The bell kept ringing in Ayush's head long after the fallen sign had gone quiet. It rang through the stairwell air and into his bones, a clean sound in a day that was all torn edges.
They moved like people who had learned that standing still is a kind of death.
The sciences block stairwell funneled cool air and the smell of old mops. Their shadows climbed the walls in broken shapes. Somewhere below, a soft dragging scuffed across linoleum. It stopped. Started again. A map of motion without a body yet.
"Two floors down to the workshop," Suraj said, voice barely above the hum of the building. "There's a service door to the back lane. If we get it open, the perimeter gate's fifty meters."
"And between?" Shivam asked.
"Between," Suraj said, "is the price of fifty meters."
Ananya squeezed Ayush's hand once and let go. "Then we pay it together."
They slipped down one flight in rhythm: Ayush, then Shivam with the iron, Suraj behind them, the others paired—Kartik with Sanaa, Lucky with Riya, Ananya in the middle, one hand on the rail, eyes forward.
On the next landing, the workshop door had the kind of dent that says someone had tried a key too late. A paper taped crooked read: DO NOT ENTER DURING PRACTICALS. Inside, something fell and rolled. A nut or a marble. The sound traced an arc along the floor and came to rest against the door.
Ayush put two fingers up—wait—and pressed his ear to the seam. He heard breath. Not the ragged saw-blade of the infected. A faster, higher flutter.
He eased the door open an inch.
A boy crouched under a drill press table with his hands over his ears. He couldn't have been more than twelve. His blazer clung to one shoulder by threads. His knees were scabbed and dirty in a child way that preceded apocalypse by years. He looked up, saw the sliver of Ayush's face, and went still as a rabbit.
"We're not going to hurt you," Ayush said, keeping his voice level and low. From behind, Ananya stepped forward so he wasn't the only face.
The boy's hands came down slowly. His chest heaved twice. "They were in the hallway," he said. "I came in here and closed the door. They kept hitting it. I thought it would break."
"What's your name?" Ananya asked.
"Nikhil."
"Did anyone bite you, Nikhil?"
He shook his head, too fast. "No. No. I fell." He showed one palm, scraped raw. "I fell."
Ayush counted to fourteen because rules are the difference between caution and fear wearing a better coat. The skin stayed skin. The boy's breath stayed breath. "Okay," he said. "We're leaving. Come with us. Stay close to Ananya."
Nikhil crawled out and stood. He looked at the iron in Shivam's grip and then at Ayush's hands. "Do you have a phone?" he asked. "I tried to call my dad."
Ananya's face moved, almost a wince. "We'll try again outside."
They left the workshop in the same line, Nikhil ghosting behind Ananya, eyes moving like they were counting escape routes the way only a child does—with more hope than practice.
On the floor below, the corridor opened wide and long, lockers on one side, glass on the other. Through the windows, the back lane ran behind the school—a narrow strip of cracked concrete, a line of Neem trees throwing skeletal shade, a tiny guard cabin like a toy house at the corner. The gate hung secured by a chain as thick as a wrist.
The glass showed them a piece of the world outside, and the world outside showed no interest in them at all. Smoke coiled beyond the far wall. A bus lay nose-down against a light pole like a dropped animal.
The corridor itself held three doors. The first—ELECTRICAL—padlocked. The second—LAB STORE—ajar, a stack of cardboard edging the seam. The third—METALS—open.
"Store first," Ayush said.
Inside, the lab store smelled like iron, ethanol, and dust. Shelves held brown glass bottles with labels bleached by years. A crate of wires coiled like snakes. Tape. Razor blades sealed in paper. Two headlamps in a plastic bin.
"Take light. Tape. Razor if you trust your fingers," Suraj said. "Leave the chemicals."
Ayush took one headlamp and handed the other to Ananya. He grabbed a roll of gaffer tape and a small tool kit. The hardware sat heavy and true in his palms. He breathed once—slow, in—on the way out.
They pushed the metals door with the gentlest part of a shoulder. The workshop beyond was a short world of shadows and steel. Benches lined with vises. A wall of tools—hammers, hacksaws, chisels—hung in a neat blue grid. At the far end, a steel door with a push bar: SERVICE EXIT.
Ayush scanned the floor. A single dark streak led from the racks to under the benches—blood dragged in a single body's pattern. No movement. No breath. The thick quiet of a place where noise had spent itself and left.
Shivam grabbed a hammer—then swapped it for a shorter one that fit his hand like something he'd grown up with. Kartik stood staring at the hacksaw for a second too long, then took a chisel instead and tucked it through his belt with a hand that shook, then steadied.
"Keys," Ayush said, nodding toward the guard cabin visible under the narrow window. "We check the cabin after we open the door."
