The yellow house had two doors and the kind of tired plaster that remembers hands. A fan hung from the ceiling like a bird with nowhere to go. The hallway smelled faintly of turmeric and old incense, the kind of scent that belongs to rooms that used to forgive you for coming home late.
Ayush cleared it fast—the front room with a divan and two plastic chairs, the kitchen with a steel sink and one window the size of a plate, a back room barely big enough for a mattress and a lock. The bathroom door stuck, then gave; no one behind it. He took longer in the corners than he used to take in hallways. He'd learned corners are where grief waits.
Ananya opened drawers with quiet hands. Riya checked the tap and nodded when water coughed. Lucky stacked tins in the kitchen; two had dates stamped recent enough to matter. Shivam tested the bar on the back door; it held well for something improvised. Kartik stood in the doorway with his chisel and made himself breathe.
Ajay stayed by the threshold, one hand on the splintered frame, watching the lane without looking like he was watching the lane. "I sleep in the back room," he said. "One window. If you put a table under it, no one comes in without making the kind of noise you can live through. The front—you make a funnel, not a wall." He nodded at the divan and chairs. "Flip those. Force them to come two at a time."
Suraj tilted the couch onto its end, pushed, and wedged it to create a channel from the door to the hallway. "Kill zone," he said. Not a boast. A label.
"Don't call it that," Ananya said, already unwinding wire. She glanced at Nikhil. "We name things so he can sleep."
"What do you want to call it?" Suraj asked.
"A hallway," she said, and climbed onto a chair to run a line for tins at shoulder level. "If they run, they won't look up."
Ayush nodded. "Noise buys seconds." He set a stool under the kitchen window and tried the latch. Rust cracked like a throat clearing. He opened it three inches and left it.
The radio in his pocket breathed a faint hash of static. He didn't pull it out. He already knew what it would say; the words burrowed through plaster whether you let them into the room or not.
Kartik stood with a roll of tape and no instructions. Sanaa handed him cans, and he made a line over the back doorway, careful to leave just enough slack to sing.
Nikhil hovered near Ananya. "Can I help?" he asked.
"Always," she said. She pointed to a basket of clothespins. "Hold these and give me one when I ask. You're the quartermaster."
"What's that?" he asked.
"The person who makes sure we don't run out," she said.
He smiled like a job had made him taller.
They finished the first layer of defenses. Ajay walked the perimeter without touching anything, a cat in a room of strings. "You've bought yourselves five minutes," he said. "Maybe more if whoever comes thinks people are still honest."
"I'll take six," Suraj said.
Ayush pulled the pack from the corner and laid out their small ration of fire: a bottle with a half inch of alcohol, a spool of cloth, a length of wire. He set them within reach, not in a pile—one hand motion away, not three.
Ananya washed a cracked mug in the sink and filled it. She pressed it into Ayush's hands. He didn't know he was thirsty until water touched his mouth. "Fifteen minutes," she said. "You sit."
"I don't sit," he said, automatic.
"You do," she said, not a question. "Or you walk into the next ten minutes half a person."
He sank onto a crate with his back to the wall and his knife flat on his thigh. He closed his eyes for two breaths. The roof at school flickered. The hall in Pinefield burned. He opened his eyes again when he said he would.
Outside, the lane held its city silence. Footsteps passed. Voices bent around the corner, did not enter. Somewhere two streets over, a scooter backfired and a woman swore like a prayer.
At the doorway, Ajay said, without turning, "He's there."
Ayush went to him. Across the lane, two roofs over, the same silhouette leaned against the parapet. Rahul, in a posture relaxed enough to frighten you. He lifted a hand, almost a wave. He had a talent for making your map include him whether you liked it or not.
Ayush didn't wave back. He nudged the three stones on the threshold again with his toe until the neat was gone.
Rahul's mouth moved. Distance made the words into theater. Ayush didn't need the sound. He knew "good" when he saw it shaped in a mouth that didn't mean it.
Ananya tapped the window glass twice—her signal. Ayush moved to the back room. She'd found a candle stub and shielded its flame with a steel plate. She held it behind the window, hand high. The smoke climbed to the frame, then drifted out in a thin, steady thread. To someone overhead, it would look like a signal from a stove or a distress. It would look like both.
