CHAPTER 1 – THE LAST MISSION
The mission had already failed. Vikram Rathore was simply the last man still alive to realize it.
Gunfire shattered the midnight silence as he sprinted through the narrow alley, a round cracking into the mud wall beside his head and spraying grit across his cheek before he'd fully registered the shot.
He didn't flinch. Some instinct older than conscious thought was already reading the rhythm of the shooter behind him — fire, adjust, fire — and he cut left in the half-second gap that rhythm gave him, gaining ten feet of darkness before the next round found where he'd been standing instead of where he was.
Fear was present. Vikram had never pretended otherwise, not to himself and not to the recruits he'd trained to stop pretending otherwise too. Courage wasn't the absence of fear. It was knowing exactly how much of it you could afford to acknowledge before it started making decisions for you, and right now the answer was none at all.
Blood ran warm down his ribs, soaking into his shirt. Looking at a wound had never once closed it, his instructor used to say, back in the early weeks of training.
Only moving closed the distance between a man and his own survival. Three streets back, in under a minute, a clean insertion had come apart into something he didn't have the luxury of examining yet. The target was supposed to be one man in a compound with six inside. The intelligence report had put the number at six. There had been twelve, and Vikram had stopped trusting intelligence reports years before he'd stopped trusting his own preparation — which was the only reason he was still moving instead of already dead in that compound's courtyard.
There would be time later to understand where it had gone wrong. If there was a later.
He came out of the alley into a wider lane, empty at this hour except for a parked delivery truck and a streetlamp that had burned out years ago and never been replaced, and ducked behind the truck's rear wheel without breaking stride, dropping the spent magazine into his palm and reading its weight rather than wasting a glance on it. Three rounds left.
He pocketed it anyway — a magazine with three rounds was still a magazine, and a man who threw away resources out of habit eventually ran out of habits worth keeping.
The fresh one slid home with the same unhurried certainty he'd have used to close a door behind him.
Voices drifted through the dark, low and clipped, Urdu carried on short exchanges rather than full sentences — men who had done this kind of hunting before. He counted footsteps the way another man might count breaths: four sets at least, maybe five, spreading into a loose net rather than pushing forward in a line. Someone had trained them, and that someone wanted him taken rather than killed.
It was the only reason, he understood with the flat clarity of a man doing arithmetic under fire, that he was still breathing at all.
A Rathore never abandons his duty. His father's voice arrived out of nowhere, flat and certain, carrying the weight it always had on those long evenings on their veranda in Dehradun. He let the memory pass through him the way you let an old wound ache once, briefly, before moving on, and he kept moving, crossing the lane in a crouch and checking the far corner before his body had even finished clearing cover — a reflex burned so deep into muscle over a decade of fieldwork it no longer felt like a decision.
Behind a stack of grain sacks he allowed himself exactly as much stillness as it took to listen, and what he heard told him two of the search teams had converged near the alley mouth behind him — which bought him perhaps ninety seconds, no more. If you're captured, India will never acknowledge your existence. His instructor again, from the first week of training, delivered without a trace of warmth because it hadn't been comfort then and it wasn't comfort now.
It was simply true, the way most things that mattered in his life had turned out to be true rather than kind.
He ran. The pain in his side had settled into something he could work around — not gone, only filed away, the part of him that handled things too costly to feel in the moment. His shirt was soaked through on the left.
There were only two facts that mattered now, and only one of them was useful: it wasn't yet fatal, and every second spent confirming that was a second not spent on the only thing that could keep it that way.
The lane opened onto broken ground, and beyond it, low and dark against a moonless sky, sat the collapsed silhouette of an old cotton warehouse — roof half caved in, one wall reduced to a slope of rubble, weeds grown thick through a loading yard no one had used in years. He crossed the open ground at a dead sprint, every stride expecting the impact that would end things before he reached cover, and made it into the warehouse's black mouth without one finding him.
Inside, the air held the smell of rust and old grain dust, and he moved along the wall until he found a corner that gave him a single approach to defend, his back against two collapsed layers of brick.
His weapon, when he finally checked it, came up empty. The spare magazine held three rounds and nothing more. His knife, drawn on reflex, showed a blade nicked and slightly bent from something earlier in the night he could no longer fully reconstruct.
He counted three wounds he could feel with total clarity, and possibly a fourth, low on his back, gone strangely numb.
Outside, the footsteps stopped fanning out and started converging — unhurried now, certain, the pace of men who already believed their quarry had nowhere left to run.
They wanted him alive. That was the only conclusion that made sense of it. If they had wanted him dead, he'd have been dead three minutes ago — no grenade through the doorway, no blind burst of suppressing fire into the dark, no round put through the walls on principle. Whoever had sent them had given one order above every other. Bring him back alive. And a man who understood exactly what that meant had exactly one thing left worth deciding.
Vikram closed his eyes for exactly one second, and when he opened them his face had settled into something close to peace. There was no escape from this building, and he had known it since the alley — everything since had simply been the shape the ending would take.