Suraj stepped to the push bar. It resisted. He put his shoulder against it and pushed. It held. "Barred outside," he said.
"Window," Ananya suggested. The pane above the bar was wired glass. Strength made pretty.
"Electrical?" Riya asked.
"Could trip alarm," Lucky said, and then frowned like the idea of alarm was quaint now.
Ayush looked at the hinges. Bolts on their side. He flipped the headlamp on and angled the beam. "We can back the pins out," he said. He pulled the toolkit and found a slotted driver. He looked at Kartik. "You're steady enough?"
Kartik swallowed. "Yeah." He wasn't, but he would be.
Ayush braced a chisel under the first hinge pin and gave Kartik the driver. "Leverage up. Gentle," he said. Kartik worked the tool under the lip and pried. The pin inched. Squealed. Inched. Popped free with a soft ring.
"Good," Suraj said, dry.
The second pin made them a little bolder and rewarded them with a louder squeal. Ananya winced. Shivam tightened his grip and half-turned toward the workshop entrance.
The third pin stuck. Kartik's hand started to slip when sweat and pressure met. Ayush covered his hand with his own, and they pushed together. The pin moved, then the door sagged a centimeter into its frame.
"Ready?" Ayush said.
"Do it," Suraj answered.
They lifted the door off the hinge tongues. It took all of them—shoulders under steel, hands on ridged edge. For a dangerous second, Kartik slipped. Shivam shouldered the weight. Ayush lifted high enough to clear the bottom tabs. They set the door down with a grunt of breath and muscle and tried to make it a soft sound. It wasn't.
Cold air slid in through the rectangle they'd made. The back lane lay three meters away and an entire kind of life beyond that.
Ayush leaned out and scanned left and right. No bodies. No breath. A cat shot under the cold water drain and made someone jump. "Clear," he said.
"Keys," Suraj reminded.
Ayush nodded. He rotated the headlamp beam to the guard cabin and watched dust fall under the light like snow. The cabin's door stood ajar, a slice of dark inside.
"I'll go," he said.
"No," Suraj said. "We go."
Ayush wanted to argue. He didn't. They slid out into the lane in two quick bursts. Concrete ground under shoes. The world smelled like exhaust and smoke and something sweet underneath that Ayush refused to name.
Inside the cabin, a landline with a dead tone lay off the hook on the desk. A wire-bound logbook with dates and neat columns for "IN/OUT" sat under it. On the floor by the chair, the guard lay on his side with eyes halfway open. His chest rose and fell shallow. His left hand was curled around something he hadn't finished reaching for.
Ayush knelt. "Sir?" The man didn't answer. He blinked slowly; it felt more like a reflex than a choice.
"Keys," Suraj said again, softer now.
Ananya knelt on the other side without being told and lifted the man's right hand. A fat key ring bit into his fingers. She eased it free. "Got them."
The man's breath stuttered. He tried to form a word; it fell apart in his mouth.
Ananya looked at Ayush and neither said the thing.
"Thank you," she told the guard, and it was a small thing but not nothing.
They slid back out and ran to the gate. One key. Two. Three. The fourth turned and the chain slackened like an old muscle. Suraj made a face and eased the links back without letting them clatter.
They opened the small pedestrian gate just enough to slip through, single file. Ayush took point. He stepped into the alley and saw the city again, closer now, and felt his heart move like it had found a new job to do.
"Left," he said. If they went right, they would run straight into the main road. Left would take them between buildings into a warren where line of sight was a choice. He preferred choices.
They moved.
Ten steps in, Nikhil stopped dead.
"Dog," he whispered, and there was awe in it. A brown stray stood in the center of the alley with its head low, hackles up. Its ears twitched. It wasn't looking at them. It was looking past them.
Ayush turned.
At the mouth of the lane, a man lumbered in, hands slack, head turned too far to one side. Behind him, a woman half-ran, half-stumbled into him and bounced. Neither seemed to notice the other, only the air in front of them that smelled like fear and meat.
"Back," Ayush said.
They eased three steps, then four. The dog gave a low growl and backed along the wall with them, never looking away from the mouth of the alley.
Another body slid into view—a teenage boy, shirt—RAVENCROFT BASKETBALL—stamped across the chest. His eyes were wrong. He moved wrong. Ayush's breath caught.
"Don't look," Ananya said to Nikhil, and put a hand over his eyes.
The boy lunged.
He was fast. He closed the distance between them with a broken stride that still managed speed. He angled not toward the group—that would have been mercy—but toward the smallest moving thing. Sanaa yelped. Riya pulled her back against the wall.
