CHAPTER 1—Moonlight on Alloy Street
The night on Alloy Street was wrong.
It was too quiet—eerily, painfully quiet. The kind of silence that pressed against the ears like a physical weight, forcing you to hear the things you tried hardest to ignore. No shouts from drunk workers returning late, no distant laughter from the steel market's back alleys, not even the restless clatter of loose metal sheets shaking in the wind. Everything was still. As if the entire street was holding its breath, waiting for something to break.
Balik stood beneath a flickering lamp, the weak yellow light stuttering against his mudmali eyes. His shadow stretched unnaturally long behind him, splitting into two faint outlines for just a moment before merging back into one. No, not his shadow—their shadow.
He dragged in a breath that burned in his throat.
Tonight should have been simple. Routine. Controlled. But nothing inside him felt controlled anymore. Every time he blinked, he could still see it—the blood, the fear, the wide, shocked eyes of the friend who had trusted him. The mission had gone wrong. Terribly wrong. And Balik wasn't sure which part of him had made the final choice.
Maybe neither.Maybe both.
A shiver crawled up his back.
"This was necessary," a cold voice murmured inside him. Smooth, steady, logical. The voice that handled fear like it was nothing more than a distraction.Balik.
But another voice trembled underneath it—soft, horrified, begging to understand why any of this was happening.Tejas.
He winced and pressed his palm against the side of his head. The flickering lamp buzzed louder, casting shadows that seemed to pulse around him.
"Stop… just stop…" he whispered, but it didn't matter. The two voices pushed and pulled inside him like tides in a storm, drowning out the world until only their conflict remained.
Balik's voice sharpened:
"You had no choice. Weakness gets people killed."
Tejas's voice cracked:
"They trusted us… I trusted them… how could you—how could we—"
"Enough!" Balik snapped aloud.
His voice echoed through the empty metal street, bouncing off rusted barrels and half-collapsed walls. The sound felt too loud, too out of place—like he didn't exist here, like he wasn't supposed to be here at all.
He pressed both hands to his face, gripping hard enough that his nails dug into his skin. Maybe the pain would drown out the noise inside. It didn't.
The moon hung heavy over Alloy Street, pale and round like an unblinking eye staring directly at him. He felt exposed beneath it, as if the night itself could see whatever he was becoming.
Something inside him twisted.
Something broke open.
A memory slammed into him so violently he staggered back.
Not a moment from Alloy Street.
Not from this world at all.
Warm light. A courtyard. The scent of jasmine.
A boy—him, but not him—laughed as his mother playfully tugged his ear. Books were stacked high on a wooden table. Bronze lamps flickered with soft fire. He remembered sunlight on his skin—gentle, warm, forgiving.
He remembered kindness not as a distant longing but a reality he once lived in.
Tejas…His name in another world, another life.
The contrast was so sharp his chest tightened painfully.
Then the memory darkened.
A metallic scream twisted through the air.A bright flash.Headlights.Pain—blinding, shattering pain.Then cold darkness swallowing him whole.
His breath caught. His legs nearly buckled.
He remembered death.
Not metaphorical.Not emotional.True, violent, irreversible death.
The shock of it left him trembling.
It wasn't just guilt now.It wasn't just inner conflict.
He had lived a whole life before this one. And the pieces were fitting together too slowly and too painfully.
The lamp above him flickered out for a heartbeat. In that breath of darkness, Balik felt the world tilt around him.
He stumbled to a patch of cracked pavement and sank down, leaning back against a dented metal railing. He pressed his cold fingers to the ground, grounding himself, trying to separate which memories were real, which belonged to which version of him.
Tejas.Balik.Ray—whatever that name meant for the future.
Three lives tangled into one.
A passing gust carried the metallic scent of Alloy Street—iron mixed with oil, dust, and faint traces of dried blood. It grounded him just enough to breathe again.
His voice was barely audible."Who… am I?"
The question rippled through him like a stone thrown into a deep well.
No answer came.
The memories shifted again.
This time, they weren't from his past life—but from the beginning of this one.
Cold darkness.A crying infant.Not in a warm home—but a storage room full of crates, cloth bundles, and metal scraps.
Hands that didn't hold him with affection.Hands that checked him like an item being inspected.
Voices whispering:
"Another one?""He's quiet. That's good.""Put him with the others."
He saw Varun's face when he was younger—sharp eyes, calculating expression even back then. A man who measured people by usefulness, not worth. He remembered First Mira's childish smirk as she poked his forehead. He remembered Ishan tripping over crates while trying to help him walk for the first time.
They were his world.His broken, twisted, makeshift world.
But the warmth inside those memories was false.Like shadows pretending to be light.
Balik swallowed hard.
He remembered the first time he took a life—small, accidental, inevitable in this world. He remembered what Varun said afterward:
"You can cry later. Right now, learn from it."
Tejas had cried.Balik had learned.
He didn't know which of them grew from it.
Maybe both.
His hands curled into fists against the pavement.
Tonight… he had gone too far.
He had killed a friend's family.
Not a stranger.Not an enemy.Someone who trusted him.
Tejas's voice shattered inside him, broken and pleading:
"Why… why did you let it happen—why didn't you stop him?"
Balik's voice was colder than the moonlight:
"Because stopping would have gotten us all killed."
A tear fell before he could stop it. It splashed onto the dry metal ground, hot against the cold surface.
He didn't even know which version of himself was crying.
The moonlight stretched his shadow again—two shapes, overlapping, separating, merging. The split wasn't just emotional anymore.
It felt real. Physical.Like two people trapped in one body.
A sharp ache erupted behind his eyes, forcing him to grip his head again. The world blurred, shifting between moonlight, memory, and darkness.
"This isn't… normal," he whispered shakily. "This isn't something a person should remember. Two lives… two voices… two souls…"
A third whisper rose from deep inside him.Not Balik.Not Tejas.
Quiet. Balanced.Calm despite everything.
Ray.
A name not yet earned, not fully formed.A shadow of what he might become.
His breathing slowly steadied.
He didn't understand it yet.But something inside him did.
This was the end of something.The end of who he had been until now.
And the beginning of a long path toward unraveling it.
The lamp flickered again, washing him in dim yellow light. The streets were still lonely, the world still quiet, but something in him had shifted forever.
He rose slowly.
The past was awakening.The present was cracking.The future was whispering.
And somewhere deep in those fractured identities…Ray waited.