Rajat Tyagi
The Return
The rain hit Delhi like a warning—sharp, relentless, and out of season. Kabir Sharma sat alone in a dusty classroom of St. Stephen’s College, staring at the half-wiped blackboard. A half-scribbled line from Kafka still clung to the surface: “A cage went in search of a bird.”
The metaphor wasn’t lost on him.
He had been out for nearly seven years. Seven years since he walked away from the agency, from fieldwork, from blood-stained codes and sleepless nights filled with static voices on encrypted radios. Now, he taught post-colonial literature to half-interested students who didn’t know that their soft-spoken professor once went by another name.
Codename: Raven.
The name came from a mission in Istanbul. A silent kill, a successful exfiltration, and a black feather left behind by accident—or fate. After that, the agency started calling him “Raven” behind closed doors. A name that flew faster than bullets and left a trail of silence in its wake.
He hadn’t thought of that name in years. Until today.
The knock on his office door was soft but deliberate.
“Professor Sharma?” a voice asked. Male. Polite. Government-polished.
Kabir didn’t answer immediately. He capped his pen, folded his reading glasses, and finally looked up.
Two men stepped in. Not students. Not colleagues. Black suits, trimmed beards, lean frames, and eyes that never stopped moving. Intelligence Bureau or RAW—he couldn’t tell from the suits, but the badge flashed quickly enough.
“Time to come back, sir,” said the taller one. “We need you.”
Kabir leaned back in his chair. “You must have the wrong man.”
“You were Codename Raven, weren’t you?”
He gave a tired smile. “That man’s dead.”
The shorter agent dropped a file on the desk. The folder was marked CLASSIFIED – SIGINT PRIORITY in red ink. Inside were satellite intercepts, coded transmissions, and a single photograph—grainy, night-vision green.
It showed a man stepping off a private jet in Kyrgyzstan.
Kabir felt a tremor in his chest. It couldn’t be.
“Is that who I think it is?”
The taller agent nodded. “Colonel Viktor Mirov. Your ghost.”
Colonel Mirov was a relic of the Cold War. A former Spetsnaz officer turned mercenary kingpin, and the architect of a dozen failed states in Africa and the Middle East. Kabir had hunted him once. The mission failed. Two agents died. Mirov disappeared. That was the mission that ended Raven.
“Why now?” Kabir asked, cold returning to his voice.
“He’s back in play. And he’s working with someone new—someone who has access to the Shadow Grid.”
Kabir’s brow furrowed. “That’s a myth. The Grid was shut down after Kashmir.”
“Apparently not. Two hours ago, a dormant relay station in Ladakh came online. A transmission went out—shortwave, coded in a Raven-class cipher.”
Kabir looked at the image again. His hand clenched.
“I haven’t touched a cipher in years.”
“But you still dream in code,” the shorter one said quietly. “We’re not asking you to kill. Just help us decode it. Help us find him. Before it’s too late.”
Outside, the storm rumbled.
Kabir stood and looked out the window at the soaked courtyard. In the reflection, he saw not a professor—but a shadow of the man he had once been.
Raven.
“How long do I have?”
“Your flight to London leaves in six hours.”
Six hours later, Heathrow International Airport – 03:12 GMT
The jet landed without announcement. Kabir walked off into the chill of the British morning, the weight of his past already tightening around his shoulders.
He was met by an MI6 field liaison named Clara Westwood—sharp cheekbones, sharper eyes, and a handshake like steel wire.
“Welcome back to the circus,” she said. “We’ve set up a war room in Camden. Joint operation between RAW, MI6, and someone from Langley who won’t shut up about coffee.”
“Do they know I’m coming?”
“They do now,” she replied, slipping a tracker into his coat. “Just in case you decide to disappear again.”
Kabir smiled. “You always this friendly to returning ghosts?”
“Only the ones who walk in wearing literature professor shoes.”
They drove through silent, fog-slicked streets. London at night was a different kind of battlefield—cleaner, colder, but just as dangerous. Kabir scanned the skyline, noting how many things had changed. And how many hadn’t.
Inside the war room, screens flickered with intercepts, decrypted lines, and algorithmic patterns. A red circle blinked over a point in Eastern Europe—Odessa.
“That’s where the signal bounced before hitting Ladakh,” Clara said. “Someone’s using Cold War relay towers. Someone who knows the old games.”
Kabir walked to the screen. The code fragment was still there, blinking.
He recognized it.
“Blackbird descending. Fire before dawn.”
It was an old protocol. One that should’ve died with the Cold War.
