They left the café at first light.
Not because they had to — they had time, they had daylight, they had a plan. But Lucian had looked at the tinted windows and the twelve people sleeping on café furniture and decided that the longer they stayed somewhere temporary, the harder it would be to leave.
He had the door open before most of them were fully awake.
Ivan was first up after him, which was unusual enough that nobody commented on it. He walked through the café one last time with the particular expression of a person cataloguing everything he had built and deciding what to take. The tension anchor came down from the door frame — he had assembled it, he was disassembling it. The wire went into his pack. The hand drill. Three of the four candles.
"You're taking the candles," Dante said from the doorway.
"My candles," Ivan said.
"The café's candles."
"I found them. Finder's rights."
Dante picked up the fourth candle and put it in his own bag.
Ivan opened his mouth.
"My candle now," Dante said. "Finder's rights."
Ivan closed his mouth and went back to packing.
◇ ◇ ◇
The walk took eleven minutes.
Lucian took point with Hollow Fang loose in his grip, reading the streets ahead with a familiarity that had taken six days of grinding to build. The northern blocks, the plaza edge, the colonial alleyways he could navigate now without thinking. Four stray zombies on the route — he took each one down before they registered the group, efficient and quiet, and none of them dropped anything.
Crisanta walked with the medical supplies in her arms rather than her bag, refusing to let them get jostled. Serafina carried the first aid kit at her hip the way she always did, her eyes moving across the route the way Lucian had noticed she moved through every space — systematically, checking.
Marco carried his napkin sketches in his shirt pocket.
The group moved in a tight column, close and quiet, and when they came around the final corner and Casa de Esperanza appeared at the end of the block — seven floors, wide courtyard, the gates still torn from their hinges exactly as the Shadow Steed had left them — several people simply stopped walking for a moment.
Rhea exhaled slowly through her nose.
Lira put her hand over her mouth.
"That's ours?" Carla said, quietly.
"Will be," Lucian said. "Keep moving."
◇ ◇ ◇
The ground floor still smelled like what had happened there. Lucian had warned them. It was the kind of thing warnings didn't fully prepare you for.
But Crisanta had walked through worse in a hospital and Serafina had already seen the second floor of a building with bodies on both sides of the corridor, and between them they moved the group through the lobby and up the cleared stairwell to the third floor before anyone had time to fully process it.
Third floor. Wide corridor. Doors on both sides — real rooms, real beds, real walls.
Dante opened the nearest door and looked inside for a long moment.
"There's a desk," he said. Like this was the most remarkable thing he had encountered since the Lightfall.
"There are twenty-eight rooms on this floor alone," Lucian said. "Take whichever ones you want. We'll claim the floors we've cleared — one, two, three for now. Four and five are done. Six and seven we sweep today."
Ivan wasn't listening. He had already gone to the stairwell and was looking up it with his head tilted, the way he looked at structural problems — slowly, from multiple angles, filing each observation without expression.
"The gate mechanism," he said, not to anyone in particular. "The hinges are intact. It's just the locking pin that sheared. If I can fabricate a new one—" He pulled out his wire and looked at it, then at the hinge, then at Dante. "I need the hand drill."
Dante handed it over without being asked.
Ivan was already walking toward the courtyard.
◇ ◇ ◇
By midday the sixth and seventh floors were swept and clear. Lucian and Ayesha took them floor by floor the way they had taken the fourth — fast, quiet, methodical. Six held nothing that posed a real problem. Seven was empty entirely, the resident rooms undisturbed, a wide corridor that looked out east over the Intramuros rooftops and toward the distant haze above the gate.
Ayesha stood at the seventh floor window for a moment and looked out.
"We could see everything from up here," she said. "If the windows were reinforced — a proper lookout."
"Ivan's going to want this floor for exactly that reason," Lucian said.
"I know." She didn't look away from the window. "He's going to be insufferable about it."
"He's earned the right."
She almost smiled.
◇ ◇ ◇
Marco found him in the early afternoon.
He had his napkins out, and he'd added three more during the walk over — quick sketches of the ground floor layout, the courtyard dimensions, the stairwell configuration. He spread them on the third floor corridor floor like a map.
"I was thinking," Marco said carefully, like he wasn't entirely sure this was appropriate, "about the courtyard gate. If Ivan can get the hinge mechanism working, we'd want a secondary brace — something that can be dropped from inside without needing a key. Spanish-era buildings like this usually have a draw-bar slot already cut into the frame, it's just been plastered over. If we chisel it out—"
He stopped.
Lucian was already crouching over the sketches, tracing the courtyard dimensions with one finger.
"Show me where," Lucian said.
Marco blinked. Then he crouched beside him and started pointing, and the conversation that followed lasted forty minutes and covered reinforcement, water storage, lighting, and the load capacity of the fourth floor for a potential supply room. Marco knew things about Spanish colonial construction that Dante had never thought to ask about and Ivan had assumed without verifying.
By the end of it Lucian stood up and looked at him. "You're the building," he said. "Any structural decision goes through you first."
Marco stared at him. "I'm a third-year architecture student."
"You're the only one who knows this building from the inside out before we've even lived in it." Lucian picked up Hollow Fang from where he'd leaned it against the wall. "That matters more than the year."
He walked away. Marco stood in the corridor with his napkins and looked at them for a moment like they had become something different.
◇ ◇ ◇
By evening, Casa de Esperanza felt like something new.
Not home exactly — not yet, not without time and noise and the specific accumulation of ordinary moments that made a place belong to people. But the rooms were claimed, the corridors were lit with candles from the café supply, the smell from the ground floor had already begun to fade with the windows open on the upper floors pulling fresh air through.
Serafina had set up a proper medical room on the second floor — a full room instead of two café tables pushed together, the supplies organized with a precision that made Crisanta stop in the doorway and look at it in silence for a moment.
"You've done this before," Crisanta said.
"No," Serafina said. "But I've been thinking about what I'd do when we had room."
Crisanta looked at the shelf organization, the color-coded bandage arrangement, the clear floor space for a patient to lie down properly. "Stay on my team," she said.
"I already am," Serafina said.
◇ ◇ ◇
Ivan got the gate mechanism working at dusk.
The draw-bar slot was exactly where Marco said it would be — two inches of Spanish-era plaster over a hand-cut groove in the original stone frame. Ivan chiseled it out in twenty minutes, fabricated a new locking pin from a piece of rebar he found in the basement, and dropped the courtyard gate closed with a sound like something settling into its proper place after a very long time.
He stood back and looked at it.
"Lead Engineer," he said to himself. Satisfied.
The gate held. The courtyard was sealed.
Lucian watched from the second floor window, Hollow Fang resting across his shoulders. Then he turned and went down, through the lobby, and out the side entrance toward the northern blocks.
She had said same time tomorrow, wherever he was.
Tomorrow was now. And he had a roof to find.