They gave the rules in a room that had once hosted birthday parties and quiet celebrations. Now the community hall smelled like cumin and bleach, and the words they laid out on a plastic table were meant to sound like safety.
"No weapons inside the hall or dormitories," the uniformed man from the gate said. Up close his tag read KUMAR. He wasn't army—just someone who'd put on a jacket with a patch and decided to make it mean something. "Curfew at dusk. Water from the north tap only. Quarantine for anyone with a fever. We check for bites. If you lie, we put you out."
He looked at Ayush on the last line like the sentence had been pointed at him since the gate.
"We understand," Ananya said, voice even.
Ayush laid his knife on the table slowly. The act felt like removing part of a hand. Shivam placed the iron rod down beside it. Kartik produced the chisel, cheeks coloring—embarrassed to have something so small and still be so attached to it. Suraj kept his hands visible and empty. Lucky handed over a hammer he'd pretended not to have.
Kumar's eyes flicked to the pile and back to their faces. "You'll get them back on exit," he said. "If there's an exit."
"How many people?" Ayush asked.
"Couple hundred inside the compound," Kumar said. He pointed to a corkboard with a crude map of Pinefield. "Hall is here. Dorms here and here. Kitchen under the water tower. We're short on beds. Families first. New arrivals sleep on the hall floor. We have volunteers for watch."
He looked at Nikhil, then at Ananya. "He stays with her," he said, as if cementing a rule that had started at the gate.
Ananya's hand closed more firmly around Nikhil's.
Kumar dipped a finger in a bottle of green ink and pressed it to the inside of their left wrists one by one. "Clean," he announced after each mark, though the ink proved nothing. It was ritual. Ritual keeps people from going feral.
A woman stepped forward with a small bottle of sanitizer and a tray of cups. She poured clear liquid into each—a sugar-salt mix—and held the tray like a shield against how the world had rearranged itself. "Drink," she said. "You look thin."
Sanaa took a cup and managed a smile that made the woman reach out and smooth a strand of hair from her forehead the way strangers do when they decide to know you. Kartik whispered thank you like he'd forgotten the word and had to make it up again.
"Hall corner," Kumar said, pointing. "Blankets are over there if you're lucky."
They walked toward the corner and avoided the eyes of the people already lined along the wall. A man with a bandaged shoulder watched them like they were weather. Two girls not much older than Nikhil stared at Shivam's iron rod with equal parts fear and envy until he set it on the table and became less valuable in their eyes.
Ananya slid down the wall and pulled Nikhil with her. He had that tilt some children have after long fear—a lean into the nearest anchor like if he let go, gravity would become personal. She let him, then carefully put a blanket around his shoulders as if warmth meant ownership of the day.
Ayush lowered himself onto the concrete and let his back press into the cool wall. He counted faces without making his eyes move obvious. Bodies packed the hall in rough order—families to the left, single men to the right, single women near the kitchen where the light felt kindest. He let the dendritic map of the place click into his internal ledger.
"It's almost nice," Kartik said, half meaning it, half policed by his own sense of irony.
"Nice is a lie made of cumin," Suraj muttered, scanning exits.
Ananya glanced at the corkboard. Someone had scrawled rules in marker below the map: No shouting. No hoarding. No fighting. Do not open doors at night. Bring a cup. If we ask, show your hands.
Ayush's phone buzzed like something that belonged to a different life.
[Uncrowned King]: Joel, confirm your hold. Do not beacon. Extraction window possible tonight if you separate.
A muscle jumped along Ayush's jaw. He typed under the blanket.
[Joel]: Negative. Holding with unit.
The dot blinked. Stopped.
He slid the phone away and watched the kitchen. A young man with a hairnet and a soldier's posture ladled stew from a pot into tin bowls discretely, making sure the older ones got more, the children got first.
"Where'd you learn that?" Ayush asked when the man came by with a tray.
The man's eyes flickered up. "CGS pantry, before it went sideways." He tilted his chin toward the uniformed cluster at the back. "They pulled what they could when their convoy split. We cook. They talk."
