They left the godown before the heat made breath into labor. The east door stuck, then let go with a sound like a throat clearing. Ajay went first, head tilted to listen to the grid—a man who could hear current the way others hear birds. The lane was gray and empty in the way that means eyes were watching from inside rooms. A drone's whine wrote a thin line over the roofline, then faded. The sky was looking elsewhere for now.
"Metro," Ajay said, keeping his voice in the slot between whisper and order. "We take the service channel by the flyover. The sweepers will tag the open streets today. Down there, the only thing that sees us is water and rats."
Uncrowned's radio in Ananya's pocket buzzed with a short, patient pulse.
[Uncrowned King]: Joel. Stand by. Asset redeploying. Do not descend.
Ayush didn't pull it out. He nodded at Ajay and picked a pace that said not running, not strolling. Leon walked half a step off his right shoulder. They moved like a line that had been taught not to break if a single link pulled.
The service grate lay where Ananya had said—down a slope of scraped concrete, covered in a veneer of oil and dust that never washed clean even in monsoon. Ajay levered it up with a bar, one side then the other, muscles doing memory.
"It's tight," he warned. "We go slow. We don't announce."
The ladder rungs were rickety but honest. Ayush went first, then Ananya, helping Nikhil's foot find metal on the second step, her hand steady on his ankle without squeezing. The tunnel swallowed them one by one: Shivam with the iron, Suraj with his head full of angles, Riya paling and biting it back, Lucky whispering something that might have been please to the dark, Leon last for the watch.
The tunnel was what all cities keep under their clothes: bone-dark and cold, with a trickle running at the center like a vein. Cables fat as a fist ran along one wall in armadillo armor. The air tasted of rust and old water. Every sound they made came back to them ten times with judgment.
They set their feet carefully. Ananya raised the headlamp just enough to find edges; the beam traced them through the black like a stitch.
"Stop," she said softly, after fifty steps. They stood in a place where the tunnel widened into a junction. The drip of water counted seconds. Dust fell in slow motion through the thin stripe of light from a maintenance hatch high above.
She looked at Ayush. "Tell them," she said. Not a request. A kindness.
He took it like a weight he had rehearsed lifting and never actually had. He faced the others so he didn't have to see the tunnel walls while he said it.
"His name is Rahul. B.S.A. called him Hunter. They called me Joel. We were partners. I don't think there's a word for how close we were in that world, so pick your favorite and it's almost right. He was faster. I was… method. We trained on riots, biohazards, infiltration. The things people want to pretend don't exist until they're under the door.
"He had a girlfriend. Aliya. She was his world. He said it like a joke he didn't want anyone else to laugh at. After a match I shouldn't have won, she… chose to humiliate him in front of the unit. I didn't do anything to make that happen. It happened. He broke. They found him at the range with a magazine emptied into a paper target that had my face stapled to it. He didn't fight when they took him. He said I took everything. They stripped him. Locked him down. I didn't see him again until this."
He looked down the tunnel, because looking any of them in the face for this next part felt like something he shouldn't do.
"I saw Aliya yesterday," he said. "She's alive the way these things are alive. Hair tied back with that same red band. Nothing human in her eyes. If he finds her like that and learns I'm the one who saw… he will burn the city to make me feel it."
Silence crowded in and sat with them. The drip counted ten, twenty, thirty seconds.
Kartik rubbed his jaw and didn't look up at the ceiling because if he did the ceiling might move. "You should've told us," he said, soft and raw. "I don't say that to hurt you. I say it because… we're here. Let us be here."
"I know," Ayush said. He met Kartik's eyes, didn't look away even when the boy had to. "I'm learning."
Ananya's hand slid into his without looking. It wasn't comfort. It was permission.
Leon cleared his throat, voice low. "Hunter and Joel weren't just good. They were the line. The rest of us measured against it. When he fell, some of us thought the line was gone. It wasn't. It moved. It moved into this." He looked at the people around him, a prayer disguised as inventory. "He will come. He will make it intimate. That's his shape now. We hold our line tight."
Suraj didn't offer grace or judgment. He tilted his chin at Ajay. "How far to where the tunnel opens into the side shaft?"
"Ten minutes, if nobody dead thinks we smell like dinner," Ajay said. He listened again, hand on cable. "We go quiet."
They moved, footsteps learning to land on the exact same place the person before had used, stealing noise from the ground. The tunnel made them into silhouettes and then into a single shape.
Aboveground, a man walked through a street full of teeth.
