Ananya heard it before Ajay said anything—the wrong kind of neat.
The base at East Ring wanted to be gentle that night. Soup that was more water than memory. Bread thin as a book page. Floodlights dimmed to amber. Someone had left two blue flags tied to the gate and forgotten to take them down before dark; they moved as if the wind were practicing.
Ajay pressed his ear to the concrete column by the mess door. Tap—tap. Pause. One. The answer came back crown‑clean—two, pause, three—but underneath ran a careful hiss, like a kettle someone was trying to hide on a low flame.
"Broadcast's not ours," he said, palm flat to the wall. "Same sentence, wrong cadence."
The loudspeaker proved him right. "All civilians… east sector… sanctuary ahead… line up by the blue flags…"
Every word was polished. It didn't sound tired. That was the tell.
"On your feet," Ananya said, because the mess had learned to obey her voice faster than instructions. "Bottles full, nothing you can't drop. If the door opens fast, we don't follow the noise."
Ayush caught Raj as he strode past the doorway, jacket thrown open, throat shining with sweat.
"It's a mimic," Ayush said. "Don't open on a call you didn't make."
Raj didn't slow. "We hold for sight," he said, clipped. "You get to your corner and drill your people."
The ground under the logistics bay cleared its throat. Steel teeth met slender pipes. A circle of floor rose a finger's width—too polite to be a breach yet. A gray glove slid something flat into the seam. No scream, no blare. Just hum.
"Under," Ajay said, and everyone who had learned what that meant was already moving.
Ananya pointed two Fireborn kids to the mouth of the east corridor. "Arc, not line," she said, low. "If you chase, you make holes."
Shivam picked up the length of iron like a promise and took the hinge of the corridor. Kartik slid behind him one pace off his left heel; he'd learned that angles were more loyal than lungs.
Ananya didn't look for Leon. She knew where he would be: on the catwalk above the motor pool, glass to eye, mouth a line a seamstress would be proud of.
The first gray head lifted through the cut, and what came out of its hands was not a gun. A hand‑stapler for pucks the size of a fist. The puck landed on tile and purred, pleased with itself.
"Don't go near it," Ajay said, too late for the old man from the ration line who had bent to pick up anything he could call his. Ananya grabbed his collar and hauled. The puck sang to the air anyway—heat, breath, excitement—a carnival trick for machines that only know how to love from a distance.
Outside, the gate creaked two inches. The flags lifted. The wrong trucks rolled into amber—the kind that swear they are friendly on paper. On the lead running board: a man in a coat too thick for Delhi, beard washed neat. Not Eden blue. Not CGS gray. Something between. He smiled like your uncle at a wedding—wide, practiced.
The floodlights reared to white; the mess turned into abdomen.
"Hold the gate!" Raj shouted from somewhere beyond sight. "East flank—hold!"
Someone screamed. Then three someones. The cutter disk bit the tile again.
"Move!" Ananya called, and the corridor breathed in.
Shivam's iron met the first gray elbow and broke the habit inside it. Kartik stepped where he had been taught to—low under the shoulder—and turned a throat into argument. One of the Fireborn kids did exactly what she had been told not to and chased a jacket into the open; Ananya snapped, "Back!" without looking, and the kid obeyed because tone is a door on nights like this.
Up on the catwalk, Leon's glass found a shape inside the white: the beard, the coat, the bored wrongness. He didn't take the face. He took the man two strides behind him, elbow high, baton humming. The man fell into his own noise.
The mimic convoy didn't stop. It didn't speed. It moved with the steady entitlement of men who had learned that noise does the heavy lifting.
The base had two souls and too few hands.
Raj ran alongside the front bumper, one palm up at his men—hold—and the other out toward the running board—stop. The man with the beard kept talking to nobody, his mouth still moving as if the loudhailer were grafted there. The driver glanced. Raj put both hands on the hood and met the driver's eyes and didn't blink.
The truck halted. The beard's smile fell off like cheap paint.
"Inside," Ajay said behind Ananya at the corridor mouth. "Second circle. They're cutting at the back door. They want the room to choke itself."
She didn't look to Ayush before she spoke; there wasn't time, and this was now her job as much as his.
"Then we give them a corridor," she said, and the men who would die for her later moved.
They pulled the table from the clinic corner and set it crosswise to make a small mouth out of a wide hall. Not a wall. A way to be smaller.
A cutter disk licked air and bit through rebar. The circle of floor lifted with the same politeness. A second puck spun onto tile with that smug cat purr. Ajay grabbed a bucket; Lucky shoved the trash bin under the seam to turn air down into its own throat. It worked for two breaths and then didn't.
"Ananya," Leon's voice from above, calm enough to lower blood. "Gate," he said. No else. Just that.
She moved to the open, eating light with her walk, and saw what he had seen. Raj's hand dropped. The mimic lifted his chin.
"You are late," Raj said, and because his tone was truthful, three men hesitated.
Ayush reached the edge of the motor pool at a run, breath already burning. He took it in as if he were a camera: the bearded man on the step; the white that made a lie look like an instrument; the floor seam behind them that wanted to become a mouth; the smell of solvent over soup; and just inside the gate, a girl with chalk dust on her knee, frozen one step in, because someone had painted three dots at adult height—where soldiers look, not children.