"What do they talk about?" Suraj asked.
"Tomorrow," the man said, and went on his rounds.
Ananya slid a bowl to Nikhil. He touched the tin and didn't move, then took cautious sips like the stew might bite back.
By late afternoon, the hall breathed in a rhythm that tricked the body into thinking it could rest. Children slept. Someone opened a Bible and whispered. Someone else scrolled through a dead phone as if habit could resurrect signal. The light coming through windows went softer, made the dust look like mercy.
Outside the door, voices rose. The tone cut through the hall's new rhythm, a wire pulled out of a wall. Kumar stood, hand already out, and three other men with mismatched batons gathered, adrenaline waking them like a slap.
"Stay," he told the room. "Don't crowd the door."
A woman at the back stood anyway. "My Sonu—"
Kumar looked at her and lowered his voice. "Sister, if you run to the gate without a plan, you will die. Let me see first."
Ayush stood as a reflex and made himself take one second to look at Ananya. She nodded once. He followed Kumar at a slight distance, just off his shoulder but not beside it.
At the gate, three figures hammered at the metal so hard the vibrations came through the bar into Ayush's wrists. Two men and a woman. The woman's sari had torn into a banner along one edge. One of the men wore a delivery shirt with a logo nobody would pay anymore. The other's face looked wrong, somehow—too tight across the cheekbones, lips dried white.
"Open!" the woman shouted. "Please!"
"Bites?" Kumar shouted back.
"No!" the woman called. Her voice cracked. "No, please—my husband—" She gestured behind her. Someone lay on the road past the puddle of the gate's shade. He tried to push himself up and collapsed again like the ground had turned to oil.
Kumar glanced at Ayush, a flicker of how to be human and how to keep a hundred humans alive in war in his face. "We check them," he said. "One at a time. If any are—" He didn't finish.
He cracked the gate two inches. A smell came through that made the body step back—sweat, blood, smoke, a sweetness that didn't belong to anything that should be sweet. He slid one bolt, two, enough to open the gate a hand's width.
"Hands," he ordered.
They shoved their hands through like offerings.
Kumar looked at wrists, at forearms. The delivery man's sleeve had blood on it but no break to his skin. The woman's skin held dirt and a bruise, but no bite. The second man kept his elbow tight to his ribs.
"Arm," Kumar said.
The man didn't move.
Ayush bent without being asked and picked a small pebble from the ground. He held it up like a choice.
"Show us your arm," he said softly, "or I throw this past you and every head in that street will turn here."
The man's eyes didn't hold calculation. They held fear. He pulled his arm away from his belly. A ragged bite crescents the meat of his forearm. Someone had tied a scarf around it tight enough to leave deeper marks.
"Sahib—" the woman began.
Kumar closed the gate the two inches and bolted it again. The woman sobbed once, deeply, and then stopped. The bit man's expression slackened, like someone had told him a truth he had already known.
"You two," Kumar said to the delivery man and the woman. "Through the side gap one at a time. You—" He nodded to the bite. "Back from the gate."
"I can stay outside," the bitten man said. His voice had calmed. "I know what this is. But please. She doesn't know how to eat without being told. She will die in the road."
The woman hit the gate with her palm, once, not hard, not trying to break anything—just against a world that had chosen a line to draw in the wrong place.
Kumar closed his eyes for a breath you could hear and opened them into a decision. "Open to a hand's width when I say. Then shut."
He waited for the dead weight on the road to shift? He waited for what can't be forecast to hold still long enough? He waited because men like him measure twice, cut once, and it breaks them.
"Now," he said.
The bolt slid. The woman squeezed through like a letter through a mail slot. The gate closed. She stumbled inside and didn't fall because the wall caught her.
The delivery man didn't wait. He turned sideways, squeezed. The bitten man stood back from the gap. He lifted his chin.
Kumar reached through with a small packet of wrapped sugar and a bottle of water and placed them in the bitten man's palms. "Go to the shade," he said. "Away from the gate."
