By: Daiyu Sanko-Tang ((AI: 1 image composition edited with LR/PS, 1 GPT generated RICO Warrant all other photos in-world))
The raid began, unusually so (in my past experience) with not just a map, but also a 3D model. This was the Hathian Police Department (‘HPD’) trying their best to look like the serious, professional and the legitimate police force that Krystal espouses they are, while Hathian fights back with rumours and exhibits of things that would make criminals in other cities blush.
It wasn’t a vague plan scribbled on the back of a napkin. It wasn’t Krystal playing a video of her about to take over the city ‘if only we crush these people’ It wasn’t even someone pointing at the street and saying “we go in there and hope the bullets miss,” but it was an actual briefing display inside the station. Buildings were marked out. Approach routes were named. The Pawn Shop sat at the centre of it all, surrounded by alleyways, roads and tactical positions. Team names were given to groups of officers while tactical gear was loaded (including that massive saw in our lead image) and, eventually when we rolled out, it felt like a proper military operation. I guess, in a way, that’s back to how Krystal likes it. Alternatively and perhaps more aligned to my view it was more like Hathian had briefly agreed to become a board game for people with body armour and very strong opinions about doors.
I had been invited to attend as the Observer, i.e. press, which is always flattering until I remember that ’embedded journalist’ is a Krystal and HPD phrase for “person close enough to get shot at, but not issued a helmet who provides free PR and a warm body as a target” Still, the Observer goes where the story is, and on this occasion the story was sitting in the middle of HPD’s briefing room while officers prepared for what Inspector Krystal O’Neil would later insist was not a raid… (sure Krystal. Sure).
“Criminals and barbarians raid,” O’Neil told me afterward. This, she said, was a “high risk warrant service, a special law enforcement operation.”
That is a very HPD way of phrasing things in Hathian and from the passenger seat of O’Neil’s vehicle, however, as HPD rolled toward the Pawn Shop it felt very much like the kind of raid Hathian is used to (and would call a raid). It was going to be sudden, loud, over-armed, and almost certainly about to ruin several people’s afternoon. I just hoped it wasn’t going to ruin mine.
The Raid
O’Neil drove us close to the target before stopping following a number of larger armoured vehicles with cops clinging to them. When Krystal killed the engine she then reached for an M4 carbine and I have to say as the unarmed woman with probably a Temu quality vest, my mood shifted from darkly comic (about HPD) to very real, very quickly. I guess it was good for my heart to get a workout.
“End of the line,” Krystal said, making it clear the taxi service had concluded and from there, we moved on foot through the alley. O’Neil kept me close enough that I was either being protected or supervised. I chose to believe it was the first one… so staying back I had my camera ready, while HPD’s teams moved around the Pawn Shop from multiple sides.
The first clear shout came from the rear approach.
“RICO RAID! REACH FOR THE SKY!“
It was as if Texas had come to Hathian, at least in my worldview. Officer Xavier’s team struck the back of the shop hard and hard was needed, because there were bodies, shouting, resistance and confusion in a narrow space where everyone seemed to have far to little time. Why time? Because they needed it to have at least half a second to decide whether they were surrendering, fighting, fleeing, or trying to put lead in the direction of a poor journalist.
It was ugly, fast and close. One man was tased by a cop and even from the ground, still managed to stab them back in the thigh before he was finally beaten back down and cuffed. At the front of the Pawn Shop, where I was not standing but where HPD accounts and Observer photographs later filled in the scene, the public face of the operation was broader, polyester and messier. The people the HPD were after moved like people who knew each other, looked to each other, and understood what was needed to defend themselves, or at the least not roll-over for the HPD show.
Katya Petrova, identified by HPD as the owner of the Pawn Shop and the de facto leader of the group gathered there, stepped out and challenged Lieutenant Vanora Blackheart directly.
“What is this all about, Blackheart,” she called, “you miss us?”
Then, as officers closed around the storefront, Katya added the line that may be remembered longer than the ‘raid’ itself: “No one is doing jack shit unless I tell them.” For anyone wondering whether HPD had correctly identified who held influence around the Pawn Shop, that probably helped confirm. RICO served.
From my review afterwards, the whole thing was a mess. But it was a mess that the HPD seemed to win, subduing everyone (at least as far as Krystal told it). If someone had managed to run, well, it wasn’t reported to the Observer and I didn’t see it.
