The Gaps

Named for the thing they actually own: specific holes in the El Infierno cordon, and the tunnels and drains that reach them from underneath. Not a territory in any block-and-street sense. A Gaps crew holds one crossing, maintains it, and charges for it, the way a toll road charges for a bridge nobody else built.

They are violent about competitors opening a new hole and almost businesslike about everyone using the one they already have, because a second gap splits the toll and a second gap that gets noticed gets the whole stretch sealed by whoever's watching the cordon that week. One crossing, kept quiet and kept paid for, is worth more than two.

What the crew knows#

• Passage is purchasable and the price is local. What a crossing costs depends on which Gaps crew holds it, what's coming through, and how much attention it's likely to draw, and haggling works about as well as it would with any toll operator.
• The deeper into the tunnel system a crossing sits, the less anybody outside the Gaps knows about it. The map of who holds what stretch exists only in their heads.
• They don't fight salvage crews or pump crews over the same tunnels; different tolls, different customers, and a fight down there is bad for everybody's business at once.
• A crossing that gets used carelessly, loudly, or by somebody who talks about it afterwards is a crossing that gets sealed. The Gaps will sooner stop selling passage through it than let it draw the wrong attention.

Standing with the crew#

Transactional, and reputation-based rather than personal. A crew that's paid fairly and kept quiet gets sold passage again; a crew that drew attention to a crossing doesn't get offered a second one, from anybody.