Dawn came late to the godown, the river pulling fog through the broken grate and laying it down like a sheet. Light slid across looms and crate edges, turned oil stains into old maps. For a while none of them moved. There is a particular stillness that comes after you've kept breathing on purpose. This was that.
Ayush lay on the cool floor for exactly one minute, eyes open. He counted eight breaths in the room, found his own and put it in step with the rest. He got up. No speeches. Not today.
Ajay stood under the skylight, palms flat on the air, listening to the grid in the walls. "They woke something north," he said. "Big draw. Dirtier hum. Not a sweeper. Column or a backup for one."
Ananya tightened the knot on her headscarf and made a list out loud so panic had to pick on someone else. "Food: none. Water: one bottle. Bandage: two rolls. Pain: clove paste. Tools: tape, wire, jack, rebar, mirror, one working radio, one broken one if we want the right lie, one Glock, one iron."
Kartik turned the chisel in his hands like it was a coin he might not want back. "Plus us," he said, almost serious. "That counts, right?"
"It does now," Suraj said. He nudged a pallet with his boot. "We're done running until the road asks nicely."
Leon had his back to a loom, Drake's dog tags curled into a fist. He looked older than yesterday by a year and younger by ten where grief makes the face raw. "We make a plan and then we keep it," he said. "Not until bullets. Until breath."
Ayush nodded. "We fortify. Not to sleep. To fight."
He spread a rag on the floor and drew with chalk on a sliver of wood. The godown's rectangle, the office corner, the broken grate where the river breathed. A line through the back wall where Ajay's jack had made a mouth. Escape arrows. Pallets into a funnel, not a wall. A crane block on a beam overhead. "We pick ground that makes them clumsy," he said. "We set exits we can use and they can't. We write a route, then a backup, then the thing we'll do when both are gone."
Ananya crouched with him. She sketched sound into the map—tin lines hung just high enough to kiss helmets, a speaker hidden under a broken crate wired to a battery with a ten-second feedback switch. "Noise not for panic," she murmured. "For shepherding. Aim them, don't scare them."
Riya sorted the med pouch with the reverence of a girl setting a prayer plate. "Nothing clean," she said. "Everything helpful." She held up two boiled needles in a chipped cup and a half-rolled bandage. "Blood doesn't care if the cloth is pretty."
Shivam flexed his arm. The bandage held. He said "Fine" in that way a man says it when it's a lie that keeps the room moving. Riya smacked his uninjured shoulder without looking at him. "Don't be brave at me," she said. He grinned despite the ache.
"Symbol," Kartik blurted. The word surprised him. He rolled it in his mouth. "We mark places. Not safe, just… ours."
"Ghost mark," Ajay said, as if he'd had the idea nested for days and was waiting for someone to remember they needed names. He drew three dots with chalk in a triangle and a small slash under them. "Three alive. One gone but not forgotten. If you see it, you know we left air, not promises."
Ananya looked at the chalk mark, then at their faces. She nodded once. "We start here."
They moved like a tide that knows the angle of the beach. Suraj dragged pallets into a forced path that led past the office, away from the grate—so a man entering would be where they wanted him even if he didn't know it. Ajay tested the jack under the back wall and found the bite point. The rebar went into a crack and the bricks sighed. He backed off and left the lever in place. "One push," he said. "When you say."
Ananya strung two tin lines knee and shoulder height, tied to screw eyes she set into timber with a pocket wrench. She ran the speaker lead along the beam and under a crate, tapped the battery, and a thin scream knifed the air. She killed it immediately. "Ten seconds buys time," she said. "Thirty draws a mob."
Leon climbed the beam ladder to the crane block with a coil of rope over his shoulder. The iron weight hung above the pallet funnel, still, attentive. He tied a release knot around a pin with fingers that kept trying to remember someone else's blood. He made the knot twice. He looked down. "On your mark," he said.
