On the school roof, three boys circled a fourth. The first kick took his breath. The fifth sent him to his knees. For a heartbeat, his eyes weren't human—bright, feral, wrong—and the tallest boy stepped back like he'd felt a cold hand slide down his spine. Then the moment passed. Fists followed. When they were done, the small boy rolled toward the ledge like a broken wheel and fell into dusk. Crows spiraled overhead, black commas written into a gold sky. Someone laughed. Someone said they should post it. The city swallowed the sound and kept breathing like nothing had changed.
By morning, Ayush leaned his forehead against the classroom window and watched the world pretend. Buses coughed smoke onto the road outside St. Ravencroft. Sunlight slashed desk rows into tidy rectangles. The whiteboard still had Thursday's equations and a smiley face from a bored teacher. Ananya laughed two rows ahead. The light in her hair distracted him the way it always did—like the moment before a storm breaks, electricity just starting to gather.
Kartik dropped into the seat beside him and nudged his elbow. "You look like you're about to write poetry. Just tell her."
"I'm not writing anything," Ayush said, though his notebook had lines he hadn't meant to write, half-phrases with no punctuation. He tugged one earbud out and let the other keep a low drum in his head. "And it's not that simple."
"It is," Kartik said, spinning his pen like a baton. "Open mouth. Move sound."
The bell cut the moment flat. Chairs scraped. Their teacher walked in, dark coffee and stricter eyes. Class happened. Or it tried to. Ayush took notes on autopilot and watched dust motes drift where the sun hit the glass. The weight in his chest hadn't moved in days. It didn't have a name yet. He knew better.
His phone buzzed once, hard, like it wanted out of his pocket.
He didn't check. Not yet.
By lunch, the unease had a pulse. They sat in the canteen under rattling fans, oily noodles and ketchup sachets torn open across metal trays. Suraj argued that fries didn't count as vegetables. Shivam stole one and got smacked hard enough to turn it into a game. Sanaa traded forks with Riya and complained about the new uniform cut like it was a crime against math.
Normal. Loud. Safe.
Ayush took a bite and barely tasted salt. His phone buzzed again. And again.
He slid it out under the table and let his thumb wake the boring blue app that said Civic Readiness.
The logo flickered. The shell peeled back. The hidden channel opened with a hiss.
[System Alert]: OUTBREAK FLAGGED. DELHI BIO-ZONE: SIGNAL LOSS FROM SECTOR-5.
[Uncrowned King]: Stay alert. Filter public channels. Verify on ground. Avoid exposure.
He read it twice. Static crawled down his neck.
Kartik leaned closer. "What's with your face?"
"Nothing," Ayush lied, and the phone vibrated again, harder this time—a secure call that bypassed the quiet tones and shook bone.
He stood. "Bathroom," he said to nobody and everybody, and took the stairs two at a time, lungs tight.
In the empty stairwell, he pressed the phone to his ear. The voice that came through was low, precise, the kind of calm that pulled the world into a straight line.
"Joel."
He closed his eyes. "Sir."
Uncrowned King never wasted words. "It's real. We have three reports north and two in the city. No cure. Rate of change varies. People are changing. Fast. Leon, Ethan, and Drake are already moving. Your priority is to stay unexposed, read the ground, and hold your line. Do not break cover. Do you understand?"
Ayush felt the codename like a collar around his throat. Joel. He hadn't said it out loud in months. "I understand."
"You are not a student right now," Uncrowned said. "You are a lifeline."
The call cut. The hum of the stairwell came back. Someone had taped a flyer crookedly over peeling paint: MIDTERM SCHEDULE—UPDATED. He stared at it too long.
By last period, the teacher's voice had turned to static in his head. Even Kartik stayed quiet. Ayush put the phone face down on his desk, because if he looked again he might start moving before he'd thought it through. Through the window, sirens pipped low and far.
The door slammed open.
A girl staggered in like she'd been pushed by the wind. Uniform torn. One knee raw and shining. Blood trailed from her nose over her mouth. Her eyes were a color eyes shouldn't be.
"Help her," someone gasped. The teacher moved first. Kartik went with him. Ayush's chair scraped back hard enough to bite the floor.
