The sun had dipped low, bleeding into the horizon like the smoldering ruins of a distant fire. Within the cracked walls of Tower C's common hall, a dull heat clung to every surface. The ceiling fan rotated lazily above, squeaking in uneven rhythm as the gathered residents argued beneath it. No one was shouting yet, but voices carried that strained edge, the kind that warned an explosion was close.
Shivansh stood near the back, arms folded, saying nothing.
Ashok Tripathi was in full swing now, pacing slowly in front of the group like a man giving a courtroom speech. His kurta was stained at the collar, his brow glistened with sweat, but he carried himself with the certainty of someone who truly believed he was making sense.
"All I'm saying is how long are we going to keep following a boy?" he declared, gesturing loosely in Shivansh's direction. "He's twenty. He's certainly not that mature! And now we're letting him make the choices that decide if we live or die?"
A few murmurs rippled through the crowd mostly uncertainty, not support.
Ankita looked up from where she sat beside Rekha Sethi. Her voice was cold, deliberate. "He's also the one who fought to save all of you. The one who organized the floor clearings. The one who came back when others stayed hiding."
Ashok raised both hands, defensive. "I'm not saying he's a bad kid. I'm just saying maybe we need a council. Voting. Real leadership. Imran-ji here is ex-army. Rekha ma'am's a principal. And Samarjeet" he nodded to the corner where the old CRPF officer leaned against a pillar, arms crossed and eyes half-lidded "he's the one teaching us how to survive, not Shivansh."
Samarjeet didn't move. "He's teaching you how to shoot. That's not the same as leading."
Ashok hesitated. It was subtle, but it was a crack in his footing.
From the back, Parth finally spoke. "Shivansh never asked to lead. We followed him because he moved while others argued. That's the difference."
Zoya, seated near the window, glanced over but said nothing.
"I'm just saying," Ashok repeated, a little quieter now, "we shouldn't be putting the weight of fifty lives on a college boy's shoulders."
Shivansh pushed away from the wall and stepped forward. Everyone turned.
But he didn't respond to Ashok. He didn't raise his voice. He just nodded once, looked across the room at everyone watching him people with dirt under their nails and hunger in their eyes and then turned and walked out.
No slamming doors. No parting speech. Just the quiet scrape of his footsteps fading down the corridor.
Vedant sat at the edge of the hallway, watching his brother disappear into the darkening corridor. His fingers curled around the cricket ball he hadn't touched in days. He didn't speak, but his wide eyes were heavy with something even he didn't have words for yet.
Back in the hall, no one filled the silence. Not right away.
Because somewhere deep down, they all knew the same truth: they hadn't followed Shivansh because they voted for him. They followed him because when hell came, he didn't wait to be asked.
The night air was thick with the smell of rust and heat-soaked cement. Shivansh walked slowly along the edge of the compound, passing shadows that once used to be lampposts and garden hedges. What little power the solar rig had managed to store today flickered across some windowpanes, casting ghostly rectangles of light onto walls where memories had dried out weeks ago.
He didn't look back toward Tower C. He didn't have to. The words Ashok had said weren't new. They just hurt differently when everyone was listening.
By the main gate, he stopped. One of the barricades a makeshift pile of discarded fridges, cabinet doors, and tin sheets creaked faintly in the rising wind. He placed his hand on the warm metal and leaned forward, staring into the empty lane outside. Beyond the trees, somewhere in the sprawl of Delhi's broken arteries, they were watching. Listening. Maybe even smiling.
He took out his walkie, thumbed it on, and whispered, "All quiet at the east barricade."
A brief hiss. Then Parth's voice: "Copy that. South line's holding too."
He clicked it off and sat down on an old cement bench, one half cracked from an earlier explosion. His mind drifted not to Ashok, but to his father.
Rajeev Sharma's voice had always carried authority without having to rise. A man of method, rules, and stubborn honor. As a child, Shivansh had been scared of him. As a teen, he resented him. But now, in this burning world, he missed him like a lung misses air.
"You don't earn trust with titles," his father had once said during Diwali police briefing, he'd taken Shivansh to. "You earn it by walking into the fire first."
He didn't know if his father was still alive. The radio signal in the morning gave hope. But hope felt too expensive now.
A sound made him stiffen a sharp footstep behind him.
Imran Qureshi walked out of the darkness like a statue breaking loose from stone. The old army man didn't say anything at first. Just stood beside the barricade, scanning the same dark horizon.
