The building held its breath around them. Morning light crept across the raw concrete in a slow sheet, catching on rebar and the little drifts of plaster that looked like old snow. Somewhere far off, Delhi made the morning noises it still could: a pressure cooker whistle, a dog barking at nothing, a scooter that refused to die.
Ananya drew the headscarf tighter at her nape and took inventory out loud, the way she'd learned calmed people more than silence. "Two bottles left. Five biscuits. One med pouch, light. Three spare rags. Solvent. Tape. One iron. One Glock. Two knives." She looked up. "Plus you."
Ayush almost smiled. "I'm consumable."
"You're reusable," she said, and the word sounded like a plan.
Shivam flexed his knees and grunted. "I can take the first stair watch." He palmed the iron like it belonged to him now. Kartik sat beside him with his chisel laid across his thighs the way you lay a violin before you can play again. Lucky hummed under his breath and counted something only he could see—steps, breaths, exits.
Suraj leaned into a window frame and watched the lane with the at-rest tension of a sprung trap. Leon sat on an upturned slab and turned Drake's dog tags over in his fingers as if feeling for more messages between the metal.
Ajay crouched by the stairwell, knuckles resting on his knees, eyes on the dark like he'd hired it. He wore his small bag slung crosswise, the way men do who never let their backs be naked to a corridor.
"You know these tunnels because…?" Ayush asked, not accusing, just filling the space.
Ajay's mouth ticked sideways. "I wired them," he said. "Before any of this. Private contractor on a public contract. Metro maintenance, then municipal. When the city wants to carry its nerves where people can't see, it calls men like me with a coil of cable and a badge that gets ignored until the water shuts off." He looked toward the ceiling like he could see through it to where the grid hummed. "After the first outbreak, they hired us night and weekend. After the second, only nights. After the third, they stopped paying." His shoulders lifted, dropped. "Muscle remembers better than memory."
"Did you have a family?" Riya asked, gentle.
"I had work," Ajay said easily, which was not an answer and maybe all of one.
A distant sound—metal skittering on cement—made heads turn. Not the whine of the larger drone, not the breathing thud of the rotors. Just a small noise like somebody knocked a tray three floors down.
Ananya set the headlamp on low and moved to the edge. "Hold," Ayush said, and she stilled like she'd been plugged into him. He leaned out instead and scanned the stairwell—dark, empty, quiet in the wrong places. He pulled back. "We move in ten," he said. "We don't let the sky learn our shape from one window."
Ananya nodded. "Then we leave this for the sky." She taped a hand mirror to a broken chair and set it in the window at an angle that would catch heat from a warmed rag and throw it into the room they weren't in.
"You could charge rent to the air," Suraj said, not unkind.
She shrugged. "It doesn't pay."
A child cried.
Not the looped, clean cry of a phone speaker. This had breath and break in it. It came from the block diagonally opposite—a low, stacked tenement whose outside stairs had buckled like knees under a weight they hadn't agreed to carry.
"Don't," Suraj said immediately.
Ananya didn't look at him. She looked at Ayush. He read the question in her face and didn't answer for two breaths because good answers hate haste.
"Count," he said at last. "How many? Where? What's between?"
They edged to the window that gave them the angle. The tenement's front had peeled off, exposing rooms like dollhouse cross-sections. On the second floor, a woman stood braced in a doorway with a toddler on her hip and a girl of maybe fourteen behind her. A man lay with his leg pinned under a chunk of concrete, his face gray, hands shaking with that useless body language that says: move, move, move.
Ananya did the math. "Front stairs are broken. Back stairs are there, but the balcony leading to them is cracked." She pointed. "If we cross at the builders' plank there—" an old length of wood bridging an alley like a dare "—we can reach the back landing. Shivam can take the weight. Leon covers with the rifle. We bring the women and child first. Then we lever the slab if we can. If not…"
"If not, we choose," Suraj said, saving her from the sentence.
Ajay breathed out. "You have fifteen minutes," he said. "Second line swept south. They'll sweep back. And your watcher"—he didn't need to point—"likes to see what you do with time."
Ayush didn't waste any more of it. "Ananya, build me two minutes of sound in the alley under us. Tins and nails. Shivam, iron and a spare board. Leon, cover. Kartik, you're on the plank with me. Riya and Sanaa, receive and move them to the stair. Lucky—" Ayush hesitated because the boy's eyes went bright, desperate to be useful—"on the door. If anything tries to come through other than us, you scream. You don't try to be a door."
