Morning came slow through the rail shed's high windows, gray seeping down beams like old tea. Dust climbed the light in tiny storms. The coach sat where it had all night, doors open like a held breath. No one moved until the shed air told their lungs it was safe to try.
Ayush woke with his back cold against concrete and his right hand still curled around the knife as if sleep had not convinced his body of anything. He slid the blade into the waistband at his back and stood, bones sending small protests that meant he was still a person, not a thing.
On the floor by the shed door, three small stones lay in a neat line. They hadn't been there last night.
Ajay noticed them at the same time as Ayush. He crouched, fingers hovering an inch above without touching. "He was on the roof," he said, tone flat, like identifying weather. "Watched until you slept. Then left you a sum."
"What does it add up to?" Kartik asked, voice rough from sleep, eyes already alive with fear he was teaching to heel.
Ajay nudged the stones with a knuckle, just enough to make their edges scrape. "Three means you moved where he wanted. Next time he will try for two. When he gets to one, he pays himself."
"What if I don't believe your arithmetic?" Suraj asked.
Ajay stood, not offended. "Then you'll test it. You won't like the mark."
Ananya wrapped the blanket tighter around Nikhil's shoulders and helped him to sit. "We can't stay," she said, as if the stones had spoken directly to her.
"No," Ayush agreed. He scanned their little pile of supplies: two bottles half-full, biscuits down to three sleeves, tape, headlamps, toolkit, the iron rod, hammer, chisel. The knife at his back. The city beyond.
His phone pulsed in his pocket—one long buzz like a vein under his skin.
[Uncrowned King]: Joel, asset inbound to your grid. Do not beacon. Do not engage. Confirm separation on contact.
He looked at the words longer than necessary, as if shape would change meaning.
Ananya caught the cast of his face. "Same question?"
"Different wording," he said, and slid the phone away.
"An asset?" Kartik asked. "Ours?"
"Ours is a big word," Suraj said. "And asset means a person with orders you won't like."
Ajay swept a gaze toward the yard door and then up to the skylight. "Asset means you have two predators now," he said mildly. "One knows you. One thinks he does."
"Routes," Ayush said, dragging the conversation into motion. "We can try the old tech college—roofs connect across three buildings. Or the drain under the ring road to the outer colonies. Both are teeth."
"Drain is flood if the grid knocks something loose," Lucky said. "Tech college at least gives us height."
"We used height at school," Kartik said, and the word school tasted like rust in his mouth.
"We use what works until it doesn't," Suraj said. "Then we invent."
Ananya spread the hand-drawn neighborhood map on a crate and traced with a finger. "College blocks here. We cut through the tire yard, past the crane. Sound will carry."
"Then we make our own noise in the other direction," Ayush said. "Ananya—rig a simple pull-line with cans."
She nodded. "Wire, tins, nails. I'll need ten minutes and someone light on their feet."
"I can do light," Kartik said, trying to make it a joke and not an apology.
They broke the barricade with quiet hands. Ajay ghosted to the far corner to listen at the thin seam in the wall, both palms flat as if you can feel approaching intention through steel.
"Fifteen minutes of quiet," he said. "No more."
Ananya and Kartik stripped wire from old harnesses, punched holes in crushed tins, threaded them into a tight chain. She fixed one end to a tire post, wrapped the other around a choke point in the alley. The cans dangled at ankle height, an ugly little jewelry line.
"If he tries to follow close, he rings his own bell," Kartik said, the grin coming easier.
"Or we ring it to turn them away from us," Ananya said, and gave the wire a subtle tension so a body brush would sing.
Ayush scavenged a coil of cable, a roll of rag, a plastic bottle with a last inch of alcohol from a forgotten first aid kit. He tucked these into the pack with tape. Fire is not a plan. Fire is a last agreement you make when doors disagree.
They left by the rear, into the alley that ran like a spine behind the long backs of warehouses. A crane loomed black against the smear of sky—its hook swayed slightly though there was no wind down here. A shape hung from the hook—a man, limp, head at a tilt that meant either sleep or something past it. A signboard from the crane's own shed had been torn and repurposed into a message, painted crude in red and tied around the man's torso.
