Riya Chowdhury
1
The desert had its own kind of silence—thick, stretched thin across salt plains like an invisible cloth drawn over the earth, humming just below the level of human hearing. In the small town of Khavda, where every house was painted with fading lime and the wind carried more memory than sand, seventeen-year-old Payel Deshmukh sat cross-legged on her rooftop, her telescope tilted toward the night. She knew the names of the stars like old friends—Betelgeuse, Rigel, Vega, and Altair—and she whispered them under her breath like prayers. The townspeople called her “Tārāwali Ladki,” the star girl who stayed up too late, who scribbled sky charts in her math notebook, who refused marriage proposals from aunties because she was in love with Saturn’s rings.
But that night was different.
There was a smell in the air, not of wet earth or desert wind, but metal. Like burnt iron. A strange pulse. The sky had been unusually clear for monsoon season. No clouds. No haze. Just endless black velvet and silver pinpricks. Until something moved—not a plane, not a satellite—but a slash of white fire across the stars. Payel jolted upright, her telescope knocked slightly. It wasn’t a meteor. Not the kind she’d seen before. This was too slow, too controlled. And then, just as suddenly, it vanished.
A distant thud rolled through the air like a muffled drumbeat from under the ground. No explosion. No fire. Just silence again. The stars blinked above, unchanged. But something had changed inside her. She grabbed her torch, jammed her notebook into her bag, and without telling her mother, descended the iron stairs of their old house.
The salt desert was an ocean frozen in stillness, miles and miles of cracked white emptiness glowing under moonlight. She took the back path through the shrubs near the temple ruins—where tourists rarely went and locals whispered about “things best left alone.” But Payel wasn’t afraid of ghosts. She was afraid of never knowing.
She didn’t expect to find anything, really. Maybe a scorched patch. Maybe a lump of space rock she could hide in her cupboard. What she found instead was a crater—shallow, still warm, the sand around it fused like glass. At the center lay a figure. Human, or close enough to fool the eye. A boy. Unconscious. Clothes unlike anything she’d seen before—woven with metallic fibers that shimmered faintly. His skin was pale, almost translucent. And his chest was glowing—dimly, with a soft blue light that pulsed in rhythm like a second heartbeat.
Payel’s first instinct was to run.
Then he moved.
Not violently. Just his fingers—twitching like they were trying to form a word in a language she didn’t know. His lips parted slightly, but no sound came out. Instead, her mind echoed with something strange—not a voice exactly, but a feeling. Like longing. Like he was trying to say: Help me.
She crouched beside him, unsure whether to touch his shoulder. The closer she got, the more she felt it—a wave of something washing over her, not heat, not cold, but memory. Her own. Flash images—her father smiling before his last space conference, her telescope on her tenth birthday, her mother crying when she thought Payel was asleep. The boy was projecting her past to her.
“What… are you?” she whispered.
The boy opened his eyes then—pale gold, like molten light. His pupils were narrow, almost reptilian, but his expression wasn’t alien. It was terrified. Human, even. He tried to sit up, wincing, and clutched his side.
“No, no—stay still,” she said, suddenly slipping into caretaker mode. Her brain screamed with questions, but her hands acted on instinct, pulling off her dupatta to press against his wound. The blood—or whatever fluid it was—was faintly blue and shimmered unnaturally under the moonlight. She should’ve called someone. The police. Her mother. The army. But she didn’t. She couldn’t. Something about his presence—his vulnerability, the memories he showed her, the silence in his eyes—it silenced her logic.
“I need to get you out of here,” she muttered, more to herself than him. Her friend Deepak had a bike. And a toolkit. And zero impulse control. If anyone could help her hide a not-quite-human boy fallen from the sky, it was him.
As she dragged the boy to his feet, his arm around her shoulder, he leaned in closer. A soft pulse radiated where their skin met, and for a second, she saw a vision—faint and flickering. A planet with twin moons. A silver city hanging upside-down. A woman’s voice in a language made of chimes.
Then it was gone.
“Who are you?” she whispered again.
This time, he answered. Barely audible, but real.
“Cael.”
She froze. “Your name?”
He nodded once.
That was the night the sky broke open. The night Payel Deshmukh stopped looking at stars through her telescope—and started walking among them. And somewhere, deep inside a satellite station hundreds of kilometers away, an alarm lit up a red screen. Object Recovered. Location Pinged. Unauthorized Lifeform Detected.
The hunt had begun.
