Ludhiana, one month later.
The city was a symphony of chaos—the blare of horns, the rumble of diesel generators, the constant press of humanity. It was the perfect place to disappear, and the perfect place to listen.
Dan sat in the back corner of a cramped internet cafe, the blue light of the monitor reflecting off his new face. A subtle prosthetic altered the line of his jaw; contact lenses dimmed the distinctive sharpness of his gaze. He was Navdeep, a freelance data-entry clerk with a forgettable manner.
On the screen, encrypted within layers of mundane traffic, was the nascent architecture of their "un-organization." It wasn't a database. It was a map—a psychic and historical cartography of the Punjab region. He plotted points: Site Gurdwara (Status: COMPROMISED/QUARANTINED). The Bhatti Mine (Status: COLLAPSED/PSI-DEAD ZONE). Dozens of other locations gleaned from I.O. files he'd mentally photographed over the years: old British-era psychiatric hospitals, decommissioned radio towers built on ancient tell sites, chemical plants with unusually high rates of "hysterical" incidents among workers.
Each point was a potential crack. A place where the material world was thin, or where human suffering had pooled densely enough to attract… attention.
His focus was broken by the gentle chime of a custom alert. Kiran's signal. She was at the rendezvous.
He logged out, wiped the terminal, and melted into the crowded street. Their base was not a sleek safe house, but a rented room above a fabric wholesaler's in the old city. The air was perpetually thick with the smell of dye and dust.
Kiran was waiting. She looked different too. Her hair was shorter, dyed a nondescript brown. She moved with a new awareness, less like a victim, more like a scout. In her hands was a paper bag from a local mithai shop. It didn't hold sweets.
"The Grey Market is real," she said, her voice low as Dan locked the door. She emptied the bag onto their low table. Out tumbled a bizarre collection: a weathered copper amulet that made the air taste of ozone, a cracked clay tablet covered in cuneiform that seemed to writhe if you didn't look directly at it, and a faded Polaroid of a smiling family, the faces blurred into featureless smudges except for the eyes, which were piercingly clear and full of terror.
"Where?" Dan asked, picking up the amulet. A faint, psychic sting, like a static shock, ran up his arm.
"A shop in the Haibowal district. Sells 'antiques.' The owner is a frightened little man named Palvi. He's a middleman. He gets these from 'diggers' and sells them to 'collectors.' He said something slipped through the usual channels. Something urgent." She tapped the Polaroid. "This came from a village near the Rajasthan border. A 'quiet sickness.' He was desperate to move it."
Dan studied the photo. The hollow horror in those clear eyes was familiar. It was the look of a memory being eaten. "The Custodian is gone, but the ecosystem remains. The diggers, the collectors… the architects."
"We need to follow the chain," Kiran said. "This photo is a symptom. We find the sickness."
Dan's analyst mind approved. This was actionable intelligence. But the soldier in him hesitated. To follow the chain was to step back onto the board, to risk exposure to the I.O. and whatever worse things were operating in the shadows.
"We're not ready," he said. "We have a map. We don't have a network. We don't have resources."
Kiran fixed him with a look. The link between them hummed with her quiet conviction. "We have each other. And we have this." She gestured at the objects. "We can't just map the cracks, Dan. We have to learn how to seal them. And to do that, we need to understand what's leaking through. This isn't the I.O.'s war anymore. It's ours. And our first mission has walked right into our shop."
He held her gaze. She was right. The purpose they had defined under the peepal tree wasn't theoretical. It was here, in a cursed Polaroid on a cheap table. The fantasy of building a quiet resistance was colliding with the gritty drama of a new case.
"We'll need identities. A cover." He picked up the clay tablet, feeling the alien impressions under his thumb. "We're not officers. We're freelance archivists. Folklore preservationists. We're interested in… local anomalies."
A ghost of a smile touched Kiran's lips. "Archivists. I like it."
The action was beginning again. Not a frantic escape, but a deliberate hunt. The horror was in a photograph. And the supernatural was on their table, waiting to be read