He turned to Clara. “He’s going to burn something. Soon.”
“What’s the target?”
Kabir shook his head. “Not what. Who.”
She raised an eyebrow.
“Mirov isn’t just sending a message,” Kabir said. “He’s summoning the past.”
And just like that, Raven was back.
Odessa Shadows
Odessa smelled of salt and secrets.
Kabir stepped off the unmarked boat and onto the cracked stone jetty under the cover of dawn. The Black Sea stretched out behind him like a curtain of iron. The city was waking slowly—fishermen unloading their hauls, church bells echoing through narrow alleys, and the ghost of the Soviet Union whispering from crumbling walls.
Clara Westwood followed close behind, her scarf tight against the chill. “You remember this place?” she asked.
Kabir gave a dry chuckle. “Odessa remembers me. Not fondly.”
It had been over a decade since his last assignment here—an arms trafficker, a double agent, and a botched extraction that left three people dead and Kabir wounded. The city bore scars, and so did he.
A grey sedan waited by the curb, engine humming. The driver didn’t speak. A local asset from SBU—the Ukrainian intelligence service. Kabir noted the Glock under the man’s jacket and the tattoos peeking from his cuffs. Definitely not a desk agent.
As the car pulled away, Clara handed Kabir a slim tablet. “We intercepted another packet last night. Same cipher structure. This time from a different node. Odessa was the bounce point.”
Kabir scanned the screen. The lines of code were simple, yet elegant—like a signature.
RAVEN_01: BLACKBIRD DESCENDING. TARGET IN SIGHT. PHASE TWO INITIATED.
“Someone’s using my old protocols,” he muttered.
Clara nodded grimly. “It’s deliberate. They’re mocking you.”
Kabir didn’t respond. His mind raced. Phase Two. That meant Phase One had already been completed. But what was it?
The car wound through narrow lanes until it stopped in front of a nondescript building in the Moldavanka district—a Soviet-era apartment block where the paint peeled like old secrets.
“This is the location from the last signal ping,” Clara said. “Top floor. Used to be an SBU safe house. Long abandoned.”
Kabir checked his sidearm, a standard-issue SIG Sauer. Clara readied her weapon too.
“Ready?” she asked.
Kabir just nodded and moved.
The stairwell reeked of mildew and cheap vodka. They climbed in silence, guns drawn, until they reached the rusted door at the top. Kabir paused, listening.
No movement. No sounds.
He nodded. Clara kicked the door open.
The room was empty. Mostly.
Dust hung in the air like memory. Furniture covered in plastic. Dead flies in the window cracks. But in the center of the room was something that didn’t belong—a folding chair, facing the far wall. On it sat a man.
Dead.
Eastern European, mid-40s. Bullet in the head, execution-style. But that wasn’t the disturbing part.
What froze Kabir in place was what was taped to the man’s chest.
A feather.
Black. Raven-like.
And beneath it, a photograph.
Clara picked it up, frowning. “Is that…?”
Kabir grabbed it from her. It was old—grainy, scanned from a surveillance camera. But the face was unmistakable.
Arun Joshi.
A name from Kabir’s past. A fellow RAW officer. Dead for five years.
Or so he thought.
“I was at his funeral,” Kabir said, his voice flat.
Clara looked at him. “You sure he’s dead?”
Kabir didn’t answer.
On the floor beside the corpse was a phone. Clara picked it up, removed the back cover, and pulled out a microSD card.
“Encrypted,” she said. “But I think you’ll want to see what’s on it.”
Back at the safehouse, 45 minutes later
The war room had been moved to a rented basement beneath a closed bar on Deribasovskaya Street. A tech officer decrypted the card in silence, and the room’s monitors came to life with video.
Grainy night footage. A man tied to a chair. Beaten. Face bloodied.
It was Arun Joshi.
Clara gasped softly. “That’s recent.”
The timestamp confirmed it. Just four days ago.
The audio was choppy but clear enough.
VOICE (offscreen): “Where is Raven?”
ARUN: “I don’t know. He’s dead.”
VOICE: “He’s not. He’s here. He’s watching.”
Then a gunshot. End of feed.
Kabir leaned back, his jaw clenched. The room was silent.
“They’re using my name to interrogate ghosts,” he said. “And they’re not just looking for me. They’re baiting me.”
Clara was quiet for a moment. Then: “What if Arun’s still alive?”
Kabir looked at her. “Then he knows something they need. And they think I’ll come for him.”
“Will you?”
