The ground said it before the men did.
Ajay put his palm flat to the concrete beside their door and closed his eyes. The hum of the base's grid sat behind the skin the way a pulse does when you're not thinking about it. Then it stuttered. Picked up. Thickened.
"Not trucks," he said. "Not above. They're crawling through the earth."
Floodlights snapped from amber to white. A loudhailer at the gate tried for calm and landed on order. "Hands! Hands!" Rifles answered with their small, stupid barks. The word sanctuary got swallowed by the wind and spit back as echo.
Colonel Raj strode the lane like a man who'd taught himself to count while people bled. "East flank! All rifles! Hold the gate!" He didn't look at Ayush when he said, "You. Drill your people. Keep your corner closed."
"Aye," Ayush said, because habit can be useful when it keeps you from being a problem.
They moved without being asked. Ananya pulled Nikhil close by the scarf and said, "Small steps," and he took them like the door was far away. Riya set two bandages and laid out clove paste and made a clinic out of shadow. Shivam loosened the sling on his bad arm, spit pink once, and picked up the iron because you only get to pretend you're not needed for so long. Kartik stood where the wall turns into a funnel and measured the distance between his fear and the first thing he would stab. Lucky checked the lantern and the mirror rig and did not look at his hands like they were evidence. Leon climbed to the parapet overlooking the motor pool and found three angles a better man would be proud of.
Ajay stayed with the wall, listening. "They've set cutters," he said. "Disks on rebar. Circular. They'll hiss right before they kiss daylight."
He was right. The floor under the logistics bay shivered once like a sheet being snapped, and then a circle of concrete lifted as neatly as a coin from a tabletop. Smoke rose through the hole with no smell at first, the way lies arrive. Then a slick chemical note, sweet and wrong.
Black shapes spilled up and out. Not infected. Efficient. Hoods up. Plates flat. One dropped a puck that hummed an octave your teeth remember. Another swept a wand and painted the air with invisible. A spray can marked the floor with a tidy symbol—a vertical slash through a circle, stenciled yellow. EDEN.
Taggers. Range-finders. The men who make other men look bright enough to shoot later.
"Paint," Ajay said. "Don't let it touch skin."
Leon put a bullet through the first puck and then the second and then the third. They popped like eggs under a boot. The fourth landed, hummed, and stuck to concrete with a small, stubborn magnet sound. He shot. Missed by a thumb and chipped the edge. The hum didn't care.
"Kill the lights!" Raj shouted to someone who could do that. They didn't. The lights belong to the wrong men now. The drone above the base dipped, dot searching. For a second it stuck to the pool of heat in the middle of the lane. Then it drifted, indecisive, like the sky had been told to wait and was obeying the wrong voice.
Uncrowned's grammar slithered through a radio in somebody's pocket. "Do not engage blue-coded. Clean the grid. Stand by for extraction."
Blue-coded. Men who brought paint.
Outside the wall, the tape-loop voice kept calling strays toward the flags. The infected loved the shouting the way fire loves good air. They pooled at the gate and pushed. The hinge screamed. Bullets slapped them into then and now. They kept coming because hunger is a better motivator than fear.
"Under," Shivam snapped. Two black-sleeved arms crawled from the hole near the rations locker and reached for the room where a woman had curled around a man and his broken leg the way bodies decide what to protect first. Kartik met one of the arms with the chisel and thrust and made a sound no one needed to respect. The arm drew back. The second swept the air and the wand kissed the hem of the woman's sari. It went bright under the right eyes. Riya yanked her back with both hands. "Inside!" she barked, and the woman listened to the voice that sounded like oxygen.
"Ananya," Ayush said, and didn't give the order. She was already there. She flicked the feedback. The speaker under their tarp screamed one long, ugly note that made Eden's front man flinch and turn his head, just long enough. Leon took his cheekbone. The man fell like a decision no one wanted to make. The puck rolled off his vest and hummed louder, hungry to matter.
Ajay scooped it with a rag and jammed it under a crate. "We'll lie to theirs," he said. "Then burn it."
Rahul crouched on the catwalk above the logistics bay with one hand on a railing. He watched men in black and men in dust hurt each other and touched the red hair tie around his wrist with his thumb. When he saw Ayush look up, he smiled, not sharp. Small. "You brought him home," he called down. "Good. Now show me who you are inside walls."
"I'm the man not obeying your clock," Ayush said. He didn't look up again.
The floor by the kitchen door lifted like a breath. Another cut circle popped. A new group in gray came through—these were Edens with batons, not tags. They liked getting close. They didn't roar. They didn't need to. One touched a man in a CGS vest with a rod and made him forget his plant-based ethics. He crumpled and convulsed. The baton's head had teeth.
"Raj!" Ayush shouted, into the noise. "Under. We're bleeding below."
