By afternoon, the ghost marks had started talking to each other.
Three dots with a slash appeared under stairwells and on inside corners at child-height. People whispered them the way you whisper a safe word. Someone taped three beans to a post outside a ration line and grinned when the right kind of stranger saw it and turned left instead of right.
Above, drones stitched lazy figure eights, red dots hunting for heat that wasn't there. Every now and then one dipped, stuck to a patch of mirror-warmth, and drifted off satisfied. The sky had learned to love lies.
"Two more to the north," Ajay said, head tilted, listening to the grid hum behind brick. "They're marking a circle around the rail sheds. If we go back, we go under."
"No under today," Suraj said, eyes on the skyline, chin nicked where a man had shaved without a mirror. "There's a door I haven't shown you. It buys us air. We're running out of honest kind."
Ananya looked at him, plain. "You pick a good day to stop being dramatic."
He didn't smile. "I pick a bad day to start needing you to trust me."
They moved to the edge of the old depot when the light was the color of an old bruise again. Ajay led in toward a blank wall of concrete like he meant to teach it a trick. Suraj scraped three knuckles down a rusted seam and rapped twice, then once, then held his hand flat. The seam shuddered, dirt sifted, and a slice of wall slid inward on greased pins. The hole exhaled cool, stale air.
Armed silhouettes stood inside in that way people do when they think they're the most dangerous thing in the room. Their weapons were clean, their eyes cleaner. No insignia. No one needed it.
"Crown," one said.
Suraj lifted his chin. "Split," he replied.
The man stepped aside.
Ananya's hand found Ayush's sleeve without needing to. He didn't shake her off. They went down a narrow earth-smelling throat and into a world that looked like it had learned how to live under the city without asking permission.
It wasn't an army's bunker. It was a heartbeat.
A hall the size of a school yard spread under concrete. Strings of bare bulbs hung in straight lines like a festival for the practical. On the left, a clinic—two cots, a nurse with a kid in her lap and a brown bottle of something not good enough. On the right, a stack of crates with faded UN on the sides and a red inverted crown spray-painted over it with a lightning slash through the middle. In the middle, a mess of tables and a map spread across them, the paper stained and fingered and alive with grease-pencil scribbles.
Children blew chalk dust across each other's hands and wrote symbols on the floor. Men cleaned rifles. Women bandaged men. Somebody fried something that made the air taste like old oil. A boy kicked a ball against a wall and killed time. When he saw Nikhil, he kicked the ball slow.
Nikhil kicked it back like it might bite and then like it wouldn't.
"Inverted crown," Kartik said, under his breath.
"Unseen Empire," Ajay answered. His voice wasn't surprised. It was what a man sounds like when he finally decides to stop pretending he's never been here.
A massive man in a dark shirt stepped out of a doorway with a presence that pushed air before him. Scars tugged his mouth into something that looked like he'd been born with a sneer but wasn't. Eyes cold, calculating. He took in the group in one pass, set Ayush in a box he had all ready, and let his gaze go back to Suraj.
"Vikram," Suraj said, ease layered over respect, over unease. "You remember my people."
Vikram's mouth twitched. "I remember you bringing problems in where doors were meant to keep them out." He nodded at Ayush like a man nods at weather. "Joel."
Ayush didn't give him the courtesy of surprise. "If you're going to try to sell me to the men above to buy your calm," he said, "do it quick."
Vikram's eyes glittered, not at the accusation—at the speed. "We've said the word Eden twice today and that's already twice too many," he said, tone almost conversational. "They tagged two of our rooms last night. We lost a pantry and a route. Suraj says bring you in. I say we can't afford you."
"Eden marks everything they don't own," Ananya said, mild. "You can decide to be a street or a city."
Vikram's laugh had no heat. "Streets get swept."
"Cities, too," Suraj said. "But they remember the hands that built them."
They stood there a second, the three of them triangulating a war on different maps. Ajay shifted his weight. Leon watched the doors, because some men are never allowed to stop.
A thin man in a patched shirt stepped out from behind Vikram and pointed at Ajay like he'd found a coin in a drain. "You still owe me for that vent in Sector Nine," he said.