Ayush stepped in without thinking. He put his body between the boy and Sanaa and felt the impact reverberate up his arm. The boy's face slammed into his shoulder and tried to bite through fabric. Ayush smelled breath rank with blood and rot and something chemical.
He had the small knife from the tool kit in his hand. He hadn't remembered taking it. He shoved once. It wasn't deep. The boy came harder. He shoved again, found the place where the bone thins at the temple, and drove up and in.
The boy went quiet in a single second. He slumped against Ayush like his body hadn't gotten the note.
Ayush went cold. His hand on the knife shook once, a hard twitch. He pulled the blade free and the sound it made was small and disrespectful.
Sanaa's breath hitched. Kartik stared like he'd seen a new law written. Nikhil sobbed behind Ananya's fingers and she whispered, "It's okay," even though it wasn't, because sometimes the truth breaks more than it fixes.
Ayush stepped back and wiped the knife on his sleeve because it was a thing that could be done. He looked at the others and watched the understanding pass through them like a wave.
"Keep moving," Suraj said, and for once no one argued.
They threaded through alleys that had grown new teeth. The dead didn't own the city yet, but they were bidding for it. A man pounded on a second-story window and made eye contact with Ayush and yelled something that didn't cross glass. A woman pulled a suitcase down a set of steps and abandoned it at the bottom when the handle pulled off in her hand. In the far distance, a siren went up and cut, went up again and cut shorter.
At the corner of a narrow street, Ayush held them with a palm and peeked out. To the left, three blocks down, a police van sat sideways like someone had kicked it. Two officers leaned over a third on the ground. One of the standing ones was crying. The one on the ground was dying loudly. The second officer patted his partner's shoulder, then turned and pointed his rifle into a small knot of bodies upgrading themselves into a crowd.
"Not that way," Ayush said, and they went right.
They landed in an alley that ended in a rubbish skip and a low wall into a school cricket ground. Luck. The wall was the kind you can vault if you learned to climb in a city.
"Up," Shivam said, already moving. He put his hands on the wall and levered, a quiet grace. He reached back and pulled Sanaa up by the wrist. Ayush boosted Ananya and then strangled his smile because now wasn't that kind of victory.
They crossed the cricket field low and fast toward the far net. Beyond it, back lanes and small shops. A board said "RAGHAV TEA & SNACKS" in paint that peeled. The door stood open and a radio inside played an old song that had nothing to do with any of this.
Ayush stopped them at the corner and crouched. "We need water," he said. "Salt. Sugar. Bandages if they exist."
"Tea shop will have sugar packets," Lucky said.
"Salt crisps," Kartik offered, and then made a face about how stupid that sounded and shrugged like he'd allow stupid if it kept somebody alive.
"And we need to rest," Ananya said. "Nikhil's shaking."
Nikhil insisted he wasn't, and his knees said otherwise.
"Two minutes," Ayush said. "In and out. Quiet."
They slipped into the tea shop like burglars stealing their own old lives. Stainless steel tumblers on the counter. A cashier drawer yawned coins. The radio sang something about rain and waiting. Behind the counter, shelves offered a small apocalypse kit: boiled sweets, glucose biscuits, chips, bottled water. An old man lay curled on the floor behind the counter with his back to them. His chest rose and fell. He snored.
"Take what we can carry," Ayush said, and then because he was still a person under layers of other things—he took coins from the drawer and placed them on the counter and hated himself for the theater of it and did it anyway.
Sanaa took glucose biscuits and sugar packets. Riya grabbed two bottles and shoved one into Nikhil's hands. "Small sips," she said, and he nodded, and obeyed like children sometimes do when adults finally sound like they mean it.
On the wall hung a small calendar with a hand-written note in the margins: Tuesday—kites.
"Let's go," Suraj said.
They slid back out. The street was the same and not.
Down the block, a group of four people ran in a loose diamond. The one in front wore a lab coat. The one in back carried a bat. The two in the middle held hands.
The bat man saw Ayush's group and made a calculation. He shouted, "You armed?"
Shivam raised the iron. Ayush raised the knife. It looked like less than it was.
"Don't go that way," the lab coat yelled, pointing the other direction. "They're coming from the ring road."
"Where are you headed?" Ananya asked, not because she expected a plan but because sometimes saying it out loud makes it true.
"Hospital," the lab coat said, and the bat man laughed, a single bark, and they ran on.
Ayush watched them turn a corner and disappear. He didn't say anything. He pivoted them the other way.
Ten meters. Thirty. The street opened into an intersection and chaos. A scooter lay with its wheel still spinning like it had an opinion. An auto rickshaw had the wrong door open. A man knelt by a woman on the ground and slapped her cheek and begged in a voice that could break anything.
