The city was between breaths. One of those nights when the river held the fog low and the drones stitched wide, lazy figure eights as if they were bored. Ajay stood on the parapet with his hand on the rebar, listening the way men in this world listen: to lines under concrete, to the way light moves when a generator pitches a different hum, to nothing and what it means.
"Three trucks," he said. "By the collapsed span. Not CGS. Not Eden-blue. Off-grid." He lifted his chin toward the dark wedge where the old flyover peeled off and lay crooked in its own shadow. "Guard posture's wrong for volunteers. Too neat for looters, not neat enough for a column."
Leon wiped a thumb down the side of the scope and clamped the rifle into the groove he'd carved for it last week. He eased his cheek to the stock and let the glass eat distance. "Two dozen men," he murmured. "Mixed kit. Firefly patches on four. The rest—unknown. Crates stacked around the center rig. Labels…" A quiet exhale. "E. Same stencils we saw under the station."
Ananya met Ayush's eyes without asking for permission. "We're not leaving regrets down there."
Ayush looked at the map he kept now only in his head. Red Door. Ghost Socket. Carry, don't count. The doctrine needed a meaner line: deny power. "We take one truck," he said, low. "We burn what we can't carry. We don't become the thing we're keeping other people from being."
Shivam smirked in the way you do when fear is a tool and you've learned how to pick it up. "I'll bring the ride," he said. "Depot on the east. Bus with juice if the city hasn't eaten it." He touched the iron once to his palm and slid into the lump of stair shadow like he'd been made of it.
"Jammers," Ajay said to Lucky. "Two Ghost Sockets. Clamp them to the feeder that touches that span. Ten-second cough. Eden scanners go dumb just long enough for us to steal their shoes."
Lucky nodded hard enough the foil antenna taped to his pack wrinkled. He'd stopped looking at his hands like they were evidence and started treating them like tools. "Foil rig to the drone's favorite angle," he said. "We give the sky a mirror. Let it get romantic."
Riya checked the pouch, the bandage, the clove paste she'd stolen from herself and given back a hundred times. "Two rolls. One needle. Don't make me choose which of you hates me more."
Suraj watched the dark. The old smirk made a quiet return and sat under the honest worry. "We don't keep crowns in crates," he said. "Burn the throne and the room it lives in."
Ananya smiled without warmth. "I'll play shepherd. Ten seconds of scream when you need left to think it's right. Thirty gets you mobs. We like ten."
Kartik swallowed. He had the chisel and the posture now. His heartbeat had learned what a funnel does and how you hold one together. "Just say when."
"Now," Ayush said, and the word wasn't a shout. It was a key.
They moved in two files along the ghost routes they'd made. Mirror rigs wrapped in tarps. A coil of tins on a string like cheap jewelry a city loves on a good day. Ghost Sockets nestled in Ajay's pack beside the small tool set that had kept ten people alive more times than a gun. They reached the edge of the flyover's rib and slid down the slope where grass had clawed its way back through asphalt. They went on their stomachs the last ten feet and a piece of old guardrail took Ayush's sleeve and refused to apologize.
Leon stalked ahead, the glass sweeping. "East truck looks light," he breathed. "Three on the far side. One smoker. One with a bolt gun. One with a face that loves shouting."
"Vulnerable," Ananya whispered. She could read men through a scope too; the data just came different.
Ajay palmed one Ghost Socket under the concrete lip and clamped it to an old conduit. He ran a wire to the second and taped it into a fat artery he'd hung last week for a moment like this he'd hoped wouldn't come. "On my tick," he murmured. "Ten seconds of dumb. No more."
The city answered with small, cooperative miracles. Shivam ghosted out of a bus bay with a battered municipal runabout in toddler-cream, lights dead, engine convinced to misbehave on command. He dipped at the edge of the ramp and set the truck idling with a breath. He got out and patted the hood once, like you pat a dog you know might bite a stranger.
Ananya ran line and tins to a low beam and left them draped just so. The first tug would turn whisper into thunder. The second would be silence again. She set the speaker under a dented section of barrier, battery taped to its back with foil that would shine like a lie to any drone that wanted to love the wrong thing.
