Ajay heard it first.
He pressed his ear to the stair column and tapped twice, then once, the crown pattern coming back through the concrete with a hiccup in the middle that wasn't theirs.
"Wrong pilot," he said softly. "South line's humming like a bad tooth."
Ananya's mouth thinned. "Knock?"
Ajay knocked—two, pause, three. The answer came slow, messy. Two. A pause that tried to be polite. Then a rushed clatter that turned three into four and then backed up.
"Not Vikram," Ajay said. "Not Suraj. Someone with their handle and someone breathing down their neck."
A kid with chalk on his knee appeared in the stair mouth, barefoot, panting. He had the ghost mark smeared on his shin. He thrust a folded strip of coil paper into Ajay's hands and only let go after looking at each of them twice.
Suraj's block print. Hurry.
ASH. SOUTH CUTTER. V OPENED DOOR. WRONG FACES. NEED JOEL. BRING AIR. NOT FIRE.
Ayush turned the paper once, saw too many versions of the next hour, picked one. "We go," he said. "Ananya, you keep the kids. If we don't return by dark, you move east by ghost routes. No waiting."
Riya touched clove to her tongue and nodded. "Don't bring me three at once."
Shivam slapped iron into his palm and grinned without heat. "Downstairs."
Kartik took the chisel like an answer.
Lucky wrapped the foil around a Ghost Socket. "I'll make their eyes stupid for ten seconds. No more."
Leon slung the rifle and didn't say the thing you say when a room wants you to make it safe for them with your mouth. He went first.
They slipped under the city through a throat that smelled like rust and decisions. The bulbs along the Empire hall glowed a mean red, hung tighter than last week. Fireborn on the rails, faces set, postures unpracticed but better. The clinic corner held two cots and six people. The map table was gone; only scorched circles on the pillar and ash in the brazier remembered it.
Vikram was at the head of a new table—shorter, uglier, not big enough for anyone to imagine a throne. He'd shaved too close and a tight purple shadow bruised his jaw. The thin folder he'd stolen was gone; the mark of where he'd kept it looked like a burn that wouldn't heal. Three men flanked him with rifles carried low. Fireborn hovered, uncertain math across their faces.
Suraj stepped out of the south tunnel with soot on his forearm and a cut across his knuckles. He moved like a man who had been standing between a door and a choice for hours. His mouth tried a smile and didn't make it. "Air," he said, and clapped Ajay's shoulder. To Ayush: "Cutter's kissing S7 and S9. Vikram opened the wrong door to make the right trade."
Vikram didn't flinch. "Rice, oil, antibiotics," he said. "Fireflies owe us credit. They sent men for the crates. Eden borrowed their jackets. That's on me. I'll pay. I won't apologize."
"You'll bleed, then," Suraj said. "Now shut the door."
Vikram's eyes went to the south mouth. "My men are on the other side."
"And mine will be dead on this one," Suraj said. "Red Door Protocol."
Vikram stared at him for the count of one regret. Then he lifted his hand. The men on the gallery didn't move.
Ajay went still. He leaned toward the pillar. The grid under the city shifted—three cutters, not two. "S9 just set a second disk," he said. "They'll kiss daylight in two and a half."
Ananya scanned the hall with a triage eye. Two Fireborn kids had old batting helmets on and no sense for when men with batons make a bee-line for shoulder bones. She hiked a chin at them. "Net, not line. Two fronts. Keep your arcs. Don't chase. Fall back on the scream."
Both boys nodded as if she'd put a laurel on their heads.
"Positions," Suraj said, voice snapped down to something that didn't ask permission anymore.
The first men in Eden gray popped out of the south like corks from a bottle someone owed money for. Tagger up front with a puck already humming; baton man behind him; a third with a stubby SMG smelled like river and solvent.
Lucky flicked the Socket. The cutter frequency sneezed into the tagger's deck. His puck hiccuped and attached itself to the wrong beam. Ajay grabbed it with a rag and fed it into the brazier where the Atlas had burned. It popped like it had never been a problem.
Leon took the SMG's elbow and then his rib. He dropped without ceremony, air leaving him like neglect.
Ayush met the baton head with knife butt and angles. Shivam's iron came up under clavicle, neat and hard. Kartik stabbed what used to be a shoulder and learned the sound you make when you win doesn't need to be brave. You can whisper it.
