The river woke before the city did. Cold metal in the air. Diesel. Refrigeration. A new hum under the old one.
Ajay pressed his ear to the stair column. Tap—tap. Pause. One. The reply came crown‑correct—two, pause, three—but under it a steady hiss like someone whispering in a metal throat.
"Freezers on the move," he said, palm flat to concrete. "South span. They're pulling current straight off the embankment."
Mallick's map lay open on the parapet, the crease where "Delta‑3" and "Delta‑4" met worn thin. He touched a fingernail to the river bend. "Ferry crossing," he said. "This part of the city used to take weddings across there. Eden's got a generator on the lower deck now. They'll ride their crates through the middle of our memory."
Ananya tied her scarf. "How many doors do we lose if the bridge goes?"
Ajay didn't answer immediately. He ran a finger along a line nobody had written because some maps live under skin. "Two markets," he said. "Three child doors. A clinic we aren't supposed to know about. A woman with a red sari who hands out boiled sweets at the corner even when she should keep them. That kind."
Suraj hefted the jack, that crooked scepter he kept refusing to let become anything but a tool. "We don't blow that bridge," he said. "They want us to. We don't."
Ayush looked south. Beyond three broken towers, a steel truss lay tight to the water like a spine, the last piece of the city that still believed in crossing. A ferry had nosed into the current under it—a wide, low tray with a pilot house, two vehicles lashed, people wedged shoulder to shoulder on deck under a smear of tarps. Blue flags flapped on a pike. Too clean. Too even. Copied grammar.
"Joseph," Ananya said, soft as a diagnosis.
On the pilot house roof, a man had one hand on a rail and the other on a loudhailer. He wore his scarf loose, like a memory. He didn't look like anyone's villain until he opened his mouth.
"Civilians," his voice rolled across the water like a practiced blessing. "Stay calm. We are moving families to safety. Ten minutes. Anyone who stands in the way kills more than they save."
There he was. Joseph sounded like mercy. He made men believe that made him right.
Ajay's head tilted, listening to the grid's thin song ride up from the river. "Eden's deck humming under him," he said. "Breakwater on a boat. He thinks he can make it a bridge."
"No," Ayush said. "We'll turn it into a bank."
They broke the work with their hands like they were teaching the city a trick.
Ajay and Lucky ran for S12—four turns from the embankment—a junction box welded into a wall and forgotten by anyone who didn't owe it rent. Ghost Sockets bit into the feeder. "Three… two…" Ajay whispered, thumb on the switch. "Now."
A small transformer under the river cleared its throat. The hum on the ferry's deck coughed, then steadied on a lower note. Enough to make a machine uncertain.
Suraj peeled east with two Fireborn boys and Shivam toward the old sluice gate above the ferry line. "We'll open her mouth just enough to push," he said. "Not enough to drown." The Fireborn boys nodded, helmets hanging by straps like pendants. Shivam tested the iron, grinned without heat. "I love water that does what we tell it," he lied.
Leon climbed to the catwalk along the truss with his glass, a rope, and a painter's pole from Ajay's stash that had started to become doctrine. He wedged himself into a cradle of rust and sighted the ferry. "Two hawser lines," he said into the borrowed radio. "One bow. One stern. If we cut the stern and pull left, the current will do the rest."
Ananya went to the landing under the bridge and strung tin low along the guardrail. Shepherd's line. Ten seconds of scream. No more. "Small steps," she told two Fireborn she handed rope to. "Hands here. Eyes there. You don't panic. You make other people change their minds."
Riya hacked triage into the shadow of a crane truss—two rolls, a needle, clove. "We don't pull crates," she said to no one in particular. "We pull people. If anyone brings me a box, I hit them with it."
Kartik knotted rope around his waist and tested the knot like a boy who had learned not to worship things he could make himself. "Say when," he told Leon.
"Now," Leon said, soft.
Ayush and Mallick dropped into the lower catwalk under the truss and moved like men who had already memorized thirty ways to fall. The ferry's bow ploughed through an oily chop. Romantic in another century. Wrong now.
Joseph's loudhailer filled the steel under Ayush's feet. "Boy with the ghost," he said without looking. "Ten minutes and nobody dies you think you could've saved."
"You make a door out of them," Ayush called back. "I make one out of steel and current."
"Necessary is not a slur," Joseph returned, almost kindly.
"Neither is coward," Ananya said under her breath from the landing, to herself, to nobody.