I AM HERE.
"Not a map," Ajay said softly. "A claim."
"Rahul," Ayush said. Saying the name pulled a wire in his chest.
Shivam's hand tightened around the iron. "Then we break his claim."
Ayush looked at the sign again. "We don't waste time arguing with a banner," he said, and forced their feet forward.
The tire yard smelled like rubber and old rain. Rows rose waist-high and taller, circles stacked like the ribs of dead animals. They took a cut between two walls of tread. Ananya's cans clinked once in the distance behind them—someone taking the bait, or wind. They didn't turn to check.
Halfway through the yard, a sound spilled into the lane they were moving toward—thin, repetitive, primal. A baby crying.
Nikhil jerked like a fish on a hook. "Baby," he blurted, already moving.
Ananya caught him around the waist in a hug that was also a restraint. "No."
"But—"
Ayush made them both look at him. "Think," he said, firm but not cruel. "If it's real, nobody leaves a baby alone in a lane. If it's not real, then it's a friend with teeth."
The cry looped and looped. It had no breath. No swallowing noise. Just a perfect little grief that didn't know why it existed.
"It's a phone," Suraj said. "Set on repeat under something you have to lift to get to."
Ayush eased along the wall, peered around the stack. A busted scooter leaned against a post. A phone sat on the seat, speaker up, baby noise spilling like a tap. The screen flickered. A string ran from the phone through a slot in the seat to something inside. A tug tripwire.
Rahul's mirrored trick made him want to bare teeth at air.
Ayush lifted a hand and mimed cutting.
Ananya nodded and pulled a razor blade from the toolkit, reached around the stack, slipped the edge under the taut string, and freed it with a whisper of sound. The phone ascended into silence. The city returned as if it had been holding its breath so the manipulation could be clear.
Kartik blew out his cheeks. "He plays games," he said. The resentment in his voice made him sound older.
"He likes teaching," Ajay said from behind them. "I think he thinks he's improving you."
Ayush didn't look at Ajay. "We're dropping out of class."
They cut through the last line of tires and reached the back of the tech college. The brick was old, soot climbing like ivy. A narrow service walkway ran under broken windows, splattered with pigeon leavings. A steel door sat at the base of one flight of steps, half open.
"Inside," Ayush said.
The corridor smelled of chalk and damp and a sting of phenol from a laboratory that had tried to be clean. Posters for robotics competitions peeled from walls. Someone had scrawled RESIST in chalk across a fire plan. The arrow pointed into an empty room.
They moved with care. Doors open on each side. Classrooms with chairs bolted to floors that had watched the world end a day late. A projector hung like a dead bat.
At the end of the corridor, a staircase turned sharply up and right. The steps had a careful gradient—old buildings care about knees. The landing light was broken. In the dim, Ayush saw a shape at the top; he froze, hand out. The head tilted too far. A left arm hung useless, socket swollen. The mouth opened too wide and closed too slow.
Shivam gestured—me. Ayush nodded. Shivam took the steps two at a time and brought the iron down on the skull with the kind of anger that lands as accuracy. The body folded without theater.
"Keep moving," Shivam breathed, and they did.
Second floor: lab benches, broken burettes, a smell of ammonia and old vinegar. Someone had smashed three windows in a neat line and left the shards in piles as if refusing entropy in at least that shape. Far across the courtyard, on the next building's roof, a figure leaned against a parapet, watching the tech block with a posture Ananya recognized before she knew why: the relaxation of someone who can hurt you at a distance.
Ayush felt it more than saw. He pulled them tight to the inner wall. The figure didn't move. It didn't need to. Watching is a kind of movement too.
"Roof," Suraj said, reading the same map—better to own sky than to be owned under it.
"What about him?" Kartik asked, nodding at the watcher.
"We plan for him to keep watching," Ayush said. "He learns more when he thinks we don't know he's there."
They reached the third floor. A corridor of closed doors. A sign said MEDIA ROOM in a font from the era of chalk dust and computer labs in a trailer on the back lawn. The door stood ajar. The room beyond was a nest of projectors and tangled AV racks. A heavy steel door on the far side—a maintenance roof access—had a crossbar.
