Dawn sifted into the shed like the day had to ask permission. The light didn't turn the steel less cold. It just let them see what they'd kept alive through the night.
Ayush rolled stiff shoulders and checked the barricade by touch, then by eye. Tires stacked two deep. A crate wedged against the rail. The coach door latched. The little pile of their world fit on a crate—tape, headlamps, the iron, a med pouch, the Glock with one magazine low, and the radio that breathed Uncrowned's voice into a space too small for it.
Leon sat on an overturned pail with Drake's dog tags looped through his fingers. He looked different in the morning, the kind of different you get after the night levels you out. The lines in his face had settled into new places. He held the tags like something between worry beads and evidence.
Ananya came from the back with a jar of water darkened by rust and a sprig of something green someone had thought would make a room smell better. She set it next to the radio like the two things could cancel each other out by proximity.
Ayush took one breath long enough to count as rest and then got up because there wasn't another kind to be had. He motioned to Leon. They stepped to the corner by the stacked tires. "We go through his kit," Ayush said, not asking. "If he left us anything, it's there."
Leon's thumb ran along the edge of one tag and stopped at a nick that didn't look like wear. He frowned, then threaded the tag's edge into the dog tag silencer groove and flexed. The tag's back split along a hairline seam. A rice-sized micro-SD fell into Leon's palm.
"Drake," Leon said, a breathy laugh sad and fond at once. "You paranoid bastard."
Ananya's head came up. Suraj left the window and joined them, curiosity a tool in his hand like everything else.
Leon slotted the card into the battered radio's side port. The radio wasn't a computer; it wasn't supposed to sing for things like these. He tapped two buttons in an order you only know if you've been taught on a rooftop by someone who likes dead tech. The radio crackled and then spoke in Drake's voice, careful and too level.
"If this reaches you and I'm not there, it means one of two things," Drake said. "Either I failed you or I kept you alive the only way I could."
They didn't look at each other. They listened.
"Trust no one holds," he went on. "Not even us. I don't know when we were compromised. I picked up the change in tone a month ago—phrases that aren't on our cards. 'Minimal collateral' used to mean 'try.' It means 'accept' now."
Leon closed his eyes, just once. Ayush felt his jaw tighten and forced it to relax.
"If Uncrowned says 'stand by for extraction' and follows with 'do not engage, asset will reacquire,' it's not extraction. It's patience. If a drone paints you with a steady dot and doesn't fire, it's marking, not aiming. They'll come later. You're not a priority. You're a problem on a list. If you see a short red blink on a rooftop—you're already on the list."
There was a pause, a breath, the kind you take when the next sentence hurts.
"If he ever asks you to 'separate clean,' it's because separating you from everyone else kills less people on paper, and the paper is what they read now. You'll do what you have to. I know you will. I know you don't need my permission. … Joel—you're not an asset. You're a person. Don't let him convince you otherwise."
The recording clicked off like Drake had been interrupted or like he didn't want to say goodbye.
Leon swallowed. The sound was rough. Ananya stared at the radio, then out the window like she could send the message back along the path it came and make it true earlier.
Suraj blew air out through his nose. "So we're marked," he said. "We knew it. Now we have a tutorial."
Ayush turned the tags over in his hand and felt the small weight of the chip he'd heard. He tucked the tags back into Leon's palm and closed his fingers around them. "We move in fifteen," he said. "We don't give the mark time to become a plan."
Ajay materialized at the far door the way he did when his body had learned a room's blind spot. "You don't have fifteen," he said. He pointed up. "Hear that?"
At first it was a suggestion more than a sound. Then the floor trembled a fraction in a way it shouldn't in a concrete shed. The air in the room got a draft like something large passing low outside.
"Not the drone," Shivam said quietly.
"Bigger," Ajay said. "Heavier. They aren't shooting. Not yet. They're sniffing."
"Heat?" Lucky asked. "Gas?"
"Paint," Suraj said grimly. "IR or aerosol. If they can't find you easy, they'll make sure they can later."
