Morning found them in the half-built tower with too much sky and not enough roof. The river dragged fog up through the slats and laid it over concrete like a sheet. They had slept, if you can call the thing your body does after a night like that sleep.
Ayush woke to the sound of water slapping pilings and the steady scrape of Ajay's fingernail on concrete. Ajay was tracing a line with his ear to the wall—listening the way other men pray.
He tapped twice on a pipe that ran along the stair. Waited. Tapped once. Two fingers to his chest. "Crown," he said quietly.
An answering rhythm came back a beat later, faint and familiar. Two knocks, a pause, three. Suraj's old call. It found the floor, traveled up the column, into their bones.
"Alive," Ajay murmured. Then his mouth flattened. "Holding. But…"
"But," Ananya said, rolling the word between her teeth like grit.
A kid with chalk on his fingers appeared in the stair mouth. Barefoot, breathing hard, eyes too big. He had the ghost mark smeared on his knee. He held out a folded scrap wrapped in cloth and didn't let go until he looked each of them in the face twice.
Ananya knelt to his height. "Who sent you?" she asked.
"Man with split crown," the kid said. "Not the big one. The other. Said find the people with dots. Said hurry before the yellow men make the door go away."
Ajay untied the cloth. Inside: two lines of block letters in pencil, hurried but careful.
ASH. SOUTH LINE HOLDS. V OPENED A DOOR HE CAN'T CLOSE. NEED JOEL. BRING AIR. NOT FIRE.
The slip shook once in Ajay's fingers. "He wrote it on a coil tag," he said, reading the paper beneath the words. "From the south splice. They were wiring while they fought."
Leon rubbed a thumb across Drake's tags and looked toward the floor as if he could see down through three layers of concrete to where the Unseen Empire beat under the city. "Vikram?"
"Opening doors to himself," Ajay said. "He thinks he can bargain with men who paint."
Ananya closed her hand around the message. "So we choose," she said. "We go under to save the map or we stay here and pretend the map won't decide our lives anyway."
Ayush turned the scrap over once. He saw too many versions of the next hour. He picked one. "We go," he said. "We don't all go."
Riya straightened from the clinic corner they had built out of three bandages and a scarf. "I keep the kids and anyone who can't run another stair," she said. "We'll shift to the ghost routes at dusk. If you don't come back, we don't wait."
Shivam flexed his bad arm and grimaced, then wrapped his hand tighter around the iron. "I like downstairs."
Kartik nodded, jaw set. He looked like a boy who had made up his mind to be a different kind of boy. "Me too."
Lucky lifted the mirror rig coil and the battery Ananya had tuned to lie so well. "Noise is better underground," he said, with a half-grin that had learned to be useful.
Leon shouldered his rifle, looked at Nikhil, and made a face meant to be reassuring and ended up being honest. "Be less brave for a few hours," he told the kid.
Ananya looked at Ayush. She didn't ask for a promise he couldn't keep. She said the thing that keeps men alive when pride has talked them into dying. "No heroics. The next right thing."
"The next right thing," he agreed.
Ajay led them down a throat the city had forgotten it owned. The pipe hum grew louder and steadier, a pulse under the bones. The ghost marks—three dots and the slash—showed up on low walls at child height like a breadcrumb trail for people who have learned not to trust any other kind.
They slid into a service shaft lit by red bulbs hung from wire. The Unseen Empire had tightened itself. Sandbags where there hadn't been. Fireborn posted at the narrower mouths. The inverted crown with its split lightning slashed on concrete pillars. People moved like a traffic pattern someone had drawn and they were all trying to follow without making noise.
The hall had changed. It was the same size, but it felt smaller. The clinic corner had two cots and six bodies. A kid slept with a sling that was too big for his arm. Someone's voice sang under breath and didn't sound like it meant the words. The map table in the middle looked like it had been carried across a river.
Vikram stood at the head of the table as if gravity had been trained to favor him. He had the thin folder pressed flat under one palm. A purple bruise shadowed his jaw. His eyes didn't move when they took Ayush in.
"Joel," he said, making it sound like a rank instead of a name. "Welcome back to the mess you made."