At the second wave, Eden shifted. Taggers fell back. Two men in gray lifted a canvas tarp and out slid a cutter disk with built-in paws. It crawled across the floor like a spider looking for weakness and kissed the north pillar. The hum climbed, an old drill pulling a tooth.
Ajay swore like a prayer. "Auto walk—new kit," he said. "We didn't teach them that."
Vikram sprang forward as if old muscle had just remembered a young rule. He kicked the pawed disk with the side of his boot and smashed it against the pillar. It clung, hungry. He grabbed it with both hands and peeled it off with a shout and a tendon in his forearm went like a violin string too tight, a bright sting under skin. He shoved the disk into the brazier with the ash of his map paper and held it there.
It screamed. So did something in his wrist. He didn't pull back until the light died.
He stood swaying, breathing hard. Blood sizzled off his palm into the coals. He looked at Ayush, then at Suraj. Face raw and unsure for maybe the second time since anyone in the room had met him.
"Door," he said hoarsely. "Close it."
Suraj didn't make him say it twice. He slammed the jack under the south mouth and cranked. The seam groaned. The door shifted down into the socket with the sound of steel remembering. "Fireborn—cone!" he barked.
They crashed into the mouth, not to make a wall—nets of bodies, angles, decisions. Eden pushed. The jack sang. The seam took one more inch. The door went home.
Quiet came fast—underground quiet that makes breathing sound like theft.
Ananya kept counting. "Three breaths," she said, eyes on the clinic corner where a woman had gone from silent to shivering. "Then we move. East and up. No one stays to argue."
She hadn't finished the sentence when somebody hammered on the north door. Not coded. Not crown. Two flat, panicked palms. Then a voice that knew how to shape pleading to fit through a slit in steel. "Please! Please! We saw your mark. Let us in. Please."
The sound pulsed through the hall like muscle memory.
"Forty hours," Ajay said without turning. "That door's got eight left before we brick it. Protocol."
"It's a child," the voice said, high and thin and wrong. "Please. Please. Please."
Riya's face went white and set. "It might be," she said. "All we do makes room for that sentence."
"Or it's a tape with a knife behind it," Suraj said. "Last week's mistake is still bleeding in my hands."
Fireborn faces looked everywhere but at the door. The boys in batting helmets swallowed like they had been asked to recite in front of men they loved.
Ayush moved before the vote grew teeth. He looked at Ajay. "Mark in the wall. Any tag smell?"
Ajay sniffed the air like a dog that's gotten good at deciding which kind of fire is eating the neighborhood. "Solvent," he said. "Light."
Ananya touched the battery on the speaker with her thumb. "I can throw sound in the south," she said. "Not a miracle. Ten seconds."
"Riya," Ayush said, his voice impossibly flat. "You choose who lives if you open it."
She met his eyes like she was a mirror. "Children," she said. "Two steps. Nothing else."
He nodded. "Shivam. On the pin. Two breaths."
Suraj didn't correct him. He didn't agree. He looked at the clinic. He looked at the door. He looked like a man who has learned all the ways a person can be wrong and is trying to pick one that kills a number he can bear.
Lucky slid the Socket switch half a click. People make decisions. Machines stutter.
Ananya thumbed the speaker. The south screamed. Eden's leftover patience flinched in the wrong direction. For ten seconds the hall was a lie.
"Now," Ayush said. Shivam folded himself into the angle by the north door, slid the pin, cracked an inch, then two. Cold air. Damp. A shadow. A face too quickly to be a mask. Small fingers clutched the seam with a clean, hungry strength. Another pair. Riya reached, slim, sure. Two bodies, too light, too fast. She dragged them through. The second child made the sound children make when they make themselves small.
Something else moved inside the dark, fast and wrong. A wand kissed the seam. Metal hummed. Ankles glowed blue in the right eyes.
"Close," Ayush said, and sugar turned to iron all through his voice.
Shivam slammed the pin. The wand clanged on the wrong side. A hand tried for the seam. Kartik stabbed through it like a rule and the sound it made told him new truths he didn't want.
The kids in Riya's lap cried once each. Then they became quiet like they had been taught already.
