School starts a week from today.
Tuesday.
All the events since I got released from the hospital have finally caught up to now, the exact point where I'm writing about them.
And yeah.
Andrew's group within The Claim still has control over Factory 24.
At this point, it seems like Andrew is The Claim. There don't appear to be any other groups actively opposing him anymore, and from the way things are being run, it's obvious he sees himself as the one in charge of everything now.
He hasn't actually called himself anything special.
But I have.
The Dictator of Factory 24.
Sounds good, right?
I'm the Monarch.
He's the Dictator.
Perfect setup for a war.
Still, as funny as that is, it sucks that he still has control over the factory.
Especially because Melanie and I had to be the ones to break the news to everyone else.
Not just the remaining members of our group, either.
The other founders too.
The ones we pretty much left behind that night.
Mel didn't seem to mind all that much. If anything, she seemed relieved that we handled it without dragging her back into the middle of all that chaos again.
Leo and George were angry.
Really angry.
But they understood.
Or at least they understood enough to know that if more of us had been there, things would've only gotten worse.
Especially with George's temper.
And Andrew's.
That would've gone nowhere good.
We also had to explain Liam's betrayal.
That part hit harder than losing the factory itself.
The Claim being the enemy made sense. They had always been the enemy. But Liam?
Liam had been one of us.
He'd been there inside the factory, hearing everything, watching everything, acting like he was still part of us while feeding it all somewhere else.
It all happened so fast that actually explaining it to the members helped me understand it a little better myself.
And what did I get out of that understanding?
He's a betraying son of a bitch.
I will not forgive him this time.
He already got beaten once, sure, but that was by Andrew's group.
That doesn't count.
If I ever see him again, I'll destroy him myself.
That betrayal hurt morale more than anything else.
The members expected The Claim to be against us.
They didn't expect Liam to be too.
After everything was explained, everyone split off and went home.
Factory 24 was no longer ours.
Our forty members stood no chance against Andrew and his eighty.
So we gave up.
———————————————————————
Just kidding!
We were preparing to take that shit back.
I had a plan to retake Factory 24, but I wasn't about to say everything out loud.
Not anymore.
Not after Liam.
Not after Sarah.
Not after everything.
Including dates.
Especially dates.
Andrew could still have scouts in our group, and for all we knew, Null could too. We no longer had the luxury of pretending trust was enough.
Since we no longer had Factory 24 as a meeting place, things had to run differently. We couldn't afford another Liam situation. And we definitely couldn't allow scouts to suck up whatever they wanted from us and hand it right over to The Claim or Null.
Honestly, Null still scares me more than The Claim.
The Claim is terrible, but understandable.
Loud.
Territorial.
Violent.
Predictable in its own awful way.
Null isn't like that.
Null feels like a hand reaching in from somewhere you can't see.
They always know something they shouldn't.
They always seem a little too calm.
A little too prepared.
I at least have a method for breaking down The Claim and taking back our territory.
Null is still an unknown variable.
Even Liam knew that.
So we changed how we operated.
We set up communication networks between the houses of the most devoted old members of Factory 24.
Nothing fancy.
Mostly just word of mouth, check-ins, and making sure that if someone learned something useful, it would get passed along to the right people without spreading too far.
The founders stayed in contact constantly.
Anything they learned, they told each other and no one else.
Sometimes, we even leaked fake information to some of the other old members of Factory 24 just to see if it would somehow reach Andrew. Then we'd watch and see if anything about his behavior changed.
It was risky.
A little cruel, maybe.
But after what happened with Liam, I didn't care.
Dates were completely off-limits.
We told dates to no one.
I was the one setting most of them anyway, so even the founders were left in the dark on when certain things would happen.
That was for the best.
If something big was going to happen, most people would only find out the day of and have to roll with it.
It's risky.
But it's safer.
The Claim and Null can't steal information that doesn't exist outside of one or two people's heads.
The fewer people who know everything, the fewer ways there are for it to leak.
The ugly truth, though?
We aren't getting the factory back before school starts.
That just isn't realistic.
We don't have the time.
We don't have the resources.
And we definitely don't have the numbers to wipe out The Claim and retake Factory 24 in one clean move.
Not anymore.
Andrew is in full control.
Or, at least, that's what it looks like.
But I know better now.
Andrew isn't the only one running things.
Axel is right there behind the scenes making sure everything actually works.
He's a lot like Liam in that way. The kind of person you barely notice until you see the difference between chaos and structure. The kind of person who doesn't look important until you realize nothing around him would function without him.
I first suspected it back at the diner, when all eighty of Andrew's members had been pulled together so quickly.
Andrew was the face.
Axel was the reason the face didn't collapse.
Same thing with Thomas and Liam.
Thomas had the voice.
Liam had the structure.
So now, Andrew is the face of the group, but Axel is the reason they've managed to hold things together this long.
That means we can exploit it.
If one of them slips, the other gets exposed.
And if the wrong one gets exposed first, the whole thing gets shaky.
So right now, all we really need to do is watch and wait for a weakness.
George and Leo have been doing most of that work from a distance. They watch the factory, track the movement, get the names and faces of whoever they can, note who comes and goes, who stays for long hours, who barely shows up, what the busiest part of the day is, what the emptiest hour is, and which groups seem to move together.
We've got it all mapped out statistically now.
More than that, we've started figuring out who actually wants the factory for the space and who just wants to be around the group that currently owns it.
That matters.
Because not everyone under Andrew actually cares about Factory 24.
Some care about Andrew.
Some care about being part of the winning side.
Some care about status.
Some care about not being alone.
And some just want the space.
If we could somehow get all the "for the space" people to work with us, we could probably swing almost the whole thing in our favor.
But that's too perfect.
That kind of plan doesn't happen in a million years.
Still, perfection isn't what I need.
I just need instability.
If things get uncomfortable enough, some of Andrew's people might leave on their own.
And that would be enough to start.
I'm not going to beat Andrew head-on anymore.
I've tried that twice.
I've lost twice.
Trying again the same way would just be stupid.
Andrew knows how to take things.
That much is obvious.
But I can already tell he doesn't know how to keep them.
It may look like he has complete control, but I can already see the future where that control slips away from him.
His group is too big.
The factory is too small.
And unlike the old Factory 24, his group doesn't actually hold together.
Yes, Factory 24 once had over a hundred and twenty members.
But we only managed that because we had years behind us. We'd grown together. We knew each other. Even when we fought, there was still some structure holding it all together.
Andrew doesn't have that.
What he has is a patchwork.
Makeshift groups.
Temporary loyalties.
People who don't actually care about each other's problems.
That kind of thing doesn't last forever.
It breaks.
It splits.
It rots from the inside out.
It's just a matter of waiting for that to happen.
Or making it happen.
So that's what we've been doing.
Stressing Andrew.
Not enough to start a full fight.
Not enough to trigger another war all at once.
Just enough to keep him on edge.
Just enough to make the place harder to hold.
Harder to enjoy.
Harder to rule.
If Andrew gets too comfortable, he'll get sloppy.
If he gets sloppy, the people around him will notice.
If they notice, control starts slipping.
And once it slips, we take it back.
That's the plan.
Or at least, the beginning of it.
I didn't hand Factory 24 over to Andrew by accident.
I let him have it, knowing he'd be reckless with it.
It's easy to take something. Keeping it is what proves who actually deserves it.