The sun climbed slow and indifferent, burning the city's night-breath off the streets. Rohan had slept in bursts, waking every hour with the same sentence stuck between his ribs like a needle: It wasn't paid. By morning his room smelled like he'd been running inside his own chest all night. He splashed water on his face, stared at the mirror until it stopped looking like a stranger, and yanked on a hoodie.
Vikram was already outside, leaning on his bike and pretending the world had not tilted. He handed Rohan a paper cup of tea. Their knuckles bumped. A peace treaty without words.
"Uncle Ash first," Vikram said. "We get cash, we eat, we sleep."
"Fine by me," Rohan said, like his pocket wasn't buzzing even though his phone lay on the table upstairs. It was just a feeling, like static without a storm.
They rode in silence through back lanes that remembered too much—rain-soaked posters, stray dogs, paint that had peeled off signs like dead skin. The granary-turned-workshop looked the same as always: a mouth of corrugated metal curved into a half-smile. The shutter was rolled up just enough to slip under. They ducked inside together.
Empty.
The air felt wrong. Not cold, not hot. Just hollow, like someone had scooped the middle out of the room and left the edges pretending nothing happened.
"Uncle?" Vikram called. His voice didn't echo. That was the first bad sign.
Rohan scanned the inside. Two chairs, one table, an old radio with a missing knob, grease on every surface, dust in patterns that said where hands had loved to be. On the table sat the black wooden box.
"Don't," Vikram warned, but Rohan was already stepping closer. The clasp lay open. Inside was only cloth. No coin. The cloth had a small burnt hole in it, the size of a cigarette ember.
"Where is he?" Vikram whispered.
Rohan stared at the floor. Dust told stories if you listened. There were footprints around the table. Not a lot. Just two sets, over and over, circling tighter, like someone had been pacing while thinking hard enough to burn.
The last prints were a single overlap, heel to heel, toe to toe. And then nothing.
Rohan swallowed. "We should go."
"Go where? To the police? And say what—our fence vanished and a cursed coin is collecting debts?"
"Don't say cursed," Rohan muttered, and then hated himself for saying it like it would make any difference.
They backed out like the room had teeth. Outside, the lane felt too bright. A woman stood near the mouth of the alley, watching them. Not the sort of watching that says curiosity. The kind that says recognition.
She wore a faded black kurta, no jewelry, hair tied like she had done it half-asleep. Her eyes had the tired shine of someone who had argued with a ghost for too long and lost, but had learned how to stand anyway.
"You touched it," she said.
Rohan's throat clicked. "Touched what?"
"The vow." The woman's gaze cut to the shutter. "You brought it back to the city. It doesn't like cities."
Vikram stepped forward, protective by reflex. "Who are you?"
"Zoya," she said. "If the coin marked you, you've already heard it."
Rohan tried to keep his face calm. "Heard what?"
She didn't smile. "It wasn't paid."
Silence thickened between them. Vikram looked at Rohan, the question already answered.
"How do you know that line?" Rohan asked.
"Because it called me once," Zoya said. "I didn't listen. People died. I'm trying to be useful now."
"Useful how?" Vikram said.
Zoya nodded at the workshop. "Your friend who trades in other people's histories. He's gone. The coin doesn't care for middlemen. It will go back to the first contact. That's you."
"I don't have it," Rohan said, palms up, empty.
"You don't have to carry it," she said. "It will carry you."
Rohan wanted to laugh. He didn't. The laugh would have sounded like a crack.
"What do you want from us?" Vikram asked.
"To stop pretending you can outwalk it," Zoya said. "Return it. Or pay."
"Pay what?" Rohan asked.
Zoya looked at him like he had asked how to breathe. "Whatever was promised. Look, I don't have a temple for you. I don't have a priest. I only have a map and a warning. The forest edge holds a ruin. There's a slab with a line carved into it. People who steal from that place don't get old. They don't even get to be buried properly. The ground refuses them."
Rohan rubbed his palm. It itched. When he looked, he saw a red crescent there, faint as a memory of fire.
"Why us?" he asked. "Why not the original thieves? Why not the people who dug it up first?"
"Because the vow isn't a police file," Zoya said. "It isn't about guilt in a straight line. It spreads to whatever hand completes the chain. You opened its home. That makes you the hinge."
Vikram shifted on his feet. "What happens if we don't go?"
Zoya looked past them, to a point over Rohan's shoulder. "You know what happens. You felt it last night."
Rohan didn't ask how she knew that. He didn't want to know.
"How do we find the place?" he said.
Zoya slipped a folded paper from her pocket. When she opened it, the edges fluttered like they wanted to be birds. Inside was a rough map without names, a line that kinked like a vein from the highway to a patch of green that could have been a leaf, a bruise, or a warning.