"Signals cut both ways," Suraj said, watching the smoke find sky. "Asset sees it. He thinks we want him."
"I want the asset to know we have doors," Ayush said.
Ajay watched the lane. "He'll come, because that's what his job is called," he said. "The other one—your friend—he'll make sure you pay for what you decide here."
"Leon?" Ananya asked softly, the name new on her tongue.
Ajay looked at her, surprised. "You know him?"
"We grew up in the same lie," Ayush said.
The drone came first, of course. It pinwheeled two roofs away and then above the lane, holding its angle like a bird that had forgotten its wild. Its red dot found the gap in the curtain and the shape of Ayush's shoulder. He didn't move. He let it paint him.
"I hate that thing," Kartik said, low. He couldn't bring himself to call it by its use.
Ten minutes later, boots. Not stomped. Placed. Measured cadence. A knock on the door that carried the same shape as the one at Pinefield: two, pause, three.
Shivam's hand tightened on the iron.
"Open," Ayush said.
Suraj moved to the side. Ajay lifted his chin. Ananya, without needing to be told, slid Nikhil into the back room and put his hand on the edge of the mattress. "Stay," she whispered into his hair. "No matter what you hear."
She closed the door until a crack of hallway remained, enough to see light under it.
Ayush eased the front door open a hand's width.
Leon stood on the step, helmet off, hair sweat-damp, eyes red but not from tears. He looked thinner than the last time Ayush had seen him in uniform. He looked like he hadn't had time to look in a mirror since. He smiled a quick, grateful, pained smile that broke and fixed something in Ayush at the same time.
"Brother," Leon said quietly.
Ayush opened the door and let him in and locked it behind him in one motion. Suraj's jaw flexed but he said nothing. Ajay shifted one pace, watching thumbs, not faces.
Leon took in the room fast—cans, wire, couch, knives. He nodded once like a man appreciating an exit plan.
"Uncrowned has you marked," he said, not wasting the breath he didn't have. He tapped his ear. "I have him here. He has me here." He tapped the drone, which hung outside the window like a bad idea. "He thinks I will unthread you from them."
"You won't," Ayush said. Not a question.
Leon's jaw clenched. "I won't. But there's a second asset inbound. He will try to make my refusal irrelevant."
"'Lesnar'?" Suraj asked, tone dry.
Leon's eyes flicked. "You hear too much."
"I listen," Suraj said.
Leon exhaled. "He's by the old banyan at the corner. Three minutes out."
Ananya evicted a breath she hadn't known she'd held. "Then we have two minutes to decide how to not die when he opens that door."
"Wishes?" Kartik said, half this will be over soon, half I am going to throw up.
"Wishes are for after," Leon said. He stepped closer to Ayush. "Uncrowned will say the words 'priority extraction.' He will mean 'abandon them.' I will say no. Lesnar will say yes."
"Then we make him say nothing," Shivam said. The suggestion landed between relief and threat.
Ayush looked at Leon. "You could walk," he said. "You could step out and tell yourself you obeyed to stay alive."
Leon's laugh was a knife slipping and getting caught. "You think that wouldn't kill me?"
"Then you're staying," Ayush said. "With me. With us." He watched the way the word us moved through the room and settled inside ribcages.
Leon nodded once, grateful in the way men are when someone makes a choice they already believed in. "We hold the door. We hold the line." He looked at Ananya. "You were always the braver of us, without making noise about it."
Ananya's mouth flickered. "You don't know me," she said softly.
"I know enough," he said, and the way he said it gave her the benefit of the doubt and a knife to use later if he was wrong.
The radio hissed. Uncrowned's voice slid into the air like cold: "Joel. Asset on station. Stand down. We will take you out clean."
Ayush put the radio on the table and didn't touch it. "There is no clean," he said, not to the device, to the room.
Boots on the step. A hand tried the handle, found it locked, knocked once—a test. The barrel of a rifle slid through the curtain gap and pulled back without firing, a rude greeting.