Lucky nodded too hard. "I can be loud."
Ananya had the cans hung and a line strung to her wrist inside two minutes. When she pulled, the alley below clanged like a dropped kitchen. A figure moved in the shadow below, turned toward the sound, decided it had a new life goal, and went that way. She counted to five and yanked again, giving the street a cheap new religion.
They crossed. Shivam went first with the iron on his shoulder like a flag. The plank flexed with his weight; the rebar under it groaned. He laid the iron across the weakest span and nodded. "A bridge masquerading as courage." He reached back. "Come."
Kartik went onto the plank with knees bent, weight low. He stepped where Shivam pointed. He didn't look down. Ayush followed, body memorizing the correct angles. The plank said something in the language of wood. He moved faster.
At the balcony, the woman pressed the toddler into Kartik's arms before he finished saying his name. Kartik made a sound he hadn't made since he was ten and caught his cousin toppling off a bed. He tucked the child into his chest and turned, careful. "You're okay," he said into her hair. It wasn't true. It worked.
Ananya's tins sang again and an answering chorus rose from two streets away. Leon's rifle made no noise; it simply made decisions. He put a round into the knee of the first one brave enough to climb on all fours up the builders' ladder and its body took three behind it down like a rope in a game.
Ayush and Shivam reached the pinned man together. The man's eyes rolled white when he tried to lift his head. "Leave me," he panted. "Don't take my pain for nothing. Take them." He jerked his chin at the girl. "Pooja—go."
"We can try," Ayush said, because he didn't want the man to die thinking nobody had.
He slid his fingers under the slab and tested its weight. It sat sickeningly, the way things do that will not negotiate. He looked at the rebar: two bars crossing under the concrete like a conspiracy. "Lever," he said.
Shivam shoved the iron through a crack and set his shoulder. The slab moved a thumb's width. The man groaned. The building shook a disapproving inch.
"Again," Shivam said, and they did.
At the window, the girl—Pooja—watched him with a face like a door she couldn't control. "Baba," she said, a prayer and a person in one.
Ananya pulled the tins. The sound went wrong. The rope went slack halfway through a yank. She didn't think. She picked up the mirror rig with her free hand and tilted it into the alley, threw light into a shadow where a body had been thinking. It blinked and moved toward the brightness, not the stair, proving the city's newest rule: hunger takes the shortest road.
The slab lifted enough for the pinned leg to be dragged, half-slide. Pooja grabbed her father under the shoulders and whispered something in his ear that made him stop struggling. Ayush pulled. Shivam shoved. The slab slipped back with a crack that would have taken fingers if they'd been slower.
The man's thigh was purple where it shouldn't be. The skin under the purple had the look of something that would swell into screaming. Ayush didn't say we can't go. He said, "We'll get you to the balcony. Water. Then we move the others." He opened the med pouch and hated its smallness.
Ananya sent Kartik back across the plank with the toddler and the girl in one file, pressed together like schoolchildren at recess. Riya met them with open arms and curses the city couldn't hear. Sanaa turned toward the stairway with a look that was all purpose and no poetry.
Ayush and Shivam got the man to the door. He put a hand out and gripped the frame hard. "You've done enough," he said. He conjured a bottle of water like magicians do when they know where they hid it last and pressed it into Ayush's hand. "For them. I wasn't going to make it yesterday. Today is a kindness. Don't waste it."
Ayush could have argued. He didn't. He put the bottle back into the man's hand and closed his fingers around it. "For you," he said. He took the girl's face in his palm and looked into her eyes—not to imprint trauma, to anchor her to this moment instead of whatever her brain wanted to do with it later. "You go," he told her. "You keep going."
She nodded once, like a soldier learning how to be one mid-charge. "I will," she said, and swallowed, and turned, and went.
Shivam shouldered the iron again and stepped back onto the plank. The plank's language changed mid-step. He froze. "Don't," Ayush said. Shivam waited, breathed, moved faster than fear, and made it.
Ayush crossed last, not because righteousness, but because weight distribution and math. The city held him between fingers and let him by. He set foot on their side and stood very still, hands on the gratitude he didn't have time to feel all the way.
They ran the women across the hall and down the stairwell. The cry of the toddler became a hiccup became a breath against Kartik's shirt. Ayush saw the throat jerk and counted—an old habit returning to prove he still could.