Suraj came in from a side tunnel with soot up his forearm and a cut across his knuckles. He moved like he had been standing for hours. His mouth quirked when he saw them, and the line settled into something that wasn't a smile. "Air," he said to Ajay, and clapped him on the shoulder with a gratitude that wasn't for show. To Ayush: "We held."
"People first," Ananya said, eyes scanning the cot line and the corners for the kind of trouble that hides in small shapes. She set her bag down and went straight to a woman trying not to cry because crying would move air wrong and everyone would hear it.
Ajay slid under the table and pressed his ear to a seam. "They've set another cutter on S9," he said. "They're using our old manholes. We taught them. That one's on me."
"It's on them," Suraj said, not kindly, not unkind. He looked at Vikram. "We need to blow S9. Jam the taggers. Re-route west. For once, close a door for the right reason."
"Close a door?" Vikram said. "While Eden is painting our north? You want more ash on my floor, Suraj? You want to give him his theater?" He tapped the folder with two fingers. "We use what we have while we have it. We stop being fools."
"What's in the file?" Ananya asked, polite as a blade.
"Maps," Vikram said without shame. "Routes. Your wires. The things we need to keep people fed while your friend here"—he nodded at Ayush—"keeps turning doors into walls."
Ayush reached across the table and took the folder. He didn't ask. He opened it. The top sheet was Ajay's neat lines—the Atlas, scrawled in pencil and smears, a city written in a language power recognizes. Yellow circles and slashes marked places someone had decided mattered. He flipped two pages in and found a stenciled EDEN on a corner. Vikram had stamped it to remind himself what he feared. Or what he loved.
Suraj's voice went dangerously quiet. "You were keeping copies."
"Insurance," Vikram said. "Ask your friend with the rifles what the word means."
Leon didn't take the bait. He stared at Vikram until the man stopped enjoying his own reflection. "Insurance is something you use for a fire," he said. "Not something you sell to the arsonist."
Vikram smiled a little. "I'm trying to make sure the fire forgets my door."
"It won't," Ananya said, matter-of-fact. "It remembers who set the table."
Ajay came up from under the table, eyes on the air which is a ridiculous thing to say and exactly what he was doing. "They'll cut through in five," he said. "Maybe four. Maybe two if they brought new teeth."
Suraj touched his chest once and then set his palm flat on the map. "We need a doctrine," he said to the room, not to Vikram. "Not walls and guts. Rules. Not because rules keep you alive. Because they keep the men who will survive you from making walls out of your bones."
Ayush closed the folder. He slid it into the coals of the brazier by the pillar and held it there with the flat of his hand until the edges blackened, then red. He let go when the paper curled and gave a small, dirty flame to the room. He watched ash climb into the light. "No maps you can steal," he said. "No lines you can sell. We burn every route after we use it. We air-gap the spines. Kids get routes we don't write down. Doors we go through become walls within two days. Any man caught dealing with Eden goes outside. There is no outside for that kind of man."
Vikram's mouth twitched. "You just traded a crown for a ghost," he said. "How do you feed people with a story?"
"You feed people with a grid," Ajay said. "We build one we can trust. Sockets instead of roads. Jammer nodes at the splices. S14—what we did there, on purpose and often. We teach the city to lie at the right second and tell the truth at the right door."
Leon slid a magazine across the table toward Suraj. "And we teach men not to love shooting at shadows."
Ananya looked at Suraj and then at the Fireborn clustered by the north tunnel, young faces tight and trying to be brave in the way that keeps their friends alive and their names off the walls. "You make oaths that cost you," she said. "Not words. Time. Tires. Food. You carry children when it makes you slow. You give up routes you love. You don't make a palace under a city that's starving."
Vikram's eyes flicked to the brazier. He looked like a man watching money burn while someone told him it's a blessing. The cut on his jaw throbbed purple, a reminder the world had hands. He lifted his head, made a tiny motion with two fingers. Up in the gallery, three men shifted their rifles a fraction in a way that made the room colder.
Suraj didn't look up. He didn't turn. "Don't," he said softly.
"Do what," Vikram said, so smoothly you almost didn't hear the echo from an hour ago when he had been a minute away from doing exactly this.