"Drake Lesnar," Leon said, quick, the way a surgeon names a scalpel. "Stubborn. Trained correctly. Thinks he has a talent for mercy."
"Does he?" Suraj asked.
"He thinks letting you live alone will save more lives," Leon said. "He is wrong."
Ananya stepped to Ayush and took his sleeve. "No heroics," she said. "Just the next right thing."
He nodded. "Always."
The back door thudded just once, as if someone had put a palm to wood to measure truth. The front handle jiggled. The drone whirred like an insect with plans.
"Open the door," Drake called. His voice had a way of pressing through material. "Hands high."
"No," Ayush said.
"You don't get a vote," Drake said, almost kindly. "You never did. You're an asset. You know that."
Ayush looked at Leon. Leon shook his head, slow. Not this.
Drake stepped back from the door and spoke into his mic. "Command, be advised: Joel is with civilians. Several. One minor. Advise on engagement."
Uncrowned didn't take long. "Priority extraction. Minimal collateral authorized."
"Repeat," Leon said into his mic, voice like smoke from water. "Minimal?"
Silence. Then the smooth lie: "You will know what it means."
Ayush's stomach went cold. He reached for the Glock in the small of his back. Leon took a half-step toward him and didn't finish the movement. That was the moment of trust.
Drake kicked the door. The couch gave an inch, the way a polite person moves out of your way. The couch did not care about polite. Drake kicked again. The joints in the plastic chair squealed. Kartik flinched like something had been shot. Ananya touched his sleeve, a small anchor.
Leon slid to the side of the door and lifted his rifle, muzzle high—not at Drake. At the frame above, in case he had to make wood fall. He mouthed I'm sorry to Ayush without taking his eyes off the hinge.
Drake's third kick took the door off one screw. The fourth took it to the floor. The couch wobbled and failed to keep being furniture. Drake stepped in, fast, covering the angle with muzzle discipline drilled into him by people who still insisted drills saved lives.
He saw Ayush. He saw Leon. His glance bounced. A calculation moved across his face like a passing cloud.
"Joel," he said. "On me. Now."
"No," Ayush said again, and this time the word sounded like something you put in the ground and build around.
Drake's eyes hardened. "Don't make me do this. You are not the story. The cure, the course—the numbers you can't see—"
"I've seen numbers," Ayush said. "I choose names."
Drake's rifle tracked left toward Ananya because that is what you do when you want compliance—you threaten what someone can't tolerate losing. Leon swore and moved without thinking and put himself between the barrel and the person.
"Stand down," Drake said, and the words finally broke, because he had been trying to be a person and the radio had been trying to make him a rule.
Uncrowned's voice arrived like a judge walking onto a stage. "Neutralize resistance."
Leon flinched like someone had struck him. He shook his head at thin air. "No."
"Then you are neutralized," Uncrowned said, and there was something in the tone that was worse than the word.
Shivam moved one inch. Drake's finger tightened. The muzzle wobbled. He was aiming at the floor and at someone and at the back of his training and at the voice in his ear and at nothing. His body was good; his orders were cruel; his heart was loud and went unheard.
Ayush raised the Glock. The world went very narrow and very clear. He saw the shape of Drake's eyes, the twitch at the corner of his mouth that belonged to an old joke, the way his toes planted, the way his shoulders set—not someone who wanted to kill them. Someone about to.
"Drake," Ayush said, and hated using his name like this, and used it anyway. "Please."
Drake hesitated for a breath that cost him everything.
Ayush shot him once, center mass, because he would not miss and because he had to. He watched Drake's face change shape as the bullet took away his ability to be anything but a body falling. Drake looked surprised, then sad. He went down in the doorway quietly. His rifle slid from his hands and clattered in a way that will always sound like shame.
For a moment, everyone was a statue.
Leon made a sound that a man makes when that is his friend on the floor. He crouched, hand going to the wound as if it mattered. Blood steamed in the cool of the house. Leon's hand came away red. He set it on Drake's chest and said, "I'm sorry," to a man who did not need to hear it anymore and said it to himself because he did.
