Fox, struggling with a police officer, is thrown onto the tracks and fatally hit by a passing train as Mercy flees the scene. Three of them, Vermin, Cochise, and Rembrandt, escape by boarding a subway car. When the group arrives at the 96th Street and Broadway station in Manhattan, they are pursued by police and separated. (There is an unwritten protocol that the subways are neutral territory and a sanctuary.) Impressed, and desperate to escape her depressed neighborhood, Mercy follows the Warriors. After Mercy, the girlfriend of the Orphans' leader, instigates a confrontation, Swan throws a Molotov cocktail and the Warriors run to the nearest subway station. Setting out on foot, they encounter the Orphans, who are insecure about their low status in the gang hierarchy as they were excluded from Cyrus's meeting. On the ride to Coney Island, the train is stopped by a building fire alongside the tracks, stranding the Warriors in Tremont. The Turnbull ACs spot the Warriors and try to run them down with an old, modified school bus, but the Warriors escape and board an elevated train. Swan, the "War Chief," takes charge of the group as they try to make it back home. The Riffs put out a hit on the Warriors through a radio DJ. Meanwhile, the other Warriors escape, unaware that they have been implicated in Cyrus's killing. In the ensuing chaos, Luther realizes that one of the Warriors, Fox, appears to suspect him, and makes a false accusation which leads the vengeful Riffs to attack the "Warlord," Cleon. Most of the gang members applaud this idea, but Luther, the unbalanced and sadistic leader of the Rogues, shoots Cyrus dead as police officers arrive to raid the summit. Cyrus proposes to the assembled crowd a citywide truce and alliance that would allow the gangs to control the city together, since they collectively outnumber the police by three to one. The Warriors, a modest, multiracial gang from Coney Island, attend the summit. Cyrus, leader of the Gramercy Riffs, the most powerful gang in New York City, calls a midnight summit of the city's gangs, requesting them to send nine unarmed delegates to Van Cortlandt Park.