Raj's eyes flicked left, then down. He wasn't a myth. He was a bureaucrat who had learned hands. "Hold the gate," he told his right. To Ayush: "Pick," he said. "Gate or ground."
The base had two souls and too few hands.
Ajay tugged at Ayush's sleeve without deference, too wired for respect. "Back of the mess," he said. "Storm drain. It's clogged. We break it, we pull their fog down and out. It becomes river. We can open a way. But if we drain it, we drain east—toward the alley you hate."
Ananya's eyes found his. They did that thing where her look put truth on the table without blame. "If we hold the wall, we die inside it," she said.
"If we open the back," Riya said flatly, "we don't take them all."
Ayush had never practiced choosing which lives to carry. The city had forced a hundred versions of it on him anyway. He put a hand on his chest, right where the jack seat would sit if you could prop a heart open, and then he pulled it away.
"Ajay. Leon. With me," he said. "Ananya, shepherd. Shivam, Kartik—you buy ten steps for anyone who looks at you like they're willing to follow directions. Riya—you choose who will live if you move them and if you don't. Lucky—forklift."
Lucky blinked hard. "I can… hotwire it."
"You already did yesterday in your head," Leon said.
They ran slant across the yard, under the sound of a drone that had finally decided that its dot belonged on a face and then chose warmth over honesty. The mess door slammed open into a room that smelled like cumin and fear and old steel. Tables shoved into a line became a weak wall. The storm grate sat behind the tray line, rust-green and proud of it.
Ajay jammed the jack into the seam where wall turned into metal and gave it a hard three cranks. The grate's top lip sighed. "It's cemented with time," he grunted. "Give me a lever."
Leon hooked his rifle sling through the lower rung and set his shoulder like a man trying to pry open the mouth of the wrong story. "On three," he said. "One, two—" They pulled on two because physics rewards men who don't wait for permission. The grate lifted, grudging, as if it had been keeping monsters in and wanted to make sure.
Cold, filthy air shouldered into the room. The tag fog rolled toward it without grace, showing you where it had decided to go when given a choice. It spilled down like a cape. Somewhere below, a channel coughed. The drone dot outside wobbled and lost faith.
Ananya's voice became the thing people put their feet on. "Small steps," she said to a line of strangers who weren't, not anymore. "Your hand here. Your eyes there. Your mouth closed. If you lose the person in front of you, you are responsible for the person behind you."
Shivam took the first baton on his forearm and put the iron into the soft under the jaw and made a shape that meant stop. Kartik knocked a tagger's wrist sideways and stabbed the space between bones with the chisel and learned you can be surgical if you don't give yourself a ceremony. Riya met a man with a broken leg and two bad decisions and made one more for him. "Not him," she told herself, and took the woman on her arm instead, because you can only carry a life you can move. She hated it, and this is grown-up work.
Lucky ran. He hit the forklift like it owed him rent and found the ignition with fingers that had practiced on ghosts. Wires kissed and spat. The engine coughed and then decided it wanted to be involved. He jammed it into gear and drove it like a stupid chariot, forks up. "Heads!" he yelled—quietly, because that's the funny thing about learning—and hit the weak part of the cinderblock by the drain. The wall cracked into a grin. The grate protested. The drain pulled.
Water found its job. Tag fog loved the lower place more than it loved lungs. It sucked down, a gray throat swallowing heat. Ayush grabbed the fork tines, burned his palms, didn't say it, and hauled sideways until the opening was the size of a man, then a child, then a person and whatever they could not let go of. He dropped, slid into the channel, and stood in stink up to his shins. "Here!" he shouted. "Here!"
Raj appeared in the doorway to the mess and looked at the back of his base the way a father looks at a house he built catching fire from the wrong side. His face did not move in a way that meant later he would let it. He looked at Ayush and lifted his chin once. He put his hand on the shoulder of a soldier at his elbow and squeezed once and then did not look back at the gate.
Uncrowned's voice popped and hissed from a radio on a dead man's vest by the tray line. "Confirm neutral. Package remains. Clean." It sounded far away, like someone trying to write orders on an earthquake.
Rahul leaned over the catwalk and watched smoke change its mind. He put three pebbles on the rail beside his elbow. He nudged the middle one half out of line. "You're going to do it," he said to Ayush. "You're going to break your own wall."
Ayush didn't answer because sometimes the best thing you can say to men like that is to show them your back.
They moved people. The right ones. The wrong ones. The ones you will remember later when it's dark and your body wants to be cruel. Two kids with hair that stuck to their foreheads. A grandmother who apologized twice as she put her hand on Ananya's shoulder. A man who kept looking backward at a door that had already become a wall, because love makes you graceless. Riya grabbed his chin with her fingers and gave him a new forward and he took it for three steps and then owned it. That is the mercy of command.