Lucky went to the broken radio and smiled despite himself. He unscrewed the antenna, rerouted it with foil and wire to the mirror rig Ananya had scratched into being. He set the rig near the front, under a tarp, a warm rag under the mirror. "We'll give the sky a heater," he muttered. "We'll be somewhere else."
Nikhil watched all of them with big, unsleeping eyes. He held the tape roll like it mattered because Ananya had put it in his hands and said, "You're the quartermaster." It meant job. Job meant the day had an order.
They were finishing the second tin line when the radio gave one clean tone that went through the floor and into ankles.
[Uncrowned King]: Joel. Confirm headcount. Column on Delta. Do not move to river. Stand by for extraction. Separate clean. Minimal collateral authorized.
Minimal. Ayush didn't look at Ananya. He didn't look at Leon. He set the radio face down on the floor like an animal that might bite the next word.
"Stand by for what?" Kartik said, dry, and nobody laughed.
Ajay cocked his head. "Engines," he said. "Far. Coming from the long road. They'll go slow at first, then faster when the grid paints the building."
"Then we paint it wrong," Ananya said.
They set the mirror rig near the front and slipped a warm rag beneath. Ananya angled the glass toward the skylight. To a drone overhead, it would look like bodies gathered at the front. The back would remain cold. "They'll think we're idiots," she said. "Let them."
"Are we ready to burn this place?" Suraj asked. He didn't look happy. He looked honest.
Ayush ran his palm along the wall by the office seam. He imagined apartments on the other side. He imagined people. "We check."
Ajay popped the seam with the jack just enough to send an eye through. An empty corridor, dust furred. No shoes by the doors. No listening bodies behind them. They slid the seam shut again.
"We do it," Ayush said. Saying it made air heavier.
Leon descended the ladder and checked the block rope again. "You want to leave a message?" he asked, to nobody in particular. "Something useful? Let's make every building we abandon say something true."
Ananya kneaded the idea with her hands. "Teach the sky to see lies," she said. "Teach men to mistrust fires."
"Teach kids which door opens," Riya added under her breath, glancing at Nikhil.
Ajay smiled without humor. "You can do worse than make work for me," he said. "I'll keep doors honest."
The engines grew from rumor to forecast. The ground carried the weight.
Ayush took position by the funnel. Suraj stood inside and to the side, iron low and rifle ready. Shivam by the office, poised to shove the rebar when Ayush's hand told him to. Leon climbed back up to the block. Ananya slid behind the crate with the speaker, hand on the switch, eyes on the shadow of the door. Lucky crouched behind a loom with the mirror's foil antenna in his hands like reins. Riya placed clove paste on a scrap and stuck it to a support beam where she could grab it. Nikhil breathed. That was his job and he did it.
"Two breaths," Ayush said. "Then we're ghosts."
He closed his eyes, opened them. No speeches.
The first armored truck didn't stop at the corner, because the men in it had rehearsed this same turn while praying for a different city. It came down the lane like an apology nobody had asked for, big, boxed, its grill chewing air. A smaller flatbed followed, men in mismatched gear standing in the bed. A drone rode the air above them like a priest, dot jerking, indecisive.
The loudhailer said, "Joel." The voice had been picked to sound like reason. "Hands up. Alone. Now."
Ananya squeezed. The speaker wailed and the front of the godown screamed heat to the sky. The drone dipped, dot stuck to the rig. The men flinched to the noise, the way men do when they have seen this done wrong. The lead truck angled into the doorway, grill first. Men moved in that trained way—one step, cover, second step, shoulder, learned shapes.
They hit the funnel. The tins sang. The first man swung on the sound. The cable under his boot rolled. He pitched. Suraj's iron came up and stole everything from the second man just fast enough to make it look easy. Not show. Work.
"Ayush," Leon said, soft from the beam. No question. He could see what Ayush had to do before Ayush did.