They led her toward the medical room, her weight too heavy for her frame, her breath coming in sharp strings. Nurse Priya stood when they crashed through the door.
"What happened?" she asked, already gloving up, already reaching for a syringe.
"We don't know," the teacher said. "She just—collapsed."
Priya swabbed the girl's arm and slid the needle home. The girl shivered like a wire. Priya held the plunger steady. The girl's spine arched. An animal sound scraped out of her throat.
Ananya's fingers found Ayush's sleeve and gripped.
"It's okay," Priya said, calm the way you pretend to be before a car hits. "Just—"
The girl's jaw clamped onto Priya's wrist. There was a wet sound like fruit split in two. Blood sheeted down to the tile.
Priya screamed. Not a little scream. The kind that says the world just changed and there is no time to bargain with it.
Ayush moved without thinking. He grabbed the girl's shoulders and pressed down hard. She was stronger than she should've been; it took too long; his hands shook; he felt the muscles hold, twitch, clench. The sedative finally punched through and the girl sagged back, mouth opening, teeth pink.
Priya pressed gauze to her wrist and stared at the wound with a face that didn't know where to put this.
"What is wrong with her?" she whispered.
Ayush didn't answer. He couldn't. The veins under the girl's skin pulsed dark as if ink were crawling toward her heart. He swallowed hard and checked the clock on the wall.
Fourteen seconds. He didn't know how he knew. He did.
Ananya's hand was still on his sleeve. He felt the tremor pass through her into him, or maybe the other way around.
They left the medical room thick with the copper smell of blood and stepped into quiet where quiet shouldn't be. In the corridor, the noise had turned to whispers, whispers to texts, texts to rumors with teeth.
"Seizure," someone said.
"Drug," someone else said.
"Dare," a third, shaky, desperate to trivialize it, to box it up and call it something safe.
Kartik's voice found the truth first. "No. That wasn't normal."
Ayush didn't argue. He took them back to class because the only thing worse than uncertainty is chaos, and you can hold chaos off for a minute if you wrap it in routine. He sat. He stared down. Sirens drew closer.
His phone buzzed on the desk.
[System Alert]: BIOHAZARD FLAGGED—SECTOR RAVENCROFT.
[Uncrowned King]: Stay put. Do not engage until clearance. We are moving.
He didn't let his face say anything. He slid the phone under his thigh until the plastic left a rectangle of heat on his skin. He looked back at the door.
It slammed open again.
Two men in plainclothes stepped in with the kind of speed that says they'd been waiting down the hall for an excuse. They flashed badges too fast for a student to read.
"Where is she?" the taller one said.
The teacher stepped forward. "Who are you?"
"Medical response," he said. "We're here for the girl."
"We already called an ambulance," the teacher said.
The men didn't look at him. They looked past him, down the corridor where blood led like breadcrumbs.
The taller one glanced at Ayush, held the glance a heartbeat longer than necessary. Ayush looked back, carefully blank. The man looked away first.
Ten minutes later, Nurse Priya went to the mirror to tie a fresh bandage and watched her pupils swallow her irises whole. Thin black lines blossomed under the skin of her neck like cracks spreading under ice. The metal tray clattered from her hand. She made a sound that wasn't language anymore.
She turned the handle and stepped into the hall and the first boy she met was laughing with his back to her. He turned and didn't have time to do anything but raise his hands.
By the time the screams reached the canteen, the noodles were cold.
Ayush's phone vibrated once more and he didn't pick it up, because if he did he was going to run, and if he ran his friends would follow him, and if they followed him, he couldn't promise they wouldn't die.
"Hey," Ananya said softly. "What did the message say?"
He looked at her and told the truth in a voice that didn't leave the space between them. "Stay put."
She nodded once. Her fingers let go of his sleeve and curled into her palm. Outside the window, a crow landed on the parapet and cocked its head at a sound Ayush couldn't hear yet.
The first thud came from the corridor. Nobody stood.
The second thud got the guard's hand onto his baton.
The third turned the room into a held breath.
Somewhere, a metal tray hit the tile.
Ayush checked the exit with a glance and measured the distance from their table to the back door, from the back door to the hall, from the hall to the stairs. He counted people who would freeze. He counted people who would shove.
