Riya didn't sleep. How could she?
By dawn, the rain had thinned into a mist, but the fog inside her mind remained dense. Her phone lay face down on the kitchen table, the screen cracked from where she'd dropped it. The red light across the street had vanished. But the memory of it still pulsed behind her eyes, rhythmic as a warning siren.
She booted the laptop again.
It was 6:06 AM. The folder was gone.
In its place, a new one:
"Aarav - Last Backup"
Modified: Today, 05:59 AM
She hesitated, her finger hovering over the trackpad.
"What did you leave for me, Aarav?" she whispered.
She clicked.
The folder exploded open with content—videos, text logs, PDF files, and a subfolder named simply: "The Root." The laptop fan whirred louder, struggling as if under some digital strain. One document auto-opened: a fragment of a conversation, recorded two days before his disappearance.
Riya's heart clenched. Her name. Her brother's voice.
She slammed the laptop shut again, breath shallow and fast. A flash of motion outside caught her attention—two figures stepping out of a matte black van parked where the red light had blinked the night before.
They were coming.
She grabbed the laptop, shoved it into her backpack, and bolted out the door.
Out on the street, Delhi was just beginning to stir. The scent of wet earth and diesel filled the air as vendors opened their stalls and street dogs padded through puddles. Riya kept her head down, weaving through alleyways she hadn't taken since childhood.
She had a destination in mind. One her brother had taken her to long ago: the old internet café near Hauz Khas Village. It had shuttered years ago, but Aarav once called it his "off-grid vault." The place where he stored what he couldn't trust to the cloud.
If answers existed, they might be buried there.
As she approached the rusted security gate, her phone buzzed again.
Unknown Number.