74.8%.
That number was burned into the back of my eyelids like a brand. It wasn't a girl's phone number. It wasn't a lottery ticket. It was my cumulative attendance in Discrete Mathematics.
If I didn't sit in that freezing lecture hall on Monday morning at 8:00 AM sharp, I was getting a "Year Back."
For most people, a Year Back was an embarrassment. For me, it was a death sentence. My parents—Amma and Appa—had sold their last gold chain to pay my tuition this semester. They tried to hide the pawn shop receipts, but I found them. They were betting their entire retirement on my Computer Science degree.
I couldn't fail them. I simply couldn't.
"Bro, seriously, stop checking the agonizingly slow banking app. You have twelve hundred rupees. We know."
The voice cut through the dark, humid air of the Tempo Traveller. Vikram.
Vikram sat in the front passenger seat, feet up on the dashboard, bathed in the blue light of his iPhone 15 Pro. He was everything I wasn't. Rich, charismatic, effortlessly brilliant. He was the kind of guy who walked into a C++ exam hungover and walked out with an S-Grade. His parents—massive real estate tycoons—called him their "miracle baby" because they had him in their fifties. He had never worried about money a day in his life.
"I'm not checking my balance," I lied, locking my cracked Android screen. "I'm checking the map. We've been stuck on this 'shortcut' for an hour."
"Relax, Dhruv," said a soft voice from the seat behind me. Riya.
Riya was the quietest girl in our Python lab. Sweet, anxious, and the kind of person who apologized when you stepped on her foot. She was clutching her backpack like a life vest. "Vikram said this route avoids the cops. We're just going to Coorg, right? Just a weekend trip."
"Yeah, just a trip," grunted Javed from the back row. Javed was the class gym rat—all muscle, zero neck, but surprisingly good at backend dev. He tore open a protein bar with his teeth. "As long as we get back for the cricket match on Sunday."
I looked to my left.
Kabir was sitting there, perfectly still.
Kabir was the enigma of our batch. Blind since birth, yet he coded faster than anyone else using just a screen reader and keyboard shortcuts. He navigated the chaotic streets of Bangalore better than people with 20/20 vision. He lived with his grandmother in a small flat in Malleswaram; she was the only family he talked about. He sat with his white cane folded on his lap, his dark sunglasses reflecting the passing trees.
"Kabir?" I whispered. "You okay?"
Kabir didn't turn his head. He was tilting it, listening to something I couldn't hear.
"The rhythm is wrong," Kabir whispered. His voice was melodic, calm, detached.
"The engine?" I asked.
"No," Kabir said. "The world. The vibration of the tires... it just feels empty. Like there's nothing underneath us."
"You're high, bro," Vikram laughed from the front. "That's just the suspension. This road is trash."
"Vikram," I said, leaning forward. A cold knot of dread tightened in my stomach. The fog outside had thickened. It wasn't normal mist; it was a wall of white, swallowing the headlights. "Tell the driver to stop."
"Chill, Dhruv. The algorithm knows best." Vikram tapped the phone mounted on the dashboard.
I looked at the GPS.
Google Maps was glitching. The blue arrow wasn't pointing forward. It was spinning in a frantic, clockwise circle. The road on the screen—the yellow line we trusted with our lives—was flickering.
The Estimated Arrival Time didn't say 4 hours.
It said: CALCULATING...
Then it changed. RECALCULATING...
Then again. NO ROUTE FOUND.
"What the hell?" the driver, a heavy-set local named Ramesh, muttered, tapping the screen aggressively. "Where did the signal go?"
"Stop the car!" I screamed.
Ramesh slammed the brakes. The tires screeched on wet mud.
But it was too late.
The headlights cut through the fog and revealed... nothing.
The road didn't curve. It simply ended.
"Oh god!" Riya screamed.
The front wheels dipped over the edge.
Gravity took over. The van tipped forward, plunging into the white void.
It was violent. Visceral. Bodies flew upward as we entered freefall. My stomach slammed into my throat. Javed's protein bar floated in the air for a split second before the world turned into a washing machine of pain and noise.
CRASH.