"Put it on a tab you never collect," Ajay said back, easy. He didn't smile at Vikram. He didn't need to.
Suraj guided them through the hall. Ananya brushed fingers with the nurse without words and knew how bad the bottle was and how much she hated it. Riya peeled off to help a woman set a splint with less tape than you'd like and a tight bandanna for a sling. A girl watched her hands and mirrored the knot; Riya nodded and let the girl finish. A small, human victory in a room that needed them rationed.
The tables in the center were a mess of routes and grids. At the head, a family of old radios served as a spine. A map of Delhi sprawled in detail only people who walked it can draw. Red lines. Blue. Black circles where water still ran. The word EDEN stenciled in hateful yellow on three sectors. The inverted crown kissed the corner of the page.
A stack of hand-drawn sheets sat on the edge. Routes, annotated in Ajay's neat block letters and in someone else's fewer, slanted ones. The Atlas, he'd called this in his head. Somebody else had thought the same.
"You made a map they'd kill for," Leon said, quiet to Suraj. "Then you kept it alive where anyone could find it with the right leash."
"Anyone can't," Suraj said. "Vikram thinks that makes me a fool. I think it makes me a shepherd."
Leon looked away. He had been a soldier too long to forgive a shepherd for how many sheep the wolves eat while he sleeps.
A kid with a crown spray-painted on his jacket collar walked past them with a rifle he carried correctly and the kind of pride you left behind one floor above. Fireborn. He gave Ayush the quick nod of the trade and kept moving.
"You used them at the filtration plant," Ayush said to Suraj.
"I used them to make sure my people didn't die under your orders," Suraj said. "We can argue later. Or never. I prefer never."
Vikram leaned both hands on the table and made his voice a weapon because that's what men like him do best. "We have two choices," he said. "We close every door we have and turn this into a can. We survive long enough to become myths they don't waste bullets on. Or," he cut a glance toward Ayush, "we walk him through the map until Eden can stop pretending they don't hear us and make us a deal."
"You hate me enough to feed me to an acronym because it makes a line straight on your paper," Ayush said, not angry. "What happens when the math makes you next?"
"It won't," Vikram said, and in the way he said it you heard the kind of certainty men mistake for courage.
Suraj's mouth tightened. "This network is for all of us or it's for no one," he said. "If we shut it, we become a story about men who had bread and ate it while a city gnawed itself to bone."
Vikram's eyes flicked to the ceiling. "Your morality buys nice words at these tables," he said. "It doesn't buy diesel."
Ajay made a small sound. He had an ear on the walls again. "Three pings on the southern conduit," he said. "Not ours."
Nobody moved for a fractional second while everyone who had learned the new language translated. Taggers. Eden markers. Cleaners. Men with a better key. All the words meant the same thing right now.
"Lock down," Vikram snapped. His men went to doors in a neat ripple of muscle, rifles in hands, boots that knew which floor creaked. The room tightened by a degree you could measure if you put your palm out to the air.
Suraj looked at Ayush. "This is my house," he said, quiet enough that only Ayush and Ananya and Leon heard. "I brought you to the table. You don't owe me anything except the truth. What would you do?"
Ayush looked at the map, at the coolers marked EDEN in someone else's careful hand, at the lines Ajay had drawn with a pencil stub. He thought of the godown breathing differently just before it burned. He thought of doors. He thought of what you owe people you will never meet.
"You don't keep maps for wolves," he said. "You use them and then you take the street up behind you."
"You burn my house," Vikram said, something like a smile that wasn't. "At least you're honest before you trespass."
Ananya stepped between words that wanted to hurt and decided to turn the conversation into something useful. "We can fry their tags," she said. "EMP's too big a dream. But you can burst their range-finders if you give me enough current and a place to lie to them from."
Ajay's head came up. "The junction box at S14," he said. "It's old and it's close. If we crank the transformer and surge the right line, we can blow anything on it that's sniffing for us."
"Run power when men are standing in water," Leon said flatly, because he knew where bad plans kill you.
"No water in that tunnel," Ajay said. "Just rats and rust."
Vikram's mouth flattened. "And when you jump the box, you cook half the grid we need to move food. You drown a kitchen to boil the beans."