Later With Katya: The Pawn Is Gone, But The People Are Not
Some days after the raid (and after her time with casa-del-a-HPD), I met Katya Petrova at the bakery.
That is not where one necessarily expects to meet the woman HPD would later describe as the de facto leader of an organised criminal group, but that coffee shop has seen more than its fair share of criminals and interesting characters. Also, let’s be honest, monsters, saints, liars, survivors and half-reformed disasters like me can always be in the same queue for coffee; it’s not like we have much choice in the city! Katya was polite, Russian, composed, and serious about cake in a way I immediately respected…
Katya knew my wife from before. She told me Clivia had saved her life when she had been ill, staying with her day after day until she recovered. There was even a plushie involved, because my wife has apparently been leaving small emotional landmines around Hathian for years.
It would be easy, perhaps too easy, to remove that part from the story. To write Katya only as HPD’s suspect, HPD’s target, HPD’s Russian woman (that special kind of doll with lots of layers) at the centre of the Pawn Shop. But people are never that tidy in Hathian and Katya herself put it better than I could:
“Labels are easy,” she said. “People are not.”
I pressed her for more details of the raid, feeling that there was someone sitting opposite me who reminded me of Nika from the Vipers crew. Sharp and seeing things more than most…
“The Pawn is gone,” she told me, “but the people are not, and that is what mattered in the end.”
She described those around her as something that had become more than colleagues after the HPD assault. She claimed that organisation and more had only grown once they saw themselves being targeted by the HPD. They had, in her words, become “something closer to family,” always shadowing one another through the worst the city could throw at them, which many had experienced (in their view) with the HPD.
I had already found myself thinking of them as the Hathian Shadows, partly because they seemed to have been there (in this case the pawn shop) for some time without most of Hathian understanding what shape they made. They were the person at the counter or a face by the crates. They were the name in someone else’s orbit or the whispered ‘ally’ that other gangs mentioned. They had, according to HPD, had the Rejects drifting close to them. They were, in truth dear reader workers, friends, lovers, muscle, customers coming together. Oh and of course, whatever special category exists in Hathian for someone holding a guitar like it might defeat police armour.
“We look after our own first,” she said. “Everything else can wait.”
There are worse founding principles in Hathian. There are also few more dangerous ones. Family can save people. It can also make them very stupid, very brave, and very difficult to arrest so when I asked what the raid had taught her, Katya did not begin with revenge or a promise of war. She did not complain about store, cash or whatever inventory HPD may have carried away under the righteous glow of a Krystal-infused-Rico-warrant.
“The raid taught me many things,” she said, “mostly that buildings are only bricks, but people are everything.”
Dear oh dear… my dear citizens, I think you’ve found yourself a potential anti-hero to root for… when of course you can see her… which brings me onto the Inspector’s point of view.
Inspector O’Neil: Like Chasing Shadow
Inspector Krystal O’Neil gave me the HPD version, I met her after Katya so O’Neil had had a little time to consider what she was going to say. She was also in a good mood and wanted to make sure I included photos of the downed suspects and general police competence this time.
According to O’Neil, the case had begun several months before which does go to show that cases are worked on, even if sometimes crime in Hathian can feel like a ‘only now’ moment, rather than a ‘investigate past issues’ kinda thing. HPD had apparently received reports of burglaries that followed a similar pattern. Homes were entered when the occupants were usually away and there was, she said, a cleaner and more professional quality to the work than Hathian’s usual grab-bag of broken windows, blood on the carpet, and someone ‘accidentally’ leaving their full name in a threatening note.
The investigation took time. Her detectives and officers worked it, but the trail kept fading.
“Like chasing shadows,” O’Neil said.
The break, (or as I would call it the ‘Eureka!’ moment) came after a firearm reported missing was found in a suspect’s possession during an unrelated incident. Information obtained from that suspect allegedly led the HPD back to the Pawn Shop. It was from there that Krystal got into doing what she loves best (at least I think so). She ordered surveillance and gadgetry and stuff that would out-sneak the sneaky criminals. Detective Shelby Katz (yes her – apparently her Union idea didn’t count against her getting prestige assignments) was assigned to watch the premises and O’Neil says that surveillance produced more than HPD had previously been able to prove. It proved that individuals connected to the Pawn Shop discussed moving stolen goods, made plans for new burglaries and chatted away, obliviously about other matters… serious matters.