A boy of eight ran into Ayush's line, saw them, and kept running. An infected hit the intersection at the same time, chasing him in a way that didn't say hunger so much as a compulsion to close the distance.
Ayush moved before he knew he had. The knife was already in his hand, cleaned and warmed by his skin. He put himself between the boy and the thing without asking himself how many times he would do this before he stopped being someone with a choice about it.
The infected came hard. Ayush stepped in, not back. He let the momentum carry the body into the angle he needed, turned the knife a fraction of a degree, and drove it up under the zygomatic arch where skull thins and the brain is cruelly accessible.
The body went slack. He caught the boy with his other hand and shoved him behind him.
"Run," he said, and the boy did, small feet skidding on grit.
"Are you keeping count?" Suraj asked at his shoulder, not with judgment.
"No," Ayush said, and didn't know if he was lying.
They cut across the intersection in the space made by choices, reached a lane that wrapped the back of the next block, and found themselves staring at a black iron door set into a blank wall. PRIVATE—NO ENTRY, a sign said with a confidence that belonged to another year.
"Door," Ayush said. He tried the handle. Locked. He looked at the hinges. They were on the inside. He looked at the padlock. New steel, no rust to give.
Shivam lifted the hammer. "Step back," he said, and Ayush did, because sometimes noise is cheaper than time.
On the third blow, the shackle sheared. The door opened into a narrow passage and then a courtyard ringed in apartments. A few doors stood open. A bicycle lay on its side. Somewhere above them, a TV blared an old cricket match where somebody heroically blocked a bad ball and the crowd roared like the world still had rules.
"Inside," Ayush said. He pulled the door shut behind them and shoved the broken lock back into the hasp to make it look closed to a glance.
The courtyard's center had a water tap. A woman had died there on her knees, as if praying to iron. An empty bucket lay beside her.
"Fill," Lucky said, automatic, and went to the tap with one of their bottles. It ran, a thin metallic trickle. He filled slow. The sound of water into plastic felt like privilege.
They picked a stairwell on the far side and climbed to the first landing, then the second, and stopped on the third where the corridor turned back and a narrow balcony looked over the courtyard. The flat at the corner had its door open. Inside, a living room with a scratched wooden table and a fan that spun like it was trying to keep a promise. No bodies. No blood.
Ananya checked the kitchen cabinets and found a bag of salt, a few herbs, and two instant noodle packets that made Kartik grin like a child for a second.
"Fifteen minutes," Ayush said. "We frame what we know, then we move."
He took his phone out because lies to yourself have a half-life. The last message still sat there, black letters on white: Are you alone?
He typed.
[Joel]: Negative. Seven with me. One additional minor picked up. Moving. Minimal contact with hostile. Will not return to main.
The typing dot blinked. Stopped. The battery icon at the top right slivered thinner.
Ananya looked over his shoulder—not nosy, familiar. "Who is that?" she asked, voice level.
He hesitated long enough for the truth to become work. He did the work.
"Someone who thinks they know what to do," he said. "Someone I used to trust."
"You're going to have to tell us," she said, not unkind. "Not now. But soon."
He nodded. "Soon."
He pocketed the phone and looked around the little room with its normal table and normal chairs and a window that looked out at a piece of a world that didn't know them and didn't owe them.
"Okay," he said. "We need a plan that isn't hope."
Shivam leaned his iron against the wall and sank onto a chair like it was the first time he'd seen one. "We find higher ground with supplies. No hospitals. No police. No crowds. Water and doors."
"Maps," Suraj said.
Lucky pulled a phone and shook his head. "No data."
"We have paper," Riya said, opening a drawer like the universe had obeyed her. She pulled out a folded neighborhood map with hand-drawn notes: sweet shop, tuition, park, tailor.
Ananya spread it on the table and traced with a finger. "We're here." She looked up at Ayush. "Pinefield is over there," she said, naming a housing cluster that had gates and rumors of a wall. "But the ring road is between."
"We avoid the ring road," Ayush said immediately.
"Then we cut through the metro market," Suraj said. "Shutters down, but the alleys run behind the shops. We use the service lanes like we used our school's."
"Perfect," Kartik said, and then made a face that said he knew that was a jinx.
"We'll need to move at dusk," Ayush said. "Light drops. People panic less because they can't see. The infected don't care about light. But people do."
Sanaa sipped water and passed the bottle to Nikhil. She watched his hands steady and nodded once like that was a small warrant to keep moving.
"First—" Ayush began, then stopped.
The TV in the next flat went out. The fan above them hiccuped and slowed. For a second, the whole building held its breath.
The lights died.
Silence spread, heavy as a blanket. Then the courtyard below came alive with voices—panicked, rising, bumping into each other.
"Grid," Suraj said softly.