He looked at his friends in the seconds before he would have to become someone they didn't know yet.
"Follow me when I move," he said to them quietly, like they were already in motion.
Kartik's pen stopped spinning.
Sanaa laced her fingers together so tightly her knuckles went white.
Shivam grinned and failed to hide the way his jaw clenched. "Got it."
Suraj didn't say anything. His eyes had already found the exits too.
The door burst open.
A girl limped in with her leg bent wrong. Blood had dried in a paintbrush stroke from her ear to her shoulder. The sound she made wasn't a sound a person makes.
A teacher stepped toward her with his palm raised like a stop sign can stop everything. "Hey, hey—"
She lunged. The boy at the water cooler didn't have time to raise his hands either.
The scream tore the room in half. A chair went down. A tray went up and clanged off the floor. Someone slipped in ketchup and hard laughter went high and cracked into terror.
"Move," Ayush said, and the word cut through noise like a clean blade.
He took Ananya's hand without looking and pulled her toward the back door, scanning for a line that didn't cross teeth. Kartik dragged Sanaa behind him. Shivam grabbed a metal rod from under a table like he'd been saving the idea for a moment like this.
The guard swung his baton and caught a skull. It wasn't enough. Another body came from behind him and his shoulder disappeared into a red blur. He went down clutching air.
Ayush shouldered someone harder than he meant to. He mouthed sorry and kept moving.
They hit the back door and skidded into the corridor, where the sounds were worse because you couldn't see their shapes yet. They ran past a girl curled around her phone and a soundless scream, past a boy with a bite blooming purple on his forearm who didn't know it was too late.
"Stairs," Ayush said.
They rounded the corner and almost ran into Ravi.
"Guys—wait!"
He limped toward them, eyes huge. He held out his arm like a ticket to a train that was already leaving. The bite mark looked like a flower pressed too hard into skin.
"Don't leave me," he said. "Please."
Kartik stepped forward and before he could take the step, Suraj caught his shirt and yanked him back hard.
"His eyes," Suraj said.
They all looked. For a second they were still brown. Then they weren't. They darkened like the sky before rain.
Ananya shook her head so hard her hair stuck to her cheek. "We can't—he's Ravi—"
Ravi fell to his knees and arched back and the sound he made had no words inside it anymore.
Ayush took Kartik's shoulder and pulled him away and felt the shape of the choice cut into his palm.
"He's gone," Ayush said, and he made it sound like a fact because if it was a fact maybe it wasn't a betrayal. "Move."
They moved.
The science lab door was open. They slammed it shut and jammed a metal cart under the handle. An emergency light bathed the room in a red that made everyone look already halfway to something else. Glass crunched under their shoes, a thousand small shatters singing.
Lucky pressed his hand to his sleeve and it came away wet. Shivam breathed like he'd sprinted too far. Sanaa wrapped her arms around herself like she could hold all the parts in place if she squeezed hard enough. Kartik stared at a spot on the floor where there was nothing to stare at and whispered a name that changed nothing.
Ayush pulled his phone out and typed with his thumb hidden under the desk.
[Ayush]: Infection in-school confirmed. Visible change ~14s post-bite. Secured lab. Group unaware of B.S.A. orders. Holding for evac?
[Uncrowned King]: Trust no one bitten. Extraction window closing. Pinefield fallback still open. Hold your line.
He locked the screen and put the phone away. His hand shook. He flattened it on the lab bench until it stopped.
The door thudded once. The chair under the handle shivered. Everyone jumped anyway.
"We can't stay," Kartik said, voice hoarse. "Once it breaks—"
"The AV room," Ayush said. "Steel doors. Fewer windows."
"We won't make it," Sanaa whispered.
"We have to," Ayush said, and he meant it the way a person means a prayer.
He pulled the cart away from the handle and counted down with his fingers. Three. Two. One.
He yanked the door open and the corridor surged in, hands and teeth and noise. Kartik slammed a desk into the first body hard enough to trip it. Lucky swung a tripod like a bat and cracked bone and didn't look at the face that went down. Shivam jabbed the rod into a ribs cage and winced like he'd felt it.
Ayush pulled Ananya's wrist and cut the angle, the group folding in behind him, small enough to move as one, big enough to break if anyone hesitated. They ran. The AV door loomed like a promise.
