returned abruptly, heavier after the noise, and for a moment the two remained inside the car, only hearing the ticking of the hot metal contracting under the hood.

They descended together. The sun beat down on the metal sheeting, and the heat it reflected could be felt meters away, an invisible wall of boiling air. The main door of the warehouse stood before them and was, by itself, a breathtaking sight: a sliding door at least six meters wide by six meters high, two gigantic sheets of corrugated steel hanging from an upper track, with a smaller hatch cut into one of them for people to pass through. An industrial padlock, even larger than the one on the fence, secured the two sheets in the center.

“I’ll use the key for this one,” Kevin said, with dry humor in his voice. He inserted the key his uncle had given him, turned it, and the padlock opened with a clean click. He removed the chain, let it fall coiled on the floor, and placed both hands on the junction of the leaves. “Move it back a little.”

Jack took two steps back.

Kevin pushed. The door resisted, as everything there resisted, held together by rust and pulleys that hadn’t turned in a long time. There was a grunt of metal against metal, sharp enough to make Jack clench his teeth, and for a second nothing moved. Then Kevin braced his legs, lowered his center of gravity, and the door simply gave way. It slid to the side in a long, screeching drag, the dead pulleys scraping the track instead of turning, releasing tiny sparks and a fine rain of orange rust that fell onto his shoulders. It was an effort that would have required three men with crowbars, maybe a tractor, and Kevin did it alone, with an ease bordering on offensive, his broad face only slightly concentrated. The door hit the end of its travel. The dark mouth of the shed opened.

Jack whistled softly, a short sound he saved for the rare times when something caught him by surprise.

Inside, the darkness was cool and ancient. The sun outside barely reached the threshold, and beyond it the space sank into a bluish twilight, broken only by the light that descended from the skylights in the ceiling, inclined columns dusty with light that landed on the concrete floor in broad patches. Between one column of light and another, everything was shadow. The air had the preserved taste of old dust, dried oil, iron, the neutral and somewhat sweet smell of a place that had been locked away for too long with its own memory.

They went inside.

It took a moment for the scale of the interior to sink in. The side walls stretched far out until they almost disappeared into the shadows, and the ceiling was so high that the steel beams crisscrossed above like the skeleton of a desiccated cathedral, all cobwebs and suspended light. The concrete floor stretched smooth and immense, with long cracks snaking here and there, phantom tire tracks, dark oil stains from machines that no longer existed. The place was almost entirely empty, and the emptiness made the sheer size hurt even more. Here and there, remnants remained: a wooden crate lying on its side with its slats broken, a pile of rotten pallets leaning against a column, an industrial reel with nothing wound inside. And at the very end, set back against the back wall, an open shipping container, its doors wide open revealing an empty, rusty interior, dark as a mouth.

“Dude,” Jack said, his own voice sounding small in the space. He took a few steps inside, the leather of his shoe scraping against the concrete, his head tilted back as he measured the beams with his eyes. “We might just be able to make this work.”

Kevin stepped in behind, nodding in agreement, then craning his neck from side to side as if he wanted to encompass the entire place with his gaze. “It’s fucking huge.” His voice bounced off the back wall and returned in layers. He let out a short laugh, surprised by his own echo, and before Jack could say anything, he cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted, loudly, just one long vowel thrown into the void. The sound rose to the beams, hit the roof sheet, went down the side walls and returned to them in waves that took a while to dissipate, overlapping each other until they became a murmur that seemed to come from many people. Kevin broke into a wide, childlike smile, the smile of someone who for a second forgot everything he was carrying. “Did you hear that?”

Jack listened. And calculated. That was the reflex that never left him: where Kevin heard a playful echo, Jack heard measurements, ceiling height, isolation, distance from the street, the absence of neighbors to complain about noise. I heard what Uncle John had said without saying it. Inside, a man could train with the fruit at maximum power, could make mistakes, could break things, could scream in pain at three in the morning, and the world outside would remain oblivious. There, a body rewritten by the Buta Buta no Mi had space to discover its own limits without cracking a plaster wall with every sneeze, as it had been cracking the apartment at the port. There, the ChaosGacha roulette could spin as many times as necessary, far from any GDA eye, far from Vought’s antennas, far from the lazy curiosity of any policeman who spent all his time occupied with cartels and shootouts. That emptiness wasn’t a problem to be solved. It was the closest thing to security the two had ever had.