"Or someone took a line," Lucky said. He didn't explain. He didn't need to.
Ayush stood. "We move in five."
"Already?" Kartik asked, not because he wanted to stay, but because the ground hadn't stayed ground all day.
"Already," Ayush said.
They packed faster than comfort. The biscuits went into pockets. The salt into the pack with the tape. The headlamps around necks. The knife back into Ayush's hand because he couldn't put it anywhere it wasn't already a part of him.
They filed back out. The courtyard was darker now, corners thicker. People stood at doors and windows, talking too loud, voices chasing panic around and around until it was too big to swallow.
At the far exit, a man in a white vest fumbled with a lock and cursed at it softly like patience was a person who'd stopped answering calls.
"Let me," Shivam said, and took the hammer to the weak part and knocked the lock free. The man looked at him like some people look at gods when they show up late.
"Thank you, beta," he said, and touched Shivam's shoulder like a blessing.
They stepped into a back lane that smelled like cooking oil and smoke, the city's two colognes. Ahead, the market's shuttered spine rose in a row of tin. Behind them, a woman started crying and didn't stop.
The alley carried them like a river would—around stacks of crates, under clotheslines with shirts that would never be folded, past a row of motorcycles leaned like dominos waiting to fall. At one corner, voices rose in a chant—names of gods in quick succession. At the next, someone played a song on a phone and sobbed to it.
The market began with a row of fruit shops and ended with hardware. The shutters were down. The alleys behind them were open—the narrow service spine where delivery men used to smoke and complain about petrol prices. It was big enough for eight people to slide through if they did it sideways and didn't mind dust.
They didn't mind dust anymore.
Halfway down the spine, a door opened into their path and a woman stepped out with a baby and a bottle and a face that said she had spent the day bargaining with things that don't bargain. She saw Ayush's group and froze, then raised the bottle to the baby's mouth again like the act could make everything outside that four inches of plastic behave.
Ananya paused. "Do you need anything?" she asked.
The woman looked at her like the question was too big. Then she nodded toward the shelves behind her. "There's water," she said. "Take some. The owner ran. I slept on the floor last night. I don't know where my husband is."
Ananya stepped inside without ceremony, grabbed two bottles, and put one in the woman's hand. "Keep this," she said. "And lock your door. Don't open it without asking who is there."
The woman nodded as if locking a door could still be advice.
They moved on. The alley kinked right, then left, then opened into a wider lane. The ring road hissed beyond it, a snake of moving noise.
Ayush put an arm out and stopped them. He flattened to the wall and peered around the corner.
On the road, a line of cars tried to become a route and failed. A bus had turned on its side and was bleeding people. Farther down, a police barricade had become a pile of wood. Three men in something like uniforms—civil defense?—held plastic shields and looked like children playing at soldiers.
Two men in plain clothes moved among them, steady where the others weren't. They moved like they had learned how. They wore no insignia. They both had short hair and eyes that didn't wander.
Ayush knew the stance. He knew the economy of motion. He couldn't read their shoulders from this angle, but he felt what direction their day had traveled. The taller one scanned and then looked straight at the alley where Ayush hid. For a second, their eyes met across motion and glass and heat.
The man shifted his gaze as if he hadn't seen anything, turned his head toward his partner, and said something Ayush couldn't hear.
"B.S.A.?" Suraj whispered.
"Maybe," Ayush said. He wanted to call it no. He called it maybe because maybe is what you say when the truth is a knife in a place you can't get to yet.
"Do we go to them?" Kartik asked.
"No," Ayush and Suraj said together.
"We cut under the road," Ananya said. "There's a service tunnel by the flyover pillars. It's for cables. It's tight, but it goes under to the old rail yards."
Ayush raised his brows. "You sure?"
"I used to hide there when I was late for tuition," she said, a ghost of a smile. "My mom thinks I'm afraid of dark places."
Suraj nodded once. "Lead."
They retreated two steps and slipped into a smaller alley that smelled like oil and mango peels. The tunnel lay where Ananya promised: a rusted grate hanging by one hinge, a ladder lost to rust but only a short drop. Ayush went first and landed soft on hard-packed dirt. He helped the others down. Nikhil watched Ananya lower herself like a cat and copied her exact shape.
The tunnel was two bodies wide, if bodies didn't mind touching. Cables ran along one wall in plastic arteries. Water pooled where the floor dipped. The air had the damp chill of places the sun forgot.
They moved hunched, headlamps off to save batteries, Ananya in front with her hand on the cable conduit to feel the turns, Ayush counting the seconds between breaths so he didn't hear how the city sounded overhead—metal and shouting and that new animal music.