"Thank you," the man said. He walked to the base of a light pole, folded himself into the smallest shape he could make, and closed his eyes like someone saying a prayer with no verbs.
An old woman pushed through the hall crowd at a speed her body shouldn't have had. "You can't leave him," she cried, shoving through the men by the gate. "You can't leave him."
"Auntie—" Kumar started.
"My son went out this morning for medicine!" she shouted, glaring at Kumar so fiercely he had to look away or become the villain of a story he didn't want to be in. "They are people!"
"Not for long," someone muttered in the back. The old woman whirled.
Ayush stepped around the bolt line, into her eye-line without being the person she could fight, and spoke not like a guard but like a person. "Ma'am," he said respectfully, "if he comes in, he will kill someone. Maybe a child. You know that in your bones."
She stared at him and he watched the fight inside her travel down to a place where it would sit a long time and never sleep. She didn't forgive him for being right. She didn't have to.
On the road, the bitten man made a small sound and went quiet. He didn't thrash. He didn't bleed fresh. He breathed odd. He looked like someone who had stood in a room with a closed window too long.
A boy ran across the road behind him and the bitten man's head turned fast, and his fingers curled like a cat's.
Kumar shut the gap on instinct. The bolt clanged home. The old woman pressed her palm to the gate and let out a small keening like the day had pierced her exactly where it meant to.
The woman in the sari stood in the hall's light and looked at her hands as if they had done something they could never tidy away. She didn't cry. She settled her sari across her shoulder and sat down with her back against the wall.
"Quarantine them," someone called. "New arrivals. Quarantine for a day."
The room echoed the suggestion. A rule is easiest to swallow when it's fed to someone else.
Kumar turned to ayush's group, to Ananya with a child, to Shivam with iron, to Suraj with a finder's eyes. He raised his chin slightly at Ayush. "You help or you sit," he said. Not a question. A test.
Ayush nodded. "We help."
They swept the hall in sensible movements—moving mats, widening space near the door to create a buffer, carrying an older man gently to the corner farthest from the chaos. Riya vanished into the kitchen for five minutes and reappeared with strips of cloth, repurposed into armbands for "clean handlers." Ananya orchestrated without bossing—one look, one gesture, choices that made a circle rather than a line. Even Kartik found a steady, useful movement that had nothing to do with weapons: passing cups, calm words, making eyes crinkle at children in a way that felt honest.
Then the first scream came from the dormitory across the courtyard.
Ayush reacted before hope could argue. He reached the door on a run, skidding on the polished patch someone had cleaned before there was no time to clean. The dorm had fourteen cots lined like hospital beds. Ten held bodies. Two were empty. The last two—one held someone with their face turned to the wall and one cradled a woman curled around her stomach.
A volunteer stood in the doorway looking at him with eyes that didn't know which order to obey. "He said he didn't have a bite," she whispered.
The man who had face to wall rolled over. His eyes were wrong. The veins climbed his throat like black ivy had grown in his sleep.
Ayush stepped in. "Shivam," he called, and Shivam was there, iron up, breath measured.
Ananya stopped at the threshold and pulled the volunteer back by her sleeve. "Don't crowd," she said. "Give them space."
The man on the cot let out a sound from lower than the throat. He kicked out and took the air where a shoulder had been. He clawed at the sheet and dragged himself toward the edge of the bed.
Ayush didn't let the bed become the theater for his movements. He stepped close when most would step back and drove the knife once, quick, up. The sound it made filled the small room and then the room swallowed it.
The woman curled around her stomach rocked and made a sound that wasn't pregnancy and wasn't pain. Ananya moved before Ayush could, hands already pulling back clothing from the belly, eyes scanning skin. No bite. No rash.
"Fever," Ananya said, hand to the woman's forehead. "Just fever."
"Just," the volunteer echoed, a hysteric half-laugh.
"Water," Ananya ordered, steady as triage. "And a cloth."
The volunteer ran.