"This first," Ayush said. "We reset."
They slipped into the room and put their backs down for thirty seconds. Ananya tested the projector's aux with a battery from a wall clock and a foil wrapper. It squealed a bright half-note. She grinned despite herself. "Sound," she said. "I can throw noise into the classrooms."
"Throw it opposite our exit," Ayush said. "Then we go up."
Suraj moved to the roof door, checked the bar—the thumb latch was jammed with a bolt. Purpose or decay. He worked it loose. The bar lifted. Air from the roof came in like a whisper of a cleaner world.
Ayush's phone thrummed, a deeper vibration he hadn't felt yet. The message was short.
[Uncrowned King]: Asset on station. IR on you. Hold.
A red dot appeared at the center of his chest like a cherry on a cake baked by someone who didn't like him. It trembled lightly as if excited.
"Down!" Ayush barked.
They dropped. The dot skittered up the wall, then back to the door. A thin whir crowned the roof: a drone. Small, not toy—military or good knockoff. Its camera peered over the lip, bold and assured.
Ananya slid under the media console like a lizard. "Reflector," she said.
Ayush ripped the glass from a picture frame on the wall—"Inauguration Day"—and shoved the frame toward her. She angled it at the skylight. The drone bobbed, lens hit by a sudden scream of white. It pulled back, confused like a dog with a new trick.
"Asset," Suraj said, lips curling on the word. "Friendly."
"Friendly doesn't aim for the chest," Shivam muttered.
The red dot returned, lower, hunting their knees this time. Ayush grabbed the bottle with the inch of alcohol, poured it on a rag, wrapped it around a metal rod, struck the iron against the concrete until a spark bit, and held the rag up in front of the media rack. The heat signature swelled fast. Through a crack he saw the dot hesitate, swing to the heat, hold.
"False signature," he whispered.
"Go," Ananya said, already spinning a dial to flood the far classrooms with a high squeal. She nodded toward the roof door. "Now."
They went up into light.
The roof was a rectangle ringed with a low parapet and dotted with ductwork. The other building's roof was a meter and a half away across a narrow drop—an alley of air lined with moss and the city's less sentimental dirt.
On the far roof, the watcher had moved closer. He stood now at the edge, one hand resting on crumbling brick as if he owned the centuries in it. Rahul.
Ayush felt his body drop into the memory of standing shoulder-to-shoulder with him on a firing line, counting breaths. He fought the familiarity and won. He kept his voice in his mouth.
Rahul smiled, a small private thing at first, like he'd found a lost object in a drawer. "Joel," he called softly. The word skated across the air like oil.
Kartik flinched, not used to hearing the codename spoken like a slur.
Ayush didn't lift his chin. "We're not in your class anymore," he said.
Rahul's eyebrows tilted. "You're always in my class," he said. "I make the curriculum."
His right hand dipped into his pocket and came out with something red. He walked his fingers along his palm like a magician showing he wasn't cheating and then let the object fall. It caught the light. It landed between Ayush's feet with a soft slap.
A hair tie. Red. The kind you can buy at any corner stall. The kind Aliya had worn like a small flag.
Ananya looked at it and then at Ayush. He didn't move for one full breath. Then he nudged it gently with the toe of his shoe and left it exactly where it had landed.
Rahul's smile thinned. "You always did know where to step," he said. "We'll see if that lasts when the floor moves."
He lifted a hand and fired a flare into the sky. Red light bloomed. The city turned to look.
"Move," Ayush said, before the flare had time to talk to anything with hunger. He pointed at the sign frame bolted to the parapet—old, corroded, still strong. "One at a time. Same as before."
"Again with the sign-walking," Kartik said weakly, and set his jaw.
Ayush went first, feet placed with the memory of the last metal singing under him. He didn't look at Rahul. He didn't look at the alley of air. He looked at the far parapet and the two good places to be.
He made it and turned. Ananya came with her balance like it was part of her. Nikhil came with his eyes on Ananya's back, not the drop. Sanaa and Riya came, a small sound escaping between Riya's teeth when the metal complained.