2
The engine of Deepak’s scooter sputtered through the still night like a reluctant old man refusing to run but too loyal to stop, its battered metal frame groaning under the weight of two teenagers and a barely-conscious extraterrestrial passenger slumped between them, wrapped awkwardly in a long black shawl Payel had stolen from her mother’s cupboard. The salt flats stretched around them like a pale mirror, glittering under the milky moon, and the silence buzzed louder than any engine. Payel kept her hands tightly around Cael’s shoulders, feeling the heat of his strange body and the way his muscles tensed with every bump as if Earth’s gravity was an enemy pulling him down with cruel delight. Deepak hadn’t stopped muttering since he picked them up from the edge of the crater. “You said you found a meteorite, not a bleeding alien with superhero cheekbones,” he hissed, eyes darting from the road to the rearview mirror, “You know how many laws we’re probably breaking? This is beyond physics, Payel. This is like, Avengers-level madness.” But despite the panic in his voice, he didn’t turn back. They reached Deepak’s father’s abandoned warehouse on the outskirts of town—once a packaging center for jaggery blocks, now a dusty relic of economic failure. No one came there anymore except lizards, wind, and now, perhaps, a visitor from another galaxy. The three of them—well, two and a half conscious—stumbled inside, and Deepak locked the doors with shaking hands while Payel laid Cael gently on an old mattress layered with frayed rugs and torn posters of Shaktimaan and Hrithik Roshan. His breathing was steady but shallow, and when she touched his wrist, his skin was warmer now, more flushed, almost human. “I think he’s stabilizing,” she whispered. “Or adapting.” Deepak threw his arms in the air. “Adapting? What is he, a Pokémon?” But even he knew something was different. When Cael opened his eyes again, they were still that surreal golden hue, but softer now, like a sunset fading instead of a warning. His gaze met Payel’s, and a flicker of recognition passed between them—no words, just sensation, like he remembered her from a dream he hadn’t dreamed yet. She knelt beside him, brushing a curl of hair from his forehead. “Cael,” she said gently, “Why are you here? Did you crash? Are you being chased?” He didn’t answer in speech. Instead, a ripple of thought passed through her again—a sequence of feelings: urgency, fear, distance, a breaking sound like shattered glass in space. She gasped. “You’re running from something,” she said aloud. “You’re hiding.” Cael blinked once, then nodded, his hand trembling as he reached toward her and touched the back of her palm. The instant their skin met, Payel saw it again—not just a planet this time, but a fleet of dark, needle-shaped crafts hovering over an alien ocean, and a glowing orb locked in a chamber, pulsing violently as voices screamed in silence. The visions overwhelmed her, and she pulled back, her breath ragged. “He’s not just a visitor,” she whispered to Deepak. “He’s a warning.” Deepak sat on a rusted stool and buried his face in his hands. “Oh great. So we’re babysitting a cosmic bomb now. What next? The CBI shows up in hazmat suits?” But Payel wasn’t listening. She was staring at Cael, who had curled into himself slightly, as if trying to protect something deep inside. “He’s connected to something big. And whatever it is, it’s coming.” At that very moment, hundreds of kilometers away in a high-security DRDO lab in Jaisalmer, a crimson indicator flashed on a satellite telemetry screen. The technician on night duty leaned closer and frowned. “Sir, we’ve got a reentry anomaly—low-altitude impact, non-metallic, possibly controlled descent. Coordinates near the Rann perimeter.” The officer beside him raised a brow. “Confirm signature?” “Already cross-checked. Matched with the 1997 Vikram-9 event. Unidentified.” The officer picked up a secure line. “Alert Vigyaan-7. We may have company.” Back in the warehouse, Deepak had finally calmed enough to ask the question burning in his mind. “What if they come looking for him? The government? Aliens? Both?” Payel sat beside Cael and answered without flinching. “Then we don’t let them find him.” Deepak stared at her, incredulous. “You’re serious?” “Yes,” she said. “He’s not just an alien. He’s… he feels. He’s scared. He saved me.” “Saved you? He nearly passed out!” “No. When he touched me, I saw something—my childhood, my father, the night he left.” Deepak’s face softened. He knew that story too well. Payel’s father had been a senior astrophysicist working with ISRO, part of a classified mission that vanished without trace, leaving only a cryptic letter and a broken telescope behind. No one ever explained what happened. Not even her mother. And now this boy—this being—was projecting those memories back to her, as if they were connected through something deeper than just stars. “Maybe,” she said slowly, “he knows what happened to my father.” Cael’s breathing slowed again. As he drifted into unconsciousness, his fingers curled lightly around hers, and she didn’t pull away. Outside, the wind picked up, sending dust and salt sweeping across the barren plains. In the distance, far beyond where the desert met the sky, a black jeep with tinted windows rumbled down an old military road—no headlights, no plates. The hunt had begun. And the girl who once watched the stars alone was about to become the only thing standing between the boy who fell from them—and the world that wanted him gone.
3
The next morning arrived not with birdsong or school bells but with the low, mechanical growl of a surveillance drone slicing across the quiet desert sky like a scar drawn by metal, its wings blinking faint red pulses as it scanned the vast emptiness of the Rann for heat signatures or anomalies invisible to the human eye, but Payel was already awake, crouched beside Cael’s sleeping form on the floor of Deepak’s dusty warehouse, brushing grains of salt from his cheek as if trying to separate him from the land he now rested on, the land that didn’t belong to him, not entirely, not yet, but somehow accepted him as its own, and as he shifted slightly in his sleep, brow furrowed in pain or memory, she felt that strange connection again—the flicker of images in her mind like half-developed photographs of places she couldn’t name, floating structures above orange oceans, laughter like music in a crystalline tongue, sorrow that felt ancient and infinite, and when she touched his wrist to check his temperature, she felt a rush of warmth that wasn’t heat but something deeper, like the echo of a soul trying to survive. Deepak had been pacing since dawn, muttering equations and conspiracy theories under his breath, still wearing the same hoodie from the night before, his hair sticking up like a crow’s nest and his eyes darting toward the window every few seconds. “We need a plan,” he said for the tenth time. “We can’t keep him here. What if your mom comes looking for you? What if the police sweep the salt flats again? What if—God forbid—he explodes?” Payel gave him a flat look. “He’s not a grenade, Deepak.” “You say that now, but one sneeze and he could level Kutch.” “He’s in pain. He needs rest. And answers.” Cael stirred again, his hand twitching, and when he opened his eyes, they were duller than before—like light seen through fog—and his voice, though faint, finally returned in a language Payel had never heard but somehow understood, syllables not of sound but of sensation, meanings arriving in her chest like heartbeats. “Too many… sounds… watchers… must not find… the gate…” She leaned in. “Gate? What gate?” Cael blinked slowly, struggling. “Memory… not whole… damaged in… descent.” Deepak knelt beside him now, curiosity momentarily stronger than fear. “You hit your head on entry?” “Not head… memory core… fragmented.” “So you’re, like, a walking hard drive?” “No… more than that… I carry… echoes… what was lost.” Payel’s heart thudded. “Lost from