The city taught them how to wait.
Not the kind of waiting that looks like patience. The other kind—where every muscle learns to hold still without locking, where breath stays shallow because deep pulls bring coughs into air that might be listening. Where your hands learn the weight of quiet work.
They moved into a half-built tower two lanes off the cable yard and wrote the ghost mark low by the stairs—three dots and the small slash—where only children would notice. The second floor had three walls, a tarp for a fourth, and a roof of sky. In the mornings, the sun turned rebar into stringed instruments. By afternoon the heat hummed like a machine that had forgotten to turn itself off. At night, the drones stitched red along the river and forgot them, sometimes on purpose, sometimes because the mirror rigs lied well enough.
Days folded over each other.
Ayush drilled them at dawn. No speeches. Two minutes of quiet stretching so the body believed it belonged to itself. Twenty steps of silent movement down the stairs and back, soles finding the same dust each time. Ten seconds of freeze on the landing when Ajay lifted a finger because something in the walls changed hum. Twice a week they practiced the kind of run that doesn't look like flight—heads down, hands free, breath in the throat, not the mouth.
Nikhil learned games that could be played without sound. Ananya taught him to flick bottle caps into a chalk square with one finger, to count misses in his head, not his mouth. When he asked when they would go home, she said, "We're building a new one one room at a time," and he believed her because she said it like a thing that was already partly done.
Riya turned a corner of the room into a clinic with two bandages and a scarf. She wrote a list on the wall with a stub of chalk—CLOVES, SALT, CLEAN WATER, THEN YOU—and smiled at it once before scrubbing the last two words away because you can't ask too much of a city that keeps you alive on borrowed answers.
Shivam went from "fine" to "functional." The cut on his arm grumbled. He did not. He tried to open jars he couldn't. Riya used a spoon handle and physics and then ignored the face he made until he laughed without permission.
Leon taught Lucky how to hold the chisel like a tool, not a question. "Think of weight. Think of wrists. Not force—angle." Lucky nodded, jaw tight. He made three cuts in a scrap of timber and two of them were good and he said nothing and Leon said nothing and that said enough.
Ajay stood with his back to the stairs and listened to the grid scrim under concrete. "They like this feeder," he said on the third morning. "It's got a good temper. Eden tagged two corners at S12 last night and they'll come back when they think the city forgot." He tapped the wall. "It doesn't."
Suraj did not come.
Some afternoons Ayush stood where the parapet broke and looked two streets over in the direction of the map tables and the big man's voice and imagined how a stairwell sounds when men try to make sense of their promises with guns. He put the thought down like a hot piece of iron. He picked up the next thing—rope, mirror, water—because that was the work that kept the others breathing.
Rahul came and went without entering. He walked rooftops like gravity was a man who used to lend him money. Twice they caught him in the corner of the eye—on a parapet with his hands on the rail, or in a window across the lane, watching him watch the city. He would touch the red hair tie around his wrist and then place three pebbles and nudge one out of line, a habit turned into a language. Once, late, he lifted two fingers to his temple and gave the small off flick. Ananya stared back without moving and said nothing until he was gone.
On the eighth day of learning how to stretch time, a voice came up the linoleum of the air like a rumor wearing a uniform.
"…all survivors… CGS convoy… east sector… sanctuary ahead… keep to the blue flags…"
Ajay straightened and tilted his head, like someone had whispered a secret into the wire. "Picked it off a junk frequency," he said. "Repeating. East sector. If it were a trap they'd make the grammar better."
"That makes it a trap," Suraj would have said, if he'd been here to say it. He wasn't.
"CGS," Leon said, tasting the letters like a memory. "Walls. Rations. Rules."
"And a gate you only notice when it closes," Riya said.
"Sanctuary," Kartik murmured, and then made the face of a man who has learned to interrogate any word that looks clean.
They argued without raising voices, because they were too tired to pretend noise had things to do that didn't include teeth.
"It's real," Ajay said carefully. "I used to map their pumps. Raj runs East. He's a bureaucrat with a spine. He'll take you in if you give him something to put his name to."
"Us," Ananya said flatly.
"We can't not go," Leon said. "At least look. We're bleeding out on tins and rope. A wall buys you time. Time buys…" He didn't finish. He looked at Nikhil and didn't have to.
Ayush looked at Suraj's absence and decided. "We scout," he said. "Two. Leon and me. Ajay gives us a door." He looked at Ananya. "If we don't like what we see, we pretend we never went looking."
"And if they insist?" She meant rifles. She meant shouting. She meant the way men in lines can make a decision feel like a law.
"Then we choose it instead of letting it choose us," he said. He put a hand on her shoulder—permission to stop him if he forgot the part of his body that belonged to other people. She nodded, which was allowed to mean I hate this and I'll help anyway.
Ajay drew them a route with the pad of his finger on concrete—across the narrowest roofs, under the slowest bridge, through a tunnel the city had forgotten it owned. He made them repeat it back in four words and three turns and a comma. "If you smell resin, you're near the blue flags," he said. "They paint too much. It's how you find men who run their lives on checklists."