Rahul moved like gravity had to ask him first. He stepped into a ring of infected and they parted around him the way a shoal flows around a rock—touching, sensing, not seeing. One reached a hand and he let it rest on his shoulder for a second, a parody of comfort, then took the wrist and broke it on the turn without looking. He smiled at nothing. It didn't touch his eyes.
He turned a corner into the alley by the old dispensary. On the pavement, a woman in her twenties in a torn red scrunchie sat rocking, mouth open the wrong way. He crouched. He touched the scrunchie and her hair with a kind of reverent precision. The infected woman looked through him and tried to bite a patch of air to his left. He took the scrunchie and left a strand of hair around his fingers like a thread binding him to something he could no longer name.
"Not your fault," he told the air in Aliya's voice, and the empty street didn't contradict him. He stood. He set the hair tie around his own wrist and turned his face toward where he knew Joel would run. He could hear him down there like an old song: the way he would put his foot down, the way he would breathe through a bad air.
He looked up at the sky where the drone had been and smiled at his own reflection in a clouded window. "You thought you could take my world and the world would let you," he said softly. "Watch."
He walked into the metro access and opened a valve that made the tunnel exhale. Somewhere below, water changed its mind about direction. He set a candle on a cinder block and lit it, then set three pebbles beside it. He nudged the middle one out of line.
In the tunnel, the air moved like someone had opened a door just out of sight. Ajay stopped. "He touched the water," he said. "Not enough to flood. Just enough to make our lives wet."
"The man likes metaphors," Suraj said. "We won't give him ours. We keep to the high side."
They waded through an ankle-deep seep, cold pushing through socks and into bones. The headlamp bounced off the trickle and wrote dirty light on the ceiling. They passed a side grate where a string of fairy lights had been wound around rusted bars, battery pack taped to the wall, a softer glow than belonged down here.
"You see that?" Kartik whispered.
"Mercy market," Ajay said. "People set those up to lure you. 'Hot chai, bandages, maps,' for your last gun. Sometimes they mean it. Sometimes they mean you."
"The Fireflies?" Riya asked.
"Sometimes," Ajay said. "Sometimes just men who like orders and like being the one to decide when they stop."
They saw the stall before they saw the people manning it—a wooden crate with a kettle and a stack of plastic cups, a hand-painted sign: TEA—WATER—EXIT—DONATE WHAT YOU HAVE. Behind it, two young faces—twenty, twenty-one—one with a scar down her cheek like she'd dodged a good knife, the other tired and open in the way men make themselves when they want to be approached.
"Friends," the open one said, soft, as if voice could lower spikes. "It's okay."
Ananya didn't pick up the cup he offered. She smiled with her eyes and let the smile not reach her mouth. "We're good," she said. "Thanks."
"We can show you a way," the scarred woman said, like a song. "No sweepers. No gates. Only families today."
Suraj shifted his weight, not towards violence, towards leaving. Ajay's head ticked the smallest no.
Ayush stayed. "No charge?" he asked, polite.
The man held the cup out, palm up, no pressure. "We ask only what you can give. Everyone gives something. If not now, later."
Lucky looked at the kettle like it could stop the tightness in his throat. Ananya touched his wrist and he stepped back like he'd remembered he had feet.
Ayush still held the man's eyes. "What happens to the ones who can't?" he asked.
The woman's eyes flicked to the boy and then back to Ayush. "We feed them," she said, almost convincing. "We call a number that sends a van."
Leon's face changed very slightly. He didn't move. "What number?" he asked softly.
The man's fingers twitched—the microhesitation of someone whose lie had to pick which truth to imitate. He rattled off ten digits too fast.
Leon's jaw tightened. "That number is dead," he said. "It's been dead for three months."
The woman didn't blink. She smiled tighter. "We have a new one," she said. "We just got it."
Ananya looked past them at the crate and the kettle and the little shelf someone had bolted to the wall. On it sat an emergency beacon the size of a fist, a green LED pulsing slow. She made a small sound that could have been anything and took one more half-step back.
"We should go," she said simply.
The man nodded as if he understood and stood out of the way, bowing one shoulder, the perfect gesture for politeness that hides a knife.
Ayush wanted to believe them. He'd spent a life wanting to. He didn't. He put his palm up the way he'd learned in a different life and said nothing. He turned away. The others did too.
"Hey," the woman said to Lucky's back, voice warm the way a blanket is before someone puts it over your face. "If you change your mind—just two taps. Lights off."
Lucky didn't look. "We won't," he said, and sounded like he was talking to himself from a day ago.