The knock started again. Language this time. The kind of insult men resort to when doors tell the truth for once.
Fireborn shifted. One of them made a noise like belief breaking.
Suraj stared at the door until the hall saw him do it. He lifted his chin. "Red," he said. "Brick it."
No one moved at first.
Then Ananya stood. She took three old bricks from a bucket that had been waiting beside the jack for two days and stacked them across the seam, mortar the kind men make by spitting and not spitting anger. Ajay handed her more and the boys in helmets moved and their hands learned the weight of walls.
Vikram watched, blood dry on his wrist, jaw set. He looked at Ananya like he could finally hear the grammar of the room he was trying to control. He might have said something worth writing down. He didn't. He shut his mouth.
When the last brick went in, the door wasn't a door anymore. It was a wall with a ghost mark low by the floor where only children would know it meant there had been a door once and it had been closed for the right number of reasons.
Suraj touched the mortar with two fingers—blessing or curse. "Open, then burn," he said softly, to remind himself that the slogan costs.
Ananya crouched by Riya and counted the little bones with her eyes. "Two," she said. "Alive." She took a breath to inhale rage and exhaled mercy instead. "Done."
Ajay flinched. "Up," he said, without turning, palm flat to the pillar. "Cutter on S5. They're learning sockets."
"They always do," Leon said, not unkind.
Rahul watched from the rail above the outer tunnel, one hand always on the red band, the other on steel that hummed under his palm. He tilted his head and looked at Ayush like a teacher recognizing himself in the boy who finally cheats for the right reasons. He did not smile. He flicked his fingers off his temple—habit, vow, threat, blessing—and stepped back into the dark.
The hall moved like a muscle that had finally learned its shape. Fireborn in nets, not lines. The clinic in echo of the song. Suraj with the jack slung over his shoulder like a crooked scepter he had sworn to pretend was a tool. Ajay counting hums. Vikram bleeding quietly and deciding whether he would be both kinds of man tomorrow. Ananya with mortar on her fingers and a child under her breath. Riya with a clove under her tongue and two small pulses under her hand. Leon with a bullet he hadn't shot and a rifle that knew it. Shivam with ache in his arm and the iron sitting well in his other hand. Kartik with the chisel and a mouth that was finally empty of noise. Lucky with foil and an engine he had learned to make noise at the right moments.
Ayush leaned against the pillar with the inverted crown and the ghost slash dragged through the ash. He closed his eyes. He opened them when he said he would.
"Ghost Socket doctrine stands," he said to Suraj, to Vikram, to the hall. "No maps. Only hands. Carry, don't count. Red doors in forty-eight. Kids' doors when they can be. No deals with Eden. No deals with anyone whose grammar includes 'clean.'"
Vikram lifted his injured wrist and gave a salute that wasn't an apology. "The boys you keep," he said, looking at the helmeted Fireborn, "will be the men who decide whether all this math wasn't just theatre. Teach them the right numbers."
Suraj exhaled and looked at the boys and then at the brick they had just made a wall out of, and nodded once, to himself. "Web," he said. "Not wall."
"Alley," Ananya echoed. "Not throne."
Uncrowned's dull voice found a dead pocket radio under a bench and made itself smaller than the room. "Gamma. Clean."
No one turned toward it. They already had a list.
They climbed back toward too much sky and not enough roof.
On the tower floor, the kids that would sleep did. The ones that wouldn't watched the door and breathed in their own lungs like victory. Nikhil woke when they came up and smiled, then hid it, then didn't.
Leon stood beside Ayush at the edge of the floor and watched drones write careful, stupid circles over another part of the city. "They'll learn sockets," he said.
"We'll burn routes," Ayush said. He put his thumb in the ash of the ghost mark he'd drawn low on the wall three days ago and pressed it again under the first until the shape looked like what it was: not new, not clean, but true.
He looked at the stair and listened for knocks. There were none. That was good. He hated himself for gladness that came from closed doors. He kept it anyway because he had to give it to other people tomorrow when they asked him what to do with their hands.
"Tomorrow," Ananya said, standing beside him with brick dust on her cheek.
"Tomorrow," he agreed.
He didn't ask the city for permission. He had learned its grammar. He wrote the next line himself.
End of Episode 18: The Unseen Empire Cracks