Ayush and Shivam checked under beds, corners, door seams, made sure the dorm was what it looked like. It rarely is. Today it was.
In the hallway, a clatter and a chorus of yells. Ayush hit the doorway in time to see two men dragging a third who had started trying to bite someone's leg out of panic that had turned his human brain off just long enough for harm. They slung him into a closet and held the handle while he banged his skull against the wood.
"Not bites," Suraj said from behind Ayush's shoulder. "Fear."
"Fear kills less people if you write a rule for it," Kumar said dryly and tied a ribbon of cloth around the closet handle so the bangers knew this wasn't a cupboard you open for soap.
The woman in the sari sat near the back wall through the chaos. She held her own fingers like birds she was afraid would fly away. Her face smoothed the way a lake does when all the stones have been thrown.
In the late dusk, calm pretended to return. The sun left the windows. The hall's fluorescents didn't come on. Someone had turned the main off with the day. Candles came out of pockets like contraband. Shadows got teeth again.
Ayush's phone buzzed before darkness finished its work.
[Uncrowned King]: Joel, last offer. Night extraction. Beacon only. Priority exfil.
Ananya's eyes asked the question he had always known she could ask silently.
He typed with a deliberate hand.
[Joel]: Negative. Not leaving them.
He thought the lack of an adjective made it easier. It didn't.
He slid the phone away and let his head rest against the wall for one precious second—bones to concrete—as if the transfer of cool would make the choice feel less like heat in his body.
He closed his eyes.
For a moment he saw the boy on the school roof again—tiny, brutal memory spliced into the wrong reel. When he opened his eyes he was in the hall again and the rules were still on the board and the people were still here and they had all decided not to scream for at least one more minute.
Outside, the gate clanged. Three sharp knocks. A pause. Two more. Another pause. Not random.
Kumar's head snapped toward the door. He moved with a speed Ayush hadn't seen in him yet and was at the gate in four strides. "Who?" he called.
Silence answered. Then a man's voice that could have been any city's: "Help."
"Code?" Kumar asked.
Ayush's head tilted. There was a code already?
The man answered with three numbers that meant nothing to Ayush and everything to the men who had put chairs against doors here last night. Kumar worked one bolt, then another.
"Wait," Ayush said softly.
Kumar paused, annoyed and curious. "What?"
"Ask him who trained him to knock," Ayush said.
Kumar squinted at him. "What does that—"
"Just ask," Ayush said.
Kumar did. "Who taught you the knock?"
The pause on the other side of the gate was a fraction too long.
"A friend," the voice said.
Kumar didn't move. "Name him."
Silence. A shuffle off to the left. Two more knocks, quick, lighter, as if persuasion could be done with a rhythm. Three of the men behind the door shifted weight like they had a ballet to dance that started with bolt turns and ended in spilling.
Kumar lifted his hand and they went still.
"We'll open the small gap," he called back. "Face in. Hands out. No one else moves."
He slid the bolt and opened the gap two inches. A face appeared in the space, a sliver—sharp nose, mustache, eyes wide but too calculating.
Two hands came through. They were clean. A sleeve slid down an inch and showed an odd smear of red high on the wrist where a person doesn't usually bleed.
"Back," Kumar said, closing it. "Back from the gap."
The man's eyes flared, then smoothed and went flat. He stepped back. Three other shapes behind him stepped back as well, in sync by a hair.
"Not random," Suraj murmured at Ayush's shoulder.
"No," Ayush said.
"What do we do?" Kumar asked them, and he hated that he was asking, and he loved that he didn't pretend he didn't need help.
"Nothing," Ayush said. "We do nothing and we survive the night."
"You want to let them die?" someone from the hall called.
"I want to not let us die," Ayush said. He didn't turn to face them. He didn't make it performative. He said it to the metal and the men beside him. "They aren't alone out there. Three steps behind that voice are men waiting for the space opening a gate creates."
Kumar swallowed. The sound was audible in the quiet.
From the road came a laugh—short, wrong, cutting. It slid under the gate and right into the hall.
