Chapter 9
The still was an insult.
Jocelyn found it on her third morning at the compound, tucked in a back corner of the garage behind two dead motorcycles and a stack of tires nobody had touched in years.
A pot still—or something that had once aspired to be one—cobbled together from a stockpot, copper tubing that kinked in three places, and a condenser made from a radiator coil that had no business being anywhere near consumable spirits.
She stood in front of it for a full minute, arms crossed, lips pressed flat.
"Who built this?" she asked Tally, who was sweeping the garage floor with the enthusiasm of a man assigned to his least favorite task.
The prospect shrugged. "Couple brothers, maybe two years back? They wanted to make moonshine for the bar. Ran one batch. Tasted like paint thinner and battery acid had a baby."
"I believe it."
"Nobody's touched it since. Cipher said if anyone wanted to poison the brotherhood, they could at least have the decency to use bullets."
Jocelyn circled the disaster. The bones were there—barely. Someone had understood the basic principle of heating a mash, capturing the vapor, and condensing it back to liquid. They'd just understood nothing else.
The copper tubing was the wrong gauge. The connections leaked at every joint—she could see the residue stains where vapor had escaped instead of flowing to the condenser.
The condenser itself was a crime against distillation.
And the pot had no thermometer, no sight glass, no way to monitor what was happening inside.
Blind distilling. The equivalent of welding with your eyes closed.
Her fingers were already itching.
"I need tools," she said. "Pliers, a tube cutter, solder, flux, and whatever copper pipe you've got on the property."
Tally blinked. "We've got a workshop full of—"
"I know where the workshop is. I need what's in the garage. And a clean stockpot—stainless, not aluminum. Check the kitchen."
"I'm supposed to be sweeping—"
"You're supposed to be doing what you're told. I'm telling you."
Tally looked at her. Looked at the still. Looked at her again. Then he set down the broom and went to find copper pipe.
Jocelyn smiled for the first time in days.
She worked through the morning. Stripped the still down to its base components, separated the salvageable from the hopeless, and laid everything out on the garage floor like a surgeon prepping for an operation.
The copper tubing was garbage—wrong gauge and kinked beyond saving.
But the pot was decent stainless, the frame was solid, and whoever had built the base had at least leveled it properly.
She could work with this.
The compound moved around her while she rebuilt. Brothers came and went, pausing at the garage door to watch the woman on her knees surrounded by copper fittings. Most didn't speak. A few offered commentary.
"Prospect said you took over the still," Breach said, leaning in the doorway with a cup of coffee. "That thing almost killed us last time."
"Because whoever built it used a radiator coil for a condenser. You're lucky it only tasted bad."
"What should they have used?"
"Copper. Proper gauge, proper coil, sealed joints." She held up a length of tubing she'd cut to size. "This carries the vapor from the pot to the condenser. If it leaks, you lose alcohol. If it's the wrong material, you poison people. There's no middle ground."
Breach studied the tubing. "Sounds like demolition."
"Sounds like everything worth doing."
He grinned and walked away, and Jocelyn went back to her copper.
By noon she had the tubing replaced, the connections soldered clean, and a proper condenser coiled from pipe Tally had scavenged from the workshop.
She needed a thermometer and a sight glass—neither of which existed on the compound—but she could run a test batch without them if she paid close enough attention.
She paid close enough attention to everything. That was the Avery way.
The mash was improvised. No corn, no rye, no malted barley—she wasn't making bourbon.
But someone had left a bag of sugar and a packet of bread yeast in the kitchen, and she'd found a jug of apple cider in the walk-in cooler that was two days from turning anyway.
Sugar wash with apple character. Not elegant, but functional.
She mixed the wash, set it to ferment in a clean bucket, and calculated timing. Twenty-four hours for the sugar to convert. Then she'd run it.
Across the compound yard, she could see the workshop.
Anvil was inside. She could tell by the intermittent flash of blue-white light through the windows—welding, always welding, his hands moving from one project to the next like stopping would be dangerous. He'd been in there since before she'd started on the still, and he hadn't come out.
She watched him through the garage door.
Not the work—him. The way he moved between projects without hurrying, picking up one piece and setting down another, his body tracing a circuit around the workshop that looked almost ritualistic.
Build, check, adjust. Build, check, adjust. The same pattern she followed with her still, the same obsessive attention to joints and connections and the places where things could fail.
Jackie's voice echoed in her head. He builds things around the people he's protecting.
"He does that when something's bothering him."
Jocelyn turned. Rachel stood behind her, two cups of coffee in hand, watching Anvil's workshop with the easy familiarity of a woman who'd learned to read this compound like a language.
"Does what?"
"Disappears into the workshop. Welds until his hands cramp." Rachel handed her a cup. "After missions, mostly. Sometimes before. He's working something out."
"Last night."
"Last night." Rachel sipped her coffee. "He won't talk about it. None of them do, not the details. But he processes differently than the others. Breach hits the heavy bag. Fathom goes for a run. Anvil builds."
Jocelyn looked at her coffee. Steam curled off the surface, and beyond it the welding arc flickered like a pulse.
"Jackie told me about the apprentice," she said. It wasn't entirely true—Jackie had mentioned it in passing. But Rachel was the one standing here, and Rachel was the one who seemed to know things the others didn't.
Rachel was quiet for a moment. "What did she tell you?"
