They left the printing press while the light was still the color of old paper. The corridor's warm stink clung to them until the alley lifted it away, replacing it with tar and river rot. Ajay led, chin tipped as if listening for current. Leon watched the roofs. Suraj watched the mouths of lanes. Ayush watched the people—hands, breath, the small tells that mean someone is about to run too soon.
Uncrowned's radio pinged in Ananya's pocket with a polite patience that made Kartik grind his teeth.
[Uncrowned King]: Joel. Column moving on Sector Delta. If you separate, we can pull you. Do not descend.
Ananya didn't take it out. She had taped the antenna to a foil ribbon again and looped it through her pack so the sky would fall in love with the wrong heat for a few minutes. "Not today," she whispered to the radio like you would to a cat that keeps trying to sit on the thing you're building.
The textile district woke in patchy squares. Half-collapsed godowns gaped like pulled teeth. A long shed buckled across its spine and still somehow held. A flare coughed up three blocks away and hung in the air like a bad idea, red washing over broken tin. The sound behind it came delayed—a body of infected changing direction the way birds do, together, without voting.
"Left," Ajay said. "Then under."
They cut down a loading lane and slid along the shadow of a stacked bale wall, then under a lean-to where someone had tried to fix a truck forever. Ananya pulled her tin line and dropped the clatter into a parallel alley. The sound peeled predators off the road like you peel tape—clean and furious.
On the back wall of a dye house, something waited for them that cut breath thin.
A body was pinned to the brick with fence spikes driven through the shirt. It wore a Ravencroft blazer, blood scrubbed a shade lighter by river water. A B.S.A. patch had been torn in half and stitched back together on the chest with rough cord.
ONE DOWN, the wall said in a finger's breadth of red. THE REST ARE NEXT.
Nikhil made a sound Ananya had never heard a child make and pressed into her hip. She covered his eyes and felt his lashes on her palm.
"Trap," Suraj said quietly. He didn't step in the red.
Leon didn't either. He scanned. "Vent above. Frame wired. Trip on the shoulder seam." He pointed: hair-thin line. A flare canister sat high in the vent like a tongue in a mouth.
Ajay looked at the bricks. "And another—pressure plate under the left foot. You trip either, you tell the city where you're standing."
Kartik swallowed hard enough to hurt and said, "I've got it," because he needed to contribute something to cancel the sound he'd made.
Leon caught his wrist. "You're shaking."
"I can shake and still cut," Kartik said, and to his own surprise, it came out steady.
Ayush studied the threads. "Both are meant to be disabled, not just triggered," he said. "Hunter knows we spot crooked stitches. He wants you to get clever and tug wrong."
"Then we disappoint him," Ananya said.
She pulled out the razor, slid it under the line at a tangent—not where it wanted to be cut, where it would go slack and slip back into the frame without tug. The vent sighed. The flare didn't move. Leon wedged a chisel against the plate edge and lifted a breath. Ajay slid a folded matchbox under it, letting the pressure rest there. The body didn't shift.
"Leave him," Ayush said, voice even. He looked at the boy who had once been something other than demonstration. "We can't carry him and the rest of us both."
He made himself not look too long at the face. Rahul would want that.
They slid away under red light that felt like a lie. The flare burned out overhead to a soft hiss. Twenty seconds later, another popped farther down—Rahul's way of moving pieces with sound. A new tide of bodies poured into the next street. Ayush felt the city changing direction under his feet the way you feel a crowd at a concert surge when the song breaks.
"Rendezvous?" Suraj asked.
Ajay didn't point. "South edge. Chimney with the blue band. We break, we meet there."
They didn't like splitting. They did it anyway because the map didn't care what they liked.
"A moves with me," Ayush said, quick. "Ananya, Suraj, Ajay. B with Leon—Shivam, Riya, Lucky, Nikhil." He looked at Nikhil. "Repeat it."
The boy repeated it without looking at anyone else. Rehearsal becomes survival.
"Go," Ayush said.
Team A slid into a dye house's lower bay, shadows cool and strange, cloth ghosts hanging from rafters like flags of lost countries. Ananya tugged two and let them fall: a quiet curtain to steal line of sight from the door. Footsteps fanned past in the main lane, pause-linger-move, a pattern that meant a leader doing math. Ajay pointed at a narrow inventory shaft—one person wide, steep. They went up sideways, backs scraping. At the top, a ventilation alley kept the sun off and the ears on—the kind of slot that carries whispers forty meters.
"Hold," Ayush said when a shape crossed the mouth of the alley without looking in. The shape moved like someone who knew nothing outside him could hurt him. Ayush felt the old tick in his bones and made it stop. He counted to five. He didn't look after.