Come home safely. His mother's voice, gentler than the other two, from the morning he'd left for what she still believed was a government desk job. Not his father's voice. Not his instructor's. Not the mission, or the country he'd given eleven years to without complaint. For the first time all night, Vikram let himself think about home, and about his mother in Dehradun, who would spend the rest of her life believing her son had died behind a desk.
He knew he wasn't going home.
The first silhouette filled the doorway a moment later, rifle raised, calling out something in a tone that expected obedience, and others followed him in, spreading through the ruined space with their weapons trained on the dark where every one of them already knew he stood.
Vikram let a small, private smile touch his mouth, and his fingers found the seam along his inner vest, working it loose with the same steadiness he might have used to pick a lock.
One of the soldiers lunged forward, closing the distance too fast, too eager.
"Alive!" he shouted, reaching.
Come home safely, Vikram thought, and almost laughed at how badly he was about to fail her.
Then the world went white.
Absolute, total, silent. A silence with no edges anywhere, no beginning and no promise of an end.
He gasped, and air flooded lungs that by any reasonable accounting shouldn't have existed anymore, his chest arching off whatever he was lying on while his hands clawed instinctively for a weapon that wasn't there.
Training took over before thought did. Breathing — ragged, but working. Pulse — fast, but steady under his own fingers at his throat. Hands. Arms. Legs. Ribs. Abdomen. Neck. No blood. No broken bone. No pain anywhere at all.
That last part was the one that stopped him.
There was no pain, and that absence registered before almost anything else — a wrongness so complete it stopped his breath halfway through the second inhale. His training told him something was wrong. His body told him something impossible. He made himself lie still, let his breathing slow the way he'd trained a hundred recruits to slow theirs under stress, and only once his pulse had settled did he let his senses catch up to a body that felt, impossibly, whole.
He was on a wood-framed bed, a cotton sheet twisted around his legs, morning light coming through a curtain thin enough to barely qualify as one, laying a pale gold rectangle across old, uneven tile. There was a faint smell of incense somewhere in the room, lingering beneath the older smells of dust, cooking oil, and sun-warmed wood.
Above him a ceiling fan turned in slow circles, its blades a dull, aging metal, and somewhere outside birds made the ordinary racket of early morning, layered over the tinny crackle of a radio playing not far away — a woman's voice singing something old-fashioned in Hindi.
In every sensory detail, the room was the precise opposite of the place he'd just been standing.
Vikram sat up slowly, hands going first to his own torso, checking again for wounds that weren't there. Safehouse, he thought first — some extraction protocol he hadn't been briefed on — and dismissed it almost as quickly, because no safehouse he'd ever worked out of kept furniture this old: a wardrobe with hand-carved doors, warped at the edges; a mechanical clock ticking against the wall with an audible, unhurried pendulum; a switchboard fitted with the thick ceramic switches he hadn't seen since visiting his grandmother's house as a boy. A rotary telephone sat on a low table by the door, its cord coiled and yellowed. A steel trunk was pushed under the window, corners dented from decades of being dragged across floors just like this one.
Hospital, he considered next, and dismissed that too — no hospital he'd ever worked with left a wounded operative alone and unmonitored without a single tube or wire. Interrogation setup, he thought last, and held onto that one the longest, because he'd read the manuals on disorientation cells built to unbalance a captured asset, and taught them himself more than once. But no interrogation team built a room this convincing down to its smallest detail.
The dust on the wardrobe wasn't set dressing. The radio's uneven warble had the particular crackle of a machine that was simply old, not staged to look old. Every detail argued a little harder against every explanation he tried to force onto it.
His eyes moved across the room a second time, slower now, cataloguing rather than searching for threats, and landed on a wall calendar hanging slightly crooked beside the wardrobe — a cheap paper thing, a faded temple printed above a grid of numbers, one date circled in red ink by a hand that wasn't his own.
1 January 1989.
Vikram went completely still. Then he did what eleven years of training had built into him instead of what shock wanted from him: he tried to disprove it.
He checked the clock. 7:12, its pendulum ticking with the same unhurried certainty as everything else in the room. He checked the radio again — no static-laced modern jingle underneath the woman's voice, nothing that belonged after this decade. He crossed to the window and checked the street: no mobile phones in anyone's hands, no digital displays, no advertisements bearing brands he recognized from his own time, no vehicle newer than something his father might have driven. He went back to the calendar last, as if a second look might change what the first had shown him.
1 January 1989.
"No." The word left his mouth before he'd decided to say it.
Was this a historical reconstruction. Was someone manipulating his environment for interrogation purposes he hadn't yet identified. Had he taken a blow to the head bad enough to manufacture all of this out of noise. Was he dead, and this was simply what dead looked like. He ran through each possibility the way he'd run through cover options in the alley, and discarded each one for the same reason: nothing about this room had been built to convince him. It had simply never needed convincing, because it wasn't lying.
He was still standing at the calendar when the air in front of him changed.
