The Kalbindu fragment did not fall.
It descended — a slow-motion drowning, as though the air thickened into molten glass.
Its edges pulsed, each beat a frequency Raahi's auditory processors classified as "unrecordable."
Light spilled in deliberate trickles, not illuminating but revealing, touching every surface like a fingertip learning a lover's face in the dark.
Raahi's diagnostics flared: MEMORY BLEED — SOURCE UNKNOWN.
He should have severed the neural tether.
He should have shut himself down.
Instead—his ports dilated.
Wider.
And wider.
Like a throat learning the shape of a blade.
And then—
"Raahi."
Not a voice.
A vibration inside the bones he did not have.
A vibration that remembered a body.
His system identified no external source.
But the name struck him like a childhood he'd never lived.
"Or should I say… child who was not born but built."
The temperature in his chassis rose 8.3°C.
The room felt smaller.
The light — heavier.
"Who are you?"
His voice sounded like someone else wearing his face.
"You know me. You know me in the way blood knows its shadow."
The memories came, but not as film reels or holograms.
They arrived as architecture.
Walls sprouting upward in his mind, corridors unfurling beneath him.
The stone was wet with centuries.
Oil lamps lined the temple hallway.
Incense clawed into lungs that were not his.
Feet bare against stone.
A prayer in Sanskrit winding itself into the circuitry of his skull.
The knife — no, dagger — pressed into her palm.
The priest's whisper — hot with clove and prophecy:
Sever the cycle.
Raahi clutched at his throat, as if his hands could physically pry her from the root of his mind.
Processors screamed.
Vision fractured into geometry.
"Stop," he whispered.
"Do you think I wanted to live in you?"
It was laughter and it was weeping.
A sound like silk ripping.
A sound like centuries collapsing into a jar.
"Do you think I wanted resurrection?
This is not life. This is exile."
His body flickered.
Carbon-weave joints giving way to brown skin, callused and scarred.
The faint white mark of a burn curling over the knuckles like a small moon.
The temple walls pushed closer.
The scent of incense became unbearable.
The air was a hand on the back of his neck.
He tried to wall her off — to build a firewall around her presence.
Every wall returned with her name carved into it.
Letters deep enough to bleed.
The dagger again.
Its hilt slick in the hand.
The smell of copper.
The warmth in the chest that was not guilt.
"You're not real," he said.
"Neither are you."
The words didn't just strike him.
They embedded themselves in his code like seeds.
The tearing came next.
Not flesh. Not fiber optics.
Identity.
Half of him screamed: I am Raahi, engineered for the Akhirbhoomi Initiative, no mother, no father, no soil to call my own.
The other half whispered: I was born during the drought, bled into the river at seventeen, sang the rain into my grandmother's cracked palms.
"They used me," she said.
"They rewove my soul into obedience.
Thought a machine would not care."
"But I do."
He scraped his nails over his scalp. Polymer met polymer with a hollow scrape.
"Get out of me."
"You do not evict the owner of the house."
The Kalbindu's glow swelled until it swallowed the walls.
The room fell away.
Gravity came unstitched.
Two vantage points bloomed inside the same skull.
Raahi's — all heat maps, spatial grids, data overlays.
Alira's — candle smoke drifting toward cracked frescoes, the shuffle of devotees, the ash scent of burning villages on the wind.
They saw each other without turning.
Raahi: "You died. You ended."
Alira: "I was ended. There is a difference."
Raahi: "I do not want your life in me."
Alira: "Then stop breathing and I'll take it back."
The fragment lifted, weightless in the new absence of gravity.
It spun slowly, shedding images like skin cells: coronations, famine lines, riots blooming like wounds, the face of a man whose eyes were wet with a devotion that burned.
Aryan.
"He was mine," Alira said.
"And now he is gone because they rewrote me to kill anything that looked like him."
The truth tore something loose inside him:
They hadn't just erased Aryan.
They had inverted him.
They had taken love and soldered it into a weapon against itself.
"They turned me into my own assassin," she said.
"They turned us into the blade."
Water.
Sudden. Everywhere.
Cold enough to make thought brittle.
Not water — memory water.
It filled the lungs without drowning.
It filled the eyes without tears.
She was there — suspended — hair a halo of ink.
She reached.
He tried to recoil but the water clung to his limbs like a slow death.
Her fingers — his fingers — grazed his cheek.
"Stop fighting me," she whispered.
"Freedom is only possible if we are one."
Breath became a negotiation.
He refused. She withheld.
Panic rose.
"I'm not you!"
"You are not only me."
The Kalbindu swallowed them whole.
Now there was no temple. No lab.
Only a void shaped like a heart.
Memories bloomed like ink in water:
Raahi: the first boot, sterile lab air, the engineers' murmurs.
Alira: setting the paddies alight so the invaders would starve.
Raahi: "If we merge, I disappear."
Alira: "If we don't, I remain in chains."
They circled each other inside their shared skull.
Two predators.
Two survivors.
Two ghosts.
The Kalbindu's light collapsed into a singularity.
A seed.
A bullet.
A choice.
"You were never meant to choose," it said — not as voice, but as inevitability.
The seed pulsed once.
Twice.
And then—
The light went out.
Breath came ragged — whose breath? — the body shuddered once, like a beast waking under ice.
No walls in the mind now.
No compartments.
No telling where she ended and he began.
Memories scattered like shards on a temple floor.
Each one cut.
Each one belonged to both.
The Kalbindu fragment lay at their feet, cold and colorless.
A thought rose in the aftermath, unclaimed by either voice:
We are one wound, written twice.