They crossed under a hanging of drying indigo that bled blue onto Ayush's shoulder and made his shirt a different man's shirt. The smell of dye punched through the city's other scents. It smelled like work and patience and things that used to matter less than staying alive.
Team B took the apartments, the long way. Leon kept the center. Shivam carried Nikhil up three steps at a time when they were too broken, then made the boy walk his own legs on the flat. Riya moved light, jaw set. Lucky kept glancing at doors like everyone he'd ever let down might step out and ask him to make a different choice this time.
They hit a corridor with curtains instead of doors. A girl of twelve peered out and put a finger to her lips. Behind her, a boy with a mop of hair clutched a cricket bat too big for him. Their eyes were past panic and into the space where you can swallow instructions without choking.
Leon raised his palm. "Not safe," he mouthed. "Closet. Door. Wait."
The girl nodded. She pulled the boy gently. He wanted to come; she made him not. That kind of love does real work.
At the end of the corridor, a flight of stairs turned into a balcony with a gap where a railing should've been. Shivam looked down. Four meters to a sloped roof. Dock debris would break someone who landed wrong.
Riya sucked air through her teeth. "We can do it."
"Not with him," Lucky said, nodding at Nikhil, and hating himself for being right.
Leon scanned right. A line of laundry on a pulley ran taut to the next building. It had held sheets, once. Now it would hold a person or not—no physics exam offered.
"Bodyweight three at most," Leon said. "We rig the sleeves, make a sling. He goes first." He looked at Nikhil. "You trust us?"
Nikhil nodded too fast.
They made a harness in the shape of a child. Leon tested the pulley with a fast jerk to see how much lie it allowed. It creaked the way old metal says okay, but I'll complain the whole time. Shivam lifted Nikhil into the sling and made him look at the spot he would land, not the air he would cross.
"You're a kite," Shivam said, and Nikhil grinned, terrified and delighted. "On three. One. Two—"
He shoved on two because that's when bodies are brave. The line sang. The pulley rolled. Nikhil flew with a noise he would deny later. He hit the far balcony hard on his knees and laughed the sound of someone who has found a new part of himself and decided to keep it.
A runner's head snapped up in the alley below at the sound and then went chasing some other signal because Rahul was playing more than one song today. Riya went next. She caught the line and swung hand over hand because the pulley had decided it had done enough for the morning. Lucky followed, palms squealing on cord, arms burning, landing and nearly crying with relief when Riya grabbed his collar and hauled. Leon gestured: go. Shivam shook his head: you. Leon rolled his eyes and went the way leaders do when they know they can put their backs to someone and that someone won't fail them.
Shivam went last. The pulley complained loud enough to count as an error. The line held anyway. He hit on his feet and let the collapse happen after, laughing like someone punching grief in the mouth.
They cut through a kitchen with onions hanging from nails like rosaries and out into a stairwell that smelled of stale oil. At the bottom, a shadow peeled from the wall and became a person standing in the light, not a trick.
"Lucky," Rahul said, and it wasn't taunting. It was almost gentle. "You rang the bell. Did they teach you that, or did you teach yourself?"
Lucky froze, just a stutter. Riya's hand found his sleeve and closed hard. Leon stepped in front without making it look like it. Shivam lifted the iron without flourish.
Rahul looked past them at the boy with the cricket bat in the curtain doorway. He lifted two fingers to his temple and sent it off. The boy echoed the gesture, unsure and pleased, because heroes look like what you need them to look like the first time you see them. Then the girl pulled him back and shut the curtain harder.
"You don't live long enough to decide what a hero is," Leon said. His voice had sand in it.
Rahul turned his head to listen to something that wasn't there—maybe the city, maybe a memory. "You should hurry," he said, light. "This block is about to become interesting."
He stepped into the stairwell and was simply gone. Not theatrical. Fast. He moved like a man who had learned there are no consequences that matter.
Leon didn't chase. He had learned that lesson years ago, and then again last week, and then again this morning.
Team A hit a service yard behind a tannery. Ananya wiped her shoulder where indigo had stained skin and left a blue memory. Ajay ate three almonds from a reserve no one had seen him keep. He handed one to Nikhil when they met at the end of the lane and made it like a ceremony: you endured, take this.
They reached the blue-banded chimney at the same minute Team B did—two lines rejoining like a sketch completed by two hands. Ananya counted one-two-three-four-five-six-seven—eight. She looked again. Seven. Her stomach dropped the distance of a floor.
"Where's—" she started.
Lucky wasn't there.