"Follow this," she said. "Today. Before dusk. It's quieter then."
"What if it's a trick?" Vikram asked. "What if you're selling us to someone?"
"Then you'll have a clean answer," Zoya said. "Either you'll die in a normal way and we'll know I'm a liar. Or you'll die in a strange way and you'll know I wasn't."
Vikram blinked. "That's not funny."
"I wasn't trying to be," Zoya said. "Bring nothing you're unwilling to lose. Don't take a phone. It likes to talk through phones."
Rohan looked at his pocket even though there was nothing in it. He could hear a ring inside his bones that wasn't a sound.
"We'll go," he said, surprising himself.
"Of course we'll go," Vikram echoed, surprised by nothing. "But if this gets weird—"
"It's already weird," Rohan said softly.
Zoya stepped back, as if their decision had pushed her. "One more thing. If you see a child at the ruin, don't follow. It isn't a child."
"What is it then?" Vikram asked.
"A direction," she said. "The wrong one."
She left them with the map and the feeling that the city had become a waiting room.
They packed light. Two bottles of water, a coil of rope because it felt like the kind of day when a rope might be the difference between a bruise and a burial, and a box of matches. Vikram brought a first-aid kit because he had decided long ago that optimism without gauze was just a pretty word. Rohan took nothing sharp. He didn't want to find out if the coin would make his hand finish something his mind hadn't started.
They reached the highway by noon, heat wobbling off the road in slow ghosts. Rohan kept seeing flashes at the edge of his vision, not movement, exactly—more like the idea of movement. They turned off at a nameless service lane that knifed into scrub, then trees. The air cooled. The road turned to a path and the path turned to apology.
"Stop here," Rohan said, even though he couldn't have said why. They left the bike under a beehive of leaves, hid it with branches like boys who still believed in camouflage.
They walked.
At first, the forest only smelled like plants doing their jobs. Then the scent shifted. Rohan tasted metal on his tongue. He thought of the ruined room and the burnt hole in cloth. He thought of Uncle Ash sitting in an empty chair that still held the shape of him.
"Do you hear that?" Vikram asked.
"Hear what?"
"Nothing," Vikram said. "That's the problem."
Silence can be a volume. It can turn itself up.
They found the clearing without looking for it, which felt exactly right. In the middle was the ruin. It had the same bones as Rohan's dream, the same angles. The slab lay at the center, half-swallowed by soil. Words were scratched into its edge, too shallow to be old, too shaky to be calm.
Some vows can't be buried.
Rohan crouched. The itch in his palm sharpened like a shout. His skin warmed as if someone had put his hand near a stove. He pressed his fingers to the soil and it gave like breath.
"Don't dig," Vikram said, but the word had the weight of air, and Rohan's fingers were already in the dirt. He pulled, and the earth came away easy this time, like the ground had been waiting for politeness.
The box surfaced. The same black wood. The same clasp. But it looked newer in this light. Less like an antique, more like an idea that kept itself young.
Rohan didn't open it. The last time he had, the world had moved. He set it on the slab and stepped back.
"What now?" Vikram asked. He had the rope in his hands without knowing why.
Rohan held his breath and spoke to air. "We brought it back."
No answer. The trees sagged like old men. A fly stitched a figure eight in front of his nose and vanished, as if the air had closed around it.
"We brought it back," Rohan said again. "We didn't know what we were doing. We know now."
The forest didn't care. Or it cared in a way Rohan couldn't read. He felt foolish, which was dangerous; shame tried to turn him into something loud.
"Maybe there's a ritual," Vikram said. "A prayer?"
"Zoya didn't hand us instructions," Rohan muttered.
A breeze unwound itself from the trees and touched Rohan's cheek. He went cold from the inside out.
It wasn't paid, said a voice from nowhere and everywhere.
"I know," Rohan said, before fear could make him clever. "Tell me what to pay."
The wind shifted. A shape gathered at the edges of his sight and refused to become a person. Children's laughter skittered across the clearing, the kind of laughter that meant someone had counted to ten and the game had begun, and if you didn't hide right, you'd be found in a way that changed your life.
Vikram moved closer to Rohan until their shoulders touched. "We should go," he said, voice steady by stubbornness.
"We just got here," Rohan said.
A small figure appeared at the far end of the clearing.
It looked like a girl. Eight, maybe nine. Hair to her shoulders. Dress the color of water that had forgotten how to be blue. She didn't walk so much as arrange herself from one place to another, like film with missing frames.
Zoya's warning hit Rohan too late to be useful.
If you see a child, don't follow. It isn't a child.