Ayush scanned the second truck, the man hanging off the rail with a spray unit, a canister painted with a convenient lie: HYDRO. The nozzle mouth glittered. Paint. Tagger-grade. Not for riot control. For marking.
Left, the drone dot skittered to the mirror and stuck. Right, the truck's front tire hit the small board Ajay had wedged at the entry, rising just enough to make weight shift. Timing. Angles. Scales.
"Now," Ayush said.
Shivam wrenched the rebar. Ajay leaned into the jack. The office seam's mouth split. Air changed. The funnel's back wall became an oven, not for people—for the math. Heat rolled toward the front, off the mirror, into the sky. The drone went stupid for a heartbeat, dot splitting into two and choosing neither with proper faith. The first truck hesitated on a breath that would cost it. The crane block dropped.
It didn't fall like in a film—clean and poetic. It fell crooked, bumped a beam, rotating as it came, and smashed through the hood and windshield with a noise that was exactly how endings sound. The driver slumped. The man beside him turned his head and never turned it back. The block settled like it had trusted gravity its whole life.
The flatbed braked hard and fishtailed, spraying two men out of the bed like thrown toys. One hit the funnel and disappeared under Suraj's iron edge. The other scrambled toward the open—that door had never been for him anyway. Ananya flicked the feedback. He turned to stare at anger. While he stared, Ayush took his wind, then his certainty, then his hands. He fell with a fine astonished look, and sometimes that matters later more than it should.
"Back," Leon said, because the city always adds a third thing. Down the lane, a second loudhailer barked numbers he didn't know how to hate calmly—cordon orders. A third engine noise tried to write a different rhythm, faster. Under all that, a new slender hum. Different. A camera with a better eye.
"We go," Ananya said, because waiting for a better order is a good way to become a ghost you didn't ask to be.
Ayush pointed and gave the only two words that mattered. "Ghost route."
They moved.
Shivam shoved the rebar, Ajay leaned, and the office seam let go one last breath and opened the wall into the dead corridor beyond. They slipped through—Riya and Nikhil first, then Lucky, then an arm that might have been anyone's. Leon went backward in, rifle still up, eyes on the fallen, on the block, on the door—he held the look as a prayer for a friend he'd killed and a city that kept asking for better men than it deserved. Suraj went last, iron dragging a streak in dust that looked like a line under a sentence.
They ran the corridor and broke through the far door into the narrow passage behind the tenements, the one Ajay has always known—pipes at knee, cables at ear, a cat watching with one eye, not moving because cats understand days like these better than men do.
Behind them men tried to fit through the funnel and learned why it was named that. The drone hung over the wrong heat like a bee on a plastic flower. The tagger's spray arced wildly across brick where no one would be later. The loudhailer switched to a different voice and a harsher grammar. Clean.
The godown breathed differently as they left. Air moved along the walls, slow, the way lungs fill just before someone starts to run. Ananya flicked the rig's switch and killed the front heat. She lit a rag in the office, set it against a solvent trail—thin, patient, not a bomb—then went after the others without turning to watch.
In the alley, they hit the river grate and dropped. Water was lower than pride and colder than the last promise they had broken. They waded, bent, shoulders scraping. Ajay turned at the bend and kicked moss from a lip so the next person didn't learn something the bad way. He knew where elbows go. He was generous with the city.
"Left," he said, voice a slice of sound. "To the yard. Heads down, don't breathe if you hate the smell."
They hit the exit into a cracked gully that did not care about men. They crawled up into a yard with broken frames where cables once taught a city to sing. The sky was another ceiling. Smoke began to unroll from the godown like a flag. The drone veered to stare at it. Men shouted. Somewhere, metal gave up.
They backed into the frame of a dead machine and watched the smoke write their lesson into the morning. It said: we learned, too. It said: we picked the ground. It said: we burned our own door so you couldn't call it ours.