They went.
They moved under a sky that had learned to love being two colors at once, steel and ash. Leon counted rooftops. Ayush counted seconds. They passed a corner where someone had spray-painted EDEN and then crossed it out and then written it again and then smeared the word into a color that meant nothing. Ajay's smell of resin came a block before the flags—a line of tattered cloth disciplined by wind.
The convoy rolled under them like a thought finally made into a sentence. The lead trucks had CGS sprayed on their doors in stencils that tried too hard to look neat. A loudspeaker made the words every mouth in every room had decided to parrot when the world broke: "Civilians… sanctuary… rationing… work details…"
A small bus followed, its windows papered over in places where the glass had fallen out. Faces inside. Eyes that had forgotten they belonged to anyone. A man in the aisle stared straight ahead and didn't blink even when wind poked dust into him and made his cornea shine.
Ayush and Leon crouched behind a water tank and watched. A squad peeled off and started up the stair to the building they were on. Ayush looked at Leon and did a stupid thing because sometimes the world wants the petty comfort of pretending you make decisions.
"We could run," he said.
"We don't," Leon said.
They stood.
"Hands," the lieutenant said at the top of the stair, breath making his mask flutter. "Slow."
They did as they were told. He scanned their arms with a hand-held that beeped like a toy, then again against necks. He made a face like he trusted the false negatives and their consequences equally. "You have others?"
"No," Leon said automatically. Ayush said, "Yes," at the same second, and the lieutenant's mouth twitched into the smallest smile because authenticity always sounds like two answers that have to be reconciled.
"Rations first," the lieutenant said. "Then talk." He did not lower the rifle. He did not point it too obviously. He gestured with his chin toward the bus. "Get in."
Ayush looked at Leon and made a call. "We bring them in," he said quietly. "Not because I think this is safe. Because I think not deciding is worse."
Leon nodded, jaw tight. They were escorted down the stair like kids sneaking back into school and then crossed to the bus leaned in against the curb. The man in the aisle tracked them with his eyes, finally.
The free seats smelled like bleach and wet, like someone had tried to erase fear with liquid. The woman two seats up held her child with both hands as if the space between his ribs and hers was a door a city might try to get through. Somewhere behind them a boy said, "We made it," in a tone that didn't mean relief. It meant he had run out of words and borrowed one.
They reached the tower. Ananya had heard the speakers and stacked everything into the bag while telling Nikhil, "We're going to see a wall," and making the word sound neutral. Riya tied her hair tight with a strip of cloth like a soldier. Shivam said, "We don't leave the map," and Lucky said, "We don't tell them we drew it," and Ajay lifted a finger to the wall and listened for patrol reliance and nodded as if a fuse he'd been holding blew in the right way.
They came down the stairs into blue flags and rifles and sky, and walked into the kind of door you only notice when it closes.
The base rose off the ring road where it bent and made traffic want to forgive itself. Razor wire crowned the walls like a crown that thinks too well of itself. Sandbags bulged. Towers weren't tall enough to make anyone comfortable. The gate swung wide in a kind of cautious welcome that assumed you were too tired to make trouble.
Inside, a patchwork of tents and prefab rooms. Floodlights unlit waited like plans. Quiet grew low like mold. A woman in an orange scarf wrote names on a clipboard and didn't bother pretending it would remember anything anyone wanted it to. A man with a bucket asked for cups. Another man with a radio asked for patience like it was a ration.
Colonel Raj met them under an awning that smelled like canvas and intent. His uniform was too clean to be found in a city like this unless you knew how to move it in under tarps. His eyes had the weight men's eyes get when they didn't know they'd been elected until after the vote—cold enough to keep you alive, tired enough to mean it.
"You are strays no longer," he said. Flat. Not for effect. For rules. "Here, you work. You obey. Or you are cast outside to die."
Leon smiled, a line that didn't reach his eyes. "Welcomes are shorter these days."
"We used to have banners," Raj said without changing his face.
He made them put their blades on a table and pushed their pockets into a tray and looked at what came out of those pockets like you can measure people by what they thought they might need. A mirror. A rag. Chalk. Drake's radio. The dog tags. He noted the tags and then did not note them. You could almost respect that.
"Any of you military?" he asked.
"I made radios," Ajay said. "For men who needed to lie to each other better."
Raj's mouth twitched. "You'll do." He pointed. "Water duty. East tap."
"Medic?" he said to Riya without looking at her hands.
"Better than nothing," she said.
"You'll do," he said again, and meant it like a favor.
He looked to Ayush last. It wasn't drama. It was the way you take a measure without pretending not to. "Name?" he asked.
"Ayush," he said.
"Where from?" Raj asked.
"Here," he said, and liked the way the word made you have to pick a map.
Raj held the look for a beat and then looked away because some commands don't need to know more than what a man can carry.