They slipped past, wading through the cold water that had decided to be here when it shouldn't. Ten meters down, Ananya said, "Stop," and they did, and she crouched and unclipped a braided wire at the edge of the channel and lifted it, and three more wires came with it like fishing line. "Tripwire," she said. "Not just for noise."
Ajay made a low sound, admiration pinned under anger. "These kids do their homework," he said. He flicked the wire aside and the current took it, a small snake swimming itself into nothing.
They kept moving. The tunnel turned left and then opened into a service bay—brick walls sweating water into dark patches, a metal ladder up to a platform with a rusted cart. The air moved differently here. It pretended to be fresh.
Ananya put her hands on the wall and felt for breath like the building might have lungs. Ayush did the same, then lifted his head and listened to a sound under the sound of everything else, a persistent low hum.
"Power," Ajay said. He touched the cable casing like a pulse. "Substation ahead. Ten minutes."
"Too much light," Suraj said, as if brightness were another species of predator.
They rested on the platform long enough to apportion biscuits to mouths and not to bags. The biscuit was stale. It tasted like food.
Nikhil leaned into Ananya and whispered, "What does he want? Rahul?" The name slid out of him less afraid than Ayush had expected.
"To make us make his choices," Ananya said, not gruff, not kind. "To write our names into his story. We'll write our own."
He nodded like that was a subject he could pass.
They dropped back down. The trickle of water became a hungry seam up to their shins. It shoved little papers and a plastic sandal and a rat past their knees like the tunnel was showing off its collection. They held to the high side of the channel where the slick concrete gave grudging friction.
"Lights," Ajay said.
Ahead, beyond a bend, a gold wash. Not fairy. Not battery. Real sodium light—the round, waxy color of street lamps and old stations. A platform. Heads came into view, silhouettes against glow. Ten? Twenty? Hard to count in the shimmering heat.
"Outpost," Leon murmured. "Could be CGS. Could be Fireflies. Could be the we-were-CGS-until-we-couldn't."
"Or the rest of the city that decided to try working indoors," Suraj said.
They edged around the bend in a line that wouldn't look like a line from above. The platform stretched into an old metro station—tile cracked, map board smeared with graffiti that now read more like a prayer than directions. A small group huddled under the clock, cups in hands, a few battered rifles cradled not with soldier care, with the carefulness of people who know their gun is the difference between being a person and being a task.
A man in a green jacket stepped forward, palm up—curiously familiar. "We're trying to keep the lights on," he said, simple. "You're welcome to sit. Two minutes without moving can add a year to your life."
Ananya's eyes darted over him, over the platform, the corners, the wires. Off to the left, past a row of vending machines that had been gutted on day one, she saw a line painted on the tile: an arrow in yellow paint, fresh, with a word stenciled under it in careful block letters: EDEN.
She felt Ajay's intake of breath even before she looked at him. His face had shut down a fraction, not fear, not surprise—a closing door.
"What does Eden mean?" she asked the man in the green jacket, tone mild.
"A joke," he said. "It keeps people laughing for five minutes when they arrive."
Ananya didn't laugh. "You're Fireflies," she said softly. Not a question.
His jaw ticked. He smiled anyway. "If we were, we would ask for everything you have and call that a revolution. We don't. Sit. Your kid looks like he needs five minutes with a biscuit he isn't ashamed of."
Nikhil's fingers tightened in her scarf. She squeezed back and did not reach for him the way you do when you want to lift a child, because five men and two women watched her hands.
Ayush scanned the ceiling. The paint arrow pointed at a maintenance door with a chain. Through the small wired-glass window set into it, he saw a table and three coolers stacked. One was open. Inside, vials sat in white foam. The label was a letter: E.
He thought of the crate on the bridge. He thought of the way men who love named projects always use one syllable.
Leon saw the coolers too. He kept his eyes on the man. "We won't sit," he said. "No offense."
"None taken," the man said. He didn't move. He didn't call anyone. That made Ayush more nervous than shouting would have.
The platform lights flickered and steadied. From the tunnel behind them came the small, ugly giggle of a variant who had learned it. The sound crawled into the station and made the sitting people stand.
"Your five minutes are up," the man in green said softly. "Go."
They went, because you can respect a kindness you don't trust.
They took the maintenance corridor opposite the EDEN arrow and slid into an access passage where the wall sweated and the floor gave underfoot like the world had not finished setting.
Ananya stopped them at a bent piece of railing. "Look," she said. On the rail, pressed into grime, three clean circles. Pebbles. Someone had set them there and lifted them, leaving absence.