Kartik hesitated half a step, then stepped because habit is a stronger teacher than fear if you let it be. He landed and laughed once, both surprise and defiance. Shivam came last with the iron balanced the wrong way and righted it mid-step like a man moving a candle in wind.
Suraj stepped onto the frame and halfway across the drone swung back toward the roof at their backs, dot skittering. It chose Suraj's chest, hungry. The whine of a suppressed shot cracked the parapet brick by his hip, chips spitting.
"Friendly," Shivam said through his teeth.
Suraj finished the crossing with a slowness that insulted gravity, then stepped onto the parapet and looked out over the city with his chin up like a king surveying unwilling subjects. He lifted a middle finger toward the sky where the drone had vanished. Declaring agendas helps you keep your bones straight.
Rahul watched all of this like a teacher grading work in real time. He looked pleased, and that made something worse in Ayush's belly than anger would have.
He set a small object on the parapet: a radio the size of a hand. He tapped it. Its light blinked. "Asset," he said, speaking not to them but to someone over their heads. "You see him. You know where he is. You know what he does when you ask him to leave his pets behind."
Static answered. Then a voice that wasn't Uncrowned, wasn't anyone Ayush had heard on his phone. Calm. Low. Strained around duty.
"Joel," the radio said. No codename argument. Just his voice name. "Hold. Do not move. Do not make me choose between you and orders."
Ananya's hand found Ayush's sleeve again. Everything she wanted to say came through that grip.
Ayush stared at the radio and then at Rahul. "You don't get to triangulate my grief," he said.
Rahul grinned, delighted at the word choice. "Oh, Joel. I don't triangulate grief. I distill it." He nodded toward the far corner of the building they'd just come from. A door there creaked open—metal slow, weight behind. Bodies poured onto that roof, drawn by the flare and the sound like mice to a man with a bag. Between the two roofs, the sign frame shuddered. It was not a bridge now. It was bait.
"Run," Ajay said quietly from behind Ayush's shoulder, and the word was all grace, no panic.
They ran—not in a stampede, not in the chaos Rahul wanted—but in a line that flowed. They cut along the far parapet and hit the second roof's service door at speed. Shivam slammed the iron into the push bar; it gave. The door swung in.
Inside, the corridor was a long throat. Ananya threw the projector feedback into a classroom to the left with a flick of a wrist learned ten minutes ago. The sound knifed. Bodies in the stairwell they couldn't see changed direction like a school of fish. Ayush loved her with a sudden ferocity that made his vision white at the edges for half a heartbeat.
They took the stairs down two flights and cut right into a lab whose gas taps still gleamed. Ayush yanked a drawer, found alcohol, dumped it into a trash can with old papers, held the rag with the last of their bottle like a fan, struck iron to concrete again until spark found friend. Flame licked. He shoved the bin into the corridor as the infected spilled from the far door—a wall of wrong in human shapes.
Fire roared a small line between them and the at-last. A literal fire between us. The heat shoved air into their faces. Pulling breath through fabric helped, barely.
"Back!" Ayush shouted, coughing.
"Window!" Riya yelled, already at the frame, fingers bloody where glass bit. Shivam put his jacket over the jagged edges and kicked, opening the mouth wider. The alley beyond yawned, promising different pain. They went out one by one, the way people change stories—through wounds, not doors.
They hit the service ledge and slid down a drainpipe that protested but didn't fail. The alley spit them into a side lane of the tech block. The roar of infected behind them climbed and changed. One try at a fire. Two. Then it learned or burned.
Out on the lane, the drone was back, dot searching. Ayush yanked his shirt up to his face, leaving a band of bare stomach. The dot stuck lower, uncertain. He pictured the heat map showing the hot wick in the media room, the fire, the bodies. He didn't want the asset shot to land in someone else on a line he'd drawn.
The radio on the parapet above them crackled like a ghost still in the room.
"Ayush," the voice said again. Closer now. "You have ten seconds before I cut the angle. Do not make me shoot at friends to take you."
"Make me a deal," Ayush said, looking up at the nowhere the voice occupied. "Take all of us or none."
Static. Then: "You know that isn't how they wrote it."
"Then write it different," he said. "Or shoot me now."
