We didn’t stop in the backyard. The windows upstairs were barricaded, but they had gaps that left open the possibility of attack. We kept moving, our increased strength and toughness making the fence only a minor hurdle even with the still-heavy suitcases we were dragging.

On the other side of the fence was a drainage ditch. It would turn into something like a small river when it rained, but the past few weeks had been sunny. For now, it made a perfect escape route: paved, free from obstructions, and guarded from sight on both sides.

I took the lead, using Assisted Strike without reservation to clear the monsters I saw or sensed in our way. We hurried through the ditch, not stopping until we neared the receding edge of a retention pond it opened into. Bushes adjacent to the opening gave us some cover, but I still felt uncomfortably exposed.

“I think we’re fine here,” I said.

“We are,” Alexandra said dismissively. “All together, that group had less than fifty money. I’d be surprised if any of them have two abilities.”

“I’m worried about those Dragons of theirs,” George said. “From what they said, it sounded like they’ve been one of the few groups out on the streets around here–maybe the only group. If that’s the case, they probably each had four abilities or more before the Points Siphon arrived. We have to assume they grabbed that too. There are more of them than us, and we have to assume that most of them have more abilities than us, too.”

I eyed the local Points Siphon, gem at the top dark. We weren’t too far, but we had intentionally not gone directly to it. If there was one thing I could almost guarantee would make people upset, it was outsiders coming in and looking like they might steal locals’ points. Even if it had been claimed right before we entered the neighborhood, I didn’t want to look like we had designs on it. “They’ve probably set up by the base,” I said, nodding toward the spire. “I would, if I was trying to monopolize resources.”

“Do you think they’ll attack us?” Sofia asked. She’d taken a Biological Augment that improved her vision, and her pupils were inhumanly wide, her irises narrow. They looked even wider now. “They wouldn’t, right? The Dragons? If they do, we’d stop bringing food. They won’t want that. Right?”

“Of course!” Alexandra said. The deep furrows of her eyebrows were at odds with the light tone of her voice. “But… perhaps we should head home.”

“What? You’re kidding. You remember what it was like waking up without food in the house, Mom.”

Alexandra shifted, uncomfortable. “Of course. But my sympathy to these people is not greater than my responsibility to you. I thought we might encounter hostile people, but… individuals. Like the ones Ms. Meghan had to deal with when hunting.”

Who had told her about that? I wondered, then dismissed the thought. Alexandra was a talker. She’d had plenty of time to chitchat yesterday evening and this morning, before the Points Siphon became available.

“I didn’t expect hostile gangs,” Alexandra continued.

Sofia’s nervousness was overridden by anger. “Oh no. You are not using me as an excuse. I’m seventeen. I’m not a child. If you’re going to abandon starving people because of a threat we haven’t even seen, don’t use me to try to make it sound okay. Who knows if those Dragons are even real?”

I winced. I remembered being that age. In a sense, Sofia had a point. In a year or so, she could be going away to college, living independently, perhaps not even talking to her parents for days or weeks at a time. But I also remembered my perspective at the time, my limited view of the world. The stupid risks I took without even realizing how stupid they were.

Sofia might not be a child, but she was still young.

Not that saying that would go over well.

“Let’s take a minute and think about our options,” I said, meeting Sofia’s odd eyes. “Clearly, we’re not going to try to seek out these Dragons. There are more of them than us, and they’re probably stronger. Even if they’re hurting people, it doesn’t help anyone for us to fight them right now.”

Sofia nodded, grudgingly.

“So, we’re going to try to evade them. The question is if we head home as quickly as we can, or if we try to find ways to keep to the original plan,” I said.

“I don’t like the idea of heading straight home,” George said. “If there is a gang here, I don’t want to draw them a direct line to the Shop and our homes. The Shop might be fairly noticeable on its own, but even so...”

“That’s a good point,” I said.

“We could head off to the southeast, instead,” Alexandra said. “That will point them a bit away, and help us get closer to the road.”

I looked down the line of the drainage ditch we’d run down. It was clear and open, ready to admit a deluge of water when we got one of our infrequent but torrential rains, bordered on both sides by tall wooden fences.

“Let’s travel through backyards as much as we can,” I said. “That’ll make it harder to see us from a distance. Those Dragons might be looking for us.”

Sofia frowned. “Okay. But… if it looks like a house is occupied, I’m going to try to sell them food.”

“You are not!” her mother snapped. Sofia looked rebellious, but her face softened as Alexandra continued in a more subdued tone. “I will be the one to approach the houses. You will wait outside.”