Ayush did not lower the Glock. He couldn't. His fingers had not received the reversal order yet. He stared at the space that had held Drake upright and then at Drake's body and then away because there are places you don't look if you want to be able to move after.
The gunshot brought the city.
Feet scuffed in the lane. A scream rose, short and eager. Someone howled because they think that's what you do when you become hunger. The drone outside tilted like a curious bird who had no fear of teeth and did not bleed.
"Back," Suraj said, already moving the couch piece aside to give them room to move and not exposing his spine to the door. "We go."
Leon grabbed Drake's dog tags with a movement that was almost angry and shoved them into his own pocket. He didn't look at Ayush. He didn't have to. He stood. "Take his magazines," he said, because grief would not fill the space bullets had to occupy.
Shivam scooped the mags with efficient hands. Kartik took the med pouch with a face that might never go clean again. Ananya reached for the radio on Drake's belt and turned the volume down until Uncrowned's voice became a mosquito whining in a jar. She left it on. Information paid.
Ayush dropped the Glock's magazine and slammed a new one home with a click that sounded like reality. He exhaled a breath that shook and did not let anyone hear it.
The infected hit the front step, shoes slipping on the smear Drake's blood had made on tile. They hadn't learned that becomes a hazard. They always learned eventually. The first one fell. The second fell over the first. The third made it through and kept coming because the rules for balance had been rewritten.
Ananya tugged the line attached to the cans above the hallway. They clanged into each other, a bright crash, a false thunder. The front swarm flinched sideways toward the sound, the back pressed inward, the funnel did the work it had been built to do. Shivam put the iron into a skull with the kind of economy that made your ribs remember the shape of a door. Suraj shot clean and low, not too many rounds, no waste. Leon put a bullet into a forehead without looking away from the next.
Ayush took the back room door and twisted the knob. The latch stuck. He kicked it, low and flat. It gave. He turned to Ananya. "Now," he said.
She grabbed Nikhil and the pack and the headlamp. Sanaa and Riya followed, eyes wide but linear. Lucky went backward, eyes on the hall, tape in one hand like he was still going to use it on something.
Ajay stood by the kitchen window. He popped the latch and pushed the plate out with his palm. Night air shoved in, bringing with it a smell of damp and burning scooter. "We go here," he said. "Roof of the shed. Left. Then drop to the alley behind the tea shop. They'll follow the gunshots to the front, not the back."
"Move," Ayush said, for the third time that wasn't about running away but about remaining alive.
Ananya swung out and landed on the shed roof light. Nikhil came next, copying her hands again like it was a hymn. Riya did not look down. Sanaa did and made herself swallow the fear like it was a pill. Lucky made a joke he did not say out loud, only mouthed it to himself: flying school.
Leon turned, fired two controlled pairs, then threw his shoulder under the couch and shoved it into the body of two infected hard enough to buy one expensive second. "Go," he said, and Ayush wanted to tell him he loved him, the kind that means you keep me honest, but there was no time and also there was no need. Leon knew.
Suraj grabbed the last magazine from Drake's belt and tossed Ayush the med pouch. "Your ribs will hate you for a week," he said, as if there was a calendar he still respected. "I will hate you for the ten seconds you keep us here."
Ayush swung through the window and hit the shed roof on his palms, rolled, came up in a crouch. He reached back. Leon's hand came through. Ayush caught his wrist the way you catch someone you trust not to fall if you fail them. He didn't. He pulled. Leon came up. They ran along corrugated tin that had always wanted to be a drum.
They dropped into the alley behind the tea shop, where a radio played an old song still, as if the apocalypse had not been invited to this frequency. They moved past the back door. The old man inside snored. The world did not end in that corner of a room; it ended somewhere else.
They reached the gap in the wall kids had punched and went through it. Rahul stood on the far roof, no longer waving, only watching. He had Aliya's hair tie around his wrist. He touched it with his thumb like a man with a worry stone. He smiled—not the sharp one this time. The small one. The one that said: you keep choosing; I keep counting.
Ananya caught Ayush looking and put a hand on his shoulder and squeezed hard enough to communicate twenty sentences. He nodded once, too fast to be seen by anyone who didn't know him.