He slammed it shut and turned the lock and the sound of fists on steel turned into a drum.
Inside, their breathing filled the room with a heat that didn't come from their bodies. The dark had weight. No one spoke. No one had enough air for words anyway.
Ayush slid down into a corner and propped his elbows on his knees and let his head hang for a second. When he looked up, eyes were already on him.
No one asked him to explain what he hadn't explained.
No one asked him who he had been before today.
They just waited to see if he had another plan.
Outside, something screamed long and thin and close enough to be in the vent above their heads.
Ayush closed his eyes and saw the crows on the roof again. He opened them and counted the people in the room and made himself remember their names one by one.
"We're not dying here," he said.
The door shivered again. Metal rattled in the frame. Something on the other side dragged nails down paint like it was bored of knocking.
"Inventory," Ayush said, voice low. "What do we have that isn't a prayer?"
Shivam lifted the length of iron he'd grabbed. "Rod."
Kartik held up a chair leg, breath still uneven. "Stick and… dumb courage."
Suraj tugged a tangled cable from a crate. "Wire. Could trip someone. Or us."
Sanaa opened a storage drawer with trembling fingers and found a roll of gaffer tape, a box cutter, and two fabric straps. She passed them to Ananya without a word.
"Lucky?" Ayush asked.
Lucky pressed the heel of his hand to his forearm and grimaced. "Cut. Not a bite. I think." He rolled the sleeve higher. The wound was jagged and shallow, crimson without the dark webbing he'd seen in the medical room. Ayush still counted, because rules meant you didn't lie to yourself. Four seconds. Seven. Twelve. Fourteen. The skin stayed skin.
Ananya's hands moved while her eyes watched the door. "Let me wrap that." She tore a strip from someone's scarf, cushioned it with folded gauze she found in a first aid kit, taped the ends clean and tight. Her fingers didn't shake once.
Ayush crossed to the AV console against the wall. Static hummed through the board. He toggled a switch and a dead mic popped to life, squealing before he killed it again.
"Can you route sound into the main corridor?" he asked Ananya.
She slid into the chair. "Depends what still works." Her fingertips moved over dusty sliders like she'd been born in this booth. "PA is down, but there's an old monitor speaker in the darkroom next door. If I push a feedback loop and open the fire door, it'll scream down that hall."
"Will it pull them?" Kartik asked.
"We find out in ten seconds," Ayush said. His gut didn't like testing theories with teeth on the line, but their options were getting small.
He fished his phone out and turned the screen to dim. One new message, narrow and cold.
[Uncrowned King]: City bunker sealed. Pinefield fallback. Air assets active; avoid open spaces.
The roof plan soured on his tongue. Inside was a maze of teeth. Outside was a sky he didn't trust. He looked at the faces in the room and didn't say the message out loud.
"Two exits," he said instead. "This door. Or the fire door by the darkroom. If we draw them left, we go right. Library corridor to the staff staircase. That one hits the roof."
"You know that how?" Shivam asked.
Ayush's eyes flicked to the floor, then back up. "I've been here a while."
He didn't owe them the map in his head. Not yet.
The hinges moaned. The door handle punched in a millimeter with a hollow groan.
"Ananya," he said. "Now."
She turned the mic gain up, hit the monitor toggle, and slid the fader to the red. A feedback scream punched the room in the chest—a needle of sound that made spines curl. She cracked the darkroom fire door and let the noise pour into the hallway like acid.
For two breaths, there was only the scream.
Then the door they'd braced shook like something had thrown itself against it and changed its mind. The banging moved—left, toward the sound.
"It's working," Sanaa whispered, voice a prayer anyway.
"On me," Ayush said. "Hold your line." The words came out instinctive, something he'd been taught to say when chaos wanted to split people into pieces.
He pulled the chair out from under the handle and eased the door open just enough to see. The hall to the left stuttered under red emergency light and a moving shadow-flood. To the right, the corridor was clear.
"Go," he said.
They moved in a tight line. Suraj fed the wire out behind them and caught it around a chair leg to trip whatever changed its mind. Shivam took the front with Ayush, iron rod at his hip. Kartik pressed close to Sanaa and Lucky. Riya had a hand on Sanaa's shoulder, her grip so tight the knuckles looked carven.