where? From your world?” Cael didn’t answer, only looked past her, through the dusty slats of the warehouse, his golden eyes reflecting something far older than seventeen years. Outside, the sky had begun to shift—thin clouds rolling in from the east, curling like silk over the horizon, and in the distance, near the village’s dried-up lakebed, two government jeeps had appeared, black and official and wrong, slowly approaching the outer boundary of Khavda as villagers paused to stare, wondering if this was another census drill or another secret no one would talk about. Inside the warehouse, Deepak’s phone buzzed. A message from his cousin, who worked part-time as a technician at the Bhuj Airfield: High-clearance team landed at 4 a.m. From Delhi. Code name: Vigyaan-7. Looking for “unidentified entity.” Stay indoors. Payel read the message twice, her hands turning cold. “They’re here,” she said softly. “They’re looking for him.” Cael’s fingers tightened slightly around hers. “I… should go… must not bring danger… to you.” “No,” she said fiercely. “You’re not going anywhere. Not until I understand what you are. And why you showed me my memories.” He looked at her with an expression that didn’t belong to any boy she’d ever met—something deeper than gratitude, older than fear. “Because… you are part… of what was taken.” “Taken?” she whispered. “You mean my father.” Cael closed his eyes, and a single image filled her mind—not a dream, not a vision, but a memory. Her father, older than she remembered him, dressed in a lab coat with a small, luminous shard hovering above his palm, speaking softly into a recorder: “If we can stabilize it, if it chooses to stay… then maybe, just maybe, we can bridge the two skies.” And then, in the background of that memory, the unmistakable figure of Cael—unchanged, unmoved by time—standing beside him. Payel reeled back, breath stolen. “You… knew my father?” Cael didn’t speak. He simply nodded. “But how? That was… years ago.” “Because… I don’t age like you. I don’t move through time… the same way.” Deepak sat down hard on an oil drum, eyes wide. “Okay. I’m officially in over my head.” But Payel wasn’t listening. Her mind was racing, puzzle pieces falling into place, edges blurring between science and belief. Her father’s disappearance. The strange files hidden on his old laptop. The encrypted emails to an unknown recipient. The telescope that always pointed not to a star, but to an empty patch of sky. “There’s something buried here,” she said aloud. “Some kind of… gate. Or device. Or memory vault. And they think Cael can lead them to it.” Deepak nodded slowly. “And if they find him first, they’ll take him apart to get it.” “Then we can’t let them,” she said. “We have to move him. Somewhere safer. Somewhere no one would look.” “Where?” he asked. “The Rann’s open and flat. You can’t hide a glowing alien in the middle of a salt pan.” “Yes, you can,” Payel said. “If you know the right places. My father used to take me to the old stepwell temple ruins near the fossil park. It’s underground. Cooled. Abandoned. And off every digital map since the 1980s.” Deepak gave a low whistle. “You’re serious.” “Deadly.” Cael sat up slowly, his strength returning in small waves, and as he did, he reached into his torn suit and pulled out a small object wrapped in translucent silk. It looked like a crystal, but not of Earth—smooth, glowing faintly, and vibrating with a strange music that only hearts could hear. “What is it?” she asked. “Key,” he replied. “To the gate. To everything.” Payel’s throat tightened. “Then we definitely can’t let them take you.” Outside, the sound of jeep tires crunching salt grew closer. Inside, the boy beneath the dust stood for the first time, his spine straight despite pain, his gaze burning with a knowledge older than stars, and Payel knew with terrifying clarity: this wasn’t just about hiding someone. It was about protecting something sacred, something stolen, something lost between galaxies and timelines and hearts. And somehow, impossibly, it had chosen her.
4
They left before sunrise, with the moon still fading and the sky soaked in that dusty indigo hue that belongs only to early desert mornings, the kind that slip silently across the salt flats like breath over a mirror, and by the time the birds had begun to stir and temple bells chimed softly in the village, Payel, Deepak, and Cael were already miles away, bumping along on Deepak’s scooter with a tarp-covered cart tied behind them, loaded with supplies and masked by a false delivery label in Gujarati reading “Grain Feed – DO NOT OPEN”, and Cael hidden beneath with his limbs folded tightly and his energy fluctuating like a flickering frequency, the strange crystal in his possession pulsing faintly like a living thing trapped in a box, and Payel kept her hand on the handlebar, eyes fixed on the road ahead, wind scraping against her cheeks, her braid undone by speed, but her thoughts fixed not on the path—but on what lay buried beneath it. They reached the fossil park by mid-morning, past the dried thorn forests and ancient coral stones, the sun now blinding, harsh against the cracked terrain, and Payel guided them to the edge of a gully most locals avoided, where an old stepwell temple, long collapsed and buried in sand, still breathed beneath the dust like a sleeping god forgotten by time. Her father had taken her there once, on a night when the moon was red and the stars felt closer, telling her stories of how old Earth was once visited—not by aliens, he had said—but by “those who remembered the stars better than we ever will,” and now, standing at the same overgrown entrance framed by gnarled acacia and crumbling stone, she felt that memory wrap around her like a shawl stitched in silence. They descended into the darkness slowly, Deepak lighting the way with his modified drone torch, and the air grew cool, damp with forgotten centuries, while Cael moved with greater ease now, as if the further from human roads he walked, the more his body remembered how to exist. The underground room, once a sanctum, had collapsed on one side, but Payel found the chamber still intact—the dome ceiling covered in faded frescoes of the stars, constellations carved by monks who once mapped the sky using clay bowls and naked eyes, and in the center of the floor, a strange circular depression covered in white chalk symbols no archaeologist had ever deciphered. “This,” she said breathlessly, “this is where he brought me.” Cael walked toward the center slowly and knelt, placing the crystal into the hollow, and immediately the room seemed to vibrate, not violently, but like a sound too low for ears, a tremor that spoke directly to the bones, and Payel saw the dust swirl upward into patterns—spirals, lines, star maps, coordinates. “It responds to memory,” Cael said aloud now, his voice clearer. “To places with echoes of what was lost. Your father… he unlocked part of it. But never all.” “So it’s a kind of… cosmic archive?” asked Deepak. “No. It’s a bridge. A doorway between truths.” “Truths?” Payel asked, stepping closer. “What truths?” “That your sky is not yours alone. That what you call stars… are sometimes the reflections of watchers.” The air grew heavier as Cael placed both palms on the ground, and the crystal glowed brighter, sending faint blue light into the carvings along the wall, awakening them like veins under skin, and suddenly, images began to appear—not as visions, but as holograms of memory—her father standing with a group of scientists in a desert bunker, testing a similar crystal, and speaking in urgent whispers: “We’ve found the breach. It’s not a theory anymore. If we activate it fully… we could contact the other side.” Then—an explosion. Screams. The footage shimmered. The crystal sparked. Cael pulled back, wincing, his nose bleeding a thin line of silver. “It’s not safe to view too much at once. The gate’s unstable. It needs a stabilizer… someone rooted in both worlds.” Payel’s voice cracked. “You mean