“It must be about ten thousand square meters,” Jack said quietly, more to himself, walking slowly toward the center, his eyes scanning the dimensions. “Maybe more.”

Kevin whistled now too, imitating his friend, and the sound faded into the distance. “And it’s only ours.” He lightly kicked one of the broken planks of the overturned box, which shattered without resistance. “I mean, it will be, when we get the rest.”

The mention of the rest landed between them and lingered there for a moment, but neither of them wanted to dwell on it at that moment. There was the place to explore first.

They walked towards the back, crossing the bands of light and shadow, and the dust they raised rose and hung suspended, dancing lazily within the columns of light. The concrete bore the marks of what the warehouse had once been. Faded yellow lines demarcated corridors on the floor, rows of screw holes where heavy machinery had been bolted together, lighter rectangles where long workbenches had protected the floor from the elements. It was an organized graveyard of a dead industry, and you could almost hear the noise it had once made, the kind of noise that justifies building so far from everything.

The container in the back was just a container, empty, with the musty smell of damp iron. Jack stuck his head inside, saw the wavy walls and the dark plank floor, and quickly stepped back. Useful later, perhaps. To hide, to store, for whatever. He cataloged it and moved on.

It was Kevin who first noticed the stairs.

To the left, leaning against one of the side walls and almost invisible in the dim light, was a suspended structure, a kind of mezzanine that occupied only a slice of the warehouse, perhaps a tenth of its total length, raised on columns and connected to the ground by a steel staircase with a handrail. Under the mezzanine the space remained open, but above there were walls, an enclosed area with windows facing inwards, the kind that allowed one to monitor the production floor from above. The office, Jack thought immediately. There’s always one.

They went over there. The staircase had open treads, and when Kevin stepped on the first one, the entire structure let out a nervous groan, a tremor that rose up the handrail. He stopped, looked at Jack with a raised eyebrow.

“Will you be able to handle it?”, he asked.

“It’s sturdier than it looks, this kind of ladder,” Jack said, though he wasn’t sure. “But you climb up last. If it gives way, I’d rather it give way with you, because you fall and get back up. I don’t.”

Kevin laughed, a deep laugh that made the structure tremble again, and let Jack go ahead. They climbed carefully, the steps protesting with each step, and Jack felt the vibration under the soles of his feet that his friend’s weight transmitted to the metal. At the top, a short landing led to a sheet metal door painted an institutional green that time had peeled away in flakes. The doorknob was round, made of cold metal. Jack turned it and pushed, expecting resistance, and the door yielded immediately, barely ajar, having been unlocked for who knows how long. It opened inwards with a thin creak.

And there was the past, intact and dusty.

The room stretched the entire length of the mezzanine, long and low, with those interior windows running along one side facing the shed below and exterior windows on the other, so dirty that they filtered the light in a color of old honey. Gray metal tables, the robust kind made to last generations, were arranged in two rows, each with its tubular-framed chair and cracked leather seat, oozing yellowish foam from the cracks. On the tables were also abandoned objects as if people had gone out for lunch and never returned: a black rotary dial telephone with a cut cord, a glass ashtray with the permanent mark of cigarettes that burned there decades ago, yellowed papers stuck together by dampness, a mug with its bottom stained with fossilized coffee. A faded calendar hung from the wall, held by a single nail, forever frozen in a month of a year that no one remembered anymore. Everything was covered by a layer of dust so uniform and thick that it looked like fabric, and which muffled the sound of the two men’s footsteps as they entered.

Kevin whistled again, more quietly. “It was the factory office.”

