All Chapters of The Trillionaire System: Chapter 81 - Chapter 90

Dawn found Garden City wrapped in a gray hush—the kind that comes after rain and before decisions. Smoke still nursed the edges of broken blocks, but the first light caught the green banners strung across the plaza like vines reclaiming a wall. In the tower’s hollow crown, the council gathered around the rough table that had replaced a throne. Today wouldn’t be a day of speeches. It would be a day of plans.Ethan arrived with his jacket still damp and his eyes red from too little sleep. Jun stood already, tracing an outer district with a grease pencil on the paper map. Leah sorted lists by triage priority. Alexander leaned over three scavenged terminals tied to a radio lattice he’d been welding into shape for days. Arman, bandaged and grim, had a slate covered in schedules that looked like a siege on time itself. Cira, the journalist-turned-teacher, carried a small box of neatly folded petitions from the tunnels and the surface markets.“Let’s start,” Ethan said, voice low. “Selene Va

Morning broke on Garden City like a hand unclenching—sun shouldering through torn clouds, light finding its way into alleys that had only known sirens and smoke. The caravan from Green March had slept by the southern gate under lantern glow and soft watch, and when the bakers lit their ovens, the strangers bought bread with laughter roughened by long roads. For a fragile hour, it looked like a city being a city.By the time the council convened, the hour had soured.The meeting space in the tower had shed a little more of its ghost each day—fewer scorch marks, more chalked schedules, a map whose corners were held down by mugs and a dented wrench instead of knives. The rough-hewn table was full: Ethan, Leah, Jun, Arman, Alexander, Cira. Beside them, three surface-district delegates—the Dockside matriarch Nawal, the River Quarter’s mill foreman Garret, and Fay from the Old Market—and two tunnel representatives, Mira and Kesh, whose shoulders still wore the habit of stooping under low ce

The morning after the plaza assembly tasted like iron and citrus—blood ghosts and new fruit. Sunlight broke through a ragged seam in the cloudbank and fell across the square where Ethan had told the city it would not kneel. Men in aprons pulled tarps from stalls. Children chalked NO KINGS on stones until the words dulled under the dust of feet. On the tower’s crown, the green leaf snapped and settled in a wind that promised change but not its cost.Inside the council hall, change presented its bill.The table was crowded long before the hour: councilors, district delegates, three bench readers still in their aprons, two dock stevedores smelling of tar, and a militia quartermaster with the deep-set calm of someone who counted bullets because he remembered counting bodies. Paper and maps layered the wood in restless drifts. The Dominion folder lay off to one side—closed, visible, like a polite threat.Ethan took the last seat, not the first, and let the room show him what it was. Leah h

The morning began with a sound you felt in your ribs before you named it. Not thunder—thunder comes angry and leaves quickly. This was patient, metal on road, the long, low rumble of something organized. Dominion’s “regional exercise” had reached the east ridge.Jun was on the wall first, wind flattening his hair, eyes narrowed into the pale morning. Two armored carriers led the column, shape like clenched fists. Six trucks followed, canvas tops tight, wheels spotless in a way the city no longer understood. A pair of scout bikes ghosted the edges. No flags; gray paint drank the light. Behind, tucked like an afterthought, came a convoy of aid wagons with canvas stenciled in red crosses, the white too white against the bruised landscape. Dominion didn’t knock with one hand. It arrived with both.Ethan climbed the steps two at a time and joined Jun at the rail. He smelled oil and wind and the faint cinnamon of someone’s morning pot down in the plaza. “No banners,” he said.“They’re being

The light blinked again the following night. Once, twice, then gone. A polite knock on the edge of the dark. Not a flare, not a trap you could call a trap out loud. Just a lantern doing something too deliberate to be an accident.Jun reached the ridge before the rest. The ground there was damp, as if the river had crawled up in the night to listen. He crouched near the rocks, pulled his hood lower, and let his eyes adjust until the stars were just noise. There—a faint ember glow behind a crooked post. Someone was out there. Watching. Waiting.Mira arrived next, moving silently. She had brought only one rifle and no theatrics. “Not military,” she whispered. “If it were Dominion, they’d bring noise and paperwork.”Jun nodded. “One lantern. One heartbeat.”Behind them, Ethan and Leah approached with two watch volunteers. No crowd, no alarm. Just quiet steps on damp stone. They had learned that some dangers roared, and others asked politely to be invited in.The lantern flickered. A shado