Riya wiped water and river off Nikhil's face and smudged the soot instead of asking it to leave. He pushed hair out of his eyes and whispered, "We're not going back there."
Ananya shook her head. "No," she said. "We carry it with us now."
Leon sat on a wide beam and looked at the smoke and then down at the tags. He did not kiss them. He did not throw them away. He tied them to the sling of his rifle, a small promise: not medals, not ghosts. Names.
Suraj watched the lane from their high place and smiled in a way that didn't show teeth. "We just spoiled someone's morning," he said. He didn't mean the column. He meant the man in the clean office with the better radio. He meant the machine that likes clean lines.
Kartik leaned his head back and let himself laugh once, sharp. "We keep not dying," he said.
"We keep choosing," Ananya replied, automatic and fierce.
"Today we chose a fight," Ajay said, grinning like a man who had a hand in a good bit of graffiti.
Ayush didn't smile. He let the smoke reflect in his eyes like a prophecy he didn't trust. "Today we became ghosts," he said. He spat river water into dust and marked the post next to him with the ghost symbol—three dots and the small slash. He touched it with his thumb until it smudged onto his skin.
The radio in Ananya's pack, broken antenna tied to foil, crackled even without consent. A new voice joined Uncrowned's with the ease of someone who had a better key. "Command—Delta grid compromised. Cleaning failed at river. Marking secondary with Eden tag. Repeat, mark with Eden."
They looked at each other and then at the sky, imaginations stitching this to the coolers and the stenciled letters under a maintenance door. A project with a pretty name and a purpose it didn't have to tell the public.
"Eden means more men," Leon said. "More toys. Less mercy. Not a cure. Not for us."
"Then we stop being a problem you fix clean," Suraj said. "We become a rumor everyone knows but doesn't want to say out loud."
Ananya opened the radio, pulled the battery, and slid it back in. She tuned it up two clicks and over three and found a frequency where the column's flankers said the kinds of things men say when orders don't fit in their mouths. Four words kept repeating between them. Clean. Tag. Package. Burn.
She shut it. "We found the dictionary," she said. "We write our own language."
They moved before smoke brought new teeth. Ajay led them through the cable yard into a thin alley, then to a wall he'd hammered through weeks ago because he is the kind of man who puts doors where maps forgot. He pushed the brick and it swung inward on a bent nail hinge. They slipped through and into a staircase that had been folded wrong and learned how to be strong anyway.
They stopped on the second landing because Ananya stopped. She turned and put her back against the wall and slid down until she could see all the faces at once. She didn't wait to be asked for words she didn't want to give.
"Rules," she said. "New ones. Ours."
The room listened. Not with surrender. With hunger.
"We don't bring rescuers to doors unless we say it out loud first," she said, looking at Lucky. He held her gaze and didn't look away. "We don't leave marks we didn't mean. We carry children even when it slows us. We choose fights, not die in them. We don't take more people than we can feed, but we don't let people starve in front of us either. We use Uncrowned's language to make sure he has to hear ours. And when Rahul says sunrise, we ask the moon what it thinks."
Kartik snorted. "What if the moon is busy?" He didn't bother keeping the grin off his face.
"Then we throw the weight ourselves," Shivam said, and despite the pain, he meant it.
"Ghosts don't vanish," Leon said quietly. "They haunt. They make a place itself remember by changing it."
Ayush nodded, once. He didn't add to the list. He didn't correct it. He pressed a thumb full of chalk against the stair's plaster and left the mark there without comment.
They spent the rest of the day making the city learn. Ajay took them through the underground of Delhi—service niches, dead power closets, traps that had forgotten this was their job and needed to be taught again. They left caches: a half bottle of clean water wrapped in cloth and tied by a hidden nail; a length of wire around a beam with a note—NO SOUND UNLESS YOU WANT IT; a bag of cloves in a box with PAIN underlined twice. They marked each with the ghost slash.