Ayush felt something deep in him go still. He turned his head and faced the darkness ahead. "He's in front of us."
As if cued by his voice, a figure stepped out of the dark into the tunnel twenty meters ahead. No drama. No flourish. Just a man in a shirt too clean for this world, sleeves rolled to the elbow, hair tied back.
Rahul raised a hand, palm out—the freeway sign for stop a child obeys. He looked past Ayush and counted the faces. He landed on Lucky and smiled in a way that was almost friendly. "You pinged the sky," he said conversationally. "Brave. Stupid. Honest."
Lucky stopped breathing for a second. Ananya's fingers laced with his. He started again.
Rahul's eyes returned to Ayush. "You keep passing my classes," he said. "I should be proud."
Ayush didn't move. "You think you wrote them," he said. "They're just rooms you happened to be standing in."
Rahul tilted his head. "Do you talk like that to the boy who killed your friend?" he asked. "Does he like the sound of your forgiveness?"
Leon didn't flinch, though his jaw tried. Ayush kept the front sight of the Glock out of line with anything that wasn't a floor.
"This corridor floods," Rahul said, almost kindly. "There's a valve two turns ahead. It opens from here." He put his hand on a red wheel and spun it a whisper. The water around their ankles hiccuped like someone had stepped on a sleeping lung. "Bring Joel," he said, soft, like a father making a suggestion his child could disobey without consequences, "or you all learn to swim in the dark."
"Or," Ananya said, voice steady, eyes on the wheel, "we wait for you to get bored of hearing yourself and walk away. And then we tip the cart in the door and jam the valve with a bolt and go up, not forward."
He looked at her for a second. Then he laughed—not big, not cruel. Soft. Delighted. The sound was worse than cruelty because it remembered the girl he had once approved of when she had built a trap with string and tape two summers ago while the boys tried to lift a car.
"Good," he said. He lifted his hand from the valve. The water sucked once, then steadied. "Not yet," he said, and smiled at Ayush. "Not yet."
He put two fingers to his temple and touched them off in a gesture he and Ayush had used on ranges when they couldn't hear each other over gunfire and still had to say: see you there.
He stepped backward into the dark. A foot sounded where there was no floor and then there wasn't any sound at all.
They held themselves very still for a long beat. The trick of survival is to not move when your body wants to chase. The second trick is to not stay when it tells you to stop. They started moving again together.
They reached the valve he had touched and jammed it with a wedge of rebar and the bolt from a rusted bracket and tightened a wire around it until Ananya said, "Now I believe it," and Suraj nodded.
They climbed up a maintenance ladder and into a service chamber with a low ceiling and a door that led to the back of a shuttered printing press. The room smelled like paper dust and money that had never been made. They let breath loosen their shoulders and then tightened it again because quiet never meant safe twice in a row.
The printing room had space. It had a long strip of windows high on one wall where light came in like a cold favor. It had a door. On the wall, in spray paint, someone had written PHASE TWO with a smiley face turned sideways. A joke for no one.
Shivam chuckled once, humorless. "They think branding helps."
Ananya reached up and pushed one of the strip windows with the heel of her hand. It stuck. She leaned her weight. It opened three inches and didn't open a fourth. "If we need to bleed air, we can," she said.
"Bleeding air is a hobby now?" Kartik said, almost laughing for real this time.
"Put it on the list," Riya said. She pushed hair out of her eyes and smiled at him without deciding to.
Ayush walked the room, every corner, every crack. He ran a hand along the press. It was cold. He laid his palm on the floor and felt for movement. The concrete hummed a little under his skin. The grid. The heart. He was about to stand when the ceiling above him made a sound like silk tearing.
"Move," he said, not shouting because shouting wastes time. They moved. A section of acoustic tile caved and a shape dropped through the hole like a bad idea falling. It landed four-limbed, flexed, turned its head too far toward the light.
Phase two. The joints bent wrong. The mouth smiled without lips. Its eyes reflected the strip window light like coins dropped in a well.
It moved and so did they. Shivam hit it first, iron low, taking its shin like a carpenter who knows which beam bears weight. It buckled and came forward, silent, hungry. Ananya threw a rag over its face and the world went white in its eyes; it shrugged the rag off like a legend and kept coming. Suraj stabbed for the base of the skull and it twisted and he caught shoulder instead—blood, but not the right kind of victory. Leon fired once, the sound chewing the room, and it went through the mouth and out, and the body turned and came, because heads only mind holes in them if you make them in the correct places.