The AV door whispered shut behind them. Ananya killed the feedback and the hallway flinched back into simple terror.
They reached the T-junction and paused. Left: the roar and movement. Right: a long corridor to the library, ten doors and two fire extinguishers. At the end, a blue EXIT sign flickered like a bad joke.
"Right," Ayush said.
He counted steps without meaning to. He heard everyone's breath. At the fourth door, a handle turned by itself. Ayush snapped his hand out and held it flat. Everyone froze in that string of seconds that never feels long until it wants to be your last.
The handle went still. The thing on the other side moved away with a sound like wet cloth dragging the floor.
They walked again. Shivam plucked a fire extinguisher off the wall and handed it to Ananya.
"In case," he said.
"In case," she echoed, and tested its heft, her mouth a set line.
At the library doors, they stopped. The metal push bars looked clean. The smell behind them didn't. Books and dust and something sweet underneath.
Ayush nudged the door with a toe and peered through the crack.
Rows of shelves made neat alleys all the way to the staff staircase at the back. In the third row, a shape knelt on the floor. A hand pulled slowly at something it couldn't seem to pick up. No other shapes moved.
He opened the door another inch. It creaked. The kneeling shape lifted its head like a spider noticing a web tremble. The head turned too far, slowly, like it had forgotten how pivot is supposed to work.
"Single in the third row," Ayush said. "We keep left. Quiet."
They slipped along the edge. The carpet swallowed their footfalls. The thing in the third row watched them with eyes that reflected too much light like glass. It rocked once but stayed kneeling. Ayush kept his body between it and Ananya without making a show of it.
At the back, the staff staircase stood with a chain looped through its push bar. A padlock dangled, smug.
Shivam raised the iron rod and Ayush stopped him with a palm. "Sound."
Kartik dug into a desk drawer and came up empty. "Keys."
"Try the librarian's office," Suraj said. "Top drawer. Everyone keeps the bad habits."
Riya slid along the wall and shouldered the narrow office door with a whisper. She went to the desk and pulled the first drawer. Pens, a stapler, a comb. Second drawer. Keys jingled. Her fingers shook and she made herself take one breath before she tried the lock.
On the third try, the padlock clicked. She looked almost surprised. Sanaa squeezed her arm. "You did it."
Riya smiled and it looked how relief looks before it remembers it's stupid.
They eased the bar. The door opened onto a concrete stairwell that smelled like damp and cleaning fluid. It looked empty. It wasn't quiet. Something above them thudded and slid.
Ayush looked up the well. Three floors. The roof at the top. A narrow landing at each level. The door to floor three hung off one hinge.
"We go fast," he said. "If something drops in, you keep moving. Don't look back."
"I hate when you say that," Kartik muttered, but he set his shoulders.
They took the stairs two at a time. On the second landing, the metal railing vibrated, a low buzz that traveled into the bone. On the third, a body fell through the broken door and caromed down three steps before it caught the railing. Its mouth opened and closed like it was tasting the air. It turned its head too slowly toward them.
Shivam didn't wait. He stepped forward and put the iron rod through the hinge of its jaw. The sound was a snap. It stopped making the tasting motion and made another one, mindless and wanting. It reached. He wrenched the rod free. It reached again. Ananya lifted the extinguisher and hit it in the temple with the heavy cylinder. It slumped without ceremony.
She set the extinguisher down for a second and pressed the back of her wrist to her mouth. "Okay," she said, breath thin. "Okay."
They moved again.
At the top, the door to the roof had a glass panel head-height. Ayush peered through. Concrete. The big blue water tanks. Air that blew dust and smoke. The city beyond, a scrawl of buildings and thin fire.
He pushed the bar. The door swung open onto bright.
They stepped out into a new world.
From the roof, you could see everything you never wanted to see. Cars jammed a road like someone had dropped toy metal and walked away. One of the towers to the southeast shed smoke from five floors, a ladder of black. Far off, a helicopter circled and sprayed a mist over a sector that looked like it had stopped moving. Ayush didn't know what was in that mist. He knew it didn't look like mercy.