Halfway through, the tunnel widened into a junction and then narrowed again. In the junction, old chalk marks on the wall showed children's games—a hopscotch grid low to the ground, numbers smudged by years. Someone had lived here before the day the world changed. Someone had already known that an underground can be safer than a road.
They climbed up at the far end into a cluster of wrecked rails and weeds. The sky had turned orange with evening. Smoke toned it down to the color of old peels.
"Drink," Ayush said, and they drank, not much, just enough to keep the headaches away.
Nikhil leaned into Ananya's side and didn't tell her that he was scared again. She didn't tell him that she was too.
Ayush's phone buzzed in his pocket like it had a say.
[Uncrowned King]: Joel, confirm your position. Do not approach uniforms unless verified.
He typed back one word.
He didn't say anything about tunnels or exits or children. He didn't ask for help he knew he couldn't trust.
He looked at the group, seven faces and one small one, lit by a sky that had decided to bruise. He thought of the word that had sat in his ear all day: lifeline.
"We're going to the rail sheds," he said. "They're open, but there are doors. We can climb." He pointed toward the black lines of corrugated roofs ahead. "We'll stop there. Then we plan again."
"Plan forever," Kartik said, half-smiling.
"Plan until morning," Ananya corrected, firm.
They picked their way through the weeds. Crickets tried to make the night sound normal. The sheds rose like sleeping animals. A long row of doors sat chained but weakly; these were never meant to keep people out, only the idea of them.
Ayush checked one. It gave to a shoulder. Inside, the echo of their steps climbed iron beams and hung there. A single coach sat on a rusted length of track, doors open like a breath taken and held.
"Up," Suraj said, pointing at a ladder to the roof catwalk. "We can sleep above the floor. Safer."
"No," a voice said from the dark, calm and too close.
They froze. The word rang like a pebble in a bell.
"Hands," Ayush said quietly, and raised his own, knife held awkwardly by the tip.
A man stepped into the ring of their sight lines. He wore no uniform. He held his hands open at his sides the way a man does when he wants to look like someone you can trust. He had a cut on his forehead that had clotted clean. His eyes were tired, not wild.
"I've got two others," he said. "We mean no harm."
Suraj's weight shifted in a way that wasn't quite a threat. "We can't take more," he said.
"We don't need your food," the man said. "We only need floorspace and silence." He looked at Nikhil, then at the grown faces, and chose who to speak to next. "You shouldn't sleep on the catwalk. If the doors come in, you'll be trapped up there."
He was right. Ayush hated him for being right.
"What's your name?" Ananya asked.
"Ajay," he said. He stepped back, hands still visible. "We're on the far end, by the stacked tires. If you choose to stay, we'll watch our half. If not—stay quiet when you go. There's a pack on the roof of the coach. Don't open it. It smells wrong."
He disappeared back into the shadows like he'd never been there. His footsteps didn't echo loud enough to help anyone triangulate him.
"Options?" Ayush asked, and didn't mind that the question cost him pride. Pride buys nothing after a certain day.
"Stay," Suraj said. "Watch."
"Stay," Ananya agreed.
"Stay," Kartik echoed, relief and fear wrapped together, inseparable.
They chose a corner that gave them wall to their back and a line on the doors. They stacked crates to make a waist-high barrier—a theater of defense that might buy seconds. Sanaa sat with her back to the wall and closed her eyes for three breaths, then opened them like a swimmer breaking the surface.
They settled in shifts because sleep here would be by permission only.
Ayush took first watch with Suraj. He adjusted his grip on the knife and didn't pretend it felt like anything other than a tool now.
"I saw your face when you killed that boy," Suraj said, not mean.
"He was already gone."
"I didn't say he wasn't." Suraj watched the door. "I said I saw your face."
Ayush didn't look away from the dark. "I thought there would be more to it," he said. "A feeling. Something. There was nothing."
"Good," Suraj said. "That means you're here."
Ayush flexed the fingers of his knife hand. He still heard the small sound the blade had made coming free.
He took his phone out and wrote a message he didn't send.
[Joel]: We're alive. I don't know who we are anymore.
He locked the screen without sending it and slid the phone back into his pocket like the act might seal the confession back up.
From the shadows on the far side of the shed, Ajay's voice came again, conversational as gossip carried across a courtyard. "If you have to choose between doors, choose the one that makes you feel less like you know yourself. That's the one that keeps you alive."
Ayush didn't answer. He looked at Ananya, who had fallen asleep with Nikhil's head on her thigh and a hand on his hair. He looked at Kartik, who dozed with his mouth open like a child and one hand still hooked in his belt where the chisel tucked. He looked at Shivam, whose eyes were closed but whose hand still wrapped iron.
