North Blocks

The blocks went up fast after the war, built to house dockworkers and factory hands within walking distance of their jobs, and for a while the plan worked exactly as intended. What never arrived was everything else — the parks, the clinics, the reasons to stay besides rent being cheap. A generation grew up here with plenty of neighbors and not much else, and crews filled the gap the city left behind.

Dax Mercer didn't set out to run anything. He started by walking older neighbors home at night because nobody else would. Northline grew out of that habit, one favor at a time, until half the block owed him something and the other half wanted to. Sera Voss took a different route to the same result — she noticed that kids on skateboards see everything, and nobody suspects them of reporting it, and built a surveillance network out of people too young to be taken seriously.

The two crews barely compete. Mercer's muscle is worthless without Voss's warnings, and Voss's information network needs Mercer's protection to keep operating. Together they've made North Blocks the hardest district in the city to move through unnoticed — not because of firepower, but because somebody is always watching.

This is where a would-be boss finds an army, not a fortune. Every other kind of power in the city eventually needs people willing to show up, and this is where those people come from.