me.” Cael looked at her then with something deeper than recognition—something like guilt. “Your father wanted to protect you from this. But the gate remembers blood. It seeks out the lineage of those who first opened it.” “That’s why I see memories when I touch you.” “Yes.” “And why the government wants you.” “Yes.” “Because they think you’re the key.” “They are wrong,” he said softly. “You are.” Her head swam. She staggered back, breathing hard, the weight of it all too much—the boy, the crystal, her father’s secrets, the government’s hunt, the reality that she was not just a girl with a telescope anymore but something far more dangerous: a threshold. Then, from the surface above, a faint sound broke the silence—a low thump. Then another. Footsteps. Heavy. Synchronized. Deepak froze. “Someone’s here.” Payel turned to Cael, whose eyes blazed now with instinct. “Vigyaan-7.” “We have to hide the crystal,” she whispered. “And you.” But it was too late. Dust trickled from the stairwell as the footsteps grew louder, and a shadow fell across the ruined doorway, the silhouette of a man in desert fatigues with a rifle slung across his chest and a comm-link buzzing faintly in his ear. “Search the lower chambers,” came the voice of Lt. Raghav Sinha, crisp and cold. “The anomaly’s moving.” Payel reached for the crystal, but Cael stopped her. “If they touch it, they’ll corrupt the gate.” “Then what do we do?” “You run.” “No.” “Payel—” “I’m not leaving you again. Not like my father.” The moment hung suspended like breath in the throat, then shattered as the first agent stepped fully into the room. Deepak launched his drone into the man’s face, sending a burst of light and static, just enough to startle, just enough to make them scatter. “GO!” he shouted, grabbing Payel’s hand. They ran, Cael beside them, sprinting through the lower tunnels, maps of carved stone flying past in the torchlight, and above them, the agents began to descend in full force. As they reached the collapsed southern wall, Cael turned, held out his palm, and a surge of light rippled from his fingertips, briefly sealing the path behind them with a wall of sheer heat that melted rock and air alike. “That won’t hold long,” he said, breathless. They emerged into the outside world, the desert sun burning overhead, the sky now clouded with hovering drones and dark-winged birds, and as they scrambled into a ravine and vanished into salt-shadow, Payel knew one thing with aching certainty—this wasn’t just about hiding anymore. This was war. And the first battle had already begun, not between nations or species, but between truth and silence. Between memory and forgetting. Between the sky… and what lay beyond it.
5
The wind had picked up by the time they reached the sandstone ridges that marked the edge of the fossil valley, carrying with it a storm of salt dust and whispers from the earth—whispers of bones buried for millennia, of creatures lost to time, of secrets eroded into the folds of desert rock, and as Payel, Deepak, and Cael crouched behind a jagged outcrop just wide enough to shield them from the aerial scanners humming above, the tension between silence and breath stretched thinner than the air itself, every heartbeat thudding like a drum inside her ribs while her fingers trembled around the warm pulsing crystal still tucked inside her dupatta, and beside her, Cael knelt perfectly still, his golden eyes tracking the flight pattern of the drone with uncanny calm, his skin faintly glowing where it touched the shadow, and she realized then that even hiding, even afraid, he never looked human when he didn’t mean to—his stillness wasn’t the stillness of someone holding their breath, but the absence of breath entirely, like a memory paused mid-sentence, waiting to resume. Deepak checked his phone—signal blocked—and whispered, “They’ve jammed the area. No GPS, no networks. They’re sealing the radius. We’re boxed in.” Payel whispered back, “We have to move before sunset. If they spot us at night, we’re done.” Cael turned to her slowly. “There is another way… but it is not on your maps.” “Where?” “Below.” “You mean underground?” “Yes. Where time is thin.” They followed him deeper into the ridge, through a fissure between stone columns that opened into a hidden cavity, wide enough to stand but barely, and laced with veins of quartz that shimmered like veins of starlight trapped in earth. The further they walked, the more disoriented Payel felt—not in space, but in time—the air grew heavier but somehow softer, like the weight of memory pressing gently on her skin, and with every step beside Cael, she felt her thoughts slipping into places they hadn’t been, dreams she’d forgotten returning like echoes from her childhood, the night her father first told her about wormholes using marbles on the floor, the scent of cardamom on her mother’s sari, the memory of a lullaby in a language she never knew but now heard humming faintly in the dark—and then, without warning, Cael stopped and placed a hand on the wall, and the stone moved. Not like a door, but like it listened. It peeled open as if made of breath instead of rock, revealing a chamber of perfect silence. Inside, the walls glowed with gentle light—not electric, not alien, but something older than either, like the color of stars not yet born, and at the center floated a metallic platform where Cael slowly climbed, his eyes closing as the crystal hovered from Payel’s hand and joined the air like it belonged there, rotating slowly. “This is a Memory Anchor,” he said softly, “A place where truth holds still long enough to be heard.” “Heard by whom?” “By you. If you choose.” She stepped forward cautiously, and when her fingers brushed his, everything changed. Not just images this time—but immersion. She fell into a shared space, like a dream inside a memory inside another mind, and in it she saw her father again—not through a recording, but through Cael’s eyes—he was older, bearded, standing beside an earlier version of Cael in a research chamber hidden beneath Bhuj, his hands trembling as he touched a prototype version of the crystal. “We were wrong,” her father said, voice breaking, “The gate doesn’t just reach across space—it reaches across selves. Every person carries a frequency. If the wrong people access it… they won’t see knowledge. They’ll see power.” Then the vision blurred—alarm lights, a flash of betrayal, soldiers storming the lab, and Cael being forced through a gate-like structure while her father shouted, “Remember her! Keep her safe! She’s the tether!” And then silence. Payel gasped and broke the connection, stumbling back against the wall, eyes wide and throat tight. “He sent you here. To find me.” Cael nodded once. “He trusted you… to carry what he could not.” “But I’m not special,” she whispered. “I’m just a girl with a telescope.” “You are more,” he said, stepping closer. “You are the frequency that aligns the key. You are… the language.” “What language?” she asked, voice shaking. Cael raised his hand, gently touching her cheek, and the moment their skin met, a rush of feeling surged through her—not words, but emotion: his fear when he fell through Earth’s atmosphere, his awe the first time he looked at her, his loneliness buried under centuries of data, and most of all, a longing so deep it echoed her own—the desire to belong, not to a place, but to a person. “You speak without speaking,” he said, “You feel what others only bury. That is rare.” “That’s just being human,” she said softly. “No,” he replied. “That’s being Payel.” Their faces were close now, and for a moment, the desert, the agents, the threat of discovery all fell away, and she realized the terrifying truth—that she could fall for him, had already begun to, and it wasn’t just because he was beautiful or strange or otherworldly, but because he saw her in ways no one else had—not as a girl to marry off or a daughter to protect or a student to correct—but as a signal, a pulse, a sky unto herself. But just as their