Sanaa put her hand to her mouth. Riya leaned into her shoulder until both of them were holding the other up.
Kartik walked to the low parapet and looked down at the basketball court. Two bodies lay on the painted three-point line, odd and quiet.
Lucky sank cross-legged by the water tank like his legs had found the ground without asking him.
Ayush checked the adjoining buildings. The sciences block to the east sat one story lower. A metal sign frame stuck out from its edge—ST. RAVENCROFT—half the letters missing.
"We're exposed here," Suraj said.
"We were dead down there," Shivam said.
Both of them were right.
The door behind them thumped once, as if something had leaned into it.
Ananya touched Ayush's wrist with two fingers. "What now?"
He looked at the gap to the sciences block. A meter and a half. Maybe two. Easily jumpable for someone who wasn't bleeding adrenaline. The sign frame bolted to the brick might make a bridge if you didn't mind heights or broken wrists.
He looked at the stair door. It thumped again, harder. A smear of new red appeared on the glass panel, thumb-shaped, then became a handprint.
Ayush made the choice he could live with.
He jabbed a finger toward the sign frame. "There."
Kartik squinted. "You want us to walk on that?"
"No," Ayush said. "I want us to hold hands and sing until the next class bell. Yes, I want us to walk on that. One at a time. If anyone falls, we have two options: we pull them up or we jump after them."
"Great," Kartik said, because sarcasm is how some people say yes.
Ayush tossed his phone a quick glance he shouldn't have. One more message.
[Uncrowned King]: Pinefield fallback compromised. New instruction: If your unit is intact, do not move to public corridors. Hold rooftop or isolated positions. Air assets will not land.
Which meant nobody was coming, and the sky they were standing under would kill them if it wanted to.
The door shuddered. Wood split. A face pressed to the gap, all cheekbone and split lip and staring.
"On the frame," Ayush said. He stepped to the edge and put his sneaker onto the horizontal bar. It flexed more than he liked. He shifted his weight and felt bolts answer in the brick.
He didn't look down. He didn't look at the distance. He looked at the opposite ledge and the two good places he could put his feet. He went hand-over-hand and heel-to-toe along the frame's top rail, testing each step with his weight before he committed. The sign creaked. A screw squealed. He moved faster.
He made the far side and put his hands on the rough top of the parapet. He hauled himself over and turned immediately to face them.
"Ananya next," he said. "Then Sanaa. Then Lucky. Kartik, you're after Riya. Shivam and Suraj anchor."
"I can anchor," Kartik said, jaw set like a dare.
"You can also fall if you argue," Ayush said, not unkindly. "Move."
Ananya stepped onto the sign and didn't let herself look at the drop. She didn't walk gracefully. She walked like she was leaving a room on fire. Her foot slipped once and she threw herself forward without thinking; her knee caught; she didn't make a sound. Ayush grabbed her wrist when she reached the lip and pulled, and she was over, and she put her hands flat on his chest for one second like she wanted to make sure he was real.
"Go," he said softly, and she did, moving aside for Sanaa.
Sanaa tested the metal with a heel and shook her head. Riya put a hand on her back. "I'll go with you," she said.
"Together is worse," Ayush said, firmer. "Sanaa. Now."
Sanaa breathed once, deep, and stepped out. She moved like someone stepping on a lake she wasn't sure was frozen. Halfway, the frame sang out a complaint. She froze. The door behind them crashed open and bodies spilled onto the roof like a spilled bucket.
"Don't look," Ayush said. "Forward."
She took two more steps and reached. He caught her elbow and hauled. She collapsed next to Ananya with a dry sob.
Lucky came fast and quiet. Riya came with her eyes squeezed shut and made it anyway. Kartik came last of their half. He put a foot out and hesitated and looked down.
"Ayush," he said, voice small. "I—"
"Look at me," Ayush said. "Not the ground."
Kartik looked. His mouth trembled and his eyes steadied. He stepped. The metal flexed. He kept moving. He made it to the last two steps and leaped the last gap like his body had decided it was done with fear. He landed on his knees against the parapet and laughed a single shocked laugh. Ayush hauled him up and didn't let go of his sleeve.
On the far roof, the door blew open.