“Yeah,” I cut in. “Sofia can hold your suitcase. You can take her backpack.”

Everyone looked at me, puzzled. I shook my head. “Maybe you haven’t noticed, but both times we’ve sold people food, they couldn’t look away from the massive pile of it we’ve shown them. Why give them that temptation? Sofia’s backpack can hold about fifty rations. That should be enough for any one house, and if you have to abandon the backpack to get away safely, that’s a much smaller sacrifice.”

Alexandra considered this. “You are speaking sense. Also, I will not go inside any more houses. I will knock on doors and sell on their back doorstep. That is all.”

I thought about volunteering to be the one to sell the food, but even if I had my shield and Parry, Alexandra had an extra ability on me, and the increased strength and durability that went with it. Plus, even if I found her a little obnoxious and dramatic, she cut a decidedly friendlier figure than I. When fighting through the ditch she’d released four knives from a side pouch on her suitcase and had manipulated them deftly with her Telekinesis, but with no enemies visible, the knives were tucked away again. She was dangerous, but apparently unarmed: her hot pink nails would draw attention to her empty hands. Plus, since she planned to stay in eyesight, I could Draw Attention away from her.

Also, I really didn’t want to talk to more strangers right now. I was too busy kicking myself. My idea had seemed so clever when I’d proposed it, but now it was looking really reckless. Stupid. Maybe it “solved” the hunting problem for us—we’d killed over a dozen monsters in our flight down the drainage ditch alone—but at the cost of the four of us seriously risking our lives. If we’d just waited a day for another driver, we could have at least taken more people! Actually, we could have taken one or two more with us today, if we’d worked a little harder to find people to coordinate with.

We climbed the fence on the far side of the ditch, into the backyard of a house that appeared empty. The windows were unbarricaded, but also intact. It was weird, but the rams seemed to somehow be able to tell which structures had people inside. A smashed section of fence to our right suggested that a ram had spawned back here at some point and left for richer hunting grounds elsewhere. We followed its trail, pausing briefly to kill each monster we encountered.

Now that we were moving slower, I didn’t use my abilities to fight, relying on the fighting experience I’d accumulated in the past couple weeks to help me get my weapons where they needed to be. If we ran into trouble, I wanted to have a “full tank” of energy, so to speak.

Alexandra continued using her abilities, but she seemed to be taking it easy as well, only two daggers emerging from her bag each time we needed to fight, rather than four. I could see George’s eyebrows raise as he watched her fight. He’d gotten his Telekinesis ability only a few days ago, but Alexandra had been using it from the start. There was a difference in power, yes, but there was a much bigger difference in experience. She had an arsenal of tools at her disposal and she used them confidently: nets for the flyers, blades sweeping low to slice at leafenrats’ bellies or spinning like a sawblade when I pointed out a badblanket.

Actually, watching that gave me an idea. Why not use an actual sawblade? I suggested as much, and Alexandra looked confused at first.

“Is that a thing you have? I am not a handy person, but I would have thought such tools were only for professionals, yes?”

I shook my head. “We don’t have one—Vince and I aren’t super handy ourselves—but my dad had a circular saw and a, um… circular saw that you lower.. Uh…” I clicked my tongue a few times, trying to jog my ailing memory. “Miter saw, I think it’s called? Either of those would have blades you could remove and use.”

“Whatever did he need those for?” Alexandra asked, a veneer of politeness trying to conceal her disbelief. “Landscaping?”

I laughed. “No, no, you wouldn’t use them for anything like that. They weren’t hedge trimmers. Home improvement projects were my dad’s hobby. We only ever hired contractors twice I can remember, growing up, to do the framing work for a home addition and to check the work my dad had done on the electric wiring. But he was always taking down walls and re-doing trim and so forth. It was rare that there wouldn’t be some work-in-progress in our house.”

Alexandra stared at me. “Your poor mother.”

I shrugged. “I guess! But I don’t think my dad was that weird. I’m sure there are people with those tools in our neighborhood. Do you have one, George?”

He was biting his lower lip, thinking. “I’ll have to check. I’ve never used one, but we have a cupboard in the garage with a bunch of hand-me-down tools from my father-in-law. It’s definitely the kind of thing he would have given us. I need to at least get some knives like Alexandra has, there, but a sawblade would be even better - dangerous on all sides.”

“You couldn’t use it to do this, though,” Alexandra said, sending a knife sinking deeply into the side of a charging leafenrat.

“I guess that’s true,” George said. “Maybe it’d be good to have both available, for different enemies.”