Ananya tuned the radio spectrum until she found the scratchy places where rumor lived. She dropped what they needed: not where they were, but what you do when someone tells you to stand by. She let the city overhear a new grammar: We keep choosing. We keep moving. We keep each other.
Riya taught two girls in a stairwell how to make a splint from two rulers and a torn scarf. She didn't ask names. She wrote the ghost mark low on their wall where only children see it. The girls nodded like someone had finally shown them the same magic trick twice.
Shivam showed a boy how to find the balance on a length of pipe so it swings instead of drags. He took the clove from his cheek and gave the boy the laugh instead. It helped more.
Leon went up into a collapsed building and built a nest that wasn't for killing—eyes, not bullets. He set mirrors, not sights. He smiled once, bitter, then clean. He made the city give him angles he hadn't stolen and called it generosity in his head so he could put some of it back later.
Suraj walked point into an old cinema and came out with a reel of wire and two bags of stale popcorn and a line of four men behind him who he didn't bring back to the godown because it was gone; he gave them directions to two ghost marks and told them if they heard a tin sing, to stop moving. They looked at him like he had fixed a piece of the universe. He didn't correct them.
Lucky took chalk and wrote the mark in five places he thought were clever. Two were. Three weren't. Ananya found the three and made them better and did not shame him for trying. He stopped looking at his hands like they were evidence.
Nikhil learned to hear engine note changes. He told Ajay. Ajay said, "You can have my ears when I'm tired," and meant it.
When evening came back with less anger in it, they clustered in the shell of a half-built apartment and looked at the river as the light took its time leaving. A scooter went by with two men on it, one with his feet on the axle because there wasn't enough seat for belief. A child made a circle of stones and then knocked one out and giggled. It was a sound with no agenda. It landed on the day like a benediction.
Ayush sat and let his shoulders touch the unfinished wall. Ananya slid down next to him and rested her head on his shoulder, not for comfort—because we are allowed this, too.
"You set the ground this time," she said. It wasn't a compliment. It was accounting.
"It's not enough," he said.
"No," she agreed. "That's why we call it today." She looked up at him. "Tonight we sleep. Tomorrow we stop pretending we don't want to win."
He let a smile find his mouth. "We been pretending?"
She elbowed him lightly. "You have. The rest of us are way past that."
Leon came over, tagged the wall above them with the ghost mark, and leaned his forehead against the chalk for one breath. Riya and Shivam settled by the window where a breeze was not quite a breeze. Kartik found a corner and sat with his back to it, because he had learned to love what backs mean. Lucky lay down and finally closed his eyes without lying to himself first.
Ajay stood for a long time in the open and let the grid hum pass through him, cataloging its small changes like a parent who can tell which child is running in socks. He looked up at a roof line two buildings over where a man stood with his hands on a rail, a red band on his wrist. Rahul didn't wave. Ajay didn't either. He put his palm flat toward him and then turned it, the old signal that used to mean enough between electricians. He wasn't sure what he meant now. Enough of this. Enough of waiting. Enough of you.
Rahul lifted his fingers and made a sign with two of them—a flick off the temple. He placed three stones on the parapet near his elbow and nudged one half out of line. He turned away and went back into the room where he had unmade three different men in three different ways. He smiled to himself without teeth.
Uncrowned's voice leaked, faint, through someone else's bad radio on a lower floor. "…Eden mark received. Projects align. Collateral acceptable. Column three redirect. Clean."
No one turned toward the voice. That was his story. They were telling a different one.
When the moon lifted again, it wasn't red. It was an ordinary bright coin, brassy with smoke. They lay on the concrete and learned how to sleep next to new rules.
Ayush didn't pretend to ask for anything before he closed his eyes. He had learned something about honesty today: it burns fast and gives off a lot of heat, but you can warm your hands over what's left. He breathed. He counted to twenty. He said the word in his head because the mouth needed rest.
Tomorrow.
End of Episode 12: Rise of the Ghosts