Ananya tore a strip of cloth, dipped it in the rusty water, and tied it over Nikhil's nose and mouth before he could ask why. "Gear up," she told the others. "Scarves. Shirts. Wet if we can spare."
They dampened what they had. It wasn't much. It wasn't nothing.
The sound passed. It didn't linger. That felt worse. The world had been catalogued and approved for future attention.
Ayush checked Kartik's ribbon-wrapped forearm. Clean. Not a bite. He nodded. Kartik nodded back, trying to be brave without making it a performance.
The quiet after something large leaves always holds something small. In their case, it arrived as a soft scrape overhead—tin on tin, a careful test of strength. The section of roof above the open coach flexed a centimeter. Dust rained in a fine veil.
Ajay's head went up. "That's not them," he said. "That's not uniforms." His eyes cut to the rail above the coach. "That's the city's other problem."
The thing came through the roof like a spider that had learned doors. It didn't fall; it poured—four limbs and then a fifth hooking into metal, its body low and wrong. It had been human long enough that the brain tried to put it into a shape with a name. It wasn't any more. Its elbows bent the way knees do. Its chin hinged too far. Its eyes shone a little in the dark, reflective like a cat's, but where a cat's eyes blink wary curiosity, these carried nothing but wanting.
It tasted the air with its mouth open and turned its head toward the hottest patch in the room. They all felt it when its attention slid across their skins like a cold sheet. The headlamp on Ananya's neck reflected off its eyes and it hissed, an ugly, soft sound.
"Eyes," Ajay hissed back, voice low and flat. "Base of the skull. Or cut the hamstring and finish."
Shivam didn't wait. He stepped to flank, iron low. The thing launched toward the heat. Ayush grabbed a film tin and threw it toward the warmest shadow they'd made, shunting heat signature left the way he'd learned last night. The thing adjusted mid-leap like its body had an algorithm.
"Ananya—light," Ayush barked.
She hit the headlamp to full and threw the beam into its face. It flinched. It didn't stop. It kept coming blind and low, pure vector toward breath.
Ayush met it with steel at its temple. He missed the sweet spot by a finger and felt the blade skate. It tore for his shoulder. He rolled the angle and felt teeth graze his shirt in a zip of heat that could have been pain if it had found skin. Shivam put the iron into the back of its knee. It buckled and spat with a noise that made Nikhil whimper behind the wall. Suraj stepped in clean and drove a blade up at the base of the skull, hard and precise.
The body went still so fast it felt like a trick.
For a second, the world was just blood moving on the floor where it had no business being. Ananya's headlamp beam trembled and steadied. She caught Ayush's shoulder with her free hand and felt for wet. Clean. She shook. "You okay?"
Ayush nodded once. "You?"
She nodded too, big eyes, steady hands.
Kartik was breathing like he'd sprinted hard; he hadn't moved more than two steps. He pressed a palm against his sternum as if checking the heart was still under it.
Leon looked at the thing in a way that suggested there was a word for it on some list somewhere. "Phase two," he said. "Heat-chasers. First wave makes noise; this wave finds it."
"How many?" Suraj asked.
"Enough that they pattern your patterns," Leon said bleakly.
Ajay nudged the thing's clawed hand with his shoe. "He brought you that type on purpose," he said. "He wants you tired when the other line comes."
"Rahul?" Kartik said, anger and fear both.
"Your teacher," Ajay said. "He believes in the right lesson for the day."
The thin whine of a drone returned overhead, not the small one—something with patience and a better camera. It did a lazy figure eight that didn't bother pretending it feared anything below it.
Ananya shut off the headlamp and stripped the damp cloth from Nikhil's face, found him shaking hard, and knelt so her eyes were level with his. "We're leaving," she said. "Right now. Same rule. You stay on my shirt. You don't let go unless I say."
"What if—" Nikhil swallowed. "What if someone falls?"
"Then we pick them up," she said. "We are not a thing that leaves people."
He nodded hard enough to make his hair flop.