Suraj turned his head and for the first time, anger showed raw. "You would trade their lives for your lines?" He jabbed a thumb up, toward the ceiling, meaning everyone above with no map to here. "You would make us a can while they choke? That's the man you are?"
Vikram didn't answer. He didn't have to. The men at his shoulders answered for him with the way they set their feet.
Ajay looked at Ayush, the only man in the room whose decisions had consistently ended in both bodies and breath. "If we blow S14, we can collapse the south splice, too," he said. "It slows the cleaners. It slows us. It makes everything take an hour longer and the men above hate hours now."
Ayush looked at the clinic corner. The nurse was singing to a child, a song that had no patience left. Choices are doors. You hold them open or you shut them knowing who gets caught.
"Do it," he said. "But not until we move the kids east and the clinic north. We're not here to cut throats to make sure men with patches can eat."
Vikram took one step closer. "You don't give orders here," he said, soft as a razor in a pocket. He lifted a hand. Men up top in the gallery lifted rifles in the slow, careful way soldiers do when they want you to notice.
The room went very still.
Suraj didn't glance. "Really?" he asked his right hand. The word sounded like disappointment wearing a grin it didn't feel.
"You built a city on sentiment," Vikram said. "I'm trying to keep it standing with math."
"Your math is murder when you strip the zeroes off," Ananya said, and the quiet in her voice had the weight of a verdict.
Vikram smiled at her like she'd amused him in a way he wasn't sure he should enjoy. It was the smile of a man remembering himself in a mirror that flattered.
"Fireborn," Suraj called, not raising his voice. From the far side of the hall, three young men and a woman straightened. They had that posture men learn when they decide their backs belong to someone else. "You swore to the crown and the split," he said to them. "Not to a man. To the people under dirt."
They looked at Vikram. They looked at Suraj. One stepped toward Suraj. The other three did, too. Vikram's eyebrow ticked a millimeter. His mouth didn't.
He moved his fingers once. His men on the gallery didn't hesitate.
The first shot took a light out. The second put dust out of a pillar. The third would've put an end to this conversation and the people having it if Leon hadn't moved on reflex, upward, off-balance, and fired back into the dark. The man on the gallery folded and fell like rope. Chaos tried to climb onto the table.
"Move them!" Ajay shouted, pointing at the clinic. He went like a man who had already decided to pick a corridor to die in and was disappointed he couldn't do it today. Kartik and Riya grabbed the cot ends and slid a kid into a human chain of hands that weren't ready but worked because a child was on them. Ananya was already halfway up the stairs that led to the north niche, throwing tins and knives of noise into the right corners to make men duck instead of aim.
Vikram's men split the room with fire but not ferocity; control. They were making a point. "Seal south," he snapped. "We hold north."
"You'll hold your own funeral," Suraj said. He planted himself in the center and did the one thing that works when your friend forgets where he put his oath. He spoke the words the room had been built on. "Alley, not throne," he said. "Web, not wall."
For a beautiful, stupid second, some of the men actually paused. Habit is a mercy we don't deserve. Then a shot ripped the edge off the sermon, and it was a fight again.
Ayush didn't try to lead both fights. He went straight to the map, ripped the bottom third free—Ajay's lines, Eden marks, their own ghost slashes—and stuffed it into his shirt. "Ananya—north," he called. "Kartik, you're with her." He pointed at Ajay. "S14. Leon, go with him. You keep him breathing."
"Who's with you?" Suraj asked, because that's what brothers say even when they've just been asked to let you burn their house.
"You," Ayush said.
Suraj's grin returned with teeth and something like loss. "I hate when you're right."
They sprinted for the north stairs. Ananya led two kids with a game voice: "Small steps. Tiny ones. The smallest steps you've ever seen." Behind them, Lucky found himself fielding a toddler like a football and ran like a boy who had never thought of himself as useful until this week.
The lights flickered and steadied. Above the hall, the drone noise multiplied. It sounded like a rumor you couldn't unhear.
Ajay skidded at the mouth of a low side tunnel where a transformer box squatted like a metal animal that needed coaxing. "Leon," he said. "Cover." Leon found a notch that had been made for this years ago by someone who knew a rifle and a wrench belong in the same room.