The four of us were strong; strong enough to chat as we fought. Even tall fences barely slowed us down, our increased strength making climbing them a cinch. Now that she wasn’t swaying in a moving truckbed, Sofia’s bowshots accurately picked off most of the Bladetails that attacked, and Alexandra was ready with nets to foul the rest. The other foes were hardly worth mentioning. With my Life Sense, they couldn’t surprise us, and it was near-impossible for them to threaten us when we saw them coming.

We passed a number of empty houses, and I was tempted to salvage them, but we had limited time today. George broke a window to empty out a kitchen-counter knife block in clear view, but other than that, we left the unoccupied houses alone.

Whenever we came to the backyard of a house with barricaded windows, Alexandra would go knock on the door. The rest of us stood back, ready to intervene at the first hint of trouble.

People who had killed a few things and earned a bit of Money mostly didn’t cause problems. They just bought their food and thanked us, anxiously glancing around for a sign of the Dragons. I had hoped the first house was… I don’t know. Delusional? But every person we met confirmed that they’d been shaken down by the scale-skinned gang for food, and that resistance had been met with sometimes-fatal violence.

Not everyone meekly handed over their money, though I couldn't call the exception a true problem. One guy followed up his purchase with an attempt to pull Alexandra’s backpack out of her hands. He was completely ineffective. She easily plucked it from his grip with one hand and held up the other to inspect her nails, only belatedly meeting his eyes.

“You need to fight more monsters before you tangle with me,” she told him. “You are weak.”

The guy was a good foot-and-a-half taller than her, and he turned bright red at her dismissive tone. He even raised a hand as if to punch her, but then hesitated, remembering the ease with which she’d pulled the backpack away from him. Alexandra smirked as he hesitated, then turned her back on him and walked away.

No, the knotty problems were the people who hadn’t killed any monsters, or close enough as to make no difference. I didn’t understand how that was possible at this point without a dedicated group clearing the streets, but maybe the Dragons did that. I hoped so: it would make their decision to take people’s food away a little more understandable. A transaction, rather than pure theft, from their point of view. I couldn't agree with that, not when they'd left people dead, but I needed to understand how they thought.

The first time we came to a house without Money, I didn’t even realize it until Alexandra came back to us.

“I am sorry, Sofia. I have wasted ten of the Money we have earned together. She had only one, and two small kids! I could not leave them to share a single ration. I could not!”

Sofia hugged her. “Don’t apologize for that, Mom. I’m glad.”

“That’s going to happen again, though,” George said. “Are we going to keep giving food away?”

Alexandra looked pained for a moment, then flipped her hair back over her shoulder, face defiant. “I am. I suppose if you are not, the charity will cease when we work through the rations Sofia and I have purchased.”

“We’re in a good place, George,” I said.

He hesitated for a moment, but nodded. “Alright. Yeah. You can give away some of the food Meghan and I brought, too. But just a bit at each house, and we need to tell them they have to start earning Money on their own. I don’t know who’s going to come to this neighborhood next. They might not be able to be as generous.”

I frowned. I wasn’t sure if anyone was going to come back to this neighborhood, not if the threat was real. I didn’t want to say that, though. Parceling out small dollops of food to starving people was hard enough. If no one was coming back soon, if that was the last food they’d see for a while… it was too hard to think about.

I couldn’t get the so-called “Dragons” off my mind. What was their goal here? Their plan? Their actions seemed odd, like a cartoon parody of bullies. Take just enough to leave people scared and upset, but leave them alive to potentially come together in opposition. What they were doing was essentially slow murder. They had to realize that.

I came up with plenty of theories, but no certainties.

It was amazing how fast our rations dwindled. It was clear that most people here had fought only when necessary, but the Dragons had made people afraid: scared enough to risk fighting smaller monsters to reach a neighbor’s home. By the time we reached the end of the road, we’d sold nearly two-thirds of what we’d brought with us.

I creaked open the gate to the fence, quickly ending the life of a leafenrat that charged me as I left the backyard. Cautiously, I poked my head around the corner of the house. I could see quite a distance down the road in both directions, but it was empty. I could sense the edge of a badblanket ahead and I beckoned the others.

“It looks clear. Stay close, and follow me exactly. I want to get into the next set of backyards as quickly as possible.”

Serious nods met my instructions and I didn’t waste time, bolting out across the road. I risked a glance backward as I swerved around a second badblanket, making sure everyone had avoided the first. As I looked backward, I saw Sofia slow, eyes wide with alarm. I whipped my head back to the front.

Two people had stepped out of the home in front of us, each covered head-to-toe in scales.