Ayush grabbed the pack, the med kit, and Drake's radio. He slung the Glock back into the small of his back. "Ajay," he said. "Pick us a road where the sky can't see our heat."
Ajay tipped his chin toward the far end of the yard. "There's a culvert that runs under the old container lot," he said. "It stinks. It's deep in places. The sky can't see it. Half the city's rats live there. So do the ones that don't mind."
"Perfect," Suraj said dryly.
They broke the barricade and slipped through the shed door, moving the way people move who have learned that running looks too much like prey. The rail yard ground under their feet. The day was full now, the kind of full that made the air look bruised even without a cloud. In the distance, a chopper smeared a gray strip of mist along a low street. It didn't look like mercy, again.
Ajay led them along the back of the yard past a rusted crane with a hook that still swayed like another body had just left it, down a concrete slope to a black-mouthed pipe big enough to swallow three people side by side if the third didn't mind being scrubbed of skin.
"Breathe shallow," Ajay said, eyes on Ananya to make sure she could tell Nikhil in a voice that would work. She did. "Feet, then hands. Feel the slope before you trust it. If it moves, it's alive. Don't step there."
They went in. The cool of the culvert took the heat from their skin, hid them, suffocated them. The smell lifted bile. The ceiling made men into shapes that had to rethink their spines.
Halfway, the culvert widened to a junction where four pipes met. Light trickled down a maintenance shaft like something changed its mind about being day halfway down. Ajay held his hand up and they stopped so quickly Kartik bumped into Riya and apologized with a breath in the word.
Voices above. Different cadence. Low. Intent. Men who know how to talk when sound kills you. A blue-green glimmer fell through the grate—chemstick light.
"Second line," Leon mouthed. Ayush didn't need the translation. The light wasn't white. It was the kind sticks you crack when you want to see without heat.
A boot scraped overhead. A man crouched. His face came into view through the grate. He was a stranger with a home's worth of violence in his eyes. He held a small puck and set it on the grate and clicked it and left it there. It began to pulse faintly—I see you—even if nothing else did.
When he stood, the chemstick glow made his jaw look like a story with no climax. He moved on soundless as a man who finally has enough permission.
In the culvert, Nikhil pressed his hand against Ananya's and trembled so hard her bones caught it. She pressed back a steady pressure until some of the shake had an exit that wasn't panic. Kartik's knuckles went white on the iron and he put his teeth into words he didn't say.
Leon leaned close to Ayush's ear. "They're leaving us a marker," he breathed. "Rangefinder. Later."
"Drake's note," Ayush said softly back. "Paint then plan."
Ananya's jaw set. "We can scrub paint and we can move markers," she whispered. She looked at Ajay. "Solvent?"
Ajay's mouth tilted. "Wrong kind of city to be without it," he said. He dug into a side pocket of his small bag and came up with a tiny bottle with a skull and crossbones symbol sharpied onto it. "Motor cleaner. Cuts most industrial tags."
"How do you—" Kartik began and stopped, because survival answers questions you don't ask.
They waited a full minute after the last boot left the grate and then another thirty seconds because seconds are cheap compared to bodies. Ajay climbed the six rungs of the maintenance ladder with a grace that startled no one anymore, popped the grate enough to lift the puck, and lowered it to Ananya.
She held it in her palm—light through skin—and unscrewed the top. "There," she said. A wafer slid free with a neat click. She flicked it into the trickle of drain water and watched it drift away into the culvert's throat. She snapped the empty puck back together and set it on the grate where it had been like a grave marker with no body.
They slid forward through the second leg of the culvert and came up under the lip of a stacked container yard where box metal rose into a sky made of colored squares. Ayush breathed the bigger air like a sin.
A new sound patched into the day—high and toothy, like saws on metal. Not the drone, not the chopper. He didn't know it. He listened and found it: wheels on rails, but too light to be trains—a trolley. He edged to the slit between containers and looked.
Five men in gray rolled a flatbed along a track between stacks. On it sat a cage-like frame with sensors and a box that vibrated like electricity. One of the men looked up at the sky, checked a small screen, and nodded to the others. They were painting the metal with something Ayush couldn't see. Later, someone else would.
