The man clearly in charge lifted his other arm.

Rifles slid into place along the barricade.

The cartel didn’t look nervous. Didn’t look eager either. Just... ready.

Like men used to winning.

Lachlan rolled his shoulders once and spat dust over the side of the truck.

"Boss," he called toward Sera without looking back at her. "You want I should tell ’em no, or you want to do the honors?"

She finally moved then, sliding out of the truck slow enough to make every rifle track her at once.

Luci dropped to the ground beside her, his lips peeled back from teeth built for ending arguments.

Sera didn’t look up at the man on the barricade.

She looked at the trucks. At the guns. At the men gripping them.

Then she smiled. Small. Sharp.

"Why waste words?" she asked out loud, her voice bright and young. "Men like this only understand one language." She turned to Zubair, taking her eyes off the ’threat’ in front of her. "Burn them all."

The man on the barricade lifted his arm higher like he thought he was giving the order first and the entire front line of sandbags erupted in fire where it touched the ground.

Men cursed and stumbled back from the heat.

Rifles barked.

The trucks roared forward.

Lachlan jumped off the side before they even stopped moving, rifle snapping to his shoulder, grin cutting wide open as the whole world went loud again.

Fire ran along the sandbags like a fuse and climbed the poles in a rush that turned red cloth into black ash.

Rifles cracked all down the barricade.

The first rounds fizzed past her hip and chewed chips out of the concrete. Sera dropped off the tailgate, boots hitting hot grit, Luci pacing tight on her right with lips peeled back and breath white in the heat.

"Front," Elias clipped from behind the hood. Two shots answered him, clean. Two masks disappeared from the firing line.

Zubair rolled the truck forward six feet and lifted his hand.

The flames parted at the bumper the way weeds do for a prow. Heat shimmered off his wrists, pushed the worst of the fire aside, and fed the rest until it ate only what he allowed.

Alexei slid out of the lead cab and walked left into the smoke like a man on a cold morning. His palm described a small circle, lazy.

Frost took the nearest barrel and locked it solid. A lit bottle hit it, shattered, and went dark with a sad little hiss that made the men behind it swear.

Lachlan vaulted the side of the bed with a laugh that didn’t quite reach his eyes. He hit the ground already moving, rifle up, blue pulsing faint along his forearms like wire humming in a wall.

The captain on the barricade, the one with the long coat, mirrored goggles, and the stance that belonged to someone used to winning, raised an arm to cut the chaos.

His line tried to listen and failed.

Fear outran discipline.

Two more molotovs came in high arcs. Zubair burned one apart midair; Alexei froze the second to a dead rock that bounced once and fell off the span.

Sera didn’t rush forward.

She crossed the last lengths of hot concrete the way she crossed labs and cages—straight, unbothered, already cataloging angles.

The drum on her left coughed flame, then choked when Zubair stole its breath.

A raider popped from behind a panel and tried a shot from the hip. She put a round through his shoulder and kept walking while his rifle clattered into the burn.

"Right flank," Elias breathed. Lachlan pivoted without looking. One burst. The pressure on their right dropped by half.

The front edge broke first. Not because she asked it to, but because men taught to collect tribute discovered what a firebreak looked like when it walked.

"Hold your line!" the captain barked, not loud, somehow everywhere.

They did, to their credit. Boots skidding back into place, barrels leveling on her chest as the men tried to regroup.

The nearest lifted his chin and tried to meet her eyes through the smoke.

She didn’t give him that contact. She gave him the reality that the horde at her back didn’t fear numbers, flags, or practiced speeches at toll booths.

"Enough," she told the fire, and it obeyed, curling down off the center sandbags into a low orange wall that marked her side from theirs.

Of course, she wasn’t the one really commanding the fire, but no one else needed to know that.

She stopped at that line. Luci’s shoulder leaned into her arm, steady.

Zubair’s truck idled ten paces behind and to the left, grill glowing a dull cherry that frightened the men who were old enough to remember what an engine block looked like when it failed.

Elias took a knee on her right, rifle settled. Alexei stood in the smoke to her left with frost licking the metal under his boots.

Lachlan split the difference wherever a hole opened, joy in his mouth, restraint in his hands.

The captain hopped down from the barricade, coat sweeping the heat like he didn’t mind the singe. He walked to the firebreak she’d left and stopped there.

Close enough to see her eyes. Far enough to keep his men from shooting out of reflex.

"The River branch doesn’t kneel," he told her, voice even now that he was close, scarf muffling the words just enough to take the theater out of them.

"Nobody asked you to," she returned.

"Then try a different door." He lifted his gloved hand a fraction toward the red-and-black banner behind him. "Toll or teeth."

"We aren’t paying the toll, and you already tried teeth." She tipped her chin toward the spent bottles and cooling brass. "You don’t want a second pass."

Something in the set of his shoulders shifted—calculation, not doubt.

He took a breath that fogged faint in Zubair’s heat. "You force my hand, I lose men. You give me nothing, I lose face. You pass this bridge after cutting my line, I answer to a man who counts dead bodies and fuel by the same metric."

"The General," Alexei murmured, tone faintly amused.

The captain’s head barely turned toward the voice in the smoke. "He keeps people alive. That makes him unpopular in a world that prefers easy."

Sera let the line hang. The creature purred low under her ribs, approval without hunger. No punishment waited in that sound. Only choice. She liked that more than she should have.

"Olive branch, then," she told him. "Stand your men down. We don’t carve our way through your city. You don’t touch mine."

He didn’t look behind him for permission. He lifted his hand. Rifles lowered a notch.

Not all the way.

But it was enough.