Three infected came out fast. One tripped on the lip and got up wrong. One ran straight toward the sign like it saw them the way wolves see, as motion and heat. One stopped and cocked its head like it recognized a song.
"Shivam," Suraj said, and didn't need to say the rest. They stayed to fight.
Ayush snapped his head to their side. "Anchor. Get them over."
He grabbed Ananya's hand and placed it on the parapet. "You pull with your legs, not your back."
She nodded, already braced.
On the far roof, Shivam took the first one with a swing that started low and came up, a wicked arc that caught the jaw. It went sideways and came back because pain wasn't a rule here anymore. Suraj kicked its knee and it folded; Shivam finished it with a second blow that made everything quiet around the sound.
The second one ran for the sign. It got a foot on the metal and slipped because blood is lubricant, not glue. Its shin slammed into the frame and it went headfirst into the gap, fingers snatching air. It fell. The sound it made on the way down was short.
The third moved on all fours for two steps, then stood, then ran. Suraj met it with a shove. It went over the parapet with a twisted arm still in his hand. He let the arm fall.
"Now," he said, breathing hard. "Move."
He put a foot on the sign and didn't bother with careful. He made speed look like safety. Shivam followed, eyes on Ayush's face like it was a lighthouse.
Ayush grabbed Suraj's forearm and hauled him up. They clapped shoulders once, not a hug, not not a hug.
Shivam reached and a hand came up under his heel from the gap.
"Shivam!" Riya screamed.
He kicked and the fingers let go and he flung himself the last half meter and hit the parapet belly-first. Kartik and Ayush grabbed him and hauled him over while his shoes scrambled for purchase.
Two more bodies spilled onto the far roof. Three. The door wasn't stopping. The sign frame wailed softly as it took a new weight it didn't like.
Lucky's voice came thin. "We should move."
"We move," Ayush said.
He took one last look at their school roof as if he could take a picture with his eyes. The water tanks. The chalky footprint someone had left months ago. The door they wouldn't go back through.
He turned and led them across the sciences block, stepping over a tangle of cables and a pigeon that had died quietly against a vent. The far side had another gap—narrower this time—over the staff parking lot. Concrete tables squatted below like someone had left a game unfinished.
"We can jump that," Shivam said.
"Yeah," Kartik said, laughter too thin. "We can jump anything now."
Ayush went first again. He sprang and cleared it, rolled the landing, came up in a crouch with a hiss of air. Ananya followed, lighter and faster than she looked. Sanaa made a small sound in her throat but jumped anyway. Lucky needed a hand on the landing and Ayush gave it.
Riya ran and clipped her shin on the far lip. She would have fallen back if Ananya's hands hadn't caught her jacket and hauled. Riya sprawled and laughed and cried in the same breath. "Okay," she said, wiping at her eyes. "That's okay."
Kartik stepped back to give himself space and then sprinted and went airborne and cleared it by more than he needed, flailing arms like a bird learning itself. He landed on both feet and shouted, startled and proud, as if he'd surprised himself into being different. Ayush clapped him on the back hard enough to steady both of them.
Shivam came last and didn't overthink it. He jumped. He made it. He turned, grinning with adrenaline, and the grin fell off his face.
"Down!" he barked.
A sound ripped the sky open.
A helicopter hovered out over Sector-5, gray underbelly blank, no marking Ayush could recognize. A spray arced from its belly into the street. The mist drifted in a bloom. People in the road below scattered like thrown beads. Some fell. The chopper lifted and turned. It wasn't coming toward them. It didn't need to.
Ananya's hand found Ayush's again and held.
He squeezed back.
His phone vibrated harder than before. He didn't look.
On the far roof, a dozen bodies crowded the edge they had just left, hungry and watchful, the sign frame now creaking under the weight of something that had decided metal is food. One put a foot onto it and the bolt popped from brick like a tooth giving up. The sign sagged.
"Go," Ayush said again, because what else is there.
They crossed to the stairwell door on this new building and found it chained, too. The padlock here was rusted. Shivam didn't ask. He brought the iron down on it twice and it snapped on the second strike.
They slammed into the stairwell and shoved something heavy in front of the door—an old cabinet that complained on the concrete. The building groaned around them like it had settled badly decades ago.
They collapsed on the landing where the light was worst and the air was too still.
