I learned early in my training that grief does not always shout. Most of the time it whispers in paperwork, in signatures, in stamps that mean nothing to anyone until the wrong eyes read them. Today my grief had a ledger. It had names and dates and a missing signature that smelled like betrayal.
The operations tent smelled of coffee gone cold and hot metal. Colonel Rajput did not sugar the room for me; he did not make the ritual of bad news gentler with small talk. When I stepped inside he folded his hands over his mug and slid a thin stack of forms across the map like someone offering me the only weapons the institution trusted: ink and procedure.
"You asked for access," he said. "You'll have supervised viewing only. The forensic unit insists on witnesses."
I signed because there are battles you win with penstrokes. The folder was heavier than I expected. The first sheet was the evidence log — the full chain-of-custody printout I'd demanded. Patrol leader Singh, it said, then Corporal Arora, Lieutenant Verma. The stamps were there; the times were typed; someone had added an asterisk beside the transfer from forward ops to the forensic unit.
The asterisk led to a short note: Transferred under OS directive — temporary custody. No signature, no seal. Whoever had written that had used shorthand that read like a permission slip from a back room. I could feel my throat close around a dozen unsaid words.
"Who authorized the OS directive?" I asked.
The colonel's jaw hardened. "Those are restricted channels," he said, but he did not look away. He knew the answer I wanted was political, not procedural. "We'll request the authorization stream. You know as well as I do that certain operations use operational support channels for security."
"Operational support is a category," I said. "Not a person. The log should show the unit code and the officer who signed it."
He pinched the bridge of his nose. "It will. Give us time."
Time was not a currency I trusted anymore. Men were already making a martyr out of the thing I had loved. If I wanted truth I had to pry it from officers who liked tidy headlines. So I did the thing I always did when I needed leverage: I made paperwork my weapon.
Nandini came with me to the rear forensic tent. She moved with the ease of someone who could translate lab-speak into human language; when I wanted proof rather than platitudes, I asked her to be my translator. Daiwik did not follow—he could not. He paced near the clinic and sent me messages that were small and frantic and full of the little practical kindnesses he thought might hide his guilt.
The forensics tech, a man named Dev, had tired eyes and practiced compassion. He showed me the pendant behind a glass like it was a relic behind a cathedral altar. Up close, the silver was dented in a place that matched the photograph I had been shown earlier. The nick near the rim caught the light in a way that made my hands ache to touch it.
"Can I open it?" I asked.
He hesitated. The evidence remained sealed and had to remain uncontaminated. But there are times when the law and the heart carve parallel tracks. Dev turned to his supervisor on the other bench. The supervisor looked at the forms, then at my folder, then at Nandini's impatient jaw.
"Supervised viewing," Dev said finally. "You can handle it, Dr. Malhotra, but we document every motion."
They brought the pendant to a sterile tray. My fingertips hovered above it for a fraction of a breath, as if permission might still be granted by the thing itself. When I opened the locket the metal whispered like a small animal in my hands.
There was a scrap of paper folded inside — tiny, folded like a memory one wanted to keep private. My mouth went dry as I unfolded it. His handwriting, brisk and cramped, as if written in haste beneath a lamp: Forgive me. Two words.
It felt both like an explanation and an indictment. He had either left me a benediction for a feared endpoint, or he had written the line because he knew silence had to be bought with a private apology. The paper trembled in my hand like something made of breath.
"You have the chain of custody for the pendant," Nandini said quietly. "The note corroborates that it was in his possession. But as you know, items can be planted. The question is always: did he place it there, or did someone else?"
The question pricked me. I had stared at the photograph of the pendant until the image burned like cold iron into my palm. A photograph could be staged. A note could be forged. Men could create narratives when they liked how the light caught on metal. I had to know which story was true.
"Let's not get ahead of what the evidence can tell us," Dev said. "We'll run DNA from the chain and compare it to the sample we received from your registry. If there's a match, that's one piece. But we need the full chain — document signatures, transfer stamps, custody logs."