“It was.” Jack ran his finger across a table and made a clean line in the dust, revealing the gray metal underneath. He looked around, and this time he wasn’t just measuring. He was figuring out what it could be. “See this? There are windows on both sides. On one side we can watch the whole shed from up there. On the other, we can see who’s coming down the road before they see us.” He pointed with his chin. “There’s a bathroom back there, for sure. There’s a water point, there’s an electricity point, even if we have to redo all the wiring. It was made for us to spend the day in here.”

Kevin turned to him, a glint of excitement on his broad face. “I was thinking the same thing. We have the office here, you know, where we plan, where the whiteboard is, where we brainstorm the next moves. And at the same time, we live up here. We can divide it up.” He walked around the room, gesturing, transforming the emptiness into a floor plan with his hands in the air. “Put a partition here, a bedroom for you, a bedroom for me there. Kitchen next to the bathroom to make use of the plumbing. The rest is common space. Downstairs, in the shed, we can have all the training and work areas. What do you think?”

Jack listened, and hearing Kevin think that way, in rooms and pipes and partitions, after weeks of thinking only about escape and survival, stirred something in him that he couldn’t name. He stared intently at the room, turned to the interior windows and looked at the warehouse below, its vastness punctuated by columns of light, and for a moment he could see what didn’t yet exist. Workbenches. Equipment. Real weights instead of bags of rice and beans. A space where Kevin’s body could grow without breaking through the walls, where he himself could wear the Tuxedo Elite and test the Neural Synergy without each jump throwing him against a piece of furniture. A headquarters. The word sounded somewhat ridiculous in his head, something out of a comic book, and yet that’s exactly what it was.

“Maybe we’ll have to put up some partitions after all,” Jack finally agreed. “Drywall solves most of it. You buy the sheet, the metal profile, screw it in. It’s not difficult.” He scratched the back of his neck, and when he spoke again, his voice had a different weight, more intimate, the kind he rarely let out. “When I was a kid, around fifteen, I worked in construction. Lying about my age. It was that or starve faster than usual. I carried bags of cement, built walls, learned to plaster, to run wires, to install ceilings. It wasn’t a job I chose, but it stuck.” He shrugged, as if dropping a memory on the floor. “The thing is, the manual labor part of this, the construction, that I know how to do. We won’t need to call anyone. No outsiders set foot here. It’s better this way.”

Kevin nodded slowly, and there was a respect in the way he looked at his friend, the kind that didn’t need to be talked about. Their pasts were exact opposites. Kevin came from a family with enough money to have learned that money doesn’t erase danger, it only deflects it. Jack came from a place where there was no deflection at all, only direct danger and the bones to endure it. And there they were, in the same empty shed, about to build the same thing with their hands.

“So that’s it,” said Kevin, clapping his hands together, raising a small cloud of dust. “I’ll get my hands dirty with you. To be honest, I’ve never built a wall in my life. But I think I can handle carrying weight.”

Jack almost smiled. “I think it’ll do.”

And it was at this point that the work began, even before any tools arrived, because there was something to remove before putting in anything new. The metal tables were bolted to the mezzanine floor, each one fixed by four thick screws buried in the concrete, the old-fashioned way, made not to budge even in an earthquake. Jack went to the first one in the row, crouched down, and examined the base. The screws were covered in rust, fused with the nuts, the kind that wouldn’t budge with any screwdriver. He placed both hands on the edge of the table and pulled, more to measure than out of hope. The metal showed no sign of wanting to give. The muscles in Jack’s back and arms tensed, marked and firmer than they had been a month before thanks to the training Tuxedo imposed on him every night, and even so, the table didn’t move an inch. It was work of leverage, of hammering, of an entire afternoon of effort for each piece.

“Get out,” Kevin said behind him.

Jack walked away.

Kevin positioned himself sideways, bent his knees, slipped his fingers under the edge of the table, and gripped it. For a second nothing happened, and Jack saw his friend’s face change, his concentration fall on him, his brown eyes narrow. Then Kevin stood up. The table came with him. The four screws came out of the concrete at once, tearing chips from the floor along with them, with a muffled, dry bang that reverberated through the room like a distant gunshot. Shards of concrete rained down on the floor. Kevin held the whole thing in mid-air, a massive metal table that two normal men would struggle to even push, he held it like a beach chair, his face only slightly red from the effort.