Ajay's lips moved: "Taggers."
"Can they see us?" Riya whispered.
"Not if we keep our heat low and our heads lower," he said.
They ghosted along the far edge of the lot, using the deep shade between containers as if it had a price they finally could afford. Ananya counted exits automatically and saw two and a lie and chose the second. Suraj kept pace with Ajay's map without naming it. Leon moved like two different men had laid his bones out on a table and then put them back together wrong and right.
They broke out of the container grave at the far side and ran for ten seconds across open ground to a broken wall. Ayush hated the open ten. He hated the way he could feel sky on the nape of his neck. He hated how good it felt to have a wall to put that feeling against when they reached it.
They ended up in the skeleton of a seven-story apartment block that had never gotten its windows. The empty frames gleamed like it wore too many eyes. The stairwell had three places you could die and four you could hide and they took the fifth—behind an upturned slab of concrete that had decided to be furniture.
Ananya poured a capful of solvent onto a piece of cloth and dabbed it on a smear on the sole of Ayush's shoe that she wouldn't have seen yesterday. A faint iridescent sheen lifted. She pressed harder and it went, a ghost under a streetlight. "Check yours," she said to the others. "Edges. Laces. Hems."
They took turns, heads bowed, a sad little ritual. Ayush watched heat shimmer in the parking lot across the road and thought of being a kid with no codename, chasing a cricket ball between cars, trusting that the world had simple rules.
"You okay?" Leon asked quietly, sitting down heavily beside him.
"You?" Ayush answered.
Leon looked at his hands and laughed without humor. "I shot drones. You shot a friend. We're terrible at choosing hobbies."
"He gave me the choice," Ayush said, flat. There was more in the sentence but this wasn't the floor to spill it on.
Leon nodded, guilt and relief and grief making math. "He did." He let his shoulder touch Ayush's, just enough to let some of the weight share across meat. "You don't have to hold all of it alone."
"I'm not," Ayush said, and even to himself, it sounded like he believed it.
On the floor below, someone clattered and swore. Not infected. Human swearing. An old man's voice. They looked over the edge. A hunched figure in a kurta wrestled with a bucket and an invisible assailant. The bucket won. Water surged across the cement and trickled down the stair like a tiny river.
Nikhil watched, transfixed. For a moment, a tiny normalcy—and then it was gone when two shapes slid into view on the road: not men, not infected—dogs with ribs like knives, heads down, sniffing. One looked up at the building and pricked ears. The other followed, eyes on the dark.
"Rahul," Suraj said, and no one asked how he knew. They'd seen the man use everything.
The dogs moved forward in a formation that was not a formation—just two animals that had learned the shape of each other's hunger. They sniffed the path the group had taken and followed it to the stairwell. They paused at the solvent smell and snorted like it offended them personally.
Ayush tightened his grip on the Glock. He didn't want to, but he would. Ananya's hand on his forearm stopped him. She pointed—lateral. A roll of carpet leaned against the wall by the stair. She mouthed: now, and shoved.
The roll toppled down the stairs like a slow boulder. It hit the first dog at the shoulder. The animal yelped, scrambled, and fell back. The second leaped over it and caught the carpet. The carpet fought back like a drowning human. The second dog went under.
"Not today," Ananya whispered, not a prayer, a decree.
They moved again. Because movement steals the enemy's choices.
They got to a fourth floor with a cross breeze that felt like mercy. The room had one intact door and four missing windows. From here, the city looked like a map after a storm. They could see the yellow house's roof, two lanes away. On its step, three stones were in a line again. No one was on the roof. The hair on Ayush's arms lifted in a way that had nothing to do with air.
Ajay knelt and lifted the edge of a cheap rug in the center of the room—one of those patterned sheets builders throw down to pretend the dust matters. Under it, a small square of sprayed chalk glowed faintly. He held the solvent-soaked cloth over it. The glow dimmed. "They tagged the building," he said. "Either earlier or now. We were lucky enough to step around the center."