Ananya's hand found Ayush's sleeve and tightened hard. Nikhil pressed himself into her side and didn't ask questions he should never have to ask.
Outside, something moved along the wall. A shadow peeled and reattached.
"Back from the door," Kumar ordered, softer now. "Double guard. No one sleeps on the front half of the hall."
People moved themselves and the people they loved without complaining. That's what a good call buys you.
Ayush watched the gate until the shadows congealed again and the noises stepped away to a new place. The laugh echoed once more, farther this time, like someone leaving barbecue coals in strategic places and feeling proud of their future fire.
They rolled blankets. They lay down one by one in lines that used to be neat when you could draw them with a pen.
Ayush took first watch with Kumar. Suraj took second. Shivam took third. Ananya slept with a hand still on Nikhil's hair, her palm curved like a small roof.
At two-dark in the morning, the first real breach happened and made all the earlier moral arguments taste like sugar in the mouth.
It didn't come through the gate. It came from below.
The first sound was water—a rush that didn't belong to night. The second was a scream from the kitchen. The third was the lights in the hall flickering sugar-white and then going out and then coming on again with a violent stab.
Ayush was moving before he fully woke—knife in hand, feet already answering to a map. He hit the kitchen in six steps and took the situation in like a photograph you have to live inside.
The sink gushed like someone had jammed the tap wrong. The drain had backed up and a line of black water edged across the tiles. In it, small things floated—bits of cloth, hair, something that looked like a rat and wasn't. The door to the basement stairs shuddered on its hinges.
"Pump room," Lucky said at his shoulder. His voice held a memory. "My uncle was maintenance. The pump room's under the kitchen."
Riya grabbed the mop by the door and jammed it under the handle like a brace. "Won't hold," she said.
"Back," Ayush said.
The door jumped. The mop squealed across tile. The handle cracked an inch and then two. Fingers—too many—appeared in the gap and clawed up the wood like it was bread.
Kumar arrived with two men and a plank like he had been born holding that plank. He slammed it into place across the handle. The door groaned. The wood strained. The mop finally broke and became a stick with purpose. The plank held because men leaned into it with their bodies and their fear.
"Everyone back to the hall!" Kumar yelled. "We seal the kitchen!"
People ran in the wrong direction because panic uses its own compass. Ananya stood in the doorway and redirected them with her hands and her voice, that teacher tone she had never had a chance to use now saved lives—"No, back. Not this way. Go around. Go. Go." She made eye contact with each panicking person long enough to prove a better way existed. They listened because she looked like someone who could be obeyed without anyone losing dignity.
The downstairs door thudded again. Something heavy on steps. Something many.
Ayush picked two bodies out of the surge and shoved them toward the nearest exit. "Shivam," he said without looking. "Let's lock the hall."
Shivam took the far side of the hall doors. They kicked wedges under and braced benches across. They used furniture invented for festivals to hold out teeth.
Sanaa stood midway with two children who weren't Nikhil, one on each hip. She looked like a person who would not put them down even if the building collapsed on her. Riya joined her without asking if help was needed and took one child, and Sanaa nodded thanks without wasting breath.
The kitchen door creaked in a new way—the wood fibers one by one choosing a different allegiance. It wasn't going to hold.
"Fall back!" Kumar shouted. "Cordons! Into rooms! Keep doors shut!"
Ayush's group didn't go to the first rooms they saw. He pointed them toward the storeroom off the hall—the one with the tiny window that opened onto the alley between buildings. It had shelves and crates and a door they could bar and another place they could go if the door went to hell.
They piled in and jammed a shelf against the door. The little room smelled like turmeric and cardboard. The tiny window let in a square of blue-black that felt like ocean.
Something in the kitchen screamed in a way that meant a throat had ripped. The second scream cut off. After that, the noises changed. You learn the new language in hours if you want to live.
Ayush turned to the window and popped the latch. The frame stuck. Suraj shouldered it. It gave with a punishing snap that could have been louder. Air slid over their faces, thin and night-cool.
