By late afternoon the city had the color of a healing bruise. Smoke thinned the sun into a coin. The river moved slow and thick behind the cable yard. The bridge looked wider from the ground than it had from the roofs: rust and rivets and a thicket of ladderwork under the roadbed, walkways stitched into shadows, a wind that smelled like iron and salt.
"This is where we hold," Ayush said.
They worked without the old arguments. That was what grief had bought them—efficiency, and something like faith.
Ananya mapped sound like terrain. She slung fishing line between pylons at shoulder height and tied loops of tins and nails and glass. She wired a speaker to a battery under a tarp and tested a timed burst that could run ten seconds at a squeeze. The squeal jumped the gap and came back in a dozen echoes. "Good," she said. "Hate it."
Suraj placed fire like punctuation. Two bottles, rags corking brown glass, a careful tuck of cloth for ignition; a line of solvent along the lip of a lower walkway that would go if someone stepped wrong. He shaped a choke point with a coil of cable and two pallets dragged from a yard—enough to funnel, not enough to make a wall they would die behind.
Leon climbed. He found a bolt nest on the west stanchion that gave line of sight on the approach and on the underwalk, the spinal ladder that would carry someone up if they were the kind of man who didn't take the road. He set sights, adjusted elevation with a grim calm, and did not move like a man who had taught his hands not to shake out of respect for someone he once failed.
Shivam tested metal with the iron. He learned the feel of each rung like you learn spells: this one holds, this whines, this will betray you if you land wrong with speed. He marked a bad bar with chalk and crossed it out like a curse.
Riya set a small med station behind a girder. Bandage. Tape. A boiled needle. She'd found cloves somewhere and chewed them into a paste that took the edge off pain and pretended to be medicine. It was enough when you were alive.
Lucky threaded wire the way you thread apologies into actions and keep moving. He checked the knots twice. He gave Ananya the third tin without being asked. When he looked up, her face said she'd seen him try and accepted the currency.
Ajay traced wind. He stood still with his eyes half-closed, reading how the air moved around steel. "It will swirl," he said. "Sound will lie. Fire will follow the steel then jump where it shouldn't. Plan for things that won't do what you tell them."
"What's the exit?" Suraj asked.
Ajay pointed without flourish. "There," he said. "Service ladder on the far pylon. It drops to a narrower underwalk and then into a maintenance ledge. A gap to a tin roof. Your ankles will hate you, your neck will thank you. If you're burning, drop straight into the river and pray you don't breathe until you can."
"Fallbacks," Ayush said. "Not rumors." He drew them with string and chalk. Underwalk. Ladder. Roof. Alley. Godown. He spoke them aloud until they weren't lines anymore, they were grooves in their bodies.
When they were finished doing, there was nothing left but breathing. The kind that keeps you alive and the kind that keeps you human.
Ananya took a drink and passed the bottle to Nikhil. The boy took a mouthful and handed it to Sanaa without looking. She smiled at him from behind a coil and tapped the tops of his knuckles twice like the thank you it was. He lightened a degree. Only a degree. Enough.
Kartik stood at the rail and looked down at the ribs of the bridge. "If we mess this up," he said without drama, "we turn into the thing we hate."
"Then don't," Leon said from the stanchion. He kept his cheek to the stock because he had taught his eyes the shape of duty and you don't ruin good training on the day you need it.
Ayush walked the length of their ground one more time. His hands found edges. His eyes found lines. His body remembered tricks a range had taught him for rooms with clean floors and good air. He kept the ones that might still pay out in rust and wind.
Ananya intercepted him at the far pylon, and when he would have kept moving she put her palm flat on his chest and made him stop. "No heroics," she said. "No trading yourself for a promise he didn't make."
He almost smiled. "Then what?"
"The next right thing," she said. "We do it together."
He nodded and let the nod be permission to believe that was still enough.