He stared at the screen for a long time. Then nodded.
Later that night – Odessa Port
Kabir stood at the water’s edge, staring out at the ships and cranes lit in sodium orange. Clara approached with a dossier.
“Interpol confirms Mirov was seen in Warsaw two days ago. But that’s not all.”
She handed him the file.
Inside was a list of names. Operatives. Ex-agents. People from Kabir’s past. And beside some of the names were red crosses.
“Dead,” Clara said. “Or missing.”
Kabir flipped through the pages. So many familiar faces.
“Someone’s cleaning house,” he murmured.
“Not just any house. Yours.”
Kabir closed the folder. “This isn’t about the algorithm. This is personal.”
Clara nodded. “We need to get ahead of them.”
Kabir stared out at the black sea, his voice like gravel. “Then we go where the storm began.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Where?”
“Kazakhstan,” he said. “That’s where we buried it.”
“Buried what?”
Kabir turned to her.
“The real Raven.”
The Raven Vault
Almaty, Kazakhstan
Three Days Later
The cold here had a memory.
It seeped through skin and bone, down to places Kabir thought long buried. As the military transport touched down on the frozen tarmac of a disused Soviet airstrip outside Almaty, Kabir tightened his coat collar and stared into the wind-blown snow. The mountains loomed in the distance, like silent sentinels guarding forgotten sins.
Clara Westwood stepped off behind him, pulling her hood tighter. “So this is where Raven was buried?”
“Not literally,” Kabir said. “But close enough.”
They were met by a man in an olive-green jacket, heavy boots crunching in the frost. Colonel Dauren Zharkyn. Kazakh Intelligence. Broad-shouldered, square-jawed, and deeply suspicious of anyone who spoke fluent Hindi and carried MI6 credentials.
“You brought ghosts with you,” Zharkyn muttered in Russian.
“Only the useful kind,” Kabir replied in kind. “We’re looking for a vault. Near Taldykorgan. You know the one.”
Zharkyn’s eyes narrowed. “That facility was sealed after the Cold War. It doesn’t exist.”
Kabir pulled a cigarette case from his pocket, flipped it open, and removed a small chip hidden in the lid. He handed it to the colonel.
Zharkyn slipped it into his comms pad. Coordinates appeared on-screen, along with a redacted mission log dated 1999.
His jaw tightened. “This is above my clearance.”
“But not above your paygrade if you help us,” Clara said with a thin smile.
Zharkyn muttered something under his breath. “Fine. We move at dusk. But once we’re in, it’s your game.”
Six hours later – Taldykorgan Mountains
They reached the vault under cover of nightfall.
A concrete bunker carved into the side of a mountain, hidden beneath decades of rockslides and camouflage netting. Only a trained eye—or a ghost—could have found it.
Kabir stared at the sealed steel doors. Rusted. Locked tight.
“I haven’t been here in twenty years,” he said.
Clara raised an eyebrow. “What did you leave behind?”
“Everything I wanted to forget.”
Zharkyn’s men rigged the hinges with shaped thermite. Ten seconds later, the door was a molten memory. They stepped into darkness.
The air inside was stale and bitter, like frozen blood.
Kabir led the way down a narrow tunnel flanked by old Soviet signage. “This was a black site. Used by the KGB, then by us, briefly, during the cross-border conflicts. We called it—”
“The Raven Vault,” Clara finished, reading the faded stenciling on a steel door.
Kabir nodded. “A place for broken agents. Ones we couldn’t kill. Or couldn’t afford to lose.”
The lights flickered on, emergency backup powered by a generator Zharkyn’s team revived. The main chamber looked like a forgotten morgue: metal beds, medical restraints, terminals from the 1980s.
But in the center of the room was something much newer: a data coffin.
Clara’s eyes widened. “Is that—?”
“A Codex-9,” Kabir said. “Only five were ever made. Encrypted black box used to store intelligence gathered by sleeper agents. It requires two voice authorizations.”
Zharkyn muttered in awe. “How did this stay hidden so long?”
Kabir stepped forward. “Because no one who knew about it survived. Except me.”
He placed his hand on the scanner. A red beam flickered, then a female voice spoke in Russian.
“Authorization required. Codename One.”
“Raven,” Kabir said calmly.
“Accepted. Second code required.”
Clara stepped forward. “It won’t work. It needs someone from the original clearance circle.”
Kabir looked at Zharkyn. “Your father was part of that circle. Colonel Iskander Zharkyn. He helped run this place. Ever hear that name in whispers?”
Zharkyn looked