Leon scanned faces like he'd misfiled a person. He hadn't. "He was with us at the pulley," he said, anger stripped down to bone. "Then he was at the stairwell. Rahul came. We moved."
Shivam's jaw locked. "He was here. Then he wasn't. He was talking." He looked as if he wanted to punch the sky. It would punch back.
A tin clinked and rolled into the open like a toy. It hit Ayush's boot and circled to a stop. Inside, a red cloth lay folded small. Ayush crouched and lifted it. A strip of shirt sleeve fell out with a single word printed on it in black factory ink: LUCK.
Ananya's breath left her body in a sound she didn't recognize as her own. She closed her hand hard enough to make the cloth bite her palm.
Ajay went still in a different way, a listening neither to grid nor footsteps. "Roof," he said. He pointed at the factory across the lane. "Fire escape."
They were moving before their minds said they were. The fire escape had the wrong angle, the rung bent just enough to cost a second. They paid it. Ayush hit the roof coughing dye dust and looked across.
On the next roof, the blue band chimney making its circle in the sky, Rahul stood with a hand on Lucky's shoulder. Not tight. Not unkind. The way you hold a child who has stepped too close to a curb. Lucky was conscious, eyes wide and on Ayush's face. His mouth moved around a word he didn't choose to say. Sorry.
"Bring Joel," Rahul called, voice normal like this was a street. "Alone. Dawn. Bridge by the cable yard. If not, I start tipping stones out of line."
Ananya made a sound, and Ayush touched her wrist, just once. He kept his face calm and his mind a straight line because Rahul had given him rules and he had to decide whether to pretend to follow them.
Leon raised his rifle and lowered it without looking like he had. He wouldn't shoot across the body of a child. Not with Rahul holding the shoulder. Not if he had twelve perfect shots lined up by God.
"Let him speak," Ayush said to Rahul, and the request came out with every kind of control in it.
Rahul's smile didn't include business with his eyes. "He already did," he said. He squeezed Lucky's shoulder once, firm. "He told me the truth."
Lucky's face folded in on itself and he fought to beat the breath that tried to shake him. "I—" he started.
"You're alive," Ananya said, and the words snapped like a command. "That's what matters. Keep that going."
Rahul watched the exchange like a man being told what menu he'd be choosing from. Then he guided Lucky toward the stairwell hatch with that same almost-kind pressure and disappeared with him without theater.
Silence climbed up out of the alley and looked around for a chair. No one offered it one.
Kartik kicked a bit of tar and made it jump. "We go now," he said, because his math didn't allow for anything else.
"He didn't give us a time because he's sure we'll choose dawn," Suraj said. "You crash into his game now, you write his ending for him."
"I'm not—" Ayush started, stopping his own mouth. He looked at Ajay. "Cable yard. Tell me what's there."
Ajay's mouth flattened. "Old cranes. Ladderwork. Shadows where the city doesn't know itself yet. Twenty ways in. Ten ways to die. I can give you three that don't feel like suicide."
"That one," Ananya said, pointing across rooftops to a run of low parapets you could cross without owning fear. "We get eyes on him. We write the first line."
Leon looked at Ayush. "We can scout. We don't go," he said. "Not yet." He didn't say because Drake died for something and that something wasn't you soloing into a city that wants you dead without you making it easier.
Ayush nodded once and made the nod a decision. He looked down at the cloth in his hand. He folded it and tucked it into his pocket like a contract he hadn't signed yet. "Scout," he said. "Now. We don't speak on the radio. We don't make the sky smarter. We mark our way back."
"Marker?" Riya asked.
Ananya held up a stub of chalk. "Left pocket," she said. "Always."
Ajay led them across a series of roofs that stepped down toward the river like old stairs. The air tasted like mud and burnt sugar. Ananya marked chalk at foot level, not eye—Rahul liked eye-level hints too much.
They reached the cable yard's edge just as the light tilted into the part of day that makes the city think of evening and then remember what else comes with it. The yard spread out like a spider's old web: spools, gantries, frames that used to carry thick lines from here to there. A stack of shipping crates angled into a corner, making a pocket a body could be spied from and die in.
Ayush flattened and scanned. Ananya slid next to him and laid the headlamp on its side, off, the way it makes you look without using it. Leon tucked to the right and found a line that would give a man with a rifle a choice, later.
They saw Rahul before he saw them. He stood in a gantry with his back to them, looking down. Lucky sat on a crate under the gantry, hands tied in front of him, rope loose enough for a conscience. He was alive. He was breathing. He was looking at his shoes because looking anywhere else would make it real in a way he wasn't ready for.
Ananya's hand shook once and then stilled.