The sun dropped like someone letting go. The moon lifted through smoke and was immediately wrong: fat and red and low, as if the city had painted it with all the sirens it could not hold. Kartik looked up and swore softly. "Blood moon," he said, as if naming it might make it less a sign.
Uncrowned's voice crawled through Ananya's pack with infuriating calm.
[Uncrowned King]: Joel. Column inbound to Delta. Hold position. Asset will reacquire. Do not engage. Confirm willingness to separate under fire.
Ayush didn't touch the radio. He looked at the faces he wanted to drag out of this city by the collar and typed with his thumb without letting them see the screen.
He turned the volume down until the voice was just a mosquito in a jar.
Flares bloomed three blocks off, then closer, then to their left, a sequence that made a wave of bodies move like a dark tide. The sound came with a throat—the wet, tearing chorus of the new world. A group of runners broke through the shadow below the bridge and streamed toward the mouth of the underwalk ramp, hit the first can-line, flinched, and bunched. The funnel did what funnels do.
"Hold," Ayush said, not to himself.
Ananya squeezed, and the speaker under the tarp screamed ten seconds of feedback across the open. The pack cut left for the noise and jammed itself into the rail. Those at the back kept pushing because hunger doesn't negotiate. The side load carried them into the open, where the first bottle Suraj had placed waited like a rule. Glass broke. Fire lifted. Screams changed key.
"Left under," Leon said from above, voice low through grit. "Two. Three. Human."
The first human moved like a man who had always been able to step sideways out of consequences. He loped with lazy economy along the lower catwalk, one hand on a cable, boots finding the gaps by memory. He looked up once and tapped two fingers to his temple. He didn't need an introduction.
"Rahul," Kartik said, like a prayer mispronounced.
He stopped under them, almost directly beneath Ayush, and smiled up into shadow. "You set the ground," he said. "I brought the wind."
He lit a flare and tossed it underhand into the underwalk lattice where their solvent had sketched its thin line. The fire took it like a compliment and followed steel, sideways into places they hadn't intended, down and then up, curious, hungry, erratic the way Ajay had predicted.
"Cut it," Ananya said. Ayush didn't hesitate. He grabbed the ragged edge of the first solvent line with a cloth and dragged it back along the rail, smearing and breaking the unbroken path. The fire hesitated and went the way fire goes when you give it two choices and one is work.
Below, the pack hit the flame and behaved like anything else with nerves—some stopped, some jumped, some learned and failed learning. Variants dropped from the underside of the bridge the way they had from the press ceiling, spined and wrong, doing that awful soft giggle like a child learning to mimic. Shivam stood two paces in front of the choke and put iron into skulls like a carpenter who finally has wood that listens.
Rahul promised something with his eyebrows and climbed the spine ladder, not fast, not slow, not hiding. He wanted to be seen; he wanted not to be shot. Leon tracked him through the iron grid, reminding his finger who had command and who had a face. "Angle," he murmured, to himself, to the air. "Two more rungs. Now."
"Ayush," Ananya said without looking at him, because they shared an inner ear for each other's movements. "If you go down there, I go down there."
"I won't," he said. He was already moving.
He didn't go down the spine. He dropped into the parallel cavity and slid along a lower beam, knees and palms blackened. He met Rahul on the small square of decking that anchors use to pretend stability. The river yanked itself underneath them, hectic and sullen.
"Alone at last," Rahul said, and the way he said it made your body try to remember being seventeen in a room that smelled like oil and chalk. "Do you like the moon I brought you?"
"It's not yours," Ayush said, and drew the knife with his right while the Glock sat heavy and useful at his back.
Rahul moved first. He always had. He came in low, not the way you train for, the way you watch and learn and then decide to make a new shape. The knives met with a sound that wasn't the romantic ring of film, it was ugly and practical and bright. Ayush let himself give ground because space was life. Rahul took space like he had a right.
"I can make you forgive me," Rahul said conversationally, driving a thrust at the hip that would have made most men fall wrong. "If I give you the right person to hate."