Ananya's fingers dug crescents into his forearm. "Ayush."
He exhaled and gave her one second of his face, not the one he wore for everyone else. "I'm not asking him," he said quietly. "I'm telling him he's not the only one with orders."
The infected burst through the lab window behind them with a spray of glass. One dropped into the alley, ankles shattering without meaning, and crawled with a seriousness that didn't think about pain. Another lunged and hit the drainpipe, slid, landed on the first. They bit at each other without prejudice, mouths wild at the nearest warm thing.
"Move," Suraj said, shoulder-checking an impulse toward poetry.
They moved toward the far end of the lane where a welded staircase climbed two floors to a shutter. The first flight groaned under them. The second shook. The shutter at the top was locked, two bolts and a cheap padlock. Kartik stepped without being asked and jammed the chisel into the hinge, working it like a man who'd done this to a pane cupboard for crackers at midnight. The padlock held. The hinge gave. The shutter peeled enough to allow bodies that didn't mind bruises.
Inside: a projection booth from a different era—black curtains, rolls of film like mummified snakes, a table with cigarette burns in a map of impatience. Through the window, rows of red seats watched a dead screen.
"Of course," Ananya breathed. "AV room."
"Don't say that," Kartik said, half-laughing despite his lungs.
Shivam shoved a cabinet against the door.
The drone's whine edged into the space; its dot found the window and then the heat of their breath. Ayush grabbed a film tin and angled it, mirror-like, sending their heat-signature sideways, a little magic trick of survival.
"Choices?" Suraj asked. "We sit and get flanked. Or we run and get flanked."
Ajay looked at the ceiling. "Roof hatch."
They found it—a square cut with a cheap ladder nailed wrong. Ayush went first. He pushed against the hatch. It stuck. He shoved harder. It popped open into the sky with a sound like a small animal dying. He flinched. He pushed through.
The roof was a flat expanse of tar and gravel. To the west: the metro flyover, a river of concrete with no cars. To the east: the rail yard and the shed, a memory already decided on their behalf. To the south: the city still on fire in pockets like questions you can't answer yet.
On the far parapet of this roof, Rahul stood again. Not surprised. Not smug. Simply there, a constant like a badly hung moon.
"You could have been everything," he called.
"I still could," Ayush called back. "You too."
Rahul tilted his head. "You always did ask me to be generous with my definitions."
He lifted something in his hand and for a heartbeat Ayush's stomach dropped, expecting a gun. It was only a radio earpiece. He pressed it to his ear and listened to the asset's voice in a channel Ayush wasn't on.
Then, softly, to Ayush, he said: "He's closer than you think. He will choose the easier grief."
Ananya swore under her breath. It sounded wrong from her mouth. It sounded right, too.
"Ayush," the asset's voice came again, this time from a speaker on the drone itself, all pretense of stealth gone. "Last call. Be still. I will not miss."
Ayush looked at his group. Soot on cheeks. Blood on sleeves. Knife in hand and chisel and iron and nothing that would withstand a man with distance and orders. He felt something inside him align, the way a compass needle calms.
He walked to the parapet and set the knife down on it, palms open. "Asset," he said. "If you shoot, I will fall. If you take me, they will die. If you do nothing, we will run and some of us will live."
Static. Then: "You don't get to decide what I carry."
"Then we share it," Ayush said. "You carry your orders. I carry my family. He—" He nodded at Rahul. "—carries his ghosts. We'll see who breaks first."
The drone hovered, uncertain on a language level beyond its rotors. Its dot danced like a drunk bee.
In the stairwell behind them, the infected found the last hinge on the shutter. It tore. The sound came up through the projection booth and onto the roof like the beginning of a song called Run.
Ayush picked up his knife. Not defiance. Employment.
"Go," he said, and meant it like a door opening.
They ran across the roof and hit the far fire escape—skittering, iron complaining, bodies improvising trust in metal. Rahul didn't stop them. He watched. He learned.
On the next roof over, a cable line ran sloppily from one building to the next. Ananya grabbed it and used her weight to swing to a ledge that shouldn't have held and did. She turned and held out a hand. Nikhil took it without looking down. Sanaa and Riya followed, the cable twanging a little song. Lucky went last, jaw clenched, eyes doing math he didn't share.