We hit the slope. The van rolled—once, twice, three times. Metal screamed against rock. Glass exploded inward, spraying us like confetti. I was thrown against the roof, my shoulder hitting a metal strut with a sickening crunch.
Then, a final, bone-jarring impact.
Silence.
Heavy, ringing silence.
I lay on the ceiling of the overturned van, tasting copper. Blood. My left arm was useless, dislocated.
"Is... is everyone alive?" I choked out.
"Mom?" Riya was sobbing somewhere in the dark. "I want my mom."
"My leg!" Javed screamed. "Fuck, my leg is stuck!"
I kicked the back door open with my good leg. It gave way with a groan of twisted metal. I tumbled out into the mud, gasping for air.
It was pitch black. We must have fallen into a ravine. The air was thick and humid, smelling strangely of sulfur and wet ozone.
I dragged myself up. "Vikram! Kabir! Get out! The fuel tank might blow!"
Vikram crawled out of the passenger window. His designer shirt was shredded. His forehead was bleeding. He looked at me, eyes wide with the terror of a boy who had never faced a real problem in his life. He fumbled for his phone, using the flashlight to scan the area.
"Where are we?" Vikram whispered, his voice trembling. "There's no road. There's no... anything."
I looked around. The flashlight beam cut through the darkness, revealing trees. But they were wrong. They were massive, twisting pillars of black wood that seemed to bleed a red sap.
"Just a forest," I said, trying to convince myself. "We just fell into a deep part of the reserve forest. We need to climb back up."
"No," Kabir said.
He stepped out of the wreckage. His sunglasses were gone, revealing his milky, unseeing eyes. He stood straighter than I had ever seen him. He snapped his white cane into a straight, rigid staff.
"We can't climb out," Kabir whispered. "There is no 'up'."
"What are you talking about?" Javed groaned, dragging his crushed leg out of the van. "Just call for help, Vikram."
Vikram raised his phone to the sky, searching for a signal.
He froze.
"Dhruv," Vikram whispered, his hand shaking so hard the light danced on the trees. "Look at the sky."
I looked up.
I expected the moon. I expected stars. I expected the dark canopy of the Western Ghats.
Instead, I saw the gears.
Miles above us, filling the entire horizon, were massive, interlocking stone gears the size of continents. They ground against each other with a tectonic rumble—Thrum... Thrum... Thrum. Bioluminescent moss dripped from them like celestial oil, casting a sickly green light over the nightmare landscape.
This wasn't a forest. It was a machine.
"Where are we?" Riya wept, staring at the impossible sky.
I looked down at the wreckage. A piece of the van's axle had snapped off—a long, jagged iron rod, sharp at one end.
I didn't think. Panic and adrenaline were screaming at me to arm myself. I walked over and picked it up. It was heavy, cold, and rusted. It was ugly, but it was a weapon.
"Something's moving," Vikram said, his voice trembling but his finger pointing dead center into the darkness. "Three hundred meters. closing fast."
"Wolves?" Riya asked, trembling behind Javed.
"No," Kabir said. He turned his head, his ear twitching. "Not wolves. They have no heartbeats."
My pocket burned.
I pulled out my phone. The screen was cracked, but a new interface glowed in gold Sanskrit text that translated itself into English before my eyes.
[ WELCOME TO THE MAZE OF MAYA ][ LOCATION: KHANDAVA-PRASTHA ][ SURVIVAL PROBABILITY: 0.03% ]
"Khandava-Prastha?" I read the words aloud, the syllables feeling heavy on my tongue.
Kabir went rigid. He gripped his staff tighter. "My Dadi told me stories about that name," he whispered, his voice trembling for the first time. "The Burning Forest. The land of snakes and fire where the old world had to die."
A howl tore through the trees. It sounded like a laugh mixed with a scream.
Hee-hee-kkhhh.
"Dhruv," Vikram said, backing up until his back hit the wrecked van. "You're the one who always gets into fights. What do we do?"
I gripped the iron spear until my knuckles turned white. My shoulder was screaming in pain, and my heart was hammering against my ribs. I wasn't a hero. I was just a student who couldn't afford to die.
"We don't run," I said, my voice shaking slightly, betraying my fear. "We hunt."