Ajay flicked the Socket. The deck stuttered. A white puff lifted from a vent. The loudhailer crackled. Joseph glanced down, eyebrows tightening, house of cards recognizing its enemy.
"Left hawser in three," Leon whispered. "Two. Now."
Kartik threw the rope like a fisherman. It looped the steel strut on the ferry's stern post, bit lovely into rust, and held. Leon slid the painter's pole over the line like a lever and dragged. Shivam gave a grunt from the sluice handle up above, and water leaned into the ferry's right flank like a new opinion.
The stern hawser hid at the edge of pilothouse shade. Ayush stepped out on the catwalk until it ceased being sane. He went one step more because he had made a habit of that lately. Mallick—ghosts heavy under his ribs—took the pole without being told and jammed it against the rail with the stubbornness of a man who had found a way to matter that didn't involve numbers.
"Cut," Leon said.
Ananya screamed the ten seconds. Two men in grey looked left at a sound that always lied to them and forgot to argue with physics. Kartik's chest jerked once and the chisel kissed the rope. It frayed. It tore. The stern swung.
"Now!" Ajay sang, unlike himself. Lucky threw the second Socket and the deck coughed one more time in the prettiest way a thing can give up. The ferry's bow yawed a degree, then three. The current loved the new math. The stern swung into it. The wide tray rolled into the slanted water like it had decided to lie down.
On deck, people shouted in the chorus people use when they don't know who gave the order to be afraid. A stack of crates slid, kissed the rail, and didn't go over because a boy with arms too thin had put his hands where he should not have and made commitment. Riya's chest hurt. Nobody saw her viewing it.
"Rudder," Leon said, glass finding the hinge where steel pretended it was a fish. "Pinned wrong. If I take the bolt, they can't un‑want to go left."
"On you," Ayush answered.
Leon took the shot. It rang through the truss like a bad hymn. The rudder pin spat into dirty water. The ferry committed to the wrong marriage.
Suraj wrenched the sluice open a half step more. Water shouldered in with an offended noise and made the ferry's new left idea turn into religion. The bow kissed the mudflat that pretended to be a bank this decade. Steel groaned. The whole tray shuddered and then sat.
Joseph cursed in a language that had borrowed too many words from logic and not enough from shame. He dropped the loudhailer and it rolled like a broken oath. He disappeared from the roof and reappeared at the bow where people were starting to pretend they were in a stampede. He had a hand on a shoulder like he meant it and a foot on a crate like he didn't.
"Open," Ananya shouted at men with rust flakes on their palms. She pointed at the ferry's cargo ramp. "Down. Not fast. Not with boxes."
Riya slid under the rail with a Fireborn boy at her hip and made herself a net with two arms and a mouth. "You hand them. You don't throw. If you throw, I throw you."
Ayush dropped from the truss onto the mudflat like a man who had finally accepted that falling can be useful. He hit, rolled, stood. Kartik fell after him and laughed once through his teeth because adrenaline likes to pretend it's joy. Mallick climbed down with a pressure that sounded like a body refusing to enjoy what it was doing.
On the deck, Eden thought they had guns. Leon denied two of them elbows before they got to the part where bullets are decisions. Two Eden men saw him and remembered what ambition feels like when the floor loves other people more than it loves you. They reconsidered both and went hunting for someone else to shout at.
Joseph found Ayush with his feet in the wrong part of the river. They were ten feet apart and the sound of other men's plans was everything in the room. "You saved your bridge," Joseph said. "You taught a machine to doubt itself. Now teach these families to live with the men they chose tomorrow."
"I'll use up the bridge carrying them and then I'll build a new one for the next ones," Ayush said. "You can help or you can be in the way."
Joseph almost smiled. It didn't make his face better. "See you tomorrow," he said, and it was software. He stepped back and didn't make a theatre of his absence. He took three men and a piece of a plan and left the crates somewhere luck could decide whether to drown them.
Suraj pulled the jack against the sluice and locked it half open so the river would keep loving the left until the ferry learned to be shore. He looked ten years old and eighty at once. "I hate water," he said cheerfully.
"You love control," Ananya said, breathless and not unkind.
Two men reached for the same child. Riya slapped one hand into the other. "Pick," she said to the man with the bad idea. He picked her order and then tried not to apologize. She refused to let his face make her a worse person.
Ajay and Lucky crawled into the gap where deck met mud and shoved at the base of one crate until the water took it and the river learned the magic trick where denying a mouth feeds a different one. The crate bobbed once like a sin and then went quiet.