hands touched again, the ground above them shook. An explosion. The agents had found the upper fissure. Cael snapped back into alertness. “They’re breaching.” “How did they find us?” Deepak yelled from the tunnel. “We were off the grid!” But Payel already knew. “The crystal. It emits a frequency. They’ve tracked it.” “We have to shut it down,” Cael said. “If they take it—” “Then they take everything,” she finished. Without hesitation, she stepped onto the platform beside him and pressed her hand to the base, letting her own energy override its signal. The light dimmed. The pulse stopped. The chamber fell still. Outside, the agents were descending, boots scraping stone, voices shouting through comms. Deepak tossed her a flare. “We’ll have ten seconds before they’re in visual range.” “That’s enough,” Cael said, pressing the crystal back into Payel’s palm. “If you trust me.” “I do.” “Then hold on.” And with that, he touched the ground again—and this time, the rock did more than open. It shimmered, rippled, and swallowed them whole—Payel, Cael, Deepak—vanishing into a fold in space barely wider than thought, while above, the agents arrived to find an empty chamber, no trace of life, only silence and dust and the faintest scent of starlight lingering in the dark.
6
They emerged not into light but into stillness—a hollow carved not by human hands but by time itself, a place that felt untouched by history yet older than language, a sanctuary sealed within the belly of the Earth where the wind no longer spoke and sound dared not echo, and as Payel blinked into the dim glow of the new chamber, her pulse gradually slowed from the chaos of flight, her hand still tightly clasped in Cael’s, whose body now shimmered with a faint aurora, like moonlight made flesh, as if shifting through dimensions had pulled back another veil of disguise, revealing more of what he truly was—not monstrous, not alien, but made of memory and metal and something that looked too much like longing to be anything but alive. The air here was cool and dry, and the walls of the chamber—if they could be called walls—were embedded with countless fragments of translucent stone, each one suspended mid-surface, humming gently like frozen fireflies, and Payel stepped closer, mesmerized, reaching out instinctively to one of them, her fingers grazing its edge, and at once a vision flooded her mind—not sharp like a video but soft, like a story whispered into her bones: a star chart drawn with blood and light, a ship gliding across folded space, and a boy—Cael—standing at the edge of a dying world, holding the crystal like a piece of himself. She gasped and stumbled back, breath trembling, and turned to find Cael watching her quietly. “These,” he said softly, “are Memory Stones. Each one holds a fragment of lived experience. Not data. Not facts. Emotion. They are what my kind use instead of books.” Deepak, now sitting on a stone ledge catching his breath, looked up with wide eyes. “You mean… these things feel?” “They remember,” Cael replied. “Not just what happened—but how it felt. That is why they’re dangerous. That is why they were hidden.” Payel stared at the glowing web of stones, the mosaic of interlocked truths vibrating faintly in the stillness, and whispered, “This is what my father was trying to reach, wasn’t he? This place. This archive.” “Yes,” Cael said, stepping beside her. “He found one of the older anchors—above the Earth, in your space station. He reached through… but only briefly. Not enough to return. Not enough to close the door.” “He didn’t vanish,” she said quietly. “He crossed.” “He crossed,” Cael confirmed. “And left a tether behind. You.” A weight settled in her chest—not the crushing kind, but the kind that came with being chosen without consent, of being connected to something vast and ancient and impossible to explain in the language of schoolbooks or science fairs. She moved slowly to another stone, this one humming a pale green, and touched it with her palm—and again, a vision surged: her father’s hand in hers, a field of stars turning upside down, and a word she’d never heard before but now understood—Eshari, the name of a promise made in Cael’s world, one spoken not aloud but felt, a bond sealed by presence, not possession. When she withdrew her hand, her eyes were wet. “What is Eshari?” she asked. Cael met her gaze, his voice low. “It means: I will remember you, even after time forgets.” A silence passed between them, thick and unbroken, until Deepak, now slightly less panicked, asked the question hovering like a drone above their heads. “Okay, so we’re in a secret alien memory vault, hunted by an elite government unit, with a living star map and a glowing rock that opens wormholes. Now what?” Payel looked at Cael. “Now we find out what they were willing to kill for.” Cael nodded once and walked toward the center of the chamber, where a stone slightly larger than the others hovered near the floor, its glow irregular—flashing like a failing heartbeat. “This is the corrupted one,” he said. “The memory your father tried to access. The one that fractured the gate.” “What does it show?” “Not what was,” Cael said, “but what will be—if this power falls into the wrong hands.” Payel hesitated, then stepped forward and placed her fingers on the edge—and instantly, the world folded inside out. The vision struck her not as a picture but as a sensation—chaos, panic, the sky above Earth burning not with stars but with machinery, human and alien, merged into weapons, the Rann cracked open like a wound with black ships rising from its depths, and above it all, a tower of crystal and metal broadcasting a single pulse: control. A future where memories are rewritten, where emotions are programmed, where truth becomes a commodity owned by whoever controls the gate. She screamed and tore her hand away, collapsing into Cael’s arms, gasping. “We can’t let that happen. We can’t.” “That is why your father destroyed the prototype,” Cael said. “And why I was sent to protect the anchor. To find the one it trusted.” “Me,” she said, still shaking. “But I don’t know how to close it.” “You don’t close it,” he said softly. “You overwrite it. With your own memory.” “You mean… give it my truth?” “Yes.” Deepak stepped forward, hesitant. “Wait, wait—if you do that, does that mean you lose it? Like, forget it forever?” Cael shook his head. “No. It remains with her. But no one else can steal it. It becomes personal. Inaccessible to those who do not feel it.” Payel stood, her voice steady now. “Then I’ll do it. I’ll give it something they’ll never understand. Something too human to control.” She turned to Cael, looked into his golden eyes, and placed her hand once more on the stone—but this time, she didn’t just recall a memory. She created one. The feeling of holding her father’s hand under the starlight, of hearing her mother laugh at the dinner table, of Deepak throwing sand in her face during Holi, of the first time she looked through a telescope and gasped at Saturn’s rings, of the morning she woke up alone and promised never to stop searching, of the moment Cael’s fingers brushed her skin and she felt not fear, but recognition—the feeling of belonging. The stone pulsed once, then again, and then it dimmed—absorbing, sealing, transforming. Cael stepped back, awe on his face. “You did it. You changed the gate.” “They can’t use it now,” she said. “It’s encrypted with love.” “They won’t understand it,” he agreed. “But they’ll still chase it.” From somewhere above, the ceiling shook faintly. A sound. Distant. Approaching. Payel turned. “They’re still tracking us, aren’t they?” Cael nodded. “Yes. But not for long.” “Why?” “Because now we move the gate.” “What does that mean?” “It means,” he said with a slight smile, “we take the memory with us. And hide it… in the stars.” Payel met his gaze, and in that moment, she realized: this was no longer about hiding a boy from another world. It was about changing her own. And maybe, just maybe, saving both.