Ajay's head tilted. "S9 is singing," he said. "We argue—we drown."
Vikram went very still. There is a particular silence that means a man has decided what kind of man he is going to be the next five minutes. Then something in his jaw slipped a millimeter toward human.
He looked at the Fireborn. "Who do you follow?" he asked.
The four at the front glanced at each other. The youngest stepped forward and tapped the split crown on his sleeve. Then he brought his fingers to his temple and flicked them off. The ghost sign. A vote that sounded like nothing and weighed like a brick.
"Fine," Vikram said. He lifted his hands from the table and stepped back. "You burn the Atlas. You build your sockets. You bleed my routes into air. If we starve people, it'll be on your ghost."
Ananya met his eyes. "If we become a throne," she said, "it will be on yours."
A run came in the floor. Ajay's head snapped toward the south tunnel. A cutter kissed daylight. Air hissed. Men in gray began to spill up through a neat hole.
"Welcome party," Leon said, moving before he finished the words, rifle and hand like one thing.
The first Eden tagger rose with his puck already spinning. Lucky flicked the rig; feedback knifed the tunnel. The man flinched, puck skittering to a pillar. Ajay kicked it into the brazier with the ash of the Atlas. It popped like a bad plan.
"Fireborn!" Suraj barked, authority snapping like his jack when it bites steel. "Not a line. A net. Two on the mouth. One on each rail. Keep them in the cone."
They moved like they had been practicing this their whole lives and had just learned the words for it. The first gray fell right into the choke. Shivam's iron met him under the ear and made a new rule: you don't get to leave the room with the map. Kartik followed with the chisel in a neat, ugly stroke and made peace with the sound it made.
Two more poured out, batons humming. Ananya tossed a coil; tin sang; one swung toward sound and lost his neck to economy. Leon fired into the second's thigh, then his shoulder, not because he was kind—because a man with electric in his hand is more dangerous than a man with a hole in him if his heart still works. The baton clattered. Smoke rolled. Ajay dove under, turned the junction, and the densest fog obeyed gravity again and went where it belongs: away.
Rahul watched from a shadowed notch, one hand hooked under the catwalk rail, the other on the red band at his wrist. He wasn't smiling. He looked like a man reading a book and surprised to find a sentence he hadn't written.
The fight lasted five minutes. Maybe six. It felt like a whole day in a room that had stopped pretending to be anything but what it was: a decision.
When the last gray slithered back down their own hole dragging the dead weight of a man who had never thought of himself as dead weight until now, quiet came fast. Quiet when you're underground always feels more final. It shouldn't. But it does.
Ajay stood and spit gritty black into his palm and wiped it on his shirt. "S9 dropped," he said. "We won this hour. I'd like to keep it."
Suraj blew air out through his nose, a laugh without joy. He clapped Ayush once on the shoulder. "Doctrine," he said. "Make it ugly. Make it ours."
Ayush put his hand on the map table and made a list with his mouth, because paper will lie again. "Red Door Protocol," he said. "Any door we use becomes a wall in forty-eight hours. Only kids' doors get longer. Ghost Sockets: jammer slugs at the splices—Ajay, you build them, Lucky assists, we hide them in places that sound wrong to the grid. Crown and Split—no deals with Eden, ever. Fireborn—rules of heat. No shooting unless there's a body behind a sound. Carry, don't count. Ghost routes will get child marks. Crown carries diesel, not pride."
He looked at Vikram. "You run trains," he said. "You can't drive men. Not like this. Be the man who lifts the sacks and counts the bolts. Not the man who counts the dead."
Vikram's eyes could have been ice or glass. He was tired. He would never admit it. He was not going to say yes. He wasn't going to say no. He was going to take his men and his vehicles and his injured pride and be indispensable tomorrow. He raised two fingers in a salute that meant nothing and everything. "Ash today," he said. "We'll see what crown is worth in the morning."
He walked, and four men went with him, and three stayed. The three swallowed, looked at Suraj, then at Ananya, then at Ajay. They weren't thrilled. They were decided.
