Col gave the word from the front of the formation, and the squad turned off the cleared avenue toward the first address on the order.

Ric had been on his feet since before dawn, and his ribs made a sharp pain know on the deep breaths. It wasn’t enough to incapacitate him, but present, the way a bad debt is present.

He had reloaded both pistols at the checkpoints and confirmed it twice, because the first time was habit and the second was because the first had not satisfied him.

The first warehouse was on the north side of the secondary street. Loading bay doors closed.

A working warehouse left the doors open in the morning. These had been closed since the checkpoint men locked down whatever was running here. Thick timber, crossbar-latched from inside.

Two men went to the side passage. Two more to the back exit. Col waited for the sign, then nodded at the door. 𝘧𝓇ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝘣𝓃ℴ𝓋𝑒𝑙.𝑐𝘰𝑚

Ric went in on the left.

His first pistol fired, or it tried to. The flint struck the frizzen, the sparks fell into the pan and the pan powder flashed and that was it, no main charge.

He had the frozen half-second experience of a weapon that had done everything right except the last thing, and then he drew steel.

The bay had four men. Two with crossbows, two with dock tools, a cargo hook and a long pry bar. The crossbowman on the right had already fired at the opening door and the bolt went into the wood two feet to Ric’s left. The crossbowman on the left had his weapon still raised and aimed, waiting for another target.

The militia soldier behind Ric fired his first pistol into the interior.

The ball took the second crossbowman through the upper chest below the collarbone on the right side, punched through the meat of the shoulder, and came out through the back, tearing through the trapezius on the way. The man went backward into the shelving unit behind him, the whole rack shifting and crates coming down off it.

He sat in the wreckage with the arm no longer receiving instructions from him, blinking at the floor in front of his feet.

The reloading crossbowman did not finish. Ric crossed the distance before the string was half-drawn and drove his shoulder into the man’s chest. They went down together, the crossbow somewhere between them, and Ric put the pommel of his sword across the man’s jaw on the way back up.

The jaw went sideways with a crushed sound and the man stopped moving.

The man with the cargo hook swung it at the nearest militia soldier. The curved point raked across the soldier’s left forearm rather than puncturing, a gash from wrist to elbow that opened the skin and the meat beneath.

The soldier pulled the arm back and the hook man overbalanced from the momentum of the swing, and Wex put a sword through his upper thigh from the side. The blade went in six inches and the man let out a high specific sound and sat down with both hands going immediately to the wound.

The man with the pry bar looked at what had happened to the other three, set the bar down and stood with his hands away from his body.

Col checked the staircase at the rear and went up.

He came back down with a ledger, a correspondence box, and a locked flat case that matched one of the descriptions from the briefing.

Then he sent two men to the partitioned room at the back of the storage floor, not on any commercial lease record, but on the briefing’s list.

Inside was a man in his fifties, not a dock worker. Good coat. His hands were shaking against the arms of the chair he had been sitting in when the first volley went off in the avenue.

He had not run and had not armed himself and was hoping the door would keep any visitors away.

It had not.

"Stand up," Col said. "Hands behind your back."

The man said he was a legitimate merchant operating under the terms of a longstanding commercial agreement and he wanted Col to understand the nature of what he was interrupting here.

Col did not move. "Hands behind your back."

The man said he had associates in the capital’s merchant district who would be made aware of this.

Col slapped him in the face. The man finally put his hands behind his back.

He bound them with cord from the correspondence box and handed him to one of the militia.

Ric watched the merchant walk out of his own warehouse with his hands tied and the militia on either side and thought it had not taken long at all.

This was a man who had deals. Who had sat in this room and received payments from Coss’s network and recorded them in ledgers that were now under Col’s arm.

He was looking back at the warehouse as he went through the bay door, still working out whether this could be resolved through the right conversation.

It could not be resolved through any conversation. He appeared to be arriving at that conclusion slowly.

The wounded crossbowman was still in the shelving wreckage when they left. Alive. He had wrapped his good arm around himself and was leaning against the broken crates with his head down. He was not going anywhere.

Wex was moving. His thigh had not been dressed beyond what he had done himself with cord, and he was leaving a partial boot print where the blood had soaked through. He said nothing about it.

The second warehouse on the other side of the block had its bay door open and the interior mostly cleared.

Someone had moved fast when the first volley hit the avenue. Crates relocated, account room stripped except for a table and a burned smell from the cold fireplace.

One man remained, an accountant, not Coss’s people, the man who kept the books. He was sitting at the table with a partially burned ledger open in front of him when they came in and he raised both hands before anyone said anything.

The unburned portions had three pages of transaction entries connecting the warehouse to a supply contract that matched the format in the briefing.

The accountant was arrested and walked out the same way as the first. He did not argue about it.

The third warehouse on the list was empty.

Recent marks in the dust showed where crates had been, the account room had drag marks where a desk had been pulled away from the wall, and the cold fireplace held ash and nothing readable.

One of eleven.

Ric looked at the empty room and said, to no one specifically, "We have a snitch."

Col did not answer that. He marked the address and they moved.

Before they reached the next address, one of the rear soldiers came forward and told Col about the armpit-bolt man. Alive. The wound was bleeding relentless and the lung was near collapse. He had been moved to a rear position near the second barricade.

Col received this and kept walking. Ric kept walking.