The river brought a different scent up the stair that morning—not ash, not clove—solvent. Sharp. Cheap. The kind men use to wipe fingerprints and intentions.
Ajay's ear found the column. Tap—tap. Pause. One. The reply came crown-correct, but under it ran a hiss that wasn't the grid.
"Smell that?" he said, palm flat to concrete. "They're moving paint. Not at the ghat. Off-grid. South-east feeder."
Ananya's mouth thinned. "Eden?"
"And anyone who buys their grammar," Ajay said. He pointed two fingers toward the old flyover that had taught them more than any teacher. "Trucks at the collapsed span again. Different drivers. Same hum on the decks."
"Follow," Ayush said.
They moved without pretending they had time to make it beautiful. Leon took the glass and the high line. Shivam rolled his shoulders and checked a bus that had decided to love him yesterday. Kartik tied the chisel into his belt like a promise. Lucky wrapped foil around a Ghost Socket and kissed the tape down. Riya tore three strips of cloth and stuffed them into a pocket like you pack courage.
They reached the overpass rib and slid low. Down by the broken apron: three trucks that weren't CGS, weren't Eden-blue. Men in mixed kit. Four with Firefly patches that looked like they'd been sewn on after someone else had stopped asking for a uniform. The rest—unknown. Around the middle rig, a honeycomb of crates. E stenciled on four. Two black triangles. Someone had gotten tired of names and picked symbols.
Leon's whisper was the kind you hear because you need to. "East truck light. Guard posture is two-thirds soldiers, one-third volunteers who learned the wrong lesson last month."
Ajay's brow furrowed at the hum. "They're pumping something cold," he said. "Freezer unit under tarp. That's not paint."
"Then we deny," Suraj said from the shadow behind Ayush. He'd slipped in without asking permission from the scene. "One truck is enough. Fire learns the rest."
Ananya laid tins low and mean on a beam. Ten-second scream if the left needed to become right. Lucky tucked the mirror rig under a shattered barrier so the drone would love the wrong heat. Ajay clipped a Socket to a conduit, ran a wire to the second, rested a thumb on the switch like a man with a good sin and better reasons.
"Now," Ayush said.
The socket whined. Somewhere the feeder coughed. A scanner deck blinked and forgot it had a job. They broke cover like men who belonged in their own plan. Shivam put the bus into a lazy idle, brake ready. Kartik cut a strap neat. Riya turned two cargo slings into harness. Leon took a knee and made two elbows remember they were hinges, not pride.
Then a face stepped out from behind the freezer tarp and made the morning change shape. Not Eden. Not Firefly. Not new.
"Mallick?" Leon said, too soft for the world. The man from the motel—Quartermaster—echo division—stood with a bandage under his sleeve and a look that said he'd stopped sleeping three months ago and decided to keep going anyway.
He didn't reach for a gun. He raised an open hand. Palms empty. Palms that had held ledgers, not rifles.
"You're dead," Ananya said, because the motel floor had bled Mallick and the smell had said final.
Mallick's cheek twitched. "Someone wanted you to think that," he said, voice ragged. "It bought me three weeks of breathing and one warehouse full of reasons to hate my old job."
Eden's man—jacket gray, no patch, eyes with nothing in them—stepped from the far side of the truck. "This your friend?" he asked Mallick pleasantly, as if they were not holding plans between them. "Tell him to take his hands off my project."
Mallick didn't take his eyes off Ayush. "You burned a door under Sector Eleven last night," he said. "Good. Now listen. Eden's crates aren't paint and they aren't a cure. They're temperature and time. What they can do isn't ready for words."
"You're the one who sold AP rounds to the men who killed my brother," Leon said, the brother in his mouth not Drake, not any of the unit, but the version of himself he'd buried under discipline. "Why now? Why us?"
"Because the men I sold to sold to someone else," Mallick said, a flush of shame in the sentence. "Because Joseph paid cash and code and then Eden bought Joseph's courier and no one in a coat cared who was counting the dead in the middle."
"Joseph," Ananya said, not a question. The photo at the motel—Mallick's arm around a man with a smile and a future. Fireflies' elusive head. The way the name had hung in every corridor since.