They hit the metro service road and ducked into the black throat of the cable tunnel because it had saved them once and you can ask a thing to save you again if you take off your shoes in the doorway. The cables hummed. The damp gave their cheeks predatory attention. They moved by headlamp bounce and hand on conduit.
Halfway through, the drone found the grate and peered in, curious. Leon stopped and crouched. He pulled a spare mag, popped the baseplate, and slid the spring free. He used the spring like a hook and snagged the drone's front leg through the grate and yanked. The drone toppled into the tunnel and hit metal with a noise that made the bats further in reconsider home.
Leon stomped the lens under his boot. The machine screamed and died. The lane above them went quiet, then filled with the sound of an angry voice in someone's ear somewhere else.
"Uncrowned will send his second line," Suraj said.
"Let him," Leon said, and the tone in his voice let Ayush know that there was a kind of leaving you can only do once. Leon had done it.
They came up in the rail yard again, breath ragged, wrists black with tunnel. Ajay's shoulders eased when he saw the sky. "You take the shed," he said. "I'll draw them wrong."
He slid away without waiting to be thanked, a man with enough life left to risk it.
Inside the shed, they reset the barricade by muscle memory. Nikhil fell into Ananya and started to shake because bodies do that when you stop telling them not to. She let it run through him and held him as if shaking could be a thing you did together.
Leon sat on a crate and looked at his hands and then wiped them on his pants over and over, not because there was so much blood but because he needed the movement. He looked up at Ayush and the apology on his face didn't demand anything. It just existed.
"I'm sorry," he said.
"So am I," Ayush said.
They didn't say Drake's name again yet. They would later, when they could do it like a promise instead of a wound.
Ananya tied a headscarf tighter because her hands wanted a task and then put them on Ayush's wrists. "You're bleeding," she said.
"I know," he said.
"Let me," she said.
She cleaned what she could of the shallow cuts, taped what needed tape. He watched her hands and made himself memorize this—the care, the competence, the choice to neither break down nor pretend nothing had happened.
Drake's radio whispered from her pocket like a conscience that didn't know how to shut up. She pulled it out. Uncrowned's voice had shifted, somehow warmer around the consonants.
"Leon," it said. "You forced my hand."
Leon took the radio and held it away from his face, as if disgust were a physical force. "No," he said. "I used mine."
"You always were sentimental," Uncrowned said. "That's why Joel follows you. That's why you will all die."
Ananya reached over and turned the volume down until the voice was a sound you don't have to think about yet. She put the radio on the crate between them like a stone you both own.
Kartik wiped the Glock with a rag until his hands stopped shaking. "So," he said, not flippant, just trying not to drown. "We're… an army now?"
"We are a family," Ayush said, and the way he said family put iron under the word.
Outside, a wind moved in a way that carried a smell like rain even though there was none. Rahul's three stones lay on the step at the yellow house, neat again, though no one had put them that way.
In the shed, Leon leaned forward. "He won't stop," he said, meaning Uncrowned, meaning Rahul, meaning the city.
"No," Ayush said. "We don't either."
He stood at the edge of the open coach, looked out at the tracks glinting like veins, and understood that he had crossed something he couldn't uncross when he pulled the trigger. He also understood that there are buttons you push and watches you wear and calls you answer that keep other people alive, and you do them even when your chest feels too full to fit breath.
He closed his eyes for a heartbeat.
"Tomorrow," he said.
"Tomorrow," Ananya echoed.
"Tomorrow," Leon said, already rewriting the day with his body.
"Tomorrow," Suraj said, the kind of man who knows you survive by inventorying your tomorrows before someone else does.
Nikhil whispered it too, into Ananya's sleeve, and the word stopped being just a day and became a kind of vow.
On a roof half a kilometer away, Rahul lay on his back and watched smoke unravel into the night like a language. He took the photograph out of his pocket and smoothed the crease where Aliya's face folded. He said something to the dark that no one else heard.
He turned the red hair tie around his wrist once.
He smiled without teeth.
He slept.
End of Episode 5: A Signal in the Smoke