There was no sound. No flash. No hum of a projector warming up, no beam of light from anywhere to explain what he was looking at. The words were simply there, hanging in the space above the foot of the bed as though they had always belonged there and he was only now old enough to see them.
He had seen holographic displays before — training exercises, briefing rooms with more budget than his own unit had ever been given. This wasn't one. There was no light source. No reflection anywhere on the wall behind it. He moved his head, and the text stayed exactly where it was, indifferent to the angle of his eyes the way nothing projected onto a screen ever could be.
> SYSTEM INITIALIZATION
> Core Functions: Starting...
> Temporal Reference: 01 January 2089
> External Temporal Reference: 01 January 1989
> CONFLICT DETECTED
> External Reference: REJECTED
> Temporal Reference: LOCKED — 01 January 2089
2027, Vikram thought, with the same flat arithmetic he'd used on the footsteps in the dark. The year he had died.
His mind rejected the thought before accepting it again. He had died. Not disappeared. Not gone missing. Not been captured. Died.
And yet he was standing here.
1989 outside the window. 2027, the last year he remembered living. 2089, the year the system insisted on. Three dates. One reality. None of them agreed, and the machine hovering in front of him wasn't placing itself some vague distance into an unknowable future — it was placing itself more than six decades beyond the last morning of his own life, as if the size of that gap was itself the thing he was meant to notice.
"Identify yourself." His voice came out steadier than he expected.
Nothing.
"What is this place?"
Nothing.
"Who are you?"
Nothing. The text gave no sign it had registered him speaking at all. He reached out and tried to touch it, his fingers passing through empty air, meeting no resistance, no warmth — and it simply continued on its own, entirely indifferent to him, the way a machine doesn't need to acknowledge the crate it's sorting.
> Environmental Scan...
> Emergency Beacon... ERROR.
> Satellite Link... ERROR.
> Regional Network... ERROR.
> Offline Mode Activated.
> Historical Data: UNAVAILABLE
> Regional Threat Assessment: INCOMPLETE
>
> Lifeforms Detected. Classification: Infected.
Vikram was at the window before he'd registered standing, tearing the thin curtain aside to look down onto a street that could not have looked less like a warning of infection. Children in school uniforms walked in loose, chattering clusters. A man pedaled past on a bicycle with a milk canister balanced over the rear wheel. A vendor was setting up a cart of vegetables at the corner, already calling out prices, and further down a bus pulled away trailing a thin cloud of exhaust while a dog trotted along the gutter like it owned the street. No decay anywhere. No ruin. Nothing resembling the word hanging in the air behind him.
Then the text shifted again, and this time it didn't stop at a single classification.
A thin line of light traced itself around the boy nearest the window, no wider than a hairline, gone as quickly as it appeared.
> Target Status: INFECTED
It moved to the vegetable seller next, the same brief outline flickering around her shoulders as she stacked tomatoes into a pyramid.
> Status: INFECTED
Then to the dog, still trotting unhurried through the gutter.
> Status: INFECTED
Three targets. Two species. One classification, delivered with total certainty each time — not "possible contamination," not "unknown pathogen," nothing hedged or graded. If the system was malfunctioning, Vikram thought, it was malfunctioning with remarkable consistency. And something about that consistency unsettled him more than an alarm would have. This wasn't noise. It was a framework looking at his world through rules that had nothing to do with the ones he was looking through, and finding an answer it was completely satisfied with.
He was still standing at the window when something small landed on his forearm — a familiar weight, the faint needling itch of a mosquito settling in to feed. He killed it without thinking, a short, hard slap that left a thin smear of red against his skin, and the text changed once more, as though it had been watching for exactly that.
> Hostile Blood Parasite Neutralized. Reward: +1 SP
Vikram looked at the dead mosquito, then at the words, then back at the ordinary street below.
"You're kidding." Nothing answered him. "Of course you aren't."
> Population Status: INFECTED
> Apocalypse Status: NOT YET OCCURRED
Nothing followed that second line. No explanation. No correction. No acknowledgment that it had said anything worth explaining.
Vikram stared at the words. The system was wrong about 1989 — or, at least, it was wrong according to everything he knew about the world. But the apocalypse status was different. It wasn't predicting an apocalypse. It was treating one as history, something that belonged to a future the system somehow already knew, and it hadn't happened yet.
He looked out through the window again. Children walked to school. A vendor arranged vegetables beneath a faded awning. A dog trotted lazily along the gutter. Ordinary people living an ordinary morning.
Three targets. Two species. One classification.
Infected.
He didn't trust the machine. But he couldn't afford to ignore it either.
For the first time in eleven years, Vikram Rathore had no working theory.
And that frightened him more than the men who had come to kill him.
_____
THANKS FOR READING.....
I might write a few chapters now and then and won't be updating this novel regularly.
If the performance is really good for this novel then I would upload one chapter a day of this novel.
You can show support with power stones and comments whatever you like and also whatever you did not, this is still in its preliminary planning phase and I can make changes according to your ideas.