Page 107 of Raven

Marlow exhales through his lips. “This started happening four hours ago.”

“In the middle of the storm?” I ask.

“Yep. We thought it was the hurricane hitting Northern Zion hard. Until Bishop called, said the center of the hurricane shifted away from Zion, didn’t even reach us technically, so no way the cameras were knocked out by the winds.”

“You didn’t call me right away?”

Archer steps in. “We thought it was just a small riot.”

“Sir?” one of the IT guys says. “Why are we not dispatching the guards to Port Mrei?”

No one answers. The answer is clear: we don’t have enough security personnel to protect Ayana and deal with the riot in Port Mrei, especially in weather like this. Ayana’s security is the priority, and we are not even sure we can trust all of our guards.

That’s our biggest problem. Guards are a whole different beast. Former mercenaries, contractors, who’ve been to hell and back. We are all human, and we learned after the Change what that means—a slight shift of circumstances, where it’s “them or I,” and we are ready to do the most atrocious things. The guards at Ayana are paid really well. But loyalties shift. Bribes are delicious. Most of all, people get bored, and so do guards. And they stop caring who they get paid by.

Archer motions to us for attention. “My office.”

In his office, Marlow, Bishop, and I take seats. Ortiz walks around, his hands on his waist as he is deep in his thoughts.

Archer leans against his desk and lights a cigarette. He never smokes in his office and barely ever in his house anymore, since Katura moved in. He is nervous, and thank God for the team we have here, specifically Bishop and Ortiz, who is quickly becoming a man in charge.

“Why didn’t the security alarms go off when more than three cameras went down?” he asks no one in particular.

Marlow rubs his face with both hands. “AI security algorithm overrode itself.”

“Overrode itself,” Archer murmurs and chuckles bitterly.

“I don’t know how it happened. The IT department is looking into?—”

“You have one fucking job, Marlow!” Archer snaps, stabbing his forefinger in the air at Marlow. “The algorithm has a glitch? You have to know. The cameras go off? You have to know. The fucking security fails? You should know why, how, when, and should’ve had plan B for that shit!”

Ayana relies heavily on high-tech and AI. Sure, we have plenty of guards and security systems. But they are curated and coordinated through a complex network that—imagine that—glitches.

“Why are you surprised, Archer?” I say as calmly as I can, knowing this is by no means Marlow’s fault. “I told you that before. We needed to pay more attention to the foot traffic. And we weren’t, not for a while. We had barely any security in town. Cameras only tell us what we see, not what’s actually happening.”

I nod toward the camera feeds on the screens outside his office. “How do we control that? We can’t. How did your kidnapping become possible? But it did, didn’t it? You can’t control every person and kid in Port Mrei. You don’t have enough foot soldiers for that. And that’s what matters. Your security system is an alert mechanism. But it doesn’t quite protect you. So, what happens when someone hacks Ayana’s security and network?”

Marlow shifts his gaze to Archer. These guys grew up in a world coordinated by service staff and AI assistance. They never lived on the streets. Old school is not extinct. It’s still there. And occasionally it sabotages the new world.

We go quiet, and it seems that everyone is looking through the office window at the screens of live feeds that go out one after another, as if someone has the camera grid plan. I’m sure they do.

“We are not looking at the riot,” Ortiz says quietly. “We are witnessing a cleverly orchestrated security hack. We are losing Port Mrei.”

It’s a pack mentality. That’s what a mob is. Even those who don’t want to fight, knowing that this war with Ayana will only make their lives worse, do it anyway, carried away by the spike of adrenalin.

You can see the anger unraveling. Brains off. Knives out. Guns. Bats. Broken bottles. Everyone is off the rails. Class, gender, race—there’s a pervasive dominant psychology connected to all those, but the rules and prejudice get erased when there’s no law in sight.

And someone planned to rile those people up. There’s fuck all nothing we can do unless we want to jeopardize the lives of our guards.

These are the roaring twenties, that’s what they started calling the era after the Change. But the joke has long turned into a grim reality.

“Can we get more guards from the mainland on such quick notice?” Marlow asks.

Archer looks at Ortiz as if checking the permission to answer. “We could. But we don’t have accommodations for them. We could set up emergency camps, sure, but then we need supplies, we need deliveries from the mainland. If we do it too fast, we take a chance on turning this into a humanitarian crisis. Is that town worth it?”

“We need to talk to Butcher,” Marlow says.

“And say what?” I taunt. “Why isn’t your town under control? I’ll tell you why it isn’t. Because Butcher wants it that way, and he orchestrated this chaos. It’s convenient. It lets him shift the blame on someone. And he doesn’t care that we know exactly what he is doing.”

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