"That a kid fell. That it wasn't Anvil's fault."
"It wasn't." Rachel leaned against the garage doorframe. "The contractor cut corners on a safety cable inspection. Signed off on equipment that should've been replaced. The kid—Danny—hooked into a line that was rated for half his weight."
Jocelyn's stomach turned. She thought of her own equipment—the copper joints she checked every morning, the connections she tested before every run. The places where cutting corners could kill.
"Anvil caught the line," Rachel continued. "Grabbed for it when he saw Danny slip. Missed by less than a second." She paused. "He filed every report. Went to every office, every union hall, every oversight board in the Southeast. Demanded accountability."
"And?"
"And the contractor got promoted. Danny got buried. Anvil got blacklisted from every ironworking job in the region." Rachel's voice was even, but her eyes were hard. "That's how it works when the man who cut corners has more money than the man who caught it."
Jocelyn stared at the workshop. The welding arc had stopped. Through the window, she could see Anvil standing at the bench, examining a joint with the focused attention of a man who would rather die than let something fail.
He checks every joint twice.
She understood now. Every weld on her barn door, every security bar on her windows, every bracket and brace and reinforcement he'd built—he wasn't just securing her property.
He was making promises. Every clean joint was a vow that what he built would hold, that nobody under his protection would fall because he'd trusted the wrong connection.
Danny had fallen because someone else cut corners.
Nobody under Anvil's hands would fall again.
"He blames himself," Jocelyn said.
"He blames himself for trusting the contractor's word.
For not checking the cable personally." Rachel finished her coffee.
"He's spent three years at this compound building things that don't need building, checking joints that don't need checking, because the one time he trusted someone else's work, a kid died. "
"And now he's checking everything on my property."
"He's checking everything about you." Rachel looked at her directly.
"Not just the structures. You. Whether you're safe, whether you're eating, whether you're sleeping.
I've watched him scan you every time you walk into a room.
That man is taking inventory of you like you're a load-bearing wall he can't afford to lose. "
The words landed like a hammer on hot steel. Jocelyn felt the impact spread through her chest, reshaping something she'd been trying to keep formless.
"I didn't ask for that," she said.
"No. You asked for help with your property." Rachel's mouth curved—not quite a smile, something wiser. "Funny how that works."
She walked away, leaving Jocelyn alone in the garage with a rebuilt still and a feeling she couldn't solder shut.
The next morning, she ran the wash.
The brothers gathered like it was a spectator sport. Word had spread that the distillery woman was running the compound's cursed still, and apparently nothing drew a crowd like the possibility of drinkable liquor or a spectacular explosion.
Jocelyn ignored all of them.
She heated the wash slow, monitoring the temperature by touch and smell because she still didn't have a thermometer. The first vapors came off sweet and sharp—foreshots, the poisonous heads that any sane distiller threw away. She caught them in a jar and set them aside.
"That the good stuff?" Breach asked from the crowd.
"That's the stuff that makes you go blind. So, yes, for you specifically."
Laughter rippled through the brothers. Breach clutched his chest in mock offense.
The hearts came next—the clean center of the run, the alcohol that carried flavor and warmth without the toxins hiding at either end. Jocelyn caught them in a clean jar, watching the stream, adjusting the heat by fractions, coaxing the still the way she'd coax a stubborn mash through fermentation.
The smell changed. She cut to tails, caught the last usable spirits, and killed the heat.
Two jars sat on the workbench. One of foreshots she'd dump. One of clear, clean apple brandy that she'd pulled from a suicide still using improvised equipment and bread yeast.
She poured a splash into a cup and tasted it.
Sharp. Hot. A little rough around the edges. But clean. No off-flavors, no chemical taste, nothing that spoke of bad connections or leaking joints. The copper had done its job. The coil had done its job. She'd done her job.
"Well?" Freefall asked.
Jocelyn poured tastes into paper cups and handed them out.
Silence. Then Breach tilted his head back and let out a sound that was half groan, half prayer.
"That's bourbon?"
"That's apple brandy made from bread yeast and expired cider on a still that tried to kill you last time someone used it." Jocelyn crossed her arms. "Bourbon takes years. You'll have to earn that."
"Name your price," Breach said.
"Better ingredients. Corn, rye, malted barley. A proper thermometer and sight glass. And everyone stays out of my garage while I'm working."
"Done." Cipher's voice came from the back of the crowd. The president stepped forward, tasted the brandy, and nodded once. "Whatever she needs. Put it on the operational budget."
Jocelyn felt something bloom in her chest. Not pride—she was past the point where a successful run surprised her. Purpose. The feeling of doing what she was built to do, in a place that hadn't been hers yesterday but was starting to feel like something other than exile.
The brothers dispersed, several sneaking second tastes from the jar. Jocelyn started cleaning the still—because a clean still was a good still, and because the work kept her from looking at the workshop.
She looked anyway.
Anvil stood in the doorway, arms crossed, watching her. He hadn't come to the tasting. Hadn't joined the crowd. But he'd been there the whole time, leaning in the workshop entrance, watching her work the way she watched his.
He raised his cup—the one she hadn't seen him take—and drank.
Then he turned and went back to his bench, and through the window she could see his hands moving over steel. Building, checking, adjusting.
Every joint twice.
She understood now. And understanding made everything harder.