"You already did," Ayush said, and diverted the blade with the butt of his knife because sometimes the shortest path between where you are and a wound is your hand, and if you move right, it doesn't hurt as much as it should.
Above them, the pack surged, then thinned, then surged again. Ananya kept the sound moving just enough to lie. Suraj lit and dropped where light became instruction. Shivam took a cut in his upper arm and didn't feel it until his body sent a telegram. Riya pressed a rag into it and said, "You'll hate me in ten minutes," and he grinned and kept the iron between teeth.
"Left," Leon whispered to himself, comms off, soul on. "He'll step left to clear the beam. He always—"
Rahul stepped left. Leon breathed out and took the shot.
The bullet hit meat under bone and the sound it made was closer than seems fair. Rahul staggered, hand going to his side in a reflex he couldn't control. He looked up at the stanchion and grinned with his teeth, all of them, briefly. Whatever word he said into the wind didn't get an answer.
"Again," Ananya said through her teeth. "Leon—again."
Leon had already moved. The second shot took the grid and sent a bright star off a bolt head. Rahul used the chance a mistake gives you. He hooked his knife back into his belt and leaped sideways onto a lower cable, caught it with one hand, and swung under, legs scissoring. He disappeared into the shadow under the roadbed like someone turning a page.
"Hold," Ayush said again, and he hated the word because it sounded like a lie when the whole world wanted to go.
"Under!" Suraj shouted. Two variants hit from the blind right and rolled into the choke with a flexibility that made you understand why bones are the way they are. One went for Ananya because the heat her body had written into air felt like invitation. She saw it a breath sooner than physics allowed and jammed the butt of the knife up into the soft place under its jaw, then pushed, then twisted. It shrugged twice and went quiet.
Kartik stood his ground with the chisel at a ridiculous angle and learned that ridiculous can be useful when it lives next to stubbornness. He yelled once, high and ugly, and the sound reminded him he wanted to be alive. He shoved harder. The blade slipped and found an eye. The variant made no protest. It fell and he gagged in a way that was ancient and private and then got up because there wasn't a committee for that.
"Right rail," Leon said. "Three more. Human behind them."
Ajay peered over the lip and swore under his breath. "Fireflies," he said. "Knives and bolts. No flags." He tossed a bolt of his own—steel and luck—into the hollow of a man's neck as he stepped into the underwalk. The man dropped his crossbow and everyone present learned one more way death sounds.
Flares popped close now—Rahul's way of telling the whole city where to look. The pack reinvested the bridge. Fire ran along a seam Ayush had not intended to make and tried to learn where to go next. The wind changed and made a decision for it. It licked back into the underwalk and ate a variant's ankle. The smell was something you only call by name in your head or you never eat meat again.
Rahul's voice came from somewhere it shouldn't, pleasant and far, as if he were already walking away. "I'll see you at dawn anyway," he said, and the laugh was not mocking. It was delighted that somebody else had written a chapter he hadn't expected.
He was gone. The pack had learned a lesson nobody taught and started to retreat from fire, not sound. Ananya cut the speaker and the sudden silence was a blow.
"Down," Leon said in a tone that made obedience feel like instinct. Everyone crouched on whatever metal permitted crouching. The drone came back, big, the kind with patient eyes and fuel that doesn't belong to anyone in a room. Its dot painted the hot place by the speaker, then moved to Ananya's shoulder, then to Ayush's chest.
"Friendly," Shivam muttered under breath that worked.
Uncrowned's voice arrived in the radio's belly, crisp, almost warm. "Joel. Stand down. Column on approach. Do not engage. We have you."
"You don't," Ayush said, calmly into a radio he didn't depress.
Leon set his sights on the drone and looked for the leg joint. The polite shot. He exhaled long and remembered Ethan's empty eyes on the laundromat floor and Drake's surprise and sadness in a doorway and decided to keep the bullet. He didn't shoot. The drone hovered and learned. The dot moved away, thinking. That scared him worse than incoming fire.