They were led to a room with four bunks and two mattresses that hadn't decided whether to be springs that day. No locks. The window had a grate. Leon set the tags on the edge of a metal frame and put his hand over them like you hold your own wrist when the pulse is trying to climb out.
Ananya stood in the doorway long enough to let the fact of a door frame feel like a thing they could own for twelve hours. She touched Ayush's sleeve and whispered, "You stayed."
"I'm here," he said, and hated how much relief charged his voice.
The long wait began again, but in a room with a list of tasks and a wall.
They learned the rhythms. Dawn: loudspeakers and buckets and a shout for bodies. Midday: bread and soup and a quick count of who didn't come back. Afternoon: patrols out, drones contested by children with mirrors playing at warfare without words for what they were doing. Evening: the sound of someone crying in a place where you could pretend it was the wind.
Ananya strung a new tin line in their heads by telling stories that didn't require names. She taught Nikhil to read the plastic water-gauge stripes like he was decoding secret writing. Riya made the clinic corner look like a place you could tell the truth without being punished. Shivam shook hands with a man from a building three colonies down and learned his mother's recipe for lentils in a tin cup. Kartik helped a boy wedge a makeshift shelf under a cot leg so it wouldn't wobble when he tried to pretend to sleep. Lucky rewired a lantern with a foil strip and ten minutes of not giving up.
Ajay slipped out three nights and back before the count, using a piece of the map he'd never written down because even paper deserves secrets. He came back with a split lip and a look like a wire under tension.
"Suraj?" Ananya asked quietly, because it took less breath to say one name than what it stood for.
"Holding," Ajay said. "Vikram closed two doors. Opened one to himself."
"Are they…?" Leon started, and stopped at the word family, because he hadn't earned it yet, not for those men.
"They're not us," Ajay said. "And we're not them. Not for now."
Rahul watched the base from a billboard scaffold once, then twice. The second time he spoke to himself with the ease of a man who has forgotten he's allowed to say things out loud in front of other people. "You made a wall," he told Ayush through the air. "You'll bring him out anyway."
Colonel Raj passed by like weather, never the same twice. Once he stopped and watched Ayush set a door bar. "You drilled people outside," he said. It wasn't a question.
"I drilled people," Ayush said.
"You will do that here," Raj said.
"I do it for us," Ayush said.
Raj didn't smile. "Then pick who us is," he said, and walked on.
They waited.
What eats you in waiting is not the lack of action. It's the grind of not using the part of yourself that knows how to finish something. Ananya took to sitting on the step when the floodlights came on and counting the moths that threw themselves into light they didn't understand. Nikhil mimicked her and counted along and put his head on her shoulder when he got to ten. She let him. The world became a place where that was allowed for ten seconds each night.
Then the base changed its breath.
Engines moved closer before anyone called for calm. Somebody two tents over started whispering in a voice three octaves higher than whispering ever needs to be. On the wall by the gate, a flare zipped to life. The floodlights turned white.
A voice came through the speakers that didn't belong to anybody in the base.
"…all survivors… east sector… sanctuary ahead…"
The same. The tap on the same glass. A bad echo that meant a fix.
Ajay lifted his head and listened to the grid like he was listening for a pulse under stone. "Not us," he said. "Not them." He looked at Ayush. "It's a barrel organ. Someone has hands on clever."
The gate shouted. The loudhailer said, "Hands! Hands!" The first shots weren't in anger. They were in fear. The second were in habit. The third were in a rhythm men use when they want to pretend someone is in charge.
Ananya reached for Ayush's sleeve. "No heroics," she said, automatic.
He nodded, automatic.
They stayed in the doorway and watched the floodlights do a slow, terrified circle. Voices inside the circle turned into the wrong kind. A shadow crossed the wall that didn't belong to a man. An engine that had been faithful all week coughed and died and wouldn't come back, because the grid had heard Ajay lie to it three days ago and had decided today was the day to remember that.
Colonel Raj's voice cut through like a chisel: "Hold the gate. Every rifle. East flank. East."
Inside, the long wait ended. Not with a plan. With a shout.
Ananya pulled the door closed with both hands like she was teaching the building. She turned to Ayush and said, not a question, "We don't split."
"We don't," he said.
Leon reached for the tags the way a man reaches for the right tool before he goes to the job. Riya put clove paste on her tongue. Shivam rolled his shoulders. Kartik picked up the chisel without looking at it like a boy who now knows what his hands are for. Lucky set his palms on the lantern and watched the light make shadows on the wall and decided shadows could be useful.
Ajay put his palm on the wall and felt the grid's hum turn into a sound he hadn't named in twenty years. "They found a way inside the wire," he said. "Not through the gate. Through the ground."
Rahul stood on the scaffold and smiled without teeth. "You brought him home," he said to the floodlights. "Good."
Ayush closed his eyes for two seconds. He opened them when he said he would.
"Tomorrow," he said to the room.
"No," Ananya said. "Now."
They moved toward the door together.
End of Episode 14: The Long Wait