"Out?" Kartik asked, voice too loud in the little space and then shrinking as he heard it himself.
"Not yet," Ayush said. "Hold until we hear where they go."
They held. The storeroom door thumped twice. The second thump had weight behind it. The shelf moved half an inch and then thought better of it because physics favored the wooden plank across it—a plank Suraj had wedged deep into wall brackets.
Riya counted breaths while they waited. She counted to thirty twice and then to thirty again because numbers make walls when walls don't stay.
Nikhil's hand found Ananya's sleeve and gripped. She leaned into him and spoke into his hair: "Small steps. We make small steps."
Ayush angled the headlamp down, just a whisper, toward the seam under the door. He saw darkness. He saw movement like slow worms. He saw a hand slide into the gap and pull back quick as a lizard when the shelf didn't give.
He exhaled once. "They're moving past," he whispered. "Toward the hall."
He hated the next sentence for what it required. "We go," he said. "Now."
They went out the window in a small line: Ananya first because she is light and fast, then Nikhil because he could copy her shape, then Sanaa and Riya, then Lucky and Kartik. Shivam swung last and Ayush lowered him by the belt and let go when his boots found the wall.
Suraj dropped feet-first and found ground like he always did. He turned and lifted. He didn't even grunt doing the work that would have been hard yesterday and felt like nothing now.
Ayush came last. He took one last look at the storeroom he'd made into a sanctuary and then into an exit. The door pulsed again as if saying, See? I'm still working. He ignored it and went out into air.
They slid along the narrow alley between the hall and the block of flats like shadows that had decided to be good at their job. The hall's front door boomed and voices rose to a pitch that meant panic had won at least half the battle inside. Someone had left a mop bucket in the passage; they stepped around it and around the memory of all the silly human things that looked obscene now.
They reached the back lane. The small pedestrian gate they had used to enter had been barred. The bolt looked old; it would give to a shoulder if a body didn't mind a bruised joint. Ayush didn't mind bruises anymore. He put his shoulder to it. It budged. Suraj added his. It slid, crooked. Together, they pulled it just enough to push the gate in.
They stepped into the lane and cool air and a stripe of moon. Quiet. The kind of quiet that isn't peace, just the absence of noise you can't fight.
Ayush paused. He looked back toward the hall and felt the pull—the desire to re-enter, to keep saving strangers until it killed them all. He wanted to. He knew he wanted to. He didn't. He looked at Nikhil and Ananya and the rest of the faces he was responsible for and made the call his body already knew.
"Move," he said.
They ran along the wall to a corner and turned into a smaller lane. Pinefield's rows made a grid if you looked at them from above. On the ground at night they made a maze. They moved by smell and by the kind of instinct you learn when your brother's hand twitches on a knife.
They reached the north wall. The stones looked taller than this afternoon. The small gate here had a chain on it that had rusted in two spots and gleamed in one. Someone had repurposed one of the house's decorative iron bars to hold the chain in place. It would take two minutes to break. They had one.
Shivam put the iron bar Ayush had left on the table back into the world by lifting it from where he'd tucked it into his jacket lining before they'd entered the hall. He looked almost apologetic that the lie had worked. "Sorry," he said. "I didn't think we'd get it back."
"Never apologize for a spare truth," Suraj said.
Shivam wedged the iron inside the chain and twisted. The weak link groaned. Ayush and Suraj put their bodies into the bend. The chain gave with a gunshot crack.
The gate sagged. They pulled it open enough to squeeze through.
On the far side of the wall, the night looked like night again—smog-soft and dark. A sound came from the house across the narrow street. A laugh, low, then high, then gone.
Ayush's scalp prickled. He turned his head toward the roofline. He caught movement at the edge of vision—someone pulling back from a parapet, too smoothly to be a panic.
He didn't chase it with his eyes. He pretended not to have seen at all. He knew what it meant. Rahul had moved to a better vantage.
"Go," he said, and they did.
