The White Faces began as a neighborhood defense band after the Hunger Week Riots, then learned that a loaded pistol could protect a trader as effectively as it could defend a family. Their first profitable contracts were escorts for night barges and market carts. They soon found themselves deciding which cargoes could pass safely and which were too dangerous to tolerate. Their watershed moment came twenty-one years ago during the Lantern Quay Massacre. The Red Ledger had begun trafficking altered people through the kingdom's capital. When a shipment of captives was discovered in a company safehouse, three captains argued that the contract had already been paid for and should be honored. The company's then-leader ordered the doors opened and the captives freed. In the fighting that followed, the company destroyed the Ledger's riverside depot, but a fire killed dozens of bystanders and two company members. The survivors rewrote the rules: no person could be treated as cargo, and no captain could accept a contract involving unwilling subjects. The massacre made the company beloved in some neighborhoods and feared by the kingdom's authorities. It also made the company rich. Night traders who could no longer rely on the Red Ledger turned to the White Faces for safe passage and dispute resolution. Over the next two decades, the company spread from the capital to border towns, ports, and mining settlements. It now has enough members and leverage to interrupt trade across the kingdom, yet still claims to be a neighborhood defense band with better guns. Today, the company is caught between its own founding myth and its practical power. It protects people from exploitation, controls much of the trade that makes exploitation profitable, and cannot agree whether its dislike of mutation is a humane refusal to alter people or a superstition that has become an excuse for exclusion.

A sprawling fortified warehouse district concealed behind a legitimate powder-and-carriage depot. Its walls are layered with old posters, painted faces, and marks showing which doors are safe after dark. The central meeting room has no throne or raised chair. Captains sit in a rough circle around a scarred table, while a white mask hangs above the only exit.