I nodded. I could hear my own pulse in the small quiet of the tent. In three days, if the labs did not slow down for bureaucracy, we might have results. Three days felt like a long time when the world had already written him a fate.
When I stepped outside to the cold air it bit me on my cheeks like an insult. There were reporters hovering at the perimeter again, like a group of vultures practicing politeness. The colonel intercepted them with the sort of clipped statements men use to hold back a storm. "Formal confirmation is pending," he said for the cameras. "For families only." His voice was steady. I felt the sharp satisfaction of someone else doing the thing I could not with my shaking hands: keeping some dignity in the process.
But dignity is not always a shield. I wanted a culprit.
Aditya Rathore found me like a fever finds a wound. He moved through the perimeter with radio cords and a noise of self-satisfied purpose. He smiled at me with teeth that gleamed like polished brass.
"Dr. Malhotra," he said, as if our acquaintance were pleasant and casual. "My condolences. Terrible business."
I did not answer him with ritual grief. I had too many other feelings wired under my ribs.
"Did you leak to the press?" I asked.
He laughed, a soft thing that put the lie to the idea of innocence. "I didn't leak anything. A source provided information, and I reported what I was given. We hold people accountable; we don't make up stories."
"You made him a headline," I said. "Before his family was told. Before his body was confirmed. You took a human being and sold him to the morning."
He tilted his head like a man who could not understand low morality. "The public has a right to know. When the army doesn't communicate, the press will fill the vacuum. You ought to be glad the world is watching—maybe pressure will get things done quicker." He smiled in a way that suggested his conscience was an accessory he could leave at the barber's.
"I'm not here for optics," I said. "I'm here for chain-of-custody logs, signatures, and the name of the person who authorized temporary OS transfer. And if you have a source, give it to me. Right now the only thing you've done is weaponize a man's absence for your byline."
He gave me a look that was almost pity. "And what would you do with that, Doctor? Launch a witch hunt? I am doing coverage, not adjudication."
"You would do coverage," I said, "and then pretend to be a hero when others bow. If you have a source, I will get it verified. If you gave them a name, I will take that person's file and show it to a tribunal." My voice had the hard, measured cadence I used in court when I told soldiers the truth they needed to face.
He raised an eyebrow at the word tribunal, just slightly. "Bold words. Be careful, Doctor. Words in this war travel further than men do."
I reached for my phone out of reflex and held up a small voice recorder app, the little red dot glowing. "Every conversation is recorded," I said. "Anything you say will be on the record."
He looked at me, and for a flicker of an instant I thought I saw the glint of worry.
"Fine," he said. "I had a contact at Forward Ops. He texted me an update. I asked for confirmation and he said—"
"Who was the contact?" I pressed.
Aditya's smile was a paywall. "A local contractor, someone who moves between units. I don't expose my sources willy-nilly. It's not good for trust in reporting."
"You mean you use human lives as currency and keep their names because your career needs mystique," I said. My anger now was the clean kind you get when you know exactly how to cut. "Give me the number. Give me the phone. I will subpoena."
He drew a breath like a man deciding whether to be brazen or coy. Then he shrugged as if he had already chosen his posture. "I'll give you the number if you promise the paper will not be used to ruin a man's life without certainty. We aren't in the business of smearing."
"Then hand it over," I said.
He fished the number out of his contacts with ridiculous efficiency and handed me the phone. I stared at the string of digits like one stares at a scalpel.
Later, when we traced the number, it led to a civilian contractor who had been moonlighting as a communications aide for certain officers. His messages to Aditya were casual, offhand: "Found remains. Looks bad. Might be Rajput." There was an eagerness in the timestamps — a message at dawn, another at first light — all sent before forensics had confirmed anything. The contractor had not signed a military nondisclosure; he had no right to run the news to press. But the trace also revealed another thread: a forwarded message that showed the contractor had received his tip from a burner number registered in the OS network. It was the kind of breadcrumb that smelled like a breadcrumb trail.