Rahul didn't turn, not yet. He spoke to the yard. "You think dawn makes you brave," he said to the air. "It only makes you visible."
He turned then and looked straight where Ayush lay. He couldn't have seen them, not at that angle. He saw them anyway. He lifted two fingers to his temple and sent off the gesture again, almost lazy. Then he bent, untied Lucky's hands, and put a small metal cylinder in the boy's palm. "Hold this," he said. "Don't drop it. Don't open it."
Lucky nodded and held.
Ayush felt it in his spine: a shiver the city made when this man was about to ruin something. He didn't move. He let the plan write itself one more line in front of him, because rushing a test someone else made for you is still failing it.
Rahul sat on the edge of the gantry like a man on a dock, legs dangling. He touched Aliya's red hair tie on his wrist with his thumb. He looked at the sky. "I'll see you at dawn," he said, not loud, perfectly sure.
He jumped down and slipped under the gantry and through the ladderwork and was gone in a way that made you question whether you had imagined him. Lucky sat on the crate holding the cylinder like it was a piece of the world he didn't want and might still need.
"Now," Leon said, and he didn't have to.
They moved like air becomes wind. Ayush dropped first, dismissing the distance with a bent knee. Ananya followed without argument from her body. Suraj came with that calm he drags into rooms, making them behave. Shivam hit with iron first. Riya got to Lucky and cut the rope that didn't need cutting and did it anyway because hands like to undo what people did.
Ayush took the cylinder from Lucky's palm carefully. It had a twist cap and a thin wire loop through a hole in the lid. A pin. Not a grenade. Smaller. Nasty enough.
"Trip smoke," Leon said, reading the make at a glance. "Not lethal. Marks you for a joyride later. He wants to paint us in IR when it blooms."
"Of course he does," Ananya said, already taking the thing in two hands. She pressed the cap against the edge of the crate and bent the thin wire with a tray corner until it snapped. She twisted the cap off and dropped it into a bucket of stale water sitting by the post as if someone had known they would need a bad idea drowned. The cap fizzed and sulked and died.
Lucky took a breath that made the world back up a step. He didn't say sorry. He didn't need to. He said, "He told me… he told me you counted wrong once," looking at Ayush, "and didn't tell anyone. He said I was you." His voice broke around the last word.
"He lies in facts," Ayush said gently. "So did I. Then I stopped." He put a hand on Lucky's head and left it there for a heartbeat longer than he would have yesterday. "You're you. That's who we keep."
From the far end of the yard, a flare went up, red slicing through the descending light. It was far enough to be someone else's problem, close enough to become theirs if they pretended it wasn't. The pack behind that flare screamed the way crowds do when a door slams in their face.
Ajay's head turned slightly. "We can stay," he said. "Or we can go while everyone with teeth is busy with someone else's mistake."
"We go," Ananya said immediately, and then softer, to nobody and everyone, "and we come back for whoever that is if it's still someone when we can."
They climbed the gantry ladder and took a different run of roofs back, chalk marks in reverse. The light turned itself into evening and then into the thing after it. Uncrowned's radio thrummed in Ananya's bag like a trapped insect.
Kartik looked at Ayush without trying to hide it. "We're not going to let him set the time," he said.
"No," Ayush said. "We'll set the ground."
"What ground?" Suraj asked, and didn't ask it loud.
Ayush saw it when he closed his eyes—a place that had two doors and a wall he could make into a third. He saw a ring of chairs in a yellow room and a couch he could wedge into a funnel. He saw a rail yard shed with a coach for a second roof. He saw a printing press with strip windows he could make breathe.
All of them were the wrong ground. All of them would do. None of them were enough.
"The bridge isn't his either," Ananya said. "It's Delhi's." She met Ayush's eyes. "We take the approach. We choke the ladder. We write a sound he hates and play it in the wrong place. And we remember that he's immune, not a god."
"Title of the chapter," Leon muttered, a humorless ghost of a smile. "A God Among the Dead."
"That was yesterday," Ananya said. "Today he's a man with a wristband and an audience problem."
Ayush wanted to laugh and found breathing instead. He nodded. "We plan," he said. "We sleep in turns. We hug our child. We wake up and do a thing we can live with."
On the roof two buildings over, Rahul lay on his back and watched smoke fold into itself. He could see the cable yard without moving his head. He could see the strip of river where it ran thin and wrong. He held Aliya's hair tie against his thumb and rolled it in small, obsessive circles. He set three pebbles beside him on the parapet and nudged one out of line.
"Almost," he said, smiling with his mouth, not his eyes.
He closed them and listened to the city breathing. He slept.
End of Episode 9: Predator