For a moment he just stood there, feeling the weight that didn’t weigh him down, and something passed through his eyes that was both wonder and hunger, that same new thing Jack had noticed that morning leaning against the Camaro. Then Kevin turned, measured the distance to the interior window overlooking the shed, and the dirty glass was already missing from one of the paintings, just the open frame. He took a step back, twisted his torso, and threw it.

The table crossed the room, passed through the empty window frame with ease, and plummeted the four meters to the warehouse floor below. It hit the concrete right in the center of one of the light columns, and the bang was enormous, a metallic clang that exploded in the void and rose through the beams and down the walls and returned in layers, the echo of the impact unfolding into ever smaller echoes until it thinned into a hum that took a long time to die. The dust raised below slowly rose into the light. The table lay there, toppled on its side, crumpled in a corner, in the exact center of the warehouse, like the first thing of a new life thrown into a space that had been waiting for it for decades.

Silence returned. The two of them stared down at the fallen table and the dust settling around it.

Kevin turned to his friend, and the smile on his face wasn’t that of someone who had played a prank. It was the smile of someone who had discovered something about himself and liked what he had discovered.

“I’m not going to get tired of this,” he said.

Jack looked at him, then at the table below, then back at his friend. There was no way not to understand. Kevin had spent his whole life being the fat kid behind the screen, the nephew who, according to Uncle John, would amount to nothing, the son who had to borrow money from his family to risk everything on a path he couldn’t even explain. And now he was plucking things from the ground with his fingers, things that needed a machine to move. There was a raw joy in it, and Jack understood it, although his own joy was of a different nature, colder, more calculated, the joy of someone who sees a tool work exactly as he predicted.

“No,” Jack agreed quietly. “I don’t think you will.” But his cold side was already working, and he added, because that was who he was: “Just save some of it. This power doesn’t come for free. You saw how hungry it made you, you saw what it did to the apartment walls. The more you use it, the more your body demands. We’re going to need food for an army when we start training for real. Add that to the ninety thousand.”

Kevin nodded, and the excitement on his face didn’t diminish, only gaining a layer of seriousness underneath. “I know. I feel it. This morning I ate enough for three and still left hungry.” He looked at his own hands, opening and closing his thick fingers, as if he were still learning to trust them. “But it’s strange, man. For the first time in my life I don’t feel like the weak link. Whenever we talked about Vought, about the GDA, about the Viltrumites, I thought: you have the suit, you have the plan, you have the brains. And what am I? The guy who drives the car and cleans the warehouse.” He lightly patted his chest with his fist. “Not now. Now I lift tables off the floor with my bare hands.”

Jack was silent for a moment. Outside, the wind whipped dust against the metal sheet of the shed, a soft, continuous hiss. Through the outside window, he could see the dirt road cutting through the dry terrain, empty, and beyond it the bright patch of the city where everything they feared was waking up to another day. The Seven were still in their original formation, according to what Kevin had gathered, which gave them some time. The GDA silently hunted for anomalies. And somewhere in the sky of that rewritten world, the Viltrumites, who didn’t even need a shed to crush two ants like themselves. Jack carried the entire map of that danger in his head, traced and retraced on the whiteboard of the apartment, red arrows connecting names that shouldn’t exist in the same sentence. And yet, there, on that first day inside the shed, he felt something rare opening up in his chest beneath the usual calculations. It wasn’t exactly hope. Hope was a luxury for those who hadn’t yet learned to count on defeat. It was firmer than that. It was the beginning of a base. A place to start from.

“You were never the weak link,” Jack said finally, and he said it bluntly, in the direct way that was the only way he could be sincere. “I wouldn’t be here without you. The money for the first roll was yours. The warehouse contact was yours. The idea of ​​looking for a place off the books was yours. You just didn’t have the muscle. Now you do. But the part of you that matters, I never doubted it.” He looked away, uncomfortable with his own frankness, and returned to his usual safe ground. “Now, before you get all emotional, we have a whole room of desks to rip out and four meters of warehouse to clean. And ninety thousand dollars that aren’t going to appear on their own.”