Rico-Roll
When I challenged her on her RICO paperwork which I obtained prior to the raid, she said the judge had agreed this was not just a loose collection of friends doing ‘bad’ things together, but an organised group with an internal hierarchy, formed for the purpose of committing felonies. That, she said, is why the warrant was a RICO warrant and why significant, deadly and Krystal-loves-it-like-this levels of force deployment was needed.
Apparently this new group was friends with others already in Hathian, including the Rejects. Krystal casually name dropping Foxy and Seven as alleged familiar faces around the Pawn Shop. I had actually seen some proof of this as during the raid both were present and both were part of the wider chaos that followed HPD’s arrival. The ebb and flow of Hathian gangs and how they interact is always of interest to me. I’ve seen alliances. I’ve seen romance. I’ve seen people get into bed together then get into murdering each other. So Hathian. Anyway…
Krystal Sees Shadows
A “shadow organization behind facade of legitimate business,” as she put it.
Cash was seized, O’Neil said, and would now benefit HPD’s mission against organised crime. Firearms were also recovered from the premises and O’Neil argued that the scale of the tactical response was justified by the risk: stolen weapons, a central location, prior violent resistance at the Pawn Shop, and the possibility of civilians being caught in the middle.
There were no reported fatalities. Krystal was keen to emphasise that (yay – no deaths!). Given Hathian’s relationship with HPD operations, suspects, bodies and pavement, it is a win.
O’Neil did not pretend the raid would solve Hathian. When I pressed her on what she meant she was clear that the HPD were a band-aid, not the cure, and said the courts would have to do their part (good luck there right readers?). She also made clear that this was not the end of her interest in the people and businesses she believes operate in the shade.
“I’m personally going to keep going after these shadow organizations’ profits and their businesses,” she said.
There it is again.
The word ‘Shadow’.
What HPD Dragged Into The Light
HPD says it found an organised criminal enterprise operating behind the Pawn Shop, one tied to burglaries, stolen firearms, possible further violence, and a network of people who knew exactly what they were doing. Katya Petrova says the building was only bricks, that the people mattered more, and that those people had become something closer to family. Family vs. Gang. Gang vs. HPD. The City vs. The Truth…
Both versions can be true enough to be dangerous and Hathian has never had much trouble producing criminal businesses. The city grows them the way damp walls grow mould and while at least in the Observer I keep scrubbing I can well believe that another patch has sprouted; whether they are fully grown yet or not I don’t know. For example I didn’t see on my walks any new gang signs, but that might just be a matter of time… In any case, what is more interesting here is that the Pawn Shop crew, (well now the ex-Pawn Shop crew as they’ve moved elsewhere), whether they wanted it or not, has now been introduced to the city as something more than background faces and names that drift between other people’s stories. Now they have my attention. Now they have the HPDs. Now there will be people interested in making the shadows appear more visible.
Perhaps we can say that before the warrant, they were half-seen. But that after it, they have shape and with this article, perhaps, they have a name.
The Observer is not here to declare the winner. But I know what I saw. I saw HPD plan carefully and arrive heavily. I saw officers hurt and suspects hurt more. I saw a shopfront become a battlefield and I saw people who looked less like random customers and more like a group under pressure, folding toward one another even while they fought, cursed, bled or fell.
And later, I heard Katya Petrova say the Pawn was gone but the people were not.
So perhaps that is the story.
The Pawn Shop may be gone as it was, her group may have moved on from it. The warrant may have stripped it, shaken it, and left HPD holding cash, firearms, arrests and a claim of victory. But the people around it have not vanished. They have been seen, named by others if not yet fully by themselves, and dragged out of the shade and into the light. But the problem, dear reader is that shadows in the light disappear, but they are always there and in the half-dusks and early mornings then lengthen around you and whisper to you from every corner.
And do you know something? As I admired Katya’s good looks, sophisticated attitude and sensible approach to the press (buying me a donut) I didn’t drop my guard fully. I also, didn’t drop my sense of journalistic skills. Do you know what the word for Shadows is in Russian? Teni. Sometimes journalism is skill. Sometimes it is a lucky guess wearing good goth boots. For those who need a helping hand with Russian (everyone right) then my team tell me that in the Russian alphabet it’s Тени and is pronounced roughly as ‘TYEH-nee’, not quite ‘tee-nee.’ The ‘t’ is softened, because Russian does that delightful thing where even consonants have mood and sass (I love it!).
And dear reader, you know what that means? It means that in Hathian, this is rarely where a story ends…