"Lucky," Ajay said.
"Ghost it," Lucky answered, grinning. He flipped the switch. A soft coil inside the Socket whined up to a frequency dogs hate and Eden decks are happy to ignore right until they fail. "Three… two…"
Ajay threw the splice. The old feeder hummed like a throat clearing. Somewhere up the span, a small transformer decided to be an ally. The scanner rigs on the trucks did what men do when lied to well: they believed.
"Now," Ayush said.
It was like pushing into heavy water. They broke cover and walked into the east bay like men who had come to take their overtime. Ananya squealed the feedback for ten and a little more because some mistakes are math on purpose. Three heads snapped left. Shouting man shouted—first into the sound, then at his own men, then at his choice.
Leon took the bolt gunner's knee, then the smoker's shoulder. Shivam climbed into the east cab, popped the brake, and smiled as if the steering wheel had said something admirable. Kartik slid under the truck's far side and cut the strap on the first crate with the chisel like he was in a class designed for this exact cut. Riya repurposed two cargo slings into the kind of harness you can't buy anymore and made the vials cradle themselves without anyone having to say the words break or bleed.
Suraj arrived like conscience and grabbed Ananya by the elbow as if he'd nearly done something stupid and decided not to. "Flip the mirror," he said, and she did, and the drone drank in the false heat the way love always finds a reason to misbehave.
"Two more," Leon said softly into the air. "Flank. Unknowns. Their boots aren't Firefly."
Ajay dropped the second Socket and clipped it to the truck's scan tongue for insult. "Sorry, love," he murmured to the machine. "We've got other plans for your night."
The vials were real. E printed in the same block letters as under the station. Temper locks that would shriek if you opened anything wrong. On the second layer, sealed packs with data pellets sandwiched in foam. Not a cure. A project. An appetite.
"Don't open," Ajay hissed, sharper than anything else he'd said to them all month. "Not out here. Not ever if you can help it. Box what you can carry without breaking your knees. Deny the rest."
Riya made the call with her hands. Three vials. One data pack. Enough to learn. Not enough to become a kind of king.
"Less talk," Shivam said. The engine grumbled low in his throat as if reminding everyone it was a character. He eased the truck toward the gap in the barrier between two concrete teeth. The men shouting behind them realized too late that someone had drawn a map they weren't seeing.
"Smoke," Suraj said.
Ananya tossed the can. It popped with a soft, catty cough and unrolled a curtain that made men look romantic until they coughed. The shouting man shouted in the wrong direction. He'd live. That was a gift, whether he deserved it or not.
"Leon!" Ayush's voice. No orders. You don't give a hawk orders. You point at the sky. Leon made the sky smaller by one problem and then they were over the lip and into momentum.
Shivam muscled the truck down the ramp and swung into the bus lane they'd kept clean on purpose with a whole week of stealing junk and moving it to other places. The drones made a decision. They went right for the mirror and left for the heat and in the middle they lost the plot. Men with rifles rode the wrong line. Eden decks coughed and rebooted at the worst possible time for them and the best possible time for a doctrine.
Behind them, the other two trucks had to learn very quickly what happens when someone removes the point of a triangle. Firefly patches argued with unknown shoulder stripes about command. A flare ripped up and made left look like right and Riya turned her head so she wouldn't think of the boys in the picture the flares reminded her of.
They made the ramp's end, crossed the gutter with a grunt, and cut into the service lane between two tumbling blocks. "Left," Ajay called. "Not alley. Barricaded. We set it that way." Shivam listened. The wheel listened to his hands. The truck thanked him with a lurch instead of a flip. They slid into the dead textile yard and coasted the last twenty yards—lights still down, engine reader hissing low.
"Inside," Suraj snapped. His voice was not the old one. It had thickened since the doctrine. Less teeth. More bone. "We unload and we burn the bed. Nobody gets more than we get."
The godown—a cousin of three others they had burned or used or promised to not make a palace out of—took the truck into itself with a cough of dust. They reversed into the shadow and stopped hard enough to make rags jump.
Riya counted vials. Three. She set them on a strip of rubber like she was putting a sleeping baby down on a pillow and not in a city that kept asking these children to be older than they should.