"Raj?" Ayush said, into the small radio someone had taught the drain to love. "If your trucks are coming they come now. No horns. Two, not three."
Raj's reply was not clean. It had gravel in it that comes from running and the taste of orders you can't put down. "Two," he said. "No tails."
The trucks bumped down the road like men who had learned to shoulder regret as a weight, not a story. The drivers didn't look too long at the bridge. Ananya and the Fireborn ran the ramp like it cost money each time and they'd found a bill for it. Children went down. Then shoulders. Then men who looked like fathers and didn't say anything about it that would make anyone angry.
Joseph stepped off the far end of the deck into a skiff where a boy who thought he was listening checked the sky for drones instead of the river for rocks. He bent to say something not cruel to him. It might have been "sorry." It might have been "faster."
Up on the billboard frame two buildings inland, Rahul leaned on the rail with his chin on the back of his hand and watched a bridge stay. He set three stones on the steel and nudged the middle one a tiny degree like a man practicing leaving a habit. He didn't flick. He didn't smile. "Almost," he said, and the word did not mean victory.
Vikram rolled up on the embankment with a box truck that had decided today it would behave. He leaned out the window and shouted, "Tires, not crowns!" and then looked like he hated himself and liked it. He backed the truck until its bumper touched the ramp hard enough to make the ferry understand it now had a friend.
Leon slid down the truss with rope burns on his palms and a face that had remembered how to keep being a soldier without treating the room like an order. He bumped his shoulder into Ayush's exactly once and it meant more than it needed to.
The last crate slid toward the edge. The boy with thin arms took a breath and went with it. Kartik swore and grabbed him by the shirt and made a fist out of the collar. Riya's voice went elegant with rage. "No boxes," she said, and somehow the crate heard it too.
They didn't blow the bridge. They blew a path through a room with a river and a plan and a stubbornness both sides hated and loved.
When the last person who could be carried was on dirt, Raj's trucks rolled. He didn't say "I told you so." He didn't salute. He gave Ayush a look like you give a man you are going to regret knowing and be grateful for the rest of your life. "Two drops," he said. "Morning. Dusk."
"Under the drain," Ananya said. "Low. For kids."
"For kids," Raj said.
He got into the cab and looked at the bridge and then not at it with his hands. He drove away.
They stayed long enough to make the ferry believe it belonged to the bank. Ajay cut the Socket feed. The deck hum died like a lie. Suraj shoved hard enough to make his ribs remember it. The sluice gate sang like it was learning a new prayer and then shut.
Uncrowned's voice crawled out of a dead radio in a pocket Lucky had been meaning to throw away. "Delta… clean…"
Ananya took it and put it under the heel of her hand and ground plastic into grit. "New rule," she said. "We don't leave these where they can talk."
Ayush stood at the truss and put his palm on cold steel that had decided today not to become a wall. He didn't promise himself anything. He pressed his thumb into the old ghost mark at the base of the guardrail and dragged a darker line through it. He pressed his thumb to Ananya's wrist. She pressed hers to his.
"We didn't blow a bridge," she said.
"We used it up right," he said.
She leaned her head into his shoulder for one breath and then went to count water and children and doors they had lost and doors they hadn't.
Rahul on the billboard watched the bridge like it was a friend he'd decided not to kill today. He put his fingers to his temple, flicked once, tiny. Practice.
Ajay looked at the river. "They'll come by water again," he said.
"Then we build a better hinge," Suraj answered, sounding almost happy at the thought of the work.
Leon ran his finger along the painter's pole like he was remembering where it had saved softer things than men. Riya wiped blood off her hands with a cloth no one would use again and did not cry because the math didn't improve if she did. Shivam flexed his shoulder and decided to hate it later. Kartik leaned his head against the rail and laughed once because bodies need it, then stopped and counted in his head without letting anyone see. Lucky smacked the Socket with affection and put it away like a talisman.
They walked back to the tower with the smell of cold metal in their hair and the river under their fingernails.
Nikhil slept with his foot in Ayush's hip and he didn't move it away. Ananya drew three dots low on the post and dragged a line through them. Ajay scratched "Open Water—Hinge: Sluice, Rope, Socket" into a bit of tile and shoved it under a loose brick where kids with good hands could find it later.
"Tomorrow," Ananya said.
"Tomorrow," Ayush answered.
They didn't wait for it.
They kept making it.