Suraj turned to the hall, the clinic, the Fireborn, Ajay, Ayush, and the sear of the folder in the brazier. "Say it," he said.
"Alley, not throne," Ananya said first.
"Web, not wall," Ajay added.
"Open, then burn," Leon said, surprising himself with how much the words fit in his mouth.
"Carry," Riya said softly, like a promise.
Ayush drew the ghost mark where kids could see it next to the inverted crown painted on the pillar. He put a thumb through the ash and dragged a line through it. "No maps," he said. "Only hands."
He looked at Suraj. "This is your house," he said. "You keep it humble."
Suraj huffed. "I hate humility," he said. He didn't sound like a man who planned on staying in love with thrones.
A runner slid in from the north, breath gone, eyes sharp. "Two on top," he said. "Small—fast—painted like soldiers. Not ours. Not gray. Black jackets. Guns they don't love right."
Ajay glanced at Leon. "Fireflies," he said. "Or what's left when you teach rot words."
"Not now," Suraj said, and reached for the jack.
From somewhere above, faint, through the cracks where the hall spoke to the city, a voice that didn't belong to pipes or drones found a cheap radio and made itself large. "…gamma next…" it said, still patient, still without feeling. "Clean."
"It won't be," Ananya said, with no drama, to no one in particular. She meant the grid and the men who thought they owned it.
They worked for another hour while hours still bought anything. Ajay and Lucky turned S14 into a kit. Riya threaded a sling through a boy's elbow with cloth she'd torn from a shirt that had once been worn to something happy. The Fireborn practiced hand signals until they were language. Suraj walked the line with the jack handle over his shoulder like a crooked scepter he would not allow himself to keep. Ayush set his hands on three doors until he felt the wood remember him.
Before they left, he pulled Suraj into the narrow mouth by the south splice where the sound of cutters had been five minutes ago and was not now. "You used the fuse," he said.
Suraj flexed his hand. "Bought two minutes," he said. "Cost me a knuckle and the part of me that liked easy math."
"Vikram?" Ayush asked.
"He'll be here tomorrow," Suraj said. "He's too good at being necessary to leave, and too bad at being obedient to sit." He touched the inverted crown on the pillar, then his chest. "Neither of us are kings. Remind me."
"I will," Ayush said.
They climbed back toward the heat and noise of the upper city. The hall breathed behind them—the new kind of breath. Not the held one. The working one.
Outside, the sky had turned the color it wears when everything you hate about it is honest. They reached the tower with too much roof and not enough sky. Riya had the clinic corner nested and the kids counted. Nikhil looked up at them and smiled and then looked embarrassed to be seen doing it.
Ajay's head tilted, the way a man's does when the grid tells him a joke only he can hear. "Raj is still standing," he said. He made a face like a hand placed on a shoulder through a wall. "And he will be. Until he isn't."
A shadow flickered across the gap between the buildings, quick and thin. Rahul stood on a billboard frame, one palm on steel, the other on the red band, watching them the way a man watches a fire you decided not to put out. He lifted his fingers from his temple and flicked. Habit. Vow. Threat. Blessing. It meant everything and nothing.
Ananya stared back. "He doesn't get to decide our timing," she said, quiet enough to be a prayer.
Ayush took a breath. "No," he said. "We do."
Uncrowned's voice found a dead radio on the sill and leaked its small certainty into the room. "Gamma. Clean."
Ayush turned it face down and put his foot on it until it went quiet.
They spent the last light of the day making the city learn five new tricks. Ajay slid two new Ghost Sockets into the S14 kit and sent Leon to put them where a man who loves maps will never look. Riya taught a girl how to tie off a line with one hand. Lucky ran wire up a stair and hid a mirror where the drone loves to check first. Shivam made Nikhil laugh by missing on purpose and then taught him how to not. Ananya wrote three dots and a slash low on a wall and pressed her thumb through the ash of the old mark next to it.
When night came again, it wasn't clean. That was fine. They had stopped asking it to be.
"Tomorrow," Ananya said, because she doesn't let the word scare her anymore.
"Tomorrow," Ayush said. He slept without promising anyone anything. He woke when he said he would.
End of Episode 16: Ash and Crown