The Quarantine Zone was a cancer in the heart of the city, a lawless, sprawling slum that had been walled off and abandoned decades ago after a virulent plague.
It was a place of ghosts and scavengers, where the only law was survival. And at its center, like a skeletal finger pointing at the sky, stood the silent, colossal form of the abandoned Inter-Sector Comms Array.
This was their new home. The array was a city in itself, a labyrinth of concrete bunkers, access tunnels, and echoing relay towers.
It was a place of profound isolation, the perfect hideout for a group of people who had ceased to exist.
Joric, with his engineering expertise, managed to reactivate a small section of the array's auxiliary power, bringing a single, deep-level bunker to life.
It was cold, damp, and smelled of ozone and dust, but it was theirs. And it was here that they began to build their new lives as puppeteers in a war they had helped create.
Their first priority was the deprogramming of the prisoners they had liberated from the Correction Center.
These were the 'failures' of Vex's enhancement process, their minds shattered, their spirits broken.
Joric, with a patience Ryu had never seen in him, began the slow, arduous process of healing. He used a combination of advanced neuro-therapy and simple, human conversation, trying to piece back together the identities that Vex had so ruthlessly scoured.
Ryu played a crucial role in this. His empathic sense, the same ability that had allowed him to reach Jax, now allowed him to connect with these broken souls.
He could feel the shape of their trauma, the echoes of their erased memories.
He could not heal them, but he could guide Joric's therapy, telling him which memories were too painful to touch, which fragments of their old selves were strong enough to be built upon.
It was emotionally draining work, a constant exposure to the raw, psychic wounds of Vex's victims, but it was also a profound act of defiance.
Vex built monsters. They would un-make them.
At the same time, Kiera took charge of their new 'army.' The Quartermaster, now a permanent, if unwilling, member of their team, became her instructor in the dark arts of espionage.
She learned how to create false identities, how to establish secure communication lines, how to move through the city not as a warrior, but as a whisper.
Her target for recruitment was not soldiers, but the disenfranchised, the invisible.
She used Jin's backdoors and Joric's underworld contacts to find them: disgruntled low-level technicians in the clan strongholds, bitter ex-security officers who had been unjustly dismissed, information brokers who were tired of living in fear of the syndicates.
She didn't offer them power or money.
She offered them a chance to fight back against the system that had discarded them. She was building a network not of soldiers, but of spies, a web of informants that stretched from the deepest gutters of the Outer Sector to the glittering spires of the Core.
They were the Ghost Web, and their venom was information. The final piece of their strategy was the most dangerous.
They had to leak Charon's location to Vex.
They couldn't do it directly; Vex was paranoid and would assume it was a trap.
They had to use Charon's own methods against him.
They decided to leak the information to the Onyx Serpents, Charon's secret clients.
They fabricated a report, designed to look as if it came from a panicked, low-level Vanguard agent loyal to Charon.
The report stated that Charon had been captured, that his location was known, and that Vex's faction was about to seize him.
The Serpents, desperate to protect their secret asset and the knowledge he held of their own treason, would have no choice but to act.
They would try to 'rescue' Charon themselves.
And Vex, monitoring his rivals, would see their movement. He would believe the Serpents were trying to steal his prize, and he would move to intercept them.
They were setting the stage for a three-way confrontation, a battle for a frozen spymaster, with their team pulling the strings from the shadows.