No one spoke for a long time.
Somewhere below, glass broke like ice.
Ayush slid down the wall and sat because his body had decided that's what it was doing.
Ananya tipped her head against his shoulder. "We made it," she said.
"For now," Suraj said.
Kartik let his head fall back against the step and stared up into the well of the stair with eyes that had seen a different world and didn't know where to file it. "Is this… will this stop?"
Nobody answered him. He didn't ask again.
Ayush pulled his phone out at last, because denial wasn't a plan either. The last message on the screen had been sent five minutes ago.
[Uncrowned King]: Joel, confirm headcount. Confirm your position. Hold until further.
He typed around the fact that his hands didn't want to.
[Joel]: Eight. Rooftop transit to adjacent building. Holding in stairwell. School sector overrun.
He hesitated. He added one more line.
He sent it before he could call it a weakness.
The dot that meant someone was typing blinked. Stopped. Blinked again. Stopped.
No reply came.
Ayush locked the phone and put it face down on the concrete and pressed his palm to the cold for a minute like he could learn something from it.
"Look at me," he said softly, and eight heads turned because the room had decided he was the place to look.
"We're staying here long enough to get our breath back," he said. "Then we move. We find higher ground, water, doors that close, and a way to sleep without dying. We don't split. We don't open doors for anything we can't see. We don't touch anyone bitten. If you get hurt, you show someone. We do not lie to each other. Not about that."
Sanaa nodded like someone had asked a question and he'd finally said the answer.
Riya wiped her eyes and sat straighter. "Okay."
"Okay," Kartik echoed, like the word might be a rope.
Shivam rubbed his forearm and said nothing. Suraj watched everyone, counting without moving his lips.
Ananya's fingers were still laced with Ayush's. He turned his wrist and laced them tighter.
They sat in a silence that wasn't peace, just absence.
Outside, a siren rose and fell. A crow laughed at something that wasn't funny. The day turned slowly toward evening, toward a city that didn't know how to be anything but itself, even now.
Ayush closed his eyes for the length of one breath and saw a small boy on a roof with eyes not human, just before he fell. When he opened them, the stairwell was still there. So were the seven faces who had decided his word might keep them alive.
He thought of the voice on the phone calling him by the name he didn't want. He thought of orders and of doors and of the line between rescue and erasure that looked thinner from a rooftop than it ever did on a map.
He didn't say that out loud. He said, "When we move, we move quiet."
Shivam lifted the iron rod and rested it on his knees like a promise.
Kartik blew out a breath that sounded like someone who had decided to keep breathing until he couldn't.
Ananya leaned forward and listened to the building. "Do you hear that?"
At first Ayush didn't. Then he did. A faint thud. A dragging sound. Not above. Not at their door. Below them. Someone or something moving in the floors under their feet.
"It's not coming up," Suraj said.
"Not yet," Ayush said.
They listened together in the stairwell, the eight of them, while the sound below made its way from one room to another like it had a map too.
When they finally stood, the light had shifted from white to the amber color that makes everything look like memory.
Ayush took the first step down to the next landing, and the one after that. The air smelled like chalk and old mops and fear. He put his hand out and touched the wall, just enough to feel it, to know where the edge was.
He didn't know yet that they were walking toward a night they'd talk about for the rest of their lives. He only knew that moving was better than waiting for a door to break.
Halfway to the next landing, his phone buzzed one more time. He pulled it out, already moving.
[Uncrowned King]: Joel, be precise. Are you alone?
Ayush looked at the seven people he wasn't going to leave and at the word alone and at the name he had used and decided answers were going to have to be the kind you could live with. He typed back without stopping his feet.
He left it at that.
Behind him, Ananya's voice came soft and sure, like she'd decided something too. "We'll make it to tomorrow," she said.
Kartik laughed once. "Big promise."
"Yeah," she said. "But let's start small."
They moved into the building's throat, where the dark starts earlier and the walls remember what you say. The school behind them breathed like it had a fever. The city ahead of them waited with its mouth open.
On the roof they'd left, the sign finally tore away from the brick and fell.
The sound it made when it hit the court rang out clean and far. It sounded like a bell.
End of Episode 1: The Day Before It All Broke