"He thinks Eden is a bridge," Mallick said. "It's a mouth." His lip curled. "And I—" He looked away a fraction. "—I thought a ledger could save a city. That's the kind of sin they don't warn you about in training."
Eden-gray smiled with nothing above his shoulders. "Enough," he said. He turned to Ayush as if they'd been making a polite appointment. "Give me your hands. We're taking the freezer and the east truck. You can keep your bus and your stories."
Ajay flicked the Socket. The deck coughed. Two Eden taggers glanced down in the same second—men too confident in machines to be dangerous for long. Leon didn't waste it. Two shots. Two hands off batons.
Shivam slammed the bus into the east truck, neat and hard, a kiss that knocked one wheel over a low curb and made the axle change its mind. The freezer unit thumped, grumbled, and went quiet. A chemical hiss lifted and put a bad taste on the air.
Ananya pulled the feedback for ten and a little more. Eden looked left. Fireflies looked right. Mallick grabbed a wrench off the truck bed and hit Eden-gray's forearm with a violence people reserve for their own illusions. The baton dropped. The man's eyes widened—just the once—a human look, then it was gone.
"Load," Ayush said, and they did, body motions like prayer. Three vials into Riya's sling. One data pack slid into Ajay's vest. The freezer unit tried to pretend to restart and then decided, for once, to be kind.
Eden-gray reached under his jacket for something clever and got a chisel in the tendon below the thumb for his ambition. He screamed like a man whose hand had finally betrayed him.
Mallick bled through the bandage. Riya saw it. He didn't. "You'll die here," Leon said to him flatly, not unkind. "You going to make it mean something?"
Mallick laughed once, a sound with none of the good parts. "I'll die anywhere," he said. "I'd rather be looking at the right sinners when it happens."
He shoved the wrench under the freezer's emergency latch and snapped it. Cold hissed, then calmed. On the far truck, a Firefly kid—not Joseph, not anyone anyone would write a legend about—met Ayush's eyes for half a second and did something grown. He kicked a crate off the loading bay. It hit asphalt and split and nothing obvious rolled out. Good. You never want obvious.
"Out," Suraj said. "We burn the throne and the room it lives in."
They rolled the truck, the bus, the bodies, the crates into a tangle and set the fire polite. It took slowly, then decided to be dramatic. The E stencils blackened, curled, vanished. Leon put one shot into the freezer's compressor for the old gods. Ajay's shoulders dropped half a centimeter.
Then the part none of them planned came down the service ramp like a rehearsal. Two CGS jeeps. Blue flags on one, not up—tied wrong, tired. Raj's man from the gate jumped out and took in the fire and the bus and the faces and chose not to be competent for exactly one second.
Raj climbed down and walked into the heat. He looked more like a man than a rank. "Eden," he said, in the tone you use for a diagnosis. "Not yours."
"No," Ayush said. "That's the point." He gestured at the crates they hadn't taken. "You lost them. We made sure they didn't make anyone else a king."
Mallick leaned against the bus and bled onto the wheel and looked at Raj like you look at a world you had left and had been dragged back into. "Colonel," he said. Not a greeting. Just fact.
Raj's face didn't move. The eyes did. "You're supposed to be dead," he said.
Mallick's smile was new and terrible. "Apparently I was helpful," he said. "Once."
"We have a doctrine," Ayush said, before old debts could start counting out loud. "Blind drops. No tails. You saw what Eden moves. You saw what Fireflies want to use to save their story. We keep their hands empty. You feed the city. We break doors and make new ones. You hold walls that don't try to become thrones. Or we go back underground and make your life into a rumor."
Raj looked at the fire until the heat tried to make his eyes water and then decided not to. He nodded once, not to Ayush. To the part of himself that wrote lists. "Two drops," he said. "Morning. Dusk."
Ayush didn't smile. "Under the drain. Low. For kids."
"Of course," Raj said, and it almost sounded like a good man.
They pulled out before the fire made the under-ramp dangerous. The bus groaned and made light work of a curb because sometimes the world lets you keep a small secret a day longer.
They took Mallick to the godown because he could walk and because you can hear a man's truth better in a room that isn't pretending to be a hospital. Riya unwrapped his arm, clucked at the mess, made it less of one. He gritted through without performing it.
