The base tried to be gentle that night.
Soup that pretended to be more than water. Bread that remembered ovens. The mess hall's hum—low talk, metal against tin, the wet slap of a mop. Someone had strung a line of blue flags out by the gate and forgotten to take them down before dark. They moved a little in a wind that didn't know what to do with itself.
Ayush sat with his back to a wall by the doorway so his eyes could be two places at once. Ananya had Nikhil between her knees, hair braided tight and tied with string. Riya sorted the clinic corner's kit into two piles: hurts you could walk with, hurts you couldn't. Leon took a mouthful and watched the motor pool through a crack in the plastic sheeting. Shivam and Kartik argued about the right way to wedge a shelf that didn't want to stay level. Lucky rewired a lantern with foil for the third time, then put it down and left it alone because you have to learn when to stop.
Ajay had his ear to concrete, again. The habit had turned into a tic. He tapped twice, then once. The crown knock came back right—two, pause, three. Under it, a faint hiss like someone trying to hide a kettle on a low fire.
"Solvent," he said, nose wrinkling. "Someone's moving paint. Not at the ghat. Off-grid. The hum's wrong, like a voice a little too careful. Blue-flag call's coming early."
Ananya stiffened. "You sure?"
Ajay listened again. The corridor's power was a thin river under his fingers. "Not our grammar," he said. "It's… copied."
A speaker above the hall tested itself with a cough and then the familiar sentence fell out of it with the wrong cadence. "All civilians… east sector… sanctuary ahead… report… blue flags…"
Too clean. Too even. Not Raj's tired man with papers in his throat. The wrong men had borrowed the mouth.
Ayush stood. He didn't raise his voice. "We don't stampede for a door we haven't built," he said to the room. "Eat now if you need it. Fill bottles. Keep your hands free."
The floor under the logistics bay breathed the wrong way. A cutter kissed rebar somewhere low. The sound came up through stone like a memory you didn't want back.
"Under," Ajay said, hand flat to the wall.
The floodlights snapped from amber to white. The gate loudhailer tried for calm and landed on order. "Hands! Hands!" Flares coughed up and hung red. A drone stitched the sky with a lazy figure eight, dot hunting for heat that didn't know it was being hunted.
Colonel Raj strode past the mess door like a man who had been built wrong for safety and hadn't stopped trying anyway. "East flank!" he barked. "All rifles! Hold the gate!" He caught Ayush's eye for a half-second—enough to say we're out of time and also I saw you.
"Doctrines are for bad nights," Ayush told him.
"Every night's one of those," Raj said without stopping.
The first cut circle lifted in the logistics bay. A gray glove pushed the disk through and the air made a polite noise. Then the mouth opened and men in Eden-color pulled themselves up like they'd built the place. A tagger rolled a puck and it hummed to itself. A baton kissed the floor and remembered it was meant for bone.
"Sockets," Ajay said. Lucky flicked the switch. Somewhere under the slab, a small transformer they had saved a dozen times found it in itself to love them back. The tagger's deck hiccuped. The puck briefly forgot it was important.
Leon used the half-breath to take a rib and an elbow. Shivam stepped into the choke by the hallway and became a shape the base had needed all week without knowing exactly who it wanted to be. Kartik worked the edge an inch behind him with the chisel low and ugly and exactly right.
Ananya didn't wait for the room to ask for shepherds. "Small steps," she said to people she'd never seen. "Hand here. Eyes there. Don't stand in light." The boys who had learned to be nets heard her in their bones and threw arcs instead of lines.
Outside, the blue flags snapped and a deep engine note walked down the road. Not CGS. Too smooth. Too confident. The wrong men had brought the wrong trucks to the right door.
"Gate!" Raj's voice, then the flat clap of rifles doing small jobs badly. A heavy silhouette stepped through the smoke where the wall had once been mended with everything but concrete. Tall. Coat too thick for Delhi. Beard. The kind of man who likes making a room remember him with the wrong part of its brain. The Fireflies' enforcer that men who needed legends had nicknamed the Russian as if assigning him to a place made him easier to know.
Leon switched lanes without thinking, glass finding meat. The Russian walked through a shot like it was a gnat and lifted a knife that wasn't street metal. He slid it through a man's stance with the bored precision of someone who had learned to love repetition. He moved on.
"Not him," Ananya said, catching Leon's wrist from behind the sheet's crack. "Hold the mouth."
He did. It took everything he had to do, and he did it anyway.
They could hold below or at the gate. Not both. That was the math.
Raj came back through the hall with his heel slick and didn't look at the blood he brought with him. "The drain," he said. "We use it or we drown at the wall."
Ayush swallowed the taste of ash that came up every time doctrine and cost shared a sentence. "If we blow it," he said, "we turn every child door east into a wall."
Raj looked at the people pressed into corners. He didn't look at the history of monsoons and exfil routes and blind drops. "Then we live long enough to regret it," he said. "Or we don't."
Ajay already had the jack loaded under the slab hinge. He looked like a man who had taken a mallet out of a boy's hand and didn't want to use it either. "Fuse," he said, and Suraj's palm was suddenly there with the stub of metal and whatever it cost to use it.
"It holds three seconds," Suraj said. "Maybe four. Don't ask for more."
"Do we pull the room?" Ananya asked. Not if. Two breaths, and then she was already moving bodies into the channel she'd never wanted to use like this. "Carry," she said, to a line of strangers who weren't. "Not count."