"You held your ground better than most men twice your age," Imran said finally.
Shivansh didn't respond. "You think Ashok's wrong?"
Shivansh looked up at the older man, his eyes dull. "No. I think he's scared. I think we all are."
Imran nodded. "Fear's not the problem. Cowardice is. You're not that."
There was a long silence between them, broken only by the distant hum of Mukul's drone passing overhead like a night hawk.
"They're still watching us," Imran added. "Crows. I saw one of their bikes behind the collapsed gate pile. They didn't hide."
"They're not hiding anymore," Shivansh said quietly. "They're giving us time… because they want us broken before they come in."
He stood up, brushing dust from his jeans. "Two days," he said. "That's what Vikram said."
Imran nodded. "Then we use every second of it."
Shivansh turned toward the towers. The light from the temple on the rooftop flickered, barely visible. His mother would be upstairs now, rationing the night meal. Niharika might be tending to the sick. Someone maybe Aarav was probably still crying in silence.
He gripped the bat in his hand tighter, knuckles whitening.
"I don't care if they think I'm the leader," he muttered. "I just want to make sure that my family… and my people live." Morning light broke over the towers like a reluctant truth. It spilled through broken windows and crumbled curtain rods, touching every crack, every bloodstained memory the compound carried. The silence wasn't peaceful. It was watchful like the quiet before a courtroom verdict. The survivors didn't sleep much the night before, and the lines under their eyes showed it. But they moved. They worked. Because stillness was death.
In the campus courtyard, Samarjeet Rana's voice rang out sharp and clipped.
"Grip it tighter. You're not waving a stick you're swinging to kill."
He moved among the circle of residents with the same authority he must've once had during CRPF drills. His eyes swept over every stance correcting Aarav's balance, adjusting Gurleen Kaur's wrist angle, nudging Roshni Verma's foot placement with his boot.
"Center of gravity low. Swing at the temple or the neck. Anything else is waste."
Parth stood nearby, pretending to supervise, but his mind was elsewhere. A few feet behind him, Dinesh Chauhan was wiping sweat from his forehead, crouched near a narrow opening in the western boundary wall an old maintenance duct that led into the drain systems under the sector.
They were expanding the opening, brick by brick, covering the work with plywood and junk to keep it hidden. The escape route. The backup plan. The only hope if things went south again and they would.
Only eight people knew: Shivansh, Parth, Dinesh, Samarjeet, Imran, Rekha, Ankita, and Mukul. No one else had been told. Not yet.
"They need hope, not panic," Rekha had said the night before. "Telling them now would make it worse."
"Right now, we prepare," Samarjeet had agreed. "We train them to fight but we make sure we can run."
And so the day had begun.
At the far end of the courtyard, Zoya sat on the lowest stair of Tower A, arms wrapped around her knees, staring into nothing. Her stick lay beside her, untouched. Her eyes were red not from tears, but from being too tired to cry anymore.
She didn't flinch when the kids practiced screaming. Didn't turn when Mukul's drone buzzed above the trees. But she tensed when someone behind her laughed just a harmless chuckle, nothing sinister. Still, her fingers curled tight into her arms. She remembered Aamir's laugh. How it came before the apologies, and after the bruises.
Last night had opened something inside her she hadn't dared revisit.
Vikram's voice… his calmness. It was like Aamir's all over again. A man who smiled as he broke you. A man who made silence feel like shackles. And here she was again, trapped behind walls that could not keep monsters out.
She didn't notice Shivansh sit beside her.
"You missed the swings," he said gently, not pushing.
She shook her head. "They don't work on ghosts."
Shivansh didn't ask more. He just sat with her until she could breathe again.
Later, in a dim first-floor flat that had become the unofficial "war room," Shivansh, Samarjeet, Imran, Parth, and the others gathered around a spread-out map of the sector. Dinesh used a pencil to trace the tunnel path while Mukul flipped drone images on his tablet.
"There's a weak fence line near the drain exit here," Parth said. "We can slip out two at a time, no noise."
Imran tapped a different part of the map. "The Crows are testing us. Bikes every six hours. They're waiting for us to crack first."
"And we will," Samarjeet said grimly, "if we don't move before they strike."
"And Neetu?" Shivansh asked, glancing at Ankita. Ankita's face was tight. "She's due any day now. Sooner, if the stress keeps rising."