He thought of Uncrowned's voice saying lifeline. He thought of Drake's message—no, not yet, that hadn't happened yet in their day. Time felt soft and wrong.
"Your turn to sleep," Suraj said, and Ayush realized he'd been standing too long for first shift.
He slid down the wall. He didn't sleep so much as blink long enough to lose count. The knife stayed in his hand. When he woke, the knife was still there and the sky beyond the high windows was purple-black.
Sometime in the small hours a sound came like footsteps across tin. Suraj's hand touched Ayush's shoulder once—awake—with a pressure that didn't push, just informed.
They held breath and held still.
On the coach roof, something heavy dragged. It stopped above the doors. A hand smacked the metal twice. A soft giggle floated down, incongruous and chilled.
"Not a child," Ajay whispered across the dark. "I thought so too. It's not."
The giggle came again, wronger.
Ananya woke with her hand already on Nikhil's shoulders and pressed him gently deeper into her lap. He didn't stir. He'd reached the sleep that follows shock, the kind of sleep that walls you off for a while.
The dragging moved to the far end of the coach and then away, the sound stepping from roof to beam to roof, and then out into the night again.
They waited until silence grew a skin again.
They waited longer.
Morning didn't come so much as concede itself. Gray crawled down into the shed. Dust motes came out of hiding to show themselves in ribbons of light.
"Knees," Shivam said under his breath, cracking them. It should have been funny. It wasn't.
They stretched in small ways. Ate a biscuit each. Drank two mouthfuls of water.
Ajay appeared again, careful not to come too close. He nodded once at Ayush. "You stayed."
"We did," Ayush said.
"You'll want to avoid the yard to the east," Ajay said. "Lots of glass. Lots of moving."
"What's to the west?" Ananya asked.
"The river," Ajay said. "You can go under the bridge. Water's low. Then the back of the depot. After that—whatever you decide to live through."
"Who are you?" Suraj asked, that particular flatness when he wants to decide if someone gets to stay a stranger.
"Someone who didn't get there in time," Ajay said, and didn't explain, and didn't have to.
He checked their faces in the light, one by one, and looked like he was counting something that wasn't numbers.
"If you head toward Pinefield," he said, "don't use the main gate. The small pedestrian on the north side sometimes sticks half-open. People forget."
"Thank you," Ananya said.
He shrugged. "Maybe you'll live. Maybe you won't. Maybe I'm a terrible judge of character." He went back to his corner and dissolved into it.
Ayush rolled his shoulders. The knife he'd used had dried in a line around the handle. He took a moment and cleaned it on an old rag hanging from a peg. He looked at the blade and didn't feel pride or shame, just a fact in the hand.
He looked at the group and felt all the other things.
"Time to go," he said.
They moved out into a morning that felt like a second attempt at being day. The air tasted like metal and promises. They went west, as advised, under a bridge where the water whispered shamefully low and rats watched them from culvert mouths. Nikhil wrinkled his nose and didn't complain.
On the far side, they found a street that had bent around trauma and kept going. A dog ran with part of a banner in its mouth like a king with a flag. A woman leaned out of a window and called a name over and over and wore the syllables down until they were only sound.
Ayush watched for uniforms and for eyes that moved like training. He saw neither. He wondered where Uncrowned put his people and what words they fed them and if anything he was doing fit inside anyone's words anymore.
His phone buzzed one more time.
[Uncrowned King]: Joel, maintain radio silence until ping. Do not beacon. Repeat—do not beacon.
He typed back nothing.
Ananya caught his glance. "Soon," she said again, answering the question he hadn't asked. "You'll tell us soon."
"I will," he said.
They reached the edge of Pinefield as the sun moved into a position where shadows stretched like choices. The small north pedestrian gate was ajar, the way Ajay had said. It stuck on a stone the size of a child's fist.
"Before we go in," Ayush said, "we watch. Ten minutes. Not because we like waiting. Because we're not ready to die in a gated community."
They crouched behind a stack of cement bags and watched the small slice of inside. A man in a green shirt walked across the interior road with a bucket. A child ran in a zigzag that was either play or panic. A woman watered a plant like defiance.
"Looks normal," Kartik said, and sounded like someone who knew how little that meant now.
"A village always looks normal until it doesn't," Suraj said.
They waited nine minutes and forty seconds and moved on the fortieth because sometimes the difference between nine-forty and ten is where the teeth are.
Ananya slipped through first and held the gate. Nikhil squeezed in under her arm and whispered, "Thank you." Sanaa went next, then Riya, then Lucky, then Shivam and Suraj.
Ayush paused on the threshold and looked back the way they'd come.