The girl looked at them. Her mouth moved. Rohan couldn't hear the words, but his bones did. She lifted a hand and pointed into the trees behind the ruin, where a narrow corridor of shadow cut through like a wound.
"Don't," Vikram whispered.
Rohan didn't move. That was the last smart thing he did.
Something tapped the wooden box on the slab from inside, the way a fingernail taps a table when waiting. Once. Twice. A third time, longer. The clasp shivered, not opening, just remembering it could.
Rohan took one step toward the slab. The itch in his palm became a heat, then a burn, then a number he couldn't count. He wanted to put his hand on the wood to cool it, the way you put a fevered forehead to a window. He didn't.
"Please," he said, and he wasn't sure who he was speaking to. "Tell me how."
The child tilted her head. When she smiled, it was gentle and wrong in the same breath, like a lullaby sung out of tune on purpose.
Then the forest did something it hadn't done all day. It breathed in.
The box lid rose by itself a fraction. The cloth inside rippled as if touched by wind. Something golden pulsed once, a heartbeat without a body. The coin didn't jump. It didn't fly. It simply existed in Rohan's hand without crossing the space between.
He didn't remember reaching. He didn't remember choosing. He only knew his palm closed and heat ran up his wrist like water running the wrong way.
"Drop it," Vikram said, calm rising into panic.
Rohan tried. His fingers didn't listen. The coin felt heavier than metal, lighter than guilt. A ringing sound built in his ears, thin and pure, the way a glass sings just before it breaks.
It wasn't paid, the voice said again. Closer now. Inside now.
"What?" Rohan shouted at nothing. "What wasn't?"
Something answered from behind his heart. Not a word. A pull. Like a door that had been painted shut being opened for the first time in years.
The corridor of shadow behind the ruin brightened at the edges, just enough to show that it wasn't a corridor at all. It was a mirror stretched thin until it had learned the trick of being a passage.
The child lifted her hand a second time and drew a small circle in the air, and the circle stayed. It shimmered like oil, like tears, like a promise made by a liar who wanted to be honest.
"Don't follow," Vikram said again, his voice breaking in a way Rohan had never heard.
Rohan took a step toward the circle. Not because he wanted to. Because the coin wanted to, and his hand belonged to it for the moment. He felt Vikram's fingers claw at his sleeve and hold, strong as rope, stronger.
"Let go," Rohan said quietly. "If I drag you, it'll take both of us."
"Then we go together," Vikram said.
"Not this time," Rohan said, and the words sounded like a decision he had made years ago and forgotten until now.
The circle widened, slow and polite.
Leaves at the edge of the clearing turned to mirrors. In each mirror, Rohan saw versions of himself at different ages, different hurts. In one, he was a boy standing at a hospital door he would not open. In another, he stood at a police counter and did not give his name. In another, he held his mother's hand and pretended he wasn't crying.
"Last chance," Vikram said, but he didn't sound like he believed in last chances anymore.
The coin grew hotter. The voice grew softer.
Paid, it whispered, not to the past, not to the future, but to the moment that opens both.
"Not yet," Rohan said through his teeth. "We'll do it right."
He forced his fingers open. The coin didn't fall. It floated an inch above his palm, then lay itself back down like a tired cat and cooled, just enough for him to feel the difference.
The circle flickered.
The child cocked her head, curious.
Rohan took a breath that hurt and stepped back from the slab. The forest exhaled, disappointed.
"We're coming back tomorrow," he told the air. "With a way to pay."
The circle shrank to a dot and went out like a candle. The box lid shut without a sound. The itch in his palm dimmed to a bruise that would never show.
They stood there for a long time, not looking at each other, until birds remembered how to sing.
On the way back through the trees, Rohan's phone buzzed in his pocket even though he hadn't brought it. He didn't reach for it. The sound wasn't coming from his pocket anyway.
It was coming from behind his heart.
When they reached the bike, Zoya was waiting on the road, arms folded against the wind. She looked at their faces and didn't ask if they had found the ruin.
"What did it say?" she asked instead.
"It wants payment," Rohan said.
"It always does," Zoya said. "What did you promise?"
Rohan looked at his hand. The skin there glowed a little in the fading light, like something written in lemon juice under heat.
"Tomorrow," he said.
Zoya nodded once, as if the forest had just spoken a language she understood.
"Then don't be late," she said.
That night, Rohan dreamed of a door painted shut and a hand with his palm lines but not his patience, lifting a coin like a key. When he woke, someone had written on his window from the inside with breath.
It wasn't paid.
He pressed his hand against the glass until the words blurred and his fingers left five clear ovals in the fog.
"Tomorrow," he whispered. "I heard you."
Something on the other side of the glass breathed back.