Riya put two hands on a shoulder and pushed a man toward air who was trying to walk backwards toward a crate. He cursed. She didn't. She counted anyone else instead.
"On my mark," Ajay said, voice small in the wrong way. "Three. Two. Now."
The fuse spat. The jack sang. The slab groaned, slid, then dropped into its bed like a man deciding to sleep on a couch because there isn't a better room to sulk in. The cutter's hum climbed, then died. Water rushed somewhere low and old and mean. The river door collapsed into itself, taking the easy line for air with it.
The pressure in the hall changed the way we do when we decide to stop pretending we can meet obligations and go to bed. The wrong men in gray below changed their minds about which direction was up.
They ran past the choice and into the work.
The Russian took a step into view. Suraj hit him with a forklift at ribs height like you solve problems if you have never been taught the elegant ways to fix anything. The big man grinned, a puzzled expression that tried to be pride. Then he fell over like gravity had remembered him.
"Move," Suraj said, voice raw, this time not pretending to be anything but order.
They pulled. Into the hall. Down the corridor. Out toward the motor pool where blind luck and a week's worth of moving junk to all the wrong places had created a gap exactly wide enough for a stolen municipal runabout and a habit to squeeze through.
"Trucks," Vikram said, appearing like a bad idea that had been improved by effort. He tasted the old sentence "outsiders not allowed" and spat it out with blood. "Docks. Two." He threw keys at Ananya like he was throwing knives because that's what his body wanted to do and this was the closest it was allowed.
They made a snake out of bodies and loaded it into steel. Leon climbed to the back of one truck and held a rifle in a hand that had learned you can be steady even when the rest of you was pretending to be made of wind. Ajay slid a Ghost Socket into a conduit near the gate and gave the wrong drone the wrong love at the right second.
"Where," Raj asked, like a man counting checks while his house burned.
"North," Ayush said. "Then east. Then into the part of the map we haven't drawn."
"You're going to break it," Raj said.
"We are," Ananya answered.
He didn't salute. He nodded, small and tired. "Don't come back for permission."
They fled in two trucks and a bus, tail-lights taped black, breath loud. A drone chased for a street and then veered off to romance the wrong mirror. Eden found its feet and then tripped over the thing that happens where manuals meet doctrine and lost the people who didn't have maps because doctrine had said don't give them any.
They made the ring road and the ring road was full. Then they cut through a seam where someone had welded a gate shut and forgot to tell a boy to test it. Suraj drove like a man in love with the small chance of being done with one thing correctly today. Vikram drove like a man who had stopped being a king for an hour and was trying to see if he liked it.
Dawn met them with the flattening light it also uses for hospitals and factories. Behind them, the base didn't explode. It just burned. Quietly. In all the wrong places. Flags blackened and then unspooled. The floodlights went out and didn't come back because someone had used Ajay's trick somewhere he couldn't tell them not to.
They stopped under the skeleton of an irrigation shed a mile outside the last safe lie the city used for a wall. People unfolded themselves out of metal and found each other's wrists. Riya counted kids like counting would keep them alive which, today, it did. Ananya turned and took the bandage out of her mouth and put it into someone else's hand and smiled like she meant it. Lucky leaned his head against the steering wheel and didn't cry and then did and then laughed because either is allowed. Shivam made a face at his arm and decided to hate it later. Kartik stared at the truck bed and counted in his head even though he wasn't supposed to and then stopped and exhaled and said nothing.
Raj sat on the bumper of his own truck, jacket stained, sleeve torn. He didn't look at the smoke. He held something out to Ayush between two fingers. A small, plastic tag with a serial number worn flat. The kind you wire to a door you can't afford to forget.
"Two drops," he said. "Morning and dusk. If I find a tail, the road is dead. If you smell solvent where kids are, you drop the crate in a drain and tell me, and I will burn the men who asked for it."
Ayush looked at the tag. He looked at the people around him who had decided to be a wall instead of asking for one. He took it. "Deal," he said.
Raj stood. He nodded once at Ananya like he had never not seen her and then left because there was sand to shovel and you can build walls with that when you don't have better.
The horizon lit itself with the wrong color and then chose morning anyway. Ash fell the way it falls on cricket courts and wedding tents the week after. It felt personal even though it wasn't. That's its trick.
Ayush stood with Ananya under the thin tin of the shed and watched the smoke. He didn't promise himself anything. He pressed his thumb into the old ghost mark on the post and dragged a darker line through it. He pressed his thumb to Ananya's wrist. She pressed hers to his.
"You blew a door you built," she said.
"We'll build another," he said. "Somewhere nobody knows a map for."
She leaned her head against his shoulder for exactly one breath and then went to go count water.
Behind them, Rahul stood on the roof of a broken bus two fields over and watched the smoke and his face did not move until it did. He set three stones on the rust and nudged the middle one out of line and looked at his hand like he didn't recognize it yet. He didn't flick. He didn't leave the habit entirely, either.
Uncrowned's voice crawled out of a dead radio under a seat and made itself smaller than everything else. "Gamma… clean…"
Ayush stepped on it without looking. Plastic cracked. It was not a victory. It was a rule.
"Tomorrow," Ananya said, not asking.
"Tomorrow," Ayush answered.
They didn't wait for it. They started making it.
End of Episode 22: Ashes Before Dawn