Everyone went quiet. That was the deadline. They didn't just need to survive they needed to leave. Fast. Quiet. Together. The night crawled in like smoke through a cracked window unwanted, heavy, impossible to stop. The campus felt colder than usual, despite the summer heat still radiating from the concrete. Survivors lingered in corners, kept their voices low, and glanced at each other a little too often. Trust had taken a hit and not from the Crows.
Ashok Tripathi had spent the entire afternoon whispering.
He moved subtly from Gurleen Kaur near the kitchen to Pooja Bansal at the washing area. A word here, a sigh there. He didn't outright say it, but the implication hung thick in the air: Why are we letting the boy lead?They're hiding things.We should know the plan, not just follow it blindly.
And in truth, people were cracking.
They'd seen more feathers in the corners one on the gate, another near the broken balcony of Tower D. Whether planted or carried in by wind didn't matter. The effect was the same.
Fear.
Aarav, still recovering from the hospital encounter, was the one who found it near the kitchen tucked behind the gas cylinders like a threat left under a pillow. He brought it to Shivansh in silence, eyes wide.
"They're not waiting anymore," Shivansh said, staring at the feather. "They're watching how we react."
Paranoia ran like poison through the halls. People started sleeping with whatever weapons they had knives, sticks, broken chair legs. Even Rekha had taped a shard of glass under her bedside table.
And then the music started again.
Soft, echoing over the outer wall. A Hindi classic romantic, almost pleasant. Playing from somewhere along the highway. Familiar, because it was the same tune from two nights ago. The Crows' twisted lullaby.
Mukul spotted lights blinking near the broken Society Mall wall long, short, short. Then again. Some kind of code. Maybe a warning. Maybe a game.
That night, on the rooftop of Tower B, Shivansh sat cross-legged with Samarjeet beside him, a page torn from a school notebook spread out between them. It had scribbled sketches of crude bombs tripwire layouts, gas canister pressure tricks, old-school tactics Samarjeet hadn't thought about since his CRPF field days.
"If we find what we need…" Samarjeet murmured, pointing to one corner of the paper, "we could wire a delayed explosion. Fire, noise, and maybe collapse a building wing if they swarm."
"But we'd need a lot," Shivansh said. "Wires, pipes, nails, powder… and cylinders."
Samarjeet looked up. "We'll find it. If your father's station is intact, it might still have riot supplies. Maybe even a locker key for confiscated weapons."
Shivansh's throat tightened at the thought of stepping into his father's precinct.
"Only one shot," Samarjeet added. "But if timed right, it could wipe them out. Or at least buy us the window to run."
Shivansh nodded. "Then tomorrow, we send a team east. Not to the hospital to Rohini PS-37."
The society had never felt this still not even on the night the outbreak reached their gates. This quiet was different. It was observed, like the calm inside a hunting blind, when the predator watches just close enough to hear your breath.
Up on Tower D's rooftop, Mukul sat behind a stack of water tanks, eyes on his drone feed. The boy hadn't spoken for an hour. Below him, Parth slowly patrolled the terrace with a cricket bat resting on his shoulder. The moonlight bounced off the edge of the bat like a knife waiting to be used.
Then it started. Low, haunting music. A retro Bollywood tune crackled over unseen speakers somewhere along the broken highway. Then, silence again. In Tower B, Rekha turned off the single working bulb. In the far kitchen corner of Tower A, Aarav froze mid-step his breath catching in his throat.
There, on the inside sill of the broken dining hall window, was another crow feather, laid with a kind of surgical intent.
He backed away fast and rushed down to find Shivansh. Minutes later, the rooftop was full.
"They got that close?" Imran asked coldly, looking toward the wall. "They're testing our eyes. Ours… and Mukul's drone."
"I saw something too," Mukul added. "At the Society Mall ruins. Flashlights. In threes. Then two. Then one."
"Code," Samarjeet said instantly. "Either a pattern or a distraction."
No goodbye. No signal. Just a click. Like a finger lifting off a trigger.
Down below, Ankita was guiding the night watch shifts. Zoya sat near Neetu's bedside, who was groaning in her sleep now. The baby wasn't waiting much longer.
In Tower A, Parth covered the drain exit with old doors and wheeled planters. And on the rooftop, Shivansh stood alone by the edge, watching the city glow dimly in the far distance. His hands clenched the railing. His bat leaned against the wall like a promise. He whispered into the dark.
"Tomorrow… we either lead, or we fall."