7
The night above the desert was darker than usual, not because the moon had vanished but because something in the sky itself felt… withheld, as if the stars were listening now instead of watching, holding their breath in anticipation of something unfolding too delicate for noise and too powerful for silence, and as Payel, Cael, and Deepak emerged from the hidden chamber into the salt-streaked dusk, the wind at their backs and the newly rewritten crystal pulsing faintly in Payel’s satchel like a heartbeat against her hip, she realized something in her had changed—not in a dramatic, superhero origin story way, but in a quiet, irreversible kind of way, like a page turned halfway and never turned back, and the world around her felt sharper, more layered, as though the desert and the sky and her own pulse were frequencies of the same invisible song. They didn’t speak for the first hour of walking, weaving through dry riverbeds and skeletal tree lines as Deepak checked for drones overhead and Cael moved with preternatural grace, as if magnetically pulled toward something unseen, until finally, they reached the edge of a sand shelf Payel had never noticed on any of her stargazing walks, a basin carved not by erosion but design, its edges too symmetrical, too precise, as if something long ago had pressed down from the sky and left its imprint in the Earth—and at the center, a stone pedestal barely visible under layers of cracked dust and pale grass, waiting like a switch in the middle of a forgotten machine. “This is one of the listening points,” Cael said softly, kneeling beside the pedestal and wiping dust from its surface to reveal a disc of obsidian-like metal embedded with grooves that glimmered faintly under starlight. “This is where the sky hears what the Earth remembers.” “So what do we do here?” Payel asked, brushing her fingers along the grooves, feeling them hum against her skin. “We transmit,” he said. “Not a message. A memory.” Deepak paced a few meters away, rubbing his temples. “So let me get this straight—you’re going to beam an encrypted emotion into the sky using a memory-powered alien record player?” Cael smiled faintly. “Yes. Except the sky doesn’t just receive. It replies.” Payel crouched beside him. “You said earlier there are others like you. Other Listening Ones.” “Yes. Sleepers. Hidden across systems. We do not conquer. We do not observe. We remember. And when memory is threatened, we awaken.” “And you want to call them?” “I want to warn them. But I also want them to know… there is a reason to trust this world.” He looked at her then—not just with affection, but with awe, and she felt it again, that strange blooming warmth in her chest that wasn’t fear or curiosity, but something far more dangerous: hope. As Cael placed the crystal into the pedestal, the grooves lit up, rippling with pale blue light, and Payel felt a low thrumming beneath her feet—like a vibration moving through her blood, through the salt, through the desert itself—and above them, the sky shifted, the stars rearranging ever so slightly into patterns she didn’t recognize but somehow understood, and a soft sound began to emerge—not music, not language, but something between—a frequency of shared breath, ancient and intimate, like the lullaby of a mother she’d never met but had somehow always known. “It’s working,” Cael said, his voice hushed. “They’re listening.” Then, something changed. A second frequency entered the chamber. A sharp, discordant tone. “They’ve found us,” he said suddenly, standing. “They’re jamming the signal.” From behind them, floodlights burst through the edge of the ridge—jeeps skidding to a halt, boots hitting the salt, and voices shouting in clipped Hindi and English, led by Lt. Raghav Sinha whose cold, unblinking eyes now locked on Payel like crosshairs. “Step away from the device,” he ordered. “You’re interfering with a national defense operation.” Payel held her ground. “This isn’t about defense. It’s about memory. About truth.” “Truth,” he sneered, “is classified.” And then, without warning, he raised his rifle. “I won’t ask twice.” Cael stepped between them. “You don’t understand what you’re doing. If you destroy the anchor, the gate destabilizes. Memory becomes noise.” “You think I care?” Sinha snapped. “You’re a leak. A breach. A risk.” His finger tightened on the trigger— —but Deepak, from behind the jeep where he’d slipped unnoticed, launched his drone straight into the lieutenant’s shoulder, knocking him sideways and sending the shot wild. The bullet hit the crystal’s pedestal—not breaking it, but fracturing one groove—and the signal stuttered. Cael cried out and dropped to his knees. “It’s unraveling!” “What do we do?” Payel shouted. “We must seal it manually,” Cael said. “But it needs more than my memory now—it needs ours. Yours and mine. Together.” Payel didn’t hesitate. She knelt beside him, placed her hand over his on the crystal, and closed her eyes—and this time, instead of letting a vision take her, she gave it: her full truth, unfiltered—her first telescope, the burn of her mother’s silent grief, the memory of waiting for a father who never returned, the ache of loneliness, the thrill of discovery, the first time Cael looked at her like she mattered, like she meant something more than data or duty—and in return, Cael poured into her his own: the fear of waking up light-years from home, the weight of carrying too much memory, the ache of being seen as a threat when all he wanted was to remember, to preserve, to connect. The crystal flared gold and white. The sky shimmered. The jammed frequency dissolved. The signal surged. And then… silence. The light faded. The connection was complete. Sinha stumbled backward, eyes wide with something like awe—or terror. “What… what did you do?” Payel stood slowly, her voice steady. “We reminded the stars who we are.” And as the agents hesitated, uncertain now, the first response came—not from above, but from within the Earth itself: a deep rumble, ancient and vast, as though the desert exhaled in relief, and somewhere in the distance, in a sky that now shimmered with unseen eyes, a second pulse replied—clear, resonant, unmistakable. The Listening Ones had heard. They were awake.