Far down the lane, a figure stood on a roof with a hand shading its eyes, watching the street in a way that wasn't curious. It wasn't B.S.A. exactly, and it wasn't random. The figure didn't wave. It didn't move. It just marked Ayush's group's existence and kept the knowledge for later.
Ayush couldn't see a face from here. He felt watched anyway.
He went through the gate and let Ananya drop the stone so the metal kissed metal again and looked like closure.
Inside Pinefield, the air felt different. Less movement. More held breath.
At the far end of the road, a man in a pale uniform jacket stepped from a guard post and held up a hand.
"Stop," he called, loud enough to carry. "Names? Do you live here? Coming from where?"
Ayush held his palms up, empty. "We need water and a place to rest," he called back. "We have a child."
The man squinted. He looked at the group like an equation. He glanced left. Someone behind the post said something he couldn't hear. The man nodded, once. He waved them forward, two fingers, a notch below welcoming.
"Come," he said. "Slowly."
They went.
As they walked, Ayush's phone buzzed one more time, a single pulse like a warning or maybe like a blessing.
He didn't look.
He didn't have to. He knew what it would say. He knew what none of them were ready to hear yet.
They crossed into Pinefield and the gate closed behind them with a sound achingly like safety.
From the roof beyond the wall, the watcher lowered a hand from a shade and smiled, small and private, like a man filing a detail away for the day he needs it.
He reached into his pocket and touched a photograph with the pad of a thumb. The paper was worn where the thumb always pressed. He didn't take it out. He didn't need to see it anymore to see it.
He turned and went back into the city like a fish into water.
Inside the gate, Ayush exhaled a breath that had been too expensive all morning.
"Welcome," the uniformed man said. "Stay close. Don't wander. We have rules. Break them and we put you out again."
"We won't," Ananya said.
"You will," the man said frankly. "Everybody does. Not the first day." He looked at Nikhil. "He stays with her," he said, nodding at Ananya, as if the decision was a small law of the place.
Ayush's phone finally vibrated long enough that ignoring it felt like a choice instead of a grace. He pulled it out as they walked and read the message.
[Uncrowned King]: Stand by for extraction protocol. Priority Joel. Confirm willingness to separate.
He looked up at Ananya walking with Nikhil's hand in hers. He looked at Kartik with his chisel and his growing pretense of a grin. He looked at Suraj, who already measured the place like he could see its weakness and its worth.
He typed back.
He put the phone away for good for the day, at least, and felt something like a line draw itself, real and bright.
The uniformed man led them toward a building that used to be a community hall. Voices drifted from inside, low and hoarse. People sat on steps with cups, eyes too big or too blank. A woman stirred a pot that smelled like cumin and resignation.
"Food," the man said. "A corner. After that—someone tells you the rules. Pray they're the right ones."
He went to turn away and Ayush stopped him with a word. "Sir."
The man looked back.
"Thank you," Ayush said.
The man made a face like the taste of thanks was bitter. "Save it for when we keep you alive a week," he said, and walked on.
Ayush stood there for a second and let the day catch up.
He had blood under his thumbnail that didn't wash off on the rag. He had a name in his ear that didn't belong to him and a decision in his chest that did. He had a knife that was a fact, and a group that was more than the sum of its fear, and a city that had decided to show him its teeth.
He had the next right thing to do.
"Eat," he told them. "Drink. Ten minutes. Then we find a corner and sleep in shifts."
"You always plan when we should dream," Kartik said, almost teasing.
"Somebody should," Ayush said.
Ananya bumped his shoulder with hers. "You did what you had to," she said softly.
"So did you."
She smiled. "We're not counting, remember?"
He breathed out. "Right."
In the shadow of the community hall, with cumin in the air and the sound of people who were still people, they ate. Nikhil fell asleep mid-bite, head heavy on Ananya's arm. Sanaa leaned on Riya and didn't apologize.
Ayush took a mouthful and swallowed around the taste of metal that didn't exist in the food.
He looked at the door, at the world beyond it, and knew that the day had asked him for something he hadn't known he could give.
First blood. First line drawn.
He watched the light outside shift a fraction on the concrete and thought: keep breathing. Then think.
He let himself taste the food.
He made himself finish it.
When the hall's shadow lengthened, someone came to tell them the rules.
When the hall went quiet, Ayush closed his eyes for three minutes and saw a knife slipping out of bone and didn't drop it on the floor. He opened his eyes when he said he would and counted the faces again.
Seven and a child.
Alive.
For now.
Outside the gate, the city rehearsed for night. Somewhere, a voice everyone thought they could trust crafted a plan to pull one boy out of a group and call that a win.
From a rooftop, eyes that loved and hated in equal measure watched the hall door and waited for it to open again, patience like a blade in a sleeve.
End of Episode 2: First Blood