"Now," Ajay said, not loud. "Now we exit."
They went by the book they had written that afternoon. Shivam on the bad rung to test it again. The rung lied less this time. Suraj carried heat behind them: not heroics, just the small kindness of buying time for the last pair. Riya lifted Nikhil over a bracket and forgot she could drop him. She remembered. He landed on his feet and made a face like he had been insulted by physics. It was a relief.
Ananya held the underwalk corner until Ayush moved, then moved with him, her hand keeping contact with the back of his shirt as if that act alone could tether him to where he needed to be. They crossed to the service ladder on the far pylon and dropped. Ankles yelled. Neck thanked. Ajay's map worked. It always had.
They hit the tin roof and slid to the alley, rolled behind a wall that used to carry a billboard for shoes, and didn't breathe for three seconds because hearts have to reset sometimes. The sound of the bridge behind them changed from attack to cooling. Metal pinged as it relaxed. Somebody's lungs made a wheeze you can't fix with a hand on a shoulder. The drone's hum moved downriver like a threat half-kept.
They ran the last two lanes like old thieves because by now that's what they were, by any measure that mattered to anyone with power. They crossed into the dead textile yard and into the godown that was a cousin to the one they had slept in days ago, and the door shut with a cheap, holy sound.
Riya set Shivam down on a pallet and cinched a bandage tight. He hissed and laughed because that's how pain tells you it hasn't taken everything. Kartik put his head back against a pillar and swallowed until his throat believed it. Lucky sat down cross-legged and stared at his hands and didn't cry and didn't not cry. Ananya went still for the first time since the sun threw red on steel and closed her eyes. When she opened them, they were clear.
Leon sat with his back against a crate and pulled the dog tags out of his pocket and rubbed the nick that had hidden a message and said nothing. Ayush stood by the door and looked at the chalk lines he had walked and knew they would not hold forever.
The radio throbbed again. It sounded patient and tired of being refused.
[Uncrowned King]: Joel. Confirm survivors. Column ready. You stand down, we extract. Neutralize hostile elements on-sight.
Ayush held the radio without pressing. He thought of the word neutralize. He thought of the difference between kill and ignore and make invisible. He put the radio on the floor and set his sneaker on the antenna until the LED winked out. He didn't smash it. He was not done listening even if he was done obeying.
Shivam leaned his head back and closed his eyes. "Did we win?" he asked.
"No," Suraj said. "We got to tomorrow."
"That's winning," Ananya said, and her voice cut the air cleanly.
They ate the last of a stale packet of glucose biscuits in the shadow of machines that had meant money for someone once. Nikhil fell asleep in the angle of Ananya's arm and the wall. Riya put a folded jacket under Shivam's shoulder and his eyes softened into the face he carried before he'd learned how to put iron into heads. Kartik held the chisel in his lap like a small, honest god.
Ayush went to the door. He opened it an inch and looked at the lane. He looked at the sky. The red moon had edged up and paled but hadn't forgiven them. He looked down. Three stones sat at the base of the step in a neat row. He nudged one out of line with the toe of his shoe.
He closed the door and leaned his head against it for a second. He didn't ask for anything. He just counted the eight breaths behind him and let his own match them.
"Tomorrow," Ananya said softly.
"Tomorrow," he agreed.
Far off, under some other bridge, a man sat with his feet in dirty water and wrapped Aliya's red hair tie around his wrist until the skin went white, then red again. He placed three pebbles between his boots and nudged one with his thumb and smiled without teeth.
"They keep choosing," Rahul said to the river. "Good."
He stood, steady despite the blood that had dried stiff at his side. He walked away into a city that had decided to love him back because he had learned how to hold it without asking permission.
And above them all, the drone arced its patient line and marked three more rooftops with IR a man in a room would read later and decide were problems away from paper.
End of Episode 10: The Blood Moon