It took the next five days to relocate everyone to Sector 27. It was no easy feat to move around a hundred and twenty four people to an entirely different city. Yes, just roughly more than hundred had survived everything that had happened since the riots of Sector 21. About twenty out of the initial two hundred had died in the riot itself. Thirty something had succumbed to injuries and illnesses in the Rescue and Relief camp. Seven others kept protesting even in the prison, fasting indefinitely and picking fights with the operatives. The rest just took the easier option and ended their own miseries.

And those that were left came back to Sector 27 with barely any air or celebration, with hardly any joy for freedom. The Sector 25 prison massacre (what it would be dubbed later on) hung over everyone's head like a dark, melancholy cloud.

Cathy spent most of these past five days with the man named Gary Wan. Gary had volunteered to be the last one to inhabit one of the many empty houses in the town of Mathesdale. He'd chosen to help everyone else settle in before thinking of his own comfort. Also, he was easy to talk to for Cathy. But she knew that she was really just avoiding talking to the other three people living in the Koehlwin manor. Especially Lisa.

"And I replaced all the older lights with the ones that work," she said as she came downstairs with a bag full of light bulbs with burnt up filaments. They'd allotted Gary a cozy little two story cinder-block house opposite the old post office.

"You didn't have to do that, you know?" Gary smiled.

"It's okay. No big deal." Cathy shrugged. "You've been doing quite some heavy lifting since you returned. This is just a meager errand."

"Either way, I'm grateful," he said amiably.

"No problem." Cathy said with a smile.

Gary walked over and flicked on the light switch. "I almost can't believe this." He gazed up at the shining light bulb. "There's actually electricity in a place that doesn't belong to the government."

Cathy couldn't hold back a chuckle. "I know right?" she said. "It really feels like magic. Right now, pretty much all houses are running on solar power. Gemma and Brendan had also been talking about building a grid so we can also use the excess solar power some of these houses produce. Also, a grid can help supply the power to further houses. Right now, most houses are not connected to a grid So we've put people in solar equipped houses. Hope you won't mind the crowded neighborhood."

Gary grinned. "Don't worry. I've lived in a much smaller place with a lot less privacy for the past couple of months. This is practically a palace compared to all that."

"Good to know," Cathy said before letting out a sigh. They both drifted off into a comfortable silence. Maybe not as comfortable for Cathy. There was a question that kept gnawing at her.

"Are you okay?" Gary said with a slightly worried look.

Unconsciously, the nail on her index finger started to scrape at the cuticle of her thumb. "Were they...were the prison operatives bad people?" she asked.

Gary looked at her thoughtfully and nodded. He sat down on the couch and leaned back a bit. "They were people, alright." He shrugged. "But they were certainly better than most others of their job description."

Cathy kept scraping at her finger. "Really?"

Gary nodded. "As someone who was an active part of the Sector 21 riots, I can tell you some of the prison operatives were better people than some operatives I've encountered."

This is exactly what Cathy didn't want to hear. She wasn't sure if knowing the opposite of what Gary had told her would've made her feel any better. But this just made everything seem worse.

"I can tell what you are thinking of right now," Gary said.

She looked at him. "You can?"

"It's quite obvious, trust me." He smiled wryly before his face sobered up again. "But rather than worrying about what happened at the prison you should worry more about your friend."

She frowned and remained quiet. Gary kept going.

"The woman who handled that truck must be immensely capable, considering what she did. But there's no denying that she is also immensely dangerous for that very reason," he said. "She is someone who can handle that powerful vehicle. What if she turns the crosshairs on us? Who would even be able to stop her?"

Cathy's heart sank at Gary's words. This was just getting worse. "Do you think if someone was to convince her to...to give up the control of the truck; would she agree?"

"You and the Koehlwins know her better than me. You can answer that question way better," Gary said.

Cathy sighed. She wished she could agree with him but after what Lisa had done at the prison she wasn't so sure if she could even recognize the woman if she saw her again. She thanked Gary for his advice and left the house. Whether or not she managed to convince Lisa was a different matter. She still had to talk to her after what happened at Sector 25. Avoiding her was certainly not helping at all.

###

The Koehlwin manor had tall floor to ceiling windows on the second floor corridor. The glass was always hidden behind a thick velvet curtain but today the curtain was raised. Lisa stood by the window, holding her baby daughter in her arms as they looked down at the road.

The street was abuzz with people. There were shadows in the windows of neighboring houses. People walked up and down the asphalt, mingling and mixing together. "Look at that, sweetie," Lisa whispered to the child in her arms. "They are all our friends. Mommy freed them all from a bad place. You know how she did it? She did it by punishing her enemies."

