Andy Cerberus spread the files across the workbench and counted them twice. Three field reports, a water schematic stained brown at the edges, and a folded clinic blueprint he'd pulled from a battered drawer behind the back fence. He was an orange tabby in a tan safari jacket, and he had not slept. Red Hills Traders thought he was scouting the Broken Hills corridor for a new outpost. He was, in a way. He just hadn't told them the outpost would sit on top of a Vault-Tec lie. The filing cabinet had given up the best of it. Water-damaged, half its drawers jammed open, papers hanging out like tongues. Inside the bottom drawer he'd found the document that mattered: a pre-war work order for a secondary purification line at the buried clinic, signed off by a Vault-Tec engineer whose name appeared on none of the resident manifests. Two water systems. One for the people in the Vault. One for something else. Andy had read enough of these to know the shape of it. He set the work order on top of the stack. Beside it he placed a gaming laptop, lid open, five files queued on the desktop under a folder labeled Kira's Revelations. He had cross-referenced everything against her notes twice. The frequencies matched. The clinic's concrete pillar marker matched. The hatch location matched. If she walked in skeptical, the laptop would carry the argument he couldn't. Kira Dallas came through the door first, glasses fogged, pack still on. Sinclair Feldman followed, slower, reading the room before he stepped into it. Andy slid the rolodex aside to clear sightlines and gestured at the bench. "Two water systems," he said. "One the residents drank. One they never saw. I can show you where the second one ends." Kira picked up the work order without sitting. She held it under the lamp, traced the engineer's signature with one claw, then set it down. "Pre-war stamp's real. Routing code matches a black-budget series I've seen twice." She glanced at the laptop. "That tells me everything about how they planned it." Sinclair leaned over the blueprint and exhaled through his teeth. "Friend, you understand what you're holding. A hidden line under a clinic nobody admits exists. Guilt's a lousy negotiating partner, but this? This is a deal worth closing." Andy felt the ledger entry shift in his head. "Then we're aligned." Kira nodded once, already moving. "Tomorrow. We open the hatch and we verify. I don't get close to a deal until the product's in my hands." Sinclair was quieter. "If the second system's still running, somebody upstream knows. And the minute we lift that slab, they'll know we know." He met Andy's eyes. "You sure you want to be the one on the ladder?" Andy gathered the files back into the stack. The meeting was over. The descent had just been scheduled.

Andy left the workbench before dawn and cut across the yard to find Marcus. The hatch descent was set for tomorrow, but a message had come in overnight through one of Andy's underground contacts. He carried it folded in his jacket pocket and rehearsed the pitch as he walked. Marcus would not like paying for four guards when two had been the plan. Andy would offer to cover the gear himself. He found Marcus outside the equipment shop, checking a manifest against a stack of crates. Andy handed him the folded note. "Raider band moving north. Twenty to thirty guns. They'll pass the yard inside two days." Marcus read it twice, then looked up. "Source?" "One I trust. He was right about the runner last week." Marcus folded the note and slid it into his own pocket. "Two extra guards won't hold that." "Four," Andy said. "And I'll supply the rifles, ammunition, and vests out of my own stock. Red Hills doesn't need to see the invoice." Marcus studied him. He understood what Andy was buying. Not just wall coverage. A vote of confidence before the hatch opened. "Draw from the armory," Marcus said. "Achilles will draft the rotation. You want your name on the hiring, be there when they sign on." Achilles Greenburn came out of the armory with a clipboard and a short list already started. He was orange and black under a brown safari hat, tool kit on his belt, and he did not waste time on greeting. "Four bodies," he said. "I have two locals who can hold a rifle. I need two more by noon." Andy nodded. "I know a tuxedo named Donald Draper. Vault-Tec security jacket, carries a Colt. He's steady. I'll bring him." Achilles wrote the name down. "The fourth?" "Let Donovan pick," Andy said. "He knows who won't run." Inside the armory, the locker stood open. Rifles racked on the left, ammunition boxes stacked by caliber on the right. Donovan O'Niel was already there, headphones around his neck, sorting magazines onto the salvage bench. He was the Ranger tech who had been working the clinic perimeter with Zelda's crew. He looked up when Andy came in. "Oh man, you heard too. Twenty-plus, moving fast. Hell if I know why they picked this week, but that tends to get around." He tossed Andy a loaded magazine. "I've got a shooter from my old unit who owes me a favor. She's in." By midday all four had signed. Draper took the north corner. Donovan's shooter took the tower. Achilles set the rotation and walked the fence line himself. Andy stood by the gate and watched the yard tighten around him. The raiders had not arrived. The hatch was still scheduled for tomorrow. He had bought the wall he needed. He had also told Marcus, without saying it, that whatever came out of the vault would be worth defending.