Who owned the burner? The trail tapered into a server log that only operations could provide. I took the number and the timestamps back to Colonel Rajput. He watched the screen, his face closed and unreadable.
"This is not good," he said. "If OS channels were used to feed a civilian contractor, there is a breach. If someone in command used this to bolster a narrative, there may be consequences."
He did not say the name I wanted out loud. But he knew the implications; his silence told me he had already suspected the playing field. He would not accuse a man without evidence. For now he called meetings, asked for logs, and shone lamps into shadowed corners.
That night, exhausted, I went to the grove and pressed his Forgive me note to my lips. It tasted of paper and iron. The note had calmed me and cut me in equal measure: either the man who wrote it had envisioned his absence and coded me a plea, or someone else had folded his name into a tidy farewell meant to close a narrative.
Daiwik met me there with a thermos of tea and a face that had aged by a decade in a day. He handed me the cup without speaking. I took it like a child receiving a bandage and sipped, warmth sliding down a throat too raw to be soothed easily.
"They ran the logs," he said finally. "Verma signed off, but the server request came from a node registered to OS. We traced the node back to an administrative account with access rights. The access pattern shows someone at forward ops pulled the tag and created the transfer in the system. Then it was forwarded to a civilian number."
"Do you recognize the administrative account?" I asked.
He nodded. "It's attached to a user ID that's associated with Rathore's operational cell—administrative access granted last month for exercises. It doesn't prove Rathore typed the message, but the account sits in his domain."
I stood up then, the chair making a small protest. "Go to the colonel. Demand the audit trail. Tell him I want every access stamp. And ask Verma for a statement in person."
Daiwik did what I asked. He moved like a man carrying a confession and a calling. I watched him go, heart heavy with something that resembled gratitude and grief braided together.
At midnight the colonel called me into his office. He had the look of a man who carried too much and wanted to hand a little of it to someone else. On the table lay a slim printout: server access logs, IP address traces, a cluster of timestamps that almost stitched together a story. The node that had forwarded the message to the contractor did indeed sit in the administrative domain that serviced Rathore's operational cell. Someone in his team had used OS access to extract an evidence log entry and pass it out.
It was not proof of intent; it was proof of capacity. I could see the dark logic unfurling: the account used by Rathore's domain had the right keys, the contractor had the phone, Aditya had the byline. Someone had stitched an absence into a headline.
"You want me to take this to command?" Colonel Rajput asked. "Rathore is an officer with patrons. This will be political."
"I want truth," I said. The words were simple and brittle. "If someone allowed a civilian to get operational information that names a soldier before the family, that man needs to be held to account."
He folded his hands. "I will summon Rathore for questioning. And I will demand statements from Verma and Arora. If there was an unauthorized use of OS accounts, we will trace it to an individual. But you must understand—this is a web. Men at many levels may be implicated."
I left his tent with a small, bitter victory: the colonel's promise. It was not justice yet, but it was a beginning. The war would not stop because I wanted to hold someone accountable, but institutions respond to the right kind of pressure. Paper mattered. Procedure mattered. My rage had a language and I intended to force it into the mouths of men who liked headlines more than truth.
That night, I slept with the pendant photograph under my pillow and the Forgive me note folded beneath my journal. I thought of the way Shash had once written to me about foxes in the snow — sly, resourceful, surviving by wit. I would be that fox in paper and persistence. If men wanted to make him into an image, I would carve his story back into facts and names.
In the morning the press still circled. Men in suits called for interviews; Aditya kept his polite arrogance. But at headquarters, orders had been sent for a full audit and a formal inquiry. For the first time since the radio had made his name public, I felt the tide move under my feet instead of above my head.
Paper and blood have a strange partnership: one tells the story, the other pays the price. I would make the paper hold the truth. And when the truth came, I would let my grief be the quiet judge.