Ayush stepped in, not back. He waited the half second that would feel like arrogance later and used the thing's hunger weight against its balance, let it commit, turned the knife a fraction, and slid it under the occipital ridge the way Ajay had told him an hour ago. It convulsed. Then it quieted like somebody had finally given it permission to sleep.
They panted in the smaller silence that followed.
"More," Ajay said, listening to the ceiling like the grid. Not a guess. A report.
Three more tiles rustled. Three more bodies landed wrong and beautiful in their own way. The smiley face on the wall felt like mockery now.
"Fire line," Ananya said, sharp. "Press ink, rag, spark."
Lucky didn't wait to be told twice. He flipped open a metal cabinet on the press and found solvent. It might as well have been a plan. He sloshed it across the floor in a crooked line between the door and the windows. Ananya knelt, struck metal on concrete, caught cloth, coaxed flame. The line took, orange racing along the black like a fuse looking for an argument.
"Back," Ayush said. They put their backs against the press and let the heat write a problem for their problems. The variants paced the far side of flame, confused by light and angry in a way that made human hair try to stand.
One jumped. It landed in fire and didn't stop because pain is a language they didn't speak anymore. It came through lit and fast and the room filled with the smell you will never stop remembering once you've been in war long enough. Shivam put the iron into its skull with a grunt that might have been prayer. Suraj put his knife in the second's hamstring and the second went down and clawed for the warmest thing. Leon finished that one clean. Ajay stood to the side and watched the ceiling because he knows what first waves look like. He was right. A fourth dropped. Ayush met it. He had found the angle and he kept it.
The fire browned the air and licked oxygen out of the room. Ananya climbed the table and shoved the window open with both hands as if shoving a man she hated. It moved another inch. Air stumbled in. The room breathed.
The variants went still. The tile above them swelled and stopped. The ceiling decided to stay roof.
They stood under the strip window in the long second after your heart realizes it isn't going to leave your body. Riya laughed once, the kind laughter makes when it would prefer to cry. Sanaa leaned on the press and closed her eyes and opened them and didn't fall.
Nikhil covered his ears two beats too late. Ananya took his hands and uncovered them. "It's done," she said. "Listen. It's done." The listening calmed him quicker than any lie.
They moved the dead into a corner because leaving them in the middle had a way of turning your head into a metronome of loss. Leon reloaded with motions that he could do without looking. Ayush wiped the knife on a piece of ink-stained rag because the motions of cleaning a tool have been making men feel like men since fire learned to stay.
Uncrowned's voice came back into the room like a perfume somebody didn't invite. The radio on the floor did its light dance. Ananya stared at it like she was thinking about stepping on it. She didn't.
[Uncrowned King]: Joel. Confirmation. Military column inbound to Sector Delta for collection. Hold for coordinates. Acknowledge receiving.
Ayush picked up the radio and set it on the press like an offering in a temple he didn't believe in. He pressed transmit with his thumb.
"Negative," he said, calm enough to scare himself.
Silence. Then: "Repeat."
"Negative," he said. "We move together."
He set the radio down and looked up at the strip window and the sky beyond it and wondered if the city had ever been a thing that did not require choices like this. He couldn't remember.
Suraj rolled his shoulders. "We can hold here an hour," he said. "Then we go to the textile godown's cousin on the river. Ajay?"
Ajay nodded. "I'll take you. It has a wall you can make a door."
Ananya refilled the water cup from their bottle and passed it to Nikhil. He took two swallows and handed it to Sanaa without being told. She drank and smiled at him, and it put a light in his face that lasted long enough to do good work.
Kartik slid down the press and sat. He lifted his shirt and looked at the ragged bruise on his ribs where fire heat and a glancing elbow had told him to pay attention. "We keep not dying," he said, for the third time this week.
"We keep choosing," Ananya said, for the second.
Ayush leaned his head back against cold steel and closed his eyes for a count of five. He saw Rahul's face like you always do when you close your eyes on a person you can't keep out. He opened them again when he said he would.
"Tomorrow," Ananya said.
"Tomorrow," he said.
On a roof three blocks away, Rahul lay on his back and held Aliya's red hair tie over his face like a charm. He moved it back and forth until it blurred against the sky. He said something the city couldn't hear. It didn't matter. He could hear it.
He sat up and looked toward the river, toward the textile godown that had a cousin and a wall that liked to pretend it would hold.
He smiled without teeth. He stood. He stepped off the parapet and onto the ladder without looking down.
End of Episode 8: A God Among the Dead