Kevin laughed, and his laughter filled the room. “Okay, okay.” He turned to the second table in the row, crouched down, and slipped his fingers under the corner. “But let me do all of these. It’s therapy.”

The two spent the hottest part of that afternoon up there, in the old factory office, dismantling the past to make room for what was to come. Kevin ripped out the tables one by one and dumped them out the window onto the warehouse floor, each crash slightly less intense than the last, not because the impact diminished, but because they were getting used to the sound, the way one gets used to anything that repeats itself. Jack followed behind, stacking the broken chairs, separating what was usable from what wasn’t, collecting the yellowed papers in a box to look at later, because you never knew what useful things an abandoned place might hold. In a jammed steel cabinet that Kevin opened as if smoothing out paper, they found an old stock of rusty tools: a sledgehammer with a rotten handle, pliers covered in rust, a box of nails fused into a single block of rust. Little was salvageable, but Jack kept the sledgehammer. Everything was useful for something.

The conversation flowed quietly and practically as they worked, in the manner of two men who had learned that thin walls can hear, even when there were no walls around. They listed what needed to be bought, and the list grew quickly: drywall sheets, metal profiles, screws, joint compound, a generator for when the power was restored, water, food, lots of food, mattresses, real tools.

They discussed how much of the money they still had they could spend without compromising the margin Jack wanted to preserve. Kevin offered to handle the major purchases through his father’s contacts, the kind who delivered construction materials to unaddressed properties without asking questions, and Jack approved with his usual caveat: nothing that would leave a paper trail linking it to them or Kevin’s family. And above all, returning like a tide, the problem of the ninety thousand. Because Uncle John had been generous, but his generosity came wrapped in a deadline that no one had said aloud and that they both felt, the way one feels a storm before it arrives. And because ten thousand versus one hundred thousand was the difference between a favor and a debt, and Jack didn’t intend to be indebted to anyone for long, not to Kevin’s uncle, nor to the world.

Late in the afternoon, when the light streaming through the skylights had shifted from white to gold and then to a deep amber that cast shadows from the beams across the floor below, the two stopped. They were covered in dust from head to toe, sweat tracing clean trails across their grimy faces. They leaned side by side against the office’s interior window and looked down at the warehouse, which was no longer so empty, with its pile of crumpled desks and broken chairs heaped in the center—the first debris of a transformation that had barely begun.

“Where do we even begin?” Kevin asked, and he wasn’t talking about the artwork.

Jack remained silent for a while. His green eyes were fixed on the pile of metal below, on the open container in the background, on the expanse of concrete that would soon be filled with everything they needed to survive what was to come. The sun now streamed almost directly through the exterior windows, beating down on his back, warm, the kind of heat that seems to push a person forward.

“We’ll start with the money,” he finally said, his voice low, without any drama, like someone who had decided this a while ago and was just waiting for the right moment to say it aloud. “Ninety thousand won’t get you anywhere by robbing a fifteen thousand drug dealer. We hit a small target last time and it worked, but beginner’s luck runs out. Next time we need to raise the level of the target. Something that has real value, in money or something that ChaosGacha accepts as a high-stakes bet.” He turned to Kevin, and his face held that concentrated coldness that was how he loved his friend and protected him at the same time. “But this time we plan like grown-ups. We don’t go anywhere without mapping it out first. You have the muscle, I have the suit and the brains. If we plan properly, this isn’t just two kids trying their luck anymore. It’s something else.”

Kevin held his friend’s gaze, and after a moment shook his head slowly, seriously, the same serious nod he had given his Uncle John hours earlier in front of the fence.

“Agreed,” he said.

Outside, the last sliver of sunlight sank behind the hills, and the shadow of the shed stretched long across the barren land, alone, with no one to cast their own shadow upon it. Inside, in the growing twilight, two dust-covered boys stood before a broken window, staring at an empty space they had just made their own, ninety thousand dollars away from where they were and where they needed to be. The path was concrete, dangerous, and already laid out before either of them had spoken a word that morning. The only thing left to do now was walk it.