On the third floor landing, Shivam stopped dead. A man stood in the angle where the stairs turned. Thin as a metronome. Head tilted. A kitchen knife at his hip. A smile on his face that had no intention in it, which was the part that scared you.
"Rahul," Shivam breathed.
Rahul's eyes slid along faces and settled on Ayush's shoulder behind the group, as if sight alone were weight. He looked back at Shivam and let warmth into his smile in a way that made it worse. "You always breathe too loud when you're about to do something brave," he said, almost fond.
Shivam lifted the iron. Rahul cocked his head like he was listening for a distant song. "Not now," he said. "Tell your leader—" he said the word leader with a curl that made it both compliment and insult—"I'm not hiding anymore."
He stepped back into the shadow and vanished the way a trick vanishes when your brain finally remembers how it's done. They didn't give chase. They didn't need to. The message had already been delivered to the only face it needed to.
At the base of the stair, the rescued family crossed into the lane and became smaller and then smaller again in the tunnel of buildings and heat. Pooja looked back once. Ananya raised a hand she kept below the window line. They didn't watch them out of sight. Watching is a way to get your angle wrong.
Back in their room, Lucky hovered by the doorway with an expression like he'd put his hand on an electric fence and was waiting to see if anyone noticed. The radio in Ananya's pocket flashed a green LED and then stopped, flashed again, then stopped, the way devices do when a handshake has been attempted and not quite made.
Ananya's eyes narrowed. She slipped the radio out and turned it in her palm so the light wouldn't catch. She looked at Lucky. He looked at the floor and then straight into her face with the terrible honesty of someone who did a thing out of fear and hated fear for making them do it.
"I just… pinged," he whispered. "Only once. Drake's channel list had a subchannel. I thought—" His voice broke. "I thought if he walked through that door again with a team behind him, we wouldn't have to—" His hand made a shape that tried to be door and gun and knife and failed. "I didn't want to lose more people."
Ananya didn't raise her voice. "You can look at me," she said.
He did, terrified and grateful to be allowed to.
"We don't do that without saying it out loud," she said. "Not because we don't love help. Because we choose it together. If someone comes, it's not a friend, Lucky. It's a man with orders and an account to balance." She turned the radio so he could see the LED. "This tells every man with a spectrum scanner exactly where to point curiosity."
"I'm sorry," Lucky whispered. He swallowed like he'd swallowed sand. "I'm so—"
"Don't apologize to me," she said. "Apologize by doing the next right thing. Help me lie to them."
She snapped the back off the radio and popped the antenna feed loose with a nail. "We can still broadcast," she said, "we just won't be the ones beaming. We'll hang this on the mirror rig and let the sky fall in love with a chair for ten minutes while we go left."
Lucky blinked hard. "Okay," he said. He did exactly as she told him. You could feel the apology in his fingers.
Ayush watched Ananya work and felt something in his chest that wasn't relief or desire or command stiffen into place. It was simpler. Pride.
Leon slid down onto the slab beside him and scrubbed a hand over his face. "We need to talk about Rahul," he said. He spoke low, like a confession to a priest who had always been his brother.
Ananya looked between them. "Now?" she asked.
"Now," Ayush said. He turned so his back was to the room and his eyes could do the work.
"He's immune," he said. "The infected don't see him. He can stand among them and they won't touch him. He's stronger. Faster. He heals. He doesn't get tired yet. He thinks this makes him chosen. Or cursed. Either way, he's building a math around it."
"How?" Kartik asked, too loud and then quiet. "How is that… possible?"
Ayush shook his head once. "I don't know. He doesn't know. But he believes in it like it's a god with his face."
Leon's jaw flexed. "And he's watching," he said. "He's counting. He sets tests and you take them. The baby phone. The stones. The flare. The roof. He's writing a curriculum and you're his only student who matters."
Ananya drew the headscarf tighter, thinking. "Then we fail a test on purpose," she said. "Break his rhythm. Make him come down into the room where he can be wrong."
Ajay's mouth did that half smile again. "Not a student," he said. "A teacher's nightmare."
Ayush nodded slowly. "We'll pick our ground. Later." He looked at Leon. "For now—say the quiet part. Out loud. For them."