8
The signal had gone out, and for the first time in her life, the sky felt like it was answering back—not as a god, or a dream, or an unreachable canopy of dead light, but as something alive and listening, something that had waited generations to hear someone speak in the language of memory and truth, and now, as Payel stood beside the cracked pedestal in the cooling salt wind, watching the crystal pulse gently in her hand, she felt the ache of something both completed and just beginning, like the final note of a song that echoes even after the room has gone silent. The desert around them had changed—not physically, but perceptibly, as if the air had grown still in reverence, as if the stars had bent lower to listen, and the soldiers from Vigyaan-7, once rigid and ruthless, now stood uncertain, their rifles lowered, faces caught in the afterglow of something they didn’t have the tools to explain. Lt. Sinha looked at Payel like a man seeing color for the first time—disarmed not by weapons but by wonder. “What happens now?” he asked, voice low, more human than he’d ever sounded. “Now,” Cael said quietly, stepping forward, “you leave us. And forget what you think you saw.” “You think we’ll walk away from this?” Sinha asked. “That we’ll bury this again?” “You already tried,” Payel said. “You buried my father. You buried his research. But memories don’t die just because you hide them. They wait.” “And sometimes,” Cael added, “they come back… with names.” Deepak, battered and bruised but unshaken, tossed a small device toward the agents—a hacked hard drive, filled with edited data, decoys, false trails. “This is what you’ll report. A failed anomaly. Unrecoverable. Unstable. You’ll spin the narrative. You always do.” Sinha stared at it for a long moment, then looked back at Payel. “Your father was a patriot,” he said. “He believed in this country.” “He believed in truth,” she snapped. “And he died trying to protect it from people like you.” Sinha didn’t respond. He just nodded once, slowly, then signaled his men to retreat. The jeeps turned. The dust rose. And just like that, the threat dissolved—not defeated, not destroyed, but outpaced by something they could neither grasp nor contain. Payel stood still for a long moment after they were gone, feeling the wind settle, the stars steady above her like sentinels, and when she turned, she saw Cael watching her with that look again—not of gratitude, but of recognition, like someone staring at the last piece of a map he never thought he’d find. “You don’t have to go,” she whispered, though her heart already knew the truth. Cael stepped closer, the glow in his veins soft now, almost fading, and touched her cheek with a reverence that broke something loose inside her. “The Listening Ones have heard,” he said. “They’ll come. But not to interfere. Only to witness. The gate must be moved now—to protect it. To keep it from falling into the wrong hands again. I was meant to carry it forward.” “So you’re leaving.” “Only for now. Until it’s safe. Until it’s ours.” Her throat tightened. “But what if I forget you?” He shook his head. “You won’t. You’ve seen too much. You’ve felt too much. The gate isn’t in the crystal anymore, Payel. It’s in you. In your memory. In your frequency.” “Will I see you again?” she asked, though she already felt the answer stretching out like an echo. “Look up,” he said gently. “The sky is different now. When it pulses, you’ll know I’m close.” “That’s not the same,” she whispered. “I know,” he said. “But it’s real.” And then, with one final look—longer than a glance, shorter than a lifetime—he stepped back toward the pedestal, placed both palms on its surface, and let the last of the crystal’s light pass through him. The desert shimmered. The air folded. The stones lifted in slow orbit, like memory breaking loose from time—and then, without sound or flash, he was gone. Not vanished. Not erased. Transmitted. Payel stood there alone, her palm still tingling from where he touched it, her eyes dry but heavy, and Deepak moved beside her quietly, placing a hand on her shoulder. “He’ll be back,” he said. “He promised.” “I know,” she said, voice soft. “But sometimes even stars take time to return.” The two of them stood in silence for a while, beneath a sky that no longer felt empty, and when they finally began walking back toward the edge of the ridge, where the salt met the trees and the world resumed its old shape, Payel looked up—and saw it: a flicker. A pulse. A star that hadn’t been there before, blinking in a rhythm she recognized deep in her chest, like a heartbeat shared across galaxies. And she smiled. Because some goodbyes aren’t endings. They’re just… transmissions waiting for a return signal.