They reached the dead park with the swing still moving in the wind like a hand had pushed it a second ago. They went along its edge. Nikhil looked at it once with the ache of a child who has lost a place without permission. He kept walking because Ananya did.
They retraced to the metro yard because they had made it there once and the body trusts what it has learned to survive. The tunnel mouth yawned like a friend you aren't sure how to greet after a year.
Ananya stopped at the grate and looked back toward Pinefield. Flames now ticked in the hall windows like small flags. Shadows moved weird. Voices rose and went flat. The rules on the corkboard meant less in the burning light.
"Do we go back?" she asked, whispering the question so it didn't break anything.
Ayush didn't answer for two breaths because he had learned that sometimes giving a decision time makes it better. It didn't this time.
"No," he said.
Suraj blew air out through his nose in a sound that wasn't laughter. "You're learning."
"I hate it," Ayush said.
"We all do," Suraj said.
They slid back into the tunnel. The damp was cold on wrists. The cables hummed softly—the city's dying heartbeat. They moved by memory and by Ananya's hand tracing the conduit. Riya counted again when panic tried to pull her into itself. Kartik watched Nikhil and learned the shape of responsibility that had nothing to do with battle.
They came up in the rail yard. The sky had given up on moon and was mostly noise and dark. They went back to the shed with the coach because it had a door they could hold and an old friend in the far corner.
Ajay stepped out of the dark as if he'd never left. He took one look at them and did a quick headcount that matched Ayush's without numbers.
"You stayed alive," he said.
"Pinefield didn't," Suraj said.
"Pinefield never did," Ajay said. He looked at Ananya, then at Ayush. "You still have choices. Fewer, but you do."
Ayush took a breath and let it go. It didn't make anything better. He didn't need it to. He needed air and a place to put his back for one more night.
"Thank you," he told Ajay, meaning it in about six directions.
Ajay tilted his head at the roof. "They won't come here tonight. They had reasons to go elsewhere."
"'They'?" Kartik asked.
"People who think the apocalypse is a chessboard," Ajay said.
Ayush looked at him. "You talk like a man who knows the other side."
"I talk like a man who lived long enough to see both players cheat," Ajay said, not sure whether that was wisdom or just exhaustion.
They nested against the wall behind the crates, built a small barricade of tires and the weird detritus of a yard that used to hold trains and now held ghosts. Ananya fell asleep first because someone had to show the rest that it was still something humans did. Nikhil's head was heavy on her lap. Riya took a watch for the first time and held it like a thing she'd have to hand back.
Ayush sat with his back to the wall and looked at his hands. His left held nothing. His right still had the memory of a knife's weight even when it was on the floor beside him.
His phone buzzed one last time.
[Uncrowned King]: Joel, copy: Pinefield compromised. Maintain position. Do not engage. Command asset inbound to your grid. Confirm willingness to separate on contact.
Ayush typed back without showing anyone.
[Joel]: Negative. We move together.
He didn't expect a reply. He didn't get one. He set the phone on his thigh and watched the sleeping shapes he had chosen over orders that looked clean on a screen.
On a roof two blocks away, Rahul watched the shed through a broken skylight. He leaned his forearms on the lip and rested his chin on the back of one hand. He didn't blink for a long time. He had learned not to because blinking costs you things.
He took the photograph from his pocket and touched Aliya's face with his thumb once, gently. He put it back. He smiled—not a big smile, a private one, the kind a person shares with themselves when they have set the board the way they like.
"They ran where I wanted," he said, and the wind took the words as if they were useful to it.
He stood, slow, like a cat waking. He walked to the edge and dropped three small stones into the yard below, one by one, spaced, so they would be found in the morning by someone who learned things from patterns. He liked teaching.
He stepped into the dark. He didn't look back.
Inside the shed, Ayush let his eyes close for one minute. He pictured doors. He pictured fire. He pictured a city that had decided to keep moving even when everyone in it had stopped.
He opened his eyes again when he said he would.
He watched the dark.
He waited for morning, and whatever it was going to cost.
End of Episode 3: Containment Breach