The Reclaimed are a scavenger gang of about forty-five operating in Detroit's massive ruins belt — the miles of abandoned industrial and residential infrastructure that ring the city's still-functioning core. While other scavengers pick through surface debris, the Reclaimed specialize in deep salvage: entering structurally compromised buildings, excavating collapsed basements, and recovering materials from sites that even the desperate consider too dangerous.

The crew's edge is engineering knowledge. Their founder, an ex-construction foreman named Dutch, trained them in structural assessment — how to read a building's stress points, where a floor will hold and where it won't, how to shore up a collapsing tunnel long enough to extract what's inside. This knowledge lets the Reclaimed go where others can't, and they've pulled extraordinary finds from deep in the ruins: pre-collapse medical equipment, intact server racks with recoverable data, industrial machinery that still functions, and building materials that the modern economy can't produce because the factories that made them no longer exist.

The Reclaimed have a quasi-archaeological approach to their work. They catalog finds, maintain records of which sites have been stripped and which remain productive, and they've developed a rough map of Detroit's ruins that represents the most comprehensive survey of the city's abandoned infrastructure in existence. They treat the ruins with something approaching reverence — not sentimentality, but the practical respect of people who know that carelessness in a collapsing building kills.

Their market is diverse. Construction crews buy recovered building materials. Clinics buy pre-collapse medical equipment. Data brokers buy recovered server contents. The Reclaimed sell to anyone except the corporations that they blame for abandoning Detroit in the first place — a principled stance that costs them their most lucrative potential customers.