"Define 'lucky,'" Kartik muttered. His face had lost some of the gray it wore this morning. He still looked like a boy trying to impersonate someone who didn't break.
Ajay glanced out the window at the flat sky. "Lucky means the next thing will be worse," he said, not unkindly.
The first dull thump came a minute later—the sound of something far away making a decision the ground disagreed with. The second thump came closer, rolled through their ribs like a big hand. After the third, tiny dust avalanches fell from the unfinished ceiling. They looked at each other and understood—the crosshair had gone from theory to practice.
"Downstairs," Ayush said. "One floor. Keep concrete above us."
They moved as the fourth thump rippled a crack across plaster and scattered a line of ants that had made a brave morning of this floor. The room below had no rug. It had a mattress rolled in one corner and a packet of beedis under it. Riya picked the packet up, looked at it as if it were a relic, then put it back with a smile at herself that made her look like she remembered a self older than this week.
The fifth thump landed far enough that staying made sense. The sixth made the window frames shake. The seventh, much closer, dropped a fist of pressure into the room that made ears ring and skin goose with a reaction older than language.
Ayush closed his eyes and felt the line he'd drawn in himself yesterday go through this day too. He thought of the small room in the yellow house where they'd killed a man who had orders not to let him be a person and watched a city's worth of hungry come to the door for the sound. He thought of three stones lined in a row like a man with a system he trusted too much.
He opened his eyes. He was here. The people he'd chosen were, too.
Uncrowned's voice scratched from the radio Ananya had put on the floor, half-muted. "Heat signatures scattered. Confirm primary lost. Mark secondary grid. Package away."
Leon bent and clicked the radio off with his thumb. The silence snapped back so hard it almost hurt.
"We don't give him our shapes," Leon said. "We decide where we stand."
Ayush nodded. "Then we stop moving for an hour," he said. "We breathe. We eat. We bleed what we have to in here, not in a lane."
He looked at Ananya. "You and Lucky build us two more decoys," he said. "Mirrors, warm rags. If they come to heat, we give them heat to miss." He looked at Suraj. "You and Ajay pick the exit and the backup I won't want."
"Done," Suraj said.
"Done," Ajay echoed.
He looked at Shivam and Kartik. "You—rest your knees. In ten minutes, you guard the hall and the stair and tell anyone who uses them with a bite they picked the wrong floor."
Shivam cracked his neck and smiled a little. "Yes, sir," he said. He didn't mean it like command. He meant it like a word that stitched a cut.
Kartik nodded and sat with his back to the wall, chisel across his knees like a worry bead.
Riya took the med pouch from Ayush's hand gently and went through it, setting out what was left like a small table at a waking.
Nikhil lay down with his head in Ananya's lap without being told. She stroked his hair and watched the door and didn't look at the sky.
Outside, the city shifted its weight. The seventh thump rolled away into a long exhale of dust. Somewhere a siren sang on a note that made you think of one ambulance and one man doing his job in a world that didn't thank anyone for anything anymore.
Ayush let his head find the bare concrete for a second and counted to twenty with his eyes open. He listened to the breath in the room—the people, the city, himself. He felt the mark on them like a faint, precise hand between his shoulder blades. He felt the line in him hold.
From a rooftop down the lane, Rahul watched them through a broken window frame. He held Aliya's hair tie between finger and thumb and rolled it like a coin trick. He smiled—the small one—and set three stones in a neat row on the parapet in front of him, then nudged one gently out of line.
"Almost," he said.
He leaned his head back against the parapet and closed his eyes as if practicing sleep in front of an enemy.
In their room, Ananya whispered to Ayush, "We'll make it to tomorrow."
He looked at her and saw the frankness he had fallen in love with—the way she said a thing like it was fact until the world agreed.
"We will," he said.
He wasn't making a promise to the city. He was making it to the eight of them against its thousand voices.
The next thump didn't come for a long time. Long enough to breathe. Long enough to count faces. Long enough to get up when you say you will and go again.
End of Episode 6: Marked for Death