Ajay popped the front and stuck his hand inside a nest of wires that made normal men pray and electricians grin. He found the right line by muscle memory and the kind of faith you can only earn with burns. "On my mark," he said. "It'll get loud. It'll get bright. If something arcs where it shouldn't, move your face."
"Clear," Leon said. "Two on the right, one behind. Three breaths out."
Ajay counted under his breath and threw the makeshift jumper. The transformer keened like a machine that has learned the shape of pain. Somewhere south, a line sang and then died, sharp as an insult. Ajay threw the second switch and the noise punched into your lungs. Then silence, but the heavy kind.
Leon took a clean breath. "Taggers lost their wives," he said, voice relaxing in increments. "Drones are looking dumb."
"Still not enough," Ajay said. He set his shoulder into a secondary lever and hauled. Metal groaned, a thump deep in the stone like a city had coughed. "Splice dropped," he said under his breath. "Road's longer now. For them and us."
Upstairs, men felt their scanners go quiet in their hands and they didn't like it. Guns spoke more. One of Vikram's men yelled a thing that wasn't an order and wasn't grace and slid into a ladder he hadn't intended to take.
Suraj and Ayush hit the base of the east gallery at the same time as a Fireborn kid whose lip was bleeding and who wore a look that said today was not the day he'd expected to be asked to choose sides. Ayush caught his eye and said the sentence boys like that need even when they don't know which man they're being yet. "We're not killing each other for a map."
The kid blinked, swallowed nothing, and nodded once. He shot at a ceiling light instead of a chest and felt better, then worse.
Vikram's voice cut from the south door. "Seal the north. Burn south. We're not the ones who run."
"Then you're the ones who stay and die," Suraj said, not unkind.
Ananya materialized at the top of the north stairs with two kids and a nurse and a woman who had packed a bag full of nothing but a photograph. "Now," she said. "Move."
The room shifted. Once men start moving children, even killers stop aiming the same way. That's a law you can write on skin.
Ayush grabbed the map roll under his shirt tighter and moved into the stream. Suraj held the center like a stubborn fact. Leon and Ajay came up out of the low door with sparks still on Ajay's cuffs. Riya pushed Nikhil up by the back, clove on her own tongue because adrenaline had made her chewed one bitter. Kartik hauled a crate that pretended to be important just to get a feeling of weight in his hands. Lucky held a boy he'd never met and told him three lies about how good the top floor air would be.
They made the north door with bodies mostly unbroken. Ananya glanced back once and saw Vikram at the map table. He had his hands on the edges and was staring at the place where the map had been torn. She felt a rage that wasn't particularly strategic. She didn't see him slide a thin folder into his vest. That would be for later.
They hit the narrow stair and took it like a vein. The top door opened into a parking deck slit and then into a stairwell up into a building so new it still thought plaster was a smell.
Ajay, last in, slammed the door and wedged a pipe under the handle. "Two minutes," he said. "Not more."
They spilled onto a roof where wind remembered it had a job. The drone above them hung at an angle, confused, nose turned east now, not down. The city inhaled.
Suraj jogged to the parapet and looked at the smoke beginning to smear south. "They'll come around," he said. "We've got a turn and then one more. Not three."
"So we stop using doors that lead back to this tree," Ayush said. He slid the map into Ananya's pack and pressed her fingers down on the zipper. "We burned one house today. We can't be the men who burn all of them."
"We can be the men who burn doors behind us," she said. "New rule. Doors we can't guard become walls."
Leon propped his rifle on the parapet and sighted along a lane that had just started filling with men who thought the world was still paper with words that obeyed. He didn't fire. He knew what the right bullet was and this wasn't it.
A shout rose from the stair. Vikram's men hit the pipe and found it stubborn. Somebody sparked a grinder, and the sound went through the hilt of Ayush's knife, through the bones of his ear.
Suraj stood by the roof stair and planted his foot on the top step. He looked at the people on the roof and made a count with his eyes he didn't show. He looked at Ayush last. "I stay," he said, as if that were the only choice that made the world make sense inside his chest. "You get them out. Find a new east. Burn every door on my map after you use it."