"Joseph," Ananya said again, when the room had settled to breath. "Where is he?"
Mallick closed his eyes for one second and opened them when he said he would. "South warehouses," he said. "Edge of Sector Delta. He thinks he's buying time with words I used to believe in. He doesn't know who he's selling to anymore. He thinks Eden is a bridge. It's a mouth."
"You sold rounds that killed my friend," Leon said, this time making the sentence into what it was instead of what it wasn't. "I don't forgive you because your ledger broke your heart. You help us burn this map and I'll bury you where your sister can find you."
Mallick nodded, a movement that looked like it cost money he didn't have. "Deal," he said, tired and almost relieved to be a man who didn't have more words to bargain with.
Suraj watched the fire through the open godown door like he was memorizing it for winter. "Let's follow the money," he said. "Then we follow who thinks they deserve it."
Ajay pulled a folded page from under the bus seat where Mallick had kept it dry. Not a ledger. A photocopy of a photocopy, creases turned to tissue. Code numbers. Locations. One name printed in block letters at the bottom you could still read through the smudges.
MALLICK / ECHO.
Under it, in hand he didn't recognize: JOSEPH / DELTA. Two slashes. Eden in ink the same color.
"Picks his side like it's cricket," Shivam said.
"Picks it like a drowning man picks a plank," Ananya said. "We are not wood."
A shadow moved up on the billboard two buildings over. Rahul. Elbows on rail, chin on the back of one hand. He watched the fire finish the job. He watched Mallick breathe. He touched the red band around his wrist and didn't smile. "Maps and brothers and bullets," he said to the morning. "Pick two."
He didn't flick. He didn't leave the gesture. He just watched Ayush and Leon look at each other and say the next thing out loud.
"I shot Ethan," Leon said, voice like a window you'd closed and decided to open again. "I will keep doing that kind of math. If you believe you can stop me when I'm wrong, do it."
"I will," Ayush said. "I won't do it for a map. I'll do it for hands."
They didn't hug. They didn't need to. The city had made brothers out of worse.
They loaded the vials into a steel drawer behind the broken loom with a shop bolt for a lock. Ajay slid the data pack under a loose tile he'd be able to hear if you stepped wrong. Ananya drew a ghost mark low on the door and ran an ash-slashed line through it for the new math. Riya wrote later under it like an honest lie. Shivam and Kartik lifted and moved crates until their bodies stopped making trouble by asking for meaning.
When they were done pretending rooms were safe, they followed the last line on the photocopy. A motel on the edge of Sector Delta. The one with the rusted sign and the tub a boy could drown in if he was trying not to. The room where they had found Mallick dead, weeks ago, now held the smell of solvent and someone else's attempt at erasing failure.
Under the mattress—not a ledger. A small, sticky notebook with numbers and notations and three photographs stapled in the back. One of Joseph, younger, arm around Mallick outside a grocery store that had once liked its fruit. One of crates with the same E stencil stacked in a warehouse with a half-torn banner that said something about safety. One of a man Ayush didn't want to recognize because he had enough people to be suspicious of. Raj's quartermaster from Echo division. Scratched out. Twice. But the face was there. Hard to deny.
"Follow the money," Suraj said again, quiet. "Then burn the map."
Eden decks hummed a fresh note somewhere south. Fireflies argued with their own reflection in a closed window. Raj's convoy idled at a gate with a new dent and two fewer excuses. Vikram bled through a new bandage and didn't ask anyone to write his name on anything that mattered.
Rahul watched from the billboard. He put three stones down in a line and nudged the middle one out. He didn't smile.
Uncrowned's voice tried to find lungs in a dead radio in the motel drawer. "Shift… clean…" It sounded like paper. It sounded tired.
Ayush turned the radio face down and stepped on it. Plastic gave. It wasn't a victory. It was a rule.
He looked at the smoke of the truck they'd burned and at the river and at the city that kept asking him to decide which map mattered. He closed his eyes for exactly one second and opened them when he said he would.
"Tomorrow," Ananya said softly, already moving.
"Tomorrow," he answered, following the thread before it went cold.
End of Episode 21: Threads of Smoke