9
Weeks passed, but time did not move the same way after Cael left—as if the world around Payel had shifted just slightly off-center, tilted into a rhythm that only she could feel, like a hum beneath ordinary things, a presence woven through absence, and though the sky above Bhuj looked the same to others—dusty-blue mornings, crimson-orange sunsets, the Milky Way painting its slow arc at night—she saw it differently now, every constellation bearing his memory like fingerprints on glass, every meteor a whisper of return. She returned to school, to silence-filled mornings and the clatter of blackboards, to teachers who looked at her with curiosity they didn’t voice, and to friends who tried to reach her but couldn’t quite find where her heart had drifted. Deepak stayed close, quietly protective, forever changed in his own way—he joked less now, laughed quieter, walked with the haunted awareness of someone who’d seen the world almost end in a language no one else understood. At night, they would meet at the old telescope behind the abandoned science museum, where Payel had set up a makeshift observatory using spare parts, memories, and her father’s handwritten notes. She would watch the sky, patiently, steadily, searching not for UFOs or starships, but for rhythm—waiting for the familiar pulse that had become her secret lullaby. And then, one night, it happened. She almost missed it at first—just a flicker on the periphery, a glint of motion where there should have been stillness—but then it blinked again, steady this time, not random, but deliberate: three slow pulses, a pause, then two quick ones. She froze, fingers tightening on the telescope. “Deepak,” she whispered. “It’s him.” Deepak, lying beside her on the roof with a packet of chips and an old Walkman, sat up immediately. “You sure?” She nodded. “It’s the same pattern. He’s signaling.” Her heart raced. She adjusted the telescope quickly, calibrating coordinates by instinct more than calculation, and zeroed in on the signal’s origin. What she saw wasn’t a ship—not in the classic sense—but something spherical, cloaked in the refracted shimmer of distortion, orbiting low enough to be seen but high enough to remain unnamed. And just beneath it, a second object—smaller, descending. “He’s sending something down,” she breathed. They ran. Across the dusty rooftops, down the winding alleys of the town half-asleep, past temple bells chiming midnight mantras and dogs howling at shadows. They reached the dried-up riverbed north of the town, where the wind carried dust like prayers and the sky above opened wide—and then they saw it: a small sphere, no larger than a cricket ball, floating just above the sand, humming gently. Payel stepped forward slowly, her hands trembling, and as she touched it, the sphere unfurled into petals of light, revealing a memory stone—new, untouched, pulsing with faint golden lines. A message. She held it close. The pulse began. And she heard him. Not in words. Not in sound. But in memory. His voice in her mind, smooth and quiet. “Payel. The gate is safe. The Listening Ones have responded. Your memory… protected us. You are now part of the Archive. But more than that, you are part of me. I will return. When it is safe. When the world remembers how to listen. Until then, look up. I will always be looking back.” Her knees gave out. She dropped to the sand, tears running down her cheeks—not from sadness, but from the unbearable beauty of being remembered. Deepak sat beside her silently, placing his arm around her shoulder, and the two of them watched as the sphere slowly dissolved into stardust, floating upward until it joined the wind. The next morning, she returned to the observatory and added a new entry to her father’s journal—not a scientific observation, not a chart or formula, but a single line written in her native script and then again in the symbols Cael had taught her: “He fell from the stars. And gave me the sky.” The world did not end. No one invaded. The government buried its reports. The headlines moved on. But something had changed—quietly, permanently—and sometimes, when the wind was right and the clouds parted just so, the children of Bhuj would look up and say they saw a flicker, a light moving strangely, and Payel would smile. Because some stars fall to teach us how to rise.
10
The sky had become her companion. Not just a canvas for dreams, but a language she could finally read — every flicker, every pulse, every silence carrying meanings only she could translate, because she no longer watched it as an outsider but as someone connected, tethered not by science or wonder but by memory, by love, by the enduring echo of something once fallen and now scattered across her entire being. Months passed. The town of Bhuj moved forward, quietly unaware that the girl with the telescope and the boy who wasn’t from this world had rewritten the pulse of the planet, had bent the language of time and emotion into a song that no one could hear except those who had listened closely enough to feel it. Payel returned to her quiet rituals — walking barefoot on the salt flats at dawn, teaching astronomy lessons to younger students who thought stars were simply pretty, never realizing how many secrets they could carry. Her mother had softened, in small ways. She no longer asked about marriage or practical exams. Instead, she watched her daughter with a tenderness that bloomed in silence, noticing the way she now looked at the night sky like it answered back. At night, Payel still climbed to the rooftop where the telescope stood like a silent sentinel, worn from heat and monsoon but sharp as ever, and as the wind whispered across her face, she would lift her eyes to the same corner of the sky — that faint blue star that wasn’t there a year ago, the one that flickered not with randomness but rhythm. And always, when she looked at it long enough, it blinked in return. Some evenings, she received transmissions. Short pulses. Memory stones embedded with fragments of other skies, other worlds, other versions of him — Cael walking beneath the twin moons of a water planet, Cael teaching a child the meaning of hope in a crater garden, Cael reaching through time to whisper her name into the walls of a place made entirely of sound. She never responded with words. Instead, she sent him feelings — a mango blossom blooming early, the taste of chai from the station near her school, the warmth of rain on the first day of the monsoon, the sound of her laughter as Deepak fell off his bike into a puddle. Things no star chart could map. Things no archive could store. Human things. One night, the signal was different. Not urgent. Not sad. But… close. She felt it before she saw it — a shift in the air, a vibration that wasn’t sound, and then, a light above the western dunes — low, steady, silent. She didn’t run toward it. She walked, slowly, steadily, through the sleeping town, her breath quiet, her heart calm. And when she reached the flat where the salt met the sand, he was there. Not descending. Not broken. But standing. Whole. Human-looking, but not hiding. Glowing faintly in the moonlight like someone caught halfway between dream and reality. “You came back,” she said, her voice barely more than a breath. Cael smiled. “I said I would.” “Is it safe?” “Not yet,” he said. “But safer. And I couldn’t wait any longer.” “You remembered.” He stepped closer. “Always. You are… my anchor.” She touched his face — warm, real, not a projection, not a message. “I thought maybe I imagined all of it. That it was just some beautiful, impossible story.” “It was,” he said. “But it was ours.” They stood in silence for a long time, the stars wheeling slowly above them. And finally, she asked the question that had lived quietly inside her since the beginning. “What now?” “Now,” Cael said, “you don’t have to look up to find me.” “And you?” “I don’t have to fall to feel home.” He reached out, took her hand, and together they stood in the middle of the desert, where the Earth hummed with stardust and the sky lowered just enough to listen. It wasn’t a fairytale. The world remained dangerous, imperfect, uncertain. There were still people who would chase power instead of truth, still machines that would listen without understanding. But there would also be them. A girl who believed in stars. A boy who carried galaxies in his memory. And the sky — vast, forgiving, eternal — between them.
And so they remained — not apart, not above, but within the world. Loving quietly. Remembering fiercely. Holding onto something the rest of the world had forgotten how to hear.
-End-