Eden found the new sound. They pivoted toward the mess and the drain. Three pucks clattered along the floor and stuck to iron with cheerful magnets. "Taggers!" Ajay barked, reaching for one with a rag and missing the second. Leon took it on the second shot. The third hummed and hummed and seemed so pleased with itself that Lucky laughed once—high and wrong and necessary—and stomped on it with a boot and ground it under three times. It died like a cheap toy.
"Go!" Ananya shouted. "Go now!"
They went. Into the drain and the dark where the city keeps its other kinds of choices. Ayush followed last of the first group, then doubled back because that's what he does, even when his body insists it's time to stop being noble. A baton kissed his shoulder and told him later he'd remember it. He put his knife under a stranger's ribs and made a shape that meant stop and this time he did not say sorry in his head because you can't keep bleeding like that.
Leon covered the mouth of the drain with a burst, three precise bones removed from three men who had assumed they would get to grow old. He emptied the mag, reloaded without thinking about it, and put the empty on the floor like a chalk line around the moment where he didn't miss being someone else anymore.
Ajay slid into the channel. "Left," he said. "Follow the stink. It gets better."
It did not. But it got them away.
The culvert sucked tag fog into it like a cigarette. Behind them, the mess door filled with men who believed in orders and hated workarounds. Eden's pucks hummed to nobody. The drone dot painted the wrong heat. The base groaned, thyself remade by men who had drawn it a different way on someone else's paper.
They came out on the river side under a slab of concrete that had not fallen yet because the city loves you even when you want to pretend it doesn't. Air hit faces like a slap that apologized. Men in Eden gray hit the far bank and looked confused because their map didn't have this door on it. Lucky laughed again, low and perfect.
Rahul watched from the underside of the bridge. He had one hand on a beam with gum stuck to it from a decade ago when the city believed in small bad manners. "You'll bring him to me," he said to the water. "You always do."
"Not tonight," Ananya said out loud, to the wrong thing, and led people along the narrow service walk toward the east. She ran her hand along the rail like it was a string you could pull and the city would fall toward you instead of away.
They moved. Leon without looking like a man who thinks he dies if he looks back. Riya counting under her breath because numbers make the dark behave. Shivam grim enough to be kind. Kartik with his mouth open, finally remembering to breathe through it. Nikhil with his hand on Ananya's scarf and his feet, miracle, doing exactly what his head told them to.
Ayush stopped. He put his hand on the concrete and for a second he felt the hum again, deeper now that the box had been shocked wrong earlier. He pictured Raj at the gate, shoulders squared, the exact degree of bend in knees you learn when you are going to have to move but not yet. He put two fingers to his temple and sent it off. Not for Rahul. For a man who would not hear it and didn't need to.
He ran.
They took the broken stairs up into the skeleton of a building that had never gotten windows and would not now. They climbed to a room with three walls and sky and fell into it like men who had remembered gravity. They were ten plus their eight and three more that belonged to the city now. It was too many and not nearly enough.
Far down the river, the floodlights at the base flickered and steadied and then did a thing lights don't do unless somebody with a good wrench wants you to learn fear. They went out. For one count of ten, the base was a dark shape. Then secondary lit. It looked like a mouth refusing to close.
Ajay's lips moved. He was listening to the grid through his bones. "They'll bend," he said. "They're not done. And neither are the men under us."
Ananya put her hand on Ayush's and squeezed hard enough to mean it. He squeezed back. Leon leaned his head against the cold wall and set the dog tags on the ledge and did not pick them up for a count of three. Riya rubbed a child's back until the shaking broke itself. Shivam stared at his forearm where bruise would be and decided to hate it later. Kartik laughed, a small, nasty, tired sound. Lucky slid down and pressed his palms flat on the floor and felt the building hold. Nikhil put his head on Ananya's knee and slept because his body understood that some moments are gifts.
On a roof far enough away to make belief easy, Vikram stood with his arms crossed and watched the direction the smoke had gone. He had the thin folder under his shirt. He took it out and opened it and looked at lines that had belonged to the city before any of them claimed them. He decided he would be both kinds of man tomorrow and pay for it the next day.
Rahul sat on a parapet and smoothed the red band with his thumb and set three stones and nudged the middle one out of line and smiled, not cruel, not kind, like a teacher delighted by a student who stubbornly insists on writing his own homework.
Uncrowned's voice got smaller in a radio somebody had forgotten to turn off. "Gamma next," it said. "Clean."
Ayush looked at the people in the room and the river that had carried him out of one choice and into another, and at the city that had decided to keep asking him for answers that didn't have enough words. He closed his eyes. He opened them when he said he would.
"Tomorrow," he said.
"Tomorrow," Ananya answered.
They didn't wait for it. They started making it.
End of Episode 15: Breach