Lucky jammed the chocks and jammed them again. "Foil," he said, and taped the antenna back onto the mirror so the sky would love the wrong square for two more minutes. "Smoke," Ananya said, and ran a smaller can up the vent so it would lie to the nearest deck that thought it was smarter than it was.
Ajay took a breath and held it and then let it out. His shoulders dropped maybe one millimeter. "Ghost it," he said, and they lifted and pushed and dragged the crates they weren't keeping back onto the deck.
"Burn it," Suraj finished.
Ananya touched the rag. The city took the gift and did not say thank you. Fire walked lazily across wood like it had decided to have an easy night for once. It kissed the straps and made the nails pop with small cheerful noises. The stenciled E on a still-bound crate blackened and vanished under ash.
Leon stood by the door with his rifle up, counting shots he didn't fire. "Off-grid squads pulling away," he murmured. "Two toward east. One toward north. Fireflies aren't pursuing. They look insulted."
"Good," Ayush said. He sounded tired and like the word had meant something in a different life and he was learning its new meaning. "We don't play arena."
They rolled the truck back out and took it across the yard and made sure the fire could finish correctly. In the morning, someone would curse scorched metal and they would write a note in chalk on a wall the drone would never look at: NOT FOR SALE.
They moved the vials and the data into the closet behind the break loom. Ajay found a steel drawer that had once held patterns and made it into a safe. Ananya tied their marks low. Riya wrote one word under the ghost slash in tiny letters: later.
Leon folded a scrap of cloth and drew coordinates on it in grease. He slipped it into Ayush's vest. "If I fall," he said, not dramatic, not in need of being denied it, "you lead them here, then you burn this."
Ayush nodded and did not tell him not to say mouth-shaping things like that anymore. He had learned that denial when work waits is a theft.
Shivam leaned his forehead against the truck's hot side panel and grinned at his reflection as if the man in the metal looked better tired. Kartik sat on a crate and let his breath catch up and was surprised when it did. Lucky crouched and extended one finger toward a vial and then didn't touch it and smiled like he'd passed a test he hadn't known he was taking.
Suraj watched the fire finish what it started. "We don't run a lab," he said to Ayush's shoulder. "We don't make a crown here. We learn and we deny."
Ayush looked at the vials. He remembered the breathing under the station and the way tag fog loves the lower places and how a drone loves heat. "We learn and we deny," he repeated.
They made ready to move. Ghost sockets back into Ajay's bag. Mirror rigs under tarps. Ananya wrapped the speaker with tape like she was tucking a child in. Riya and Kartik tied harness and rope in the shape of last resort. Leon took the high guard with the ease of ritual. Shivam made sure his muscles would hate him later. Lucky touched the door frame twice, a habit that had decided to be a superstition.
They stepped into the lane.
Rahul was across the street on a dead escalator, elbows on the rail, chin on the back of one hand. He looked at the burned truck and the ash on the floor and the three faces that had changed shape because last night and this night had asked them to. He didn't clap. He didn't lift his fingers to his temple. He smiled the small way again and said, conversationally across the space, "You keep making choices. Good."
Ayush didn't look up all the way. He said without saying it: Not yours. Not this time. He walked past and the group moved with him and the city opened the way it sometimes does when you've been kind to it.
Behind them, downriver, a dull voice from a dead radio tried to make itself important. "Package lost," it said, though nobody in that room needed to hear it to know. "Shift west. Clean."
Ananya turned the dead radio face down and stepped on it. The plastic made the right noise. It wasn't a victory. It was a rule.
They faded into the dead textile lanes where ghosts belong and the map lives whether or not you write it. Before they lost the edge of the yard, Leon looked back once without letting his rifle slip. He marked lines in the dark the way men like him do and then put the marks away because the morning would need his eyes clean.
Ayush touched the scrap with the coordinates in his vest. He pictured Suraj with the jack and Vikram with the folder burned in his chest and Raj at the gate and a project with a pretty name that needed deniers as much as soldiers. "Tomorrow," he said.
Ananya didn't bother with the word. She set her hand on his and kept walking.
End of Episode 17: Phantom Shadows