"You have twenty men," Ayush said. "He has more than that. He has patience and the part of you that hates compromises."
"I have this," Suraj said, tapping his sternum where other men touch dog tags. He grinned, all wrong. "And I have a jack that buys me two minutes when I say it does."
He put his hand on Ayush's shoulder for exactly a breath. It was the right blessing for men who won't use the big words with each other unless the room is empty.
"If I fall," he said, not dramatic, not soft, "you remember whose house this is."
"You said it was everyone's," Ayush said.
Suraj's grin returned. "And now you say it, too."
He turned and went down into the stairwell with three Fireborn shadows and a sling of wire and the kind of confidence that terrifies because it is earned and might not be enough.
Ajay didn't hesitate. He slipped a bundle into Suraj's hand as he passed. "Fuse for the jack," he murmured. "You don't owe me."
Suraj didn't look but his fingers flexed around the weight.
Leon pulled up a kid from the stair who'd gotten stuck on his shoelace and set him on the roof like a baggage handler who cared. "Move," he told Ananya, and this time she didn't argue with who told her to run.
They ran.
Across roofs that had seen too many men do this this week and would see too many tomorrow. Past a tank with a hose climbing it like a strangler who'd changed his mind. Over a gap where air forgot to be kind. Down into a stair where a chalk ghost mark hung like a dare and a promise.
They hit a lane that smelled like cardamom from an old tea and like someone had dropped water on fire. Riya tasted clove again and laughed like she had found out the city still held ridiculous things like spice and her mouth could still register them.
Behind them, metal screamed in a stairwell and then stopped. The jack had held. Suraj had dialed a door closed one more time against men he had once trusted to build his table. The quiet after wasn't peace. It was the kind of silence that comes right before men kick a life into a new shape.
They cut into the market spine and let Ananya's tins sing where they were supposed to. Men to the south turned and moved toward a sound that lied to their cleverness. The drone lost a patch of heat and went to ask a chimney a question it couldn't answer.
They stopped in the shell of a half-built room three turns away. People caught breath. Children pressed faces into knees. Ajay leaned his forehead against a new brick and listened.
"We buy five minutes," he said.
"How many people does he hold?" Ananya asked, not asking for a count. For an obligation.
"Enough," Ajay said.
Leon sat and set the dog tags on the sill. He didn't close his hand over them. He let the wind do a small thing to the metal.
Ayush pulled the torn map section out of Ananya's bag and flattened it on a crate. Eden marks in yellow. Ghost slashes where they'd made new rules. He put his hand flat on a blank part of the city. "This is ours," he said. "Not to own. To haunt. Eden cleans grids. We dirty them on purpose."
"Your poetry's improving," Ananya said, dry, and bumped his shoulder.
He almost smiled. "Yours, too."
On a roof two streets over, Vikram stood in a rectangle of sky, breath even, eyes cold. He touched his vest where the thin folder sat. In it, a copy of a sliver of the Atlas—routes no one else had thought to memorize yet. He made a small calculation without moving his face. Men who think they built the only city hate being wrong; men who think they built the only map hate sharing.
He stared at the smoke lifting out of the south door and decided what kind of man he'd have to be tomorrow to keep being alive. He didn't say anything. He didn't need to. The city heard him anyway.
Half a kilometer beyond that, under a different bridge, Rahul sat with his feet in the river and rolled a red hair band around his wrist until the skin went white, then returned. He set three stones by his heel and nudged the middle one half out of line. He laughed once, almost genuinely delighted. "You keep choosing," he told the water. "Good."
The water didn't answer. It was busy moving men's maps around.
Uncrowned's voice ghosted across a dead channel, patient as always. He could have been in a room or on a roof or under god. "Eden mark failed in Delta," he said to someone who'd asked the wrong question. "Package intact. Shift to Gamma. Clean."
No one on the roof where Ayush's people caught breath had a radio on that frequency anymore. No one needed it. They had enough words.
Ayush closed his eyes for a beat and opened them when he said he would.
"Tomorrow," he said.
"Tomorrow," Ananya echoed.
The rooftop wind filed the word and took it to the next one.