The baby pressed her little hand against the glass, as if reaching for the people outside. "Mmmum..."

"Yes, baby. They will all be your friends too," Lisa whispered in the same soothing voice. "This is what a civilization looks like, sweetheart. This is the kind of place your mommy used to see when she was your age. Mommy is gonna make all the cities look like this again. Full of friends. All for her little darling." She nuzzled the baby's ear. The child made a soft mumbling noise again.

"L-Lisa?" Cathy said from behind her.

Lisa turned to look at the girl and smiled. "Hey, there. What have you been up to? Haven't seen you around since ever."

"Um...I was just helping everyone settle in," Cathy said.

"Lisa and the baby are mad cuz Cathy won't play with us." Lisa made a mock-pout at her.

Cathy chuckled nervously as she looked at the mother and the baby together and felt a lump in her throat. They both looked so...normal. "Um, Lisa, I actually wanted to talk to you about something," she said, "it's important."

"No, first I gotta show you something." Lisa said, taking Cathy's hand and pulling her towards the window. She showed her the people walking on the streets. "Isn't it beautiful? Soon every city would look like this. We'll get rid of the lifeless sectors that the governments turned them all into." She looked at Cathy with her eyes brimming with excitement. "With Erik's leadership, the numbers of the Last Hand and the power of the peacebringer, we'll bring the government to its knees."

Cathy frowned at the woman and swallowed hard. "L-Lisa, we just stormed a single prison," she said. "I don't think our current numbers are gonna be enough to take down the entire Ardvenian government."

"Remember how many people we had when we started off? Just the four of us. And now we have more than a hundred on our side," she said. "That number will only grow larger with time." She smiled back at the streets, still holding the baby in her arms, almost like a doll. "We are building a new nation out of the ruins, Cathy. It is bound to spill some blood. But it's all gonna be worth it. Deaths of our enemies don't matter as much as the lives of our friends."

Enemy, Cathy thought, that was a strange word. Makes the operatives feel even less human.

Then words seemed to betray her altogether. Everything Lisa said sounded far-fetched yet somehow attainable. Who would've even believed Erik a few months ago if he'd said that he was going to take down a high security prison with a team that consisted of a pregnant mother and a teenager? That would've sounded like the beginning of a joke. Yet, here they were today.

Is this really what victory is supposed to feel like?

###

"This is way better than the dump they called Sector 21."

"This feels like a real city."

"You don't even need to wear gas masks in some places!"

"I love the name Mathesdale."

"Has a lovely ring to it, doesn't it?"

Gemma had missed the chatter of life, the bustling streets, the crowds of people. Yet now that she was surrounded by it, she found it difficult to smile at the scene. Erik walked alongside her. They were on their way back from their final checks on the settlement, making sure no one was up to anything funny in the neighborhood. The Koehlwins hadn't expected this to be a problem they would face. But about ten people had already fled Mathesdale after getting some supplies and fueled vehicles in the past couple of days. The final number of the members of Last Hand was down to a hundred and ten approximately. Hopefully, they'd remain loyal.

Gemma wouldn't really blame any of them if they didn't. This was survival after all. They had to do what they had to do.

That's when she felt Erik's hand on her arm. "You okay, Gemmy?"

She just nodded absently.

"You sure?" he said with a worried frown. "You've been awfully quiet."

"I'm fine, brother." What does he expect me to say? They walked another block without speaking a word for a while.

After that, Erik was the one who broke the silence again. "You know what? We should kick back for a bit when we get home. I'll pour you some jogir wine. You love it, don't you?"

There was a strain of awkwardness in his voice. It was the kind of tone that people used when they knew something truly terrible had happened. Something that needed to be addressed. But there was no subtle way of broaching that subject. "I'm not in a mood for wine," Gemma said quietly.

"There's no mood for wine, Gemmy. Wine is supposed to make the mood," Erik said with a smile.

Why is he trying so hard? "I'm tired, Erik. I just wanna go to bed." It wasn't really a lie.

"Right," Erik nodded. "You obviously deserve some rest."

"Thanks," Gemma said quietly.

Then they were at the gates of the manor. They walked inside and up the gravel path to the front door.

"Gemmy, before you go inside I wanted to talk about what happened at the prison–"

"Is there anything we can do about it now?" she said as they came to a halt outside the big entrance door.

Erik sighed and looked at the garage by the west perimeter wall. No one had been in there for the past five days. "I knew the peacebringer was powerful but I didn't really expect it to be capable of...what we saw at the prison."