Shivam went for the jump without romance. He landed patchily and grinned at physics. Suraj paused and looked back at Ayush like a twin with a different father. "You choose your wars correctly," he said. "Mostly."
"Mostly," Ayush agreed.
They crossed the gap, boots scraping where paint had peeled years before. The drone hovered over the empty roof like a lost thought. The infected spilled onto the projection booth roof behind them like a tide that didn't know recent history.
At the end of the run of roofs, a ladder dropped into a courtyard that held a dead kite and a scooter with no wheels. They went down it. They hit ground and kept moving because stopping is a thing you owe yourself and you pay when you can afford it.
They cut into a lane where laundry hung as if no day were more new than this, and stopped finally, shoulders to walls, breath coming in pieces.
Ayush's phone buzzed a final time.
[Uncrowned King]: Joel, hold your ground. Asset will reacquire. Do not improvise.
He typed with both thumbs, fast and clear.
[Joel]: I'm done asking for permission to keep people alive.
No dot blinked. No reply came.
Kartik slid down into a crouch and laughed once, sharp. "We keep not dying," he said. "Is this the plan? Repeat until morning?"
"It's a good plan," Ananya said, and put a hand on his shoulder.
Shivam leaned the iron against his thigh and looked at Ayush. "You sure you don't want to go with your new friend?" The bite in the tease set through pain. He needed to throw it. He needed Ayush to throw it back.
"Not without you," Ayush said simply.
Shivam's mouth twitched. He nodded once, entire head, to hide the smallness in his voice. "Okay."
Suraj listened to the city with his head tilted, like a man hearing a song he used to know played on a different instrument. "We need a base," he said. "Somewhere that is ours for longer than thirty minutes."
Ajay's voice came, disembodied. He had not been with them on the run; he was simply there in the alley corner now like men who know how to be useful know how to appear at the correct time. "There is a yellow-painted house," he said. "Edge of the next colony. Two exits. A back room with only one window. It's held so far. You can make it yours for a night."
"How do you know?" Ananya asked.
"Because I've slept there twice," Ajay said mildly. "And because I didn't tell anyone worth remembering."
He caught Ayush's eye and let the silence either become trust or not. Ayush let it.
"Show us," he said.
They moved again, smaller now, the red flare echoes fading behind them, the drone's whine a mosquito that had lost blood and would find more. Rahul stood on a roof three buildings away and watched them go, Aliya's red hair tie gone from his hand, the memory of its color still in his fingers like dye.
On a nearby roof, a man in tactical gray knelt behind a low wall and watched the same line of figures. He had the drone's controller in one hand and a rifle across his lap. He looked like he had not slept for a day and a year. He spoke quietly into his mic as if unwilling to disturb the people he spoke about.
"Command," he said. "Visual on Joel. Civilians with him. He will not separate."
Static. Then Uncrowned's voice, cool as always, the same temperature as orders, the same shape as compromise.
"Then change his mind."
The man on the roof closed his eyes as if a different set of orders might appear on the inside of his lids. They didn't. He opened his eyes and watched Ayush disappear into the lane.
He whispered, not onto the net but to the air. "Don't make me do this, brother."
He adjusted the scope and settled into the long watch.
Ajay led them left, then right, then through a gap in a wall where sneaking kids had punched a hole long before the dead needed one. The yellow house stood at the end of a narrow lane, paint peeling in graceful curls, a balcony that looked like you could give a speech from it if you were the kind of person who still thought speeches helped. The front door was ajar. The back door had a bar. Two windows in the front. One in the back.
"Ayush," Ananya said softly, and pointed.
On the small step at the front, three stones lay in a row.
Ayush looked at them. He looked at the door. He looked at the people whose lungs now matched his.
He walked up to the stones and, very gently, with the toe of his shoe, nudged them out of their line into a small messy cluster.
He pushed the door open and stepped into the dim. "Welcome home," he said, because sometimes you need to say a thing for the walls to start believing it.
End of Episode 4: The Fire Between Us