"Who moved the mark?" Ananya said, sharply to the room, nobody sure if she meant the past or the next half minute.
The bearded man put the loudhailer to his mouth and discovered it wasn't there; it had always been a voice. "Hands," he said. "Blue flags. Sanctuary."
"No," Raj said to his own men. "On sight."
You can feel a corridor choose.
Ayush did what the body knows how to do when nothing on paper helps. He moved.
He snagged the chalk‑girl by the shoulder and spun her behind him. The bearded man's hand flicked. Someone outside—someone with a gun—shot the hinge of the small steel post by the gate; the post fell and the gate moved three inches. Floodlight white ripped the eyes out of the night and made everything flat.
"Back!" Ayush shouted into the white, and because he'd already become a part of the room that bled, men listened without knowing they had.
Behind him, the puck licked at the wrong humidity; the little cat voice rose. The air wanted to love the wrong story.
The table across the corridor held. It didn't look like it should. It did.
Shivam's iron kept time.
Kartik turned another man into punctuation and discovered, as he had not, that you can do it without giving your face away.
"Decision," Ajay said, not loud. He had his hand on a lever in the wall they had never meant to use. Not a hack. An old thing built by someone who had believed in real fires once. It would drop a steel shutter between mess and corridor, kill a dozen pucks by starving them of breath, and turn the corridor into a mouth that only let light through.
The lever would also trap two men in the half circle between that door and the seam: Jitesh from taps, who had once taught Ananya to cook lentils without wasting gas, and a boy from Fireborn with a batting helmet too big.
"Do it," Ananya said, and tasted metal.
Ajay pulled.
The shutter fell with a sound that made the room remember that metal decides if it loves you.
The pucks under the shutter went quiet, mean little animals strangled by lack of interest. The corridor shrank and remembered it didn't owe the world its whole body.
Jitesh put his hand flat to the new steel and didn't shout. The Fireborn boy looked at him and then turned to face the white. He shouted once, a sound free of metal, and someone on the outside flinched as if insulted by its purity.
Raj's shoulder hit the running board hard enough to rattle the bearded man's teeth. The driver stalled the truck by accident; the truck found silence and couldn't find its way back. The wrong convoy had to reverse in a yard that no longer loved it.
In the lit mouth of the hall, a familiar shape slouched against a fence as if it were a cousin at a function. Rahul didn't flick. He didn't touch his wrist. He watched the lever fall and pressed his bottom lip with his teeth like a man tasting a lemon. That was all.
The white became breath. Men remembered how to be people one at a time. The wrong truck found reverse. The mimics backed into their own lies. The floodlights dropped mercifully to amber.
Inside, the shutter held. Jitesh's fingers slid down the steel and left a little of the day there. The boy in the helmet turned once and put his forehead against the shutter for half a second, then moved into the smaller mouth with his iron and learned to like being the right shape.
The mess exhaled.
No one cheered.
Hours later—light gray, bread mostly eaten, bandages already gone—Raj came to the doorway with his knuckles raw and a capture of exhaustion around his mouth.
"You were right about the call," he said to Ayush. It sounded like neither apology nor compliment. Just inventory.
Ayush looked up at the shutter. Its steel still tasted like choice.
"Someone moved a mark high," Ananya said, quieter. "We'll paint them low. That doesn't fix this."
Raj worked his jaw. "Quartermaster at Echo," he said at last, as if it tasted bad. "I put a name on it because names are how you make yourself honest. He's gone."
Ananya stood. "So here," she said, skipping the parts where people tell men how they could have been better yesterday. "We do this: low chalk only near drains and steps. No marks above a child's shoulder. Blue flags don't mean open unless the man who says it has a throat I can hear."
Raj snorted, a tiny, unwilling laugh. "I am starting to admire how rude your friends are," he said.
"Don't," Suraj said, brushing past. "It's how we get away with feeding you."
Raj let that line live. "Two trucks," he said. "Morning and dusk. No escorts, no tails. Boxes under the drain."
"Never more than you can pretend to deny you brought," Ayush said.
Raj's mouth twitched. "Deal," he said. "And if anyone learns a new word for clean and uses it on my wall, I will put their face on the post."
He left.
The shutter still filled the doorway like a truth nobody wanted but everyone needed.
Ananya went to it and set her forehead against it for the full length of one breath. Metal. Cool. Not a word. A choice you could touch.
She turned back to the room.
"Count the kids," she told Riya. "We're done being sorry."
Outside, the blue flags in the gate wind stopped pretending to be ceremonial. Someone took them down and folded them as if the fabric would carry a blessing better in the dark.
Up on the fence where he'd been, Rahul had left three stones in a line. No nudge. No flick. Just three quiet shapes speaking to nobody about a habit he might be trying to end.
Ayush did not press his thumb into anything. He did not speak to the future. He took his place at the shutter with the men who would stand there when the wrong voice tried to borrow a mouth again.
He didn't promise anyone that sunrise would forgive the night. He didn't have to. The shutter had already done the part a mouth could.
He folded his hands, breathed, and got ready.
He would not say the word that usually lived here.
He would wait for a better one.