"The truck is just a weapon, Erik," Gemma said. "Even a lone match in the hand of a monster can burn an entire village."

Erik swallowed hard. Gemma walked into the manor without saying anything more.

###

Cathy found Erik on the porch when she walked out. He was leaning by the pillar, his gaze was intent on the garage that stood shut. She walked up next to him. "What's up?"

He just shook his head. "I don't know."

Cathy scoffed. "I know what you mean by that."

He turned to her, eyebrow raised. "You do?"

She nodded. "Even though we won we are somehow in a more messed up situation," she said. "And I'm not even sure what to focus on right now. The next step of our plan? Or the impact of our last actions?"

There was a moment of silence as they gazed at the garage.

Then Erik said, "Keep the casualties to a minimum. Everyone agreed to it and yet–" he stopped himself and squeezed the bridge of his nose.

Cathy was already scraping at her cuticle again. She regarded him with a worried frown. In the brief span of period she'd got to know Erik this was the first time she saw him in such...distress.

He let out a ragged breath and shook his head. "I'm tired," he said, turning to leave. "I'm going to bed. Don't come to wake me up...for anything."

###

The images of the war kept flashing in his head. There was the roar of gunfire and the screams of dying men. The ground never stopped shaking. The smell of sulfur and arsenic would get burned into his nostrils. He would soon learn to sleep with his pistol under his pillow, his hand clutching the cold carbon-fiber grip.

He would then wake up in cold sweat, still holding onto the gun. It would take another couple of minutes for the voices to stop whispering. But it would take longer for his head to stop aching. This was how most nights went for Erik Koehlwin. Tonight was no exception.

He climbed out of the bed and took off his shirt that was sodden with sweat. He walked over to the window and gazed out at the dusky sky which was as devoid of stars as ever.

The faces he saw dying in the battlefield of his nightmares had changed. Yet none of them looked out of place. You see enough death in a lifetime and then every corpse starts to look the same. And the EpiFreeze had really made these night terrors worse.

He needed a drink. He went downstairs and into the wine cellar next to the pantry. He walked into the dimly lit stone-walled room. The air was slightly damp, a heavy fermented scent hung in the air. Erik found it soothing.

He went straight towards a barrel in the far right corner. There was a cabinet full of antique crystalware. He took out a fancy glass and filled it to the rim from the barrel. He downed the booze in a single gulp. It didn't quite hit the spot. It was disappointing for the stuff that had been in that barrel since his dad's teen years. So he drank another. Bottoms up.

He kept drinking until the ache in his head got less intense. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and put the glass back in the cabinet.

He would have to talk to Lisa as soon as she woke up. He knew there was no point in trying to dance around the topic of the prison massacre. He would also need to talk to Gemmy–ease the tension that he had felt with her earlier. He needed her next to him. Afterall she was the only family he had in this world anymore. There were a few other Koehlwins in the unsectorized states of Ardvenia, living large like the millionaires they were, enjoying the fortune that his dad had left for the entire lineage. They weren't family, though. Not for Erik.

There's more to family than just the same genetics and last name.

Gemma could've gone off and lived like the rest of them. But she'd stuck to her guns. Just like him, she'd clung to the roots of what his dad had built and tried to carry it forward in her own way. Even though their father had given up on this place himself. And more than anything else, she was the only one who'd stood by Erik when he'd decided to go off and join the army rather than reaping the fruits of the family business. She was the only one who had loved him despite everything. That's what made Gemma his family. He would've died ten times over (probably a lot more) for her if it meant he could be with her in this home. He knew he couldn't keep living with that tension between them. What Lisa had done at the prison, she did it when Erik was in charge. He had to take the responsibility for it.

Yes, he had to indeed talk to Gemma tomorrow.

Erik paused for a minute, standing by the barrel full of vintage wine and reconsidered his decision. "Fuck it," he muttered, "I'm gonna talk to her right now."

He walked out of the cellar and towards her room.

"Gemmy, I wanna talk!" He hollered, almost drunkenly. "Open the do–" he noticed the door was actually ajar. The lights were on. He walked inside.

Germaine's bed was immaculate, unslept in. The wardrobe door was cracked open, just like the door of her room. And Gemma was nowhere. Erik frowned when he noticed that the desk lamp was on and shining down on a note.

He picked up the notepad. The letter on the first page was written in his sister's hand with all her elegant curlicues. His heart sank as he kept reading. And when he was done, he felt his knees buckling as he thumped down on the carpet.

With his ass on the floor and his back to her desk, Erik Koehlwin did what he hadn't done in a long time. He cried.