Leon swallowed. The words felt like bones he had to set. "Rahul and Ayush were partners," he said, and the room shifted under the sentence in that quiet way that means people had guessed and were waiting for permission to admit it. "B.S.A. called them Joel and Hunter. They were the best. Then something broke. He thinks Ayush took everything. Now he wants balance. Not death. Balance. He'll make Joel watch the scale move until it tips."
Silence found its shape. It sat in the room and everyone made a little space for it.
"So we don't let him put anything on the plate," Riya said softly, and there was steel under her voice. "We keep our people."
"That includes you," Ananya said to Lucky.
He nodded, tears stupid and welcome in his eyes. "Okay."
Ajay stood at the window and rolled his shoulders. "They're done sweeping this grid for now," he said. "That means they'll bomb the edges tonight to see who moves." He looked at the rail yard smoke and the broken skyline. "You'll need a place that looks like nothing to men who love orders."
"Suggestions?" Suraj asked.
Ajay tapped a finger on the sill. "There's a godown on the edge of the textile district," he said. "Half collapsed. Ratty enough to be ignored. You can hold it long enough to make the next decision. One door. One wall you can breach if you write your own exit."
Ananya tilted her head. "What's the price for this service?"
Ajay smiled properly for the first time. It made him look like a person who had once told jokes for free. "You let me keep telling you things," he said. "Talking this much will get me killed one day. Until then, I'd like to practice on men who listen."
Ayush clapped him on the shoulder. "We listen."
They ate the last of the biscuits and swigged rust out of a chipped mug. Ananya wound the radio antenna around a strip of foil and taped it to the mirror rig. She set a warm rag over the chair's back, watched the heat shimmer in the glass, and exhaled. "We go on that," she said. "Ten-minute clock."
They moved like a unit. Not a machine—machines break when one piece fails. More like a body that has learned how to compensate for a limp. They hit the stairwell and flowed down it, Shivam's iron a metronome, Kartik's breath steady, Lucky's face set in an apology he was going to work off step by step.
They slipped into the lane and cut left. Above them, the drone hovered over the window and hummed at the heat it had been promised. The red dot flicked back and forth across a chair like a lazy lover. They crossed a gap and were already a lifetime away.
From the roof across the lane, Rahul watched them go. He turned the red hair tie around his wrist once and set it back in place like a ritual. He arranged three stones on the parapet again, neat. He nudged one out of line with his thumb.
"Almost," he said, to the city, to the people he had chosen to make into a story, to the boy he had once been. Then he turned away from the parapet and went down into the stairwell, whistling a tune he'd heard when he was ten. He let the sound bounce off the walls and into the apartment doors of a building that had stopped believing in music.
Uncrowned's message pulsed through the city in other ways. On a few still-lit screens, a text crawled: REPORT PARAMILITARY ACTIVITY—CREDITS FOR VERIFIED SIGHTINGS. A number blinked. People looked at it and then at their doors and then at the floor.
At the godown, the front office door hung by a single hinge. The room beyond had a desk with a calendar from last year and a cup with three pens that had died before the city did. The warehouse itself yawned—a long rectangle with a skylight half broken and a smell of cloth and damp.
Ajay pointed. "There," he said. "Side wall. You can punch through if you have to. Neighboring lot is lower by a meter. Your ankles will hate you. Your neck will love you."
Ananya moved through the space like a woman memorizing a theater. "Cans," she said. "Wire. Mirrors. Two rags. We'll feed them the wrong story again."
Kartik glanced at Ayush, a half-panic laugh in his voice. "We keep not dying."
"We keep choosing," Ayush said. He looked at the faces he'd chosen, the ones who'd chosen him back. "That's different."
They set the cans. They rigged the mirror. They marked their exits in chalk where only they would know what the marks meant. Then they sat on the concrete with their backs against the cold and their shoulders against each other and watched the light walk across the floor. It had done that before people. It would do it after.
"Tomorrow," Ananya said.
"Tomorrow," Ayush agreed.
Outside, the stones on the yellow house step sat in a neat line. A fourth stone lay a few inches away, alone. If you stood at the edge of the lane and looked at them long enough, your brain would make the right number anyway. It always does that with patterns it wants.
The city turned its face toward evening. The godown settled. Somewhere close, someone muttered a prayer into noodles. On a rooftop a kilometer away, a man lay on his back and watched the smoke write letters for nobody. He smiled without his teeth and closed his eyes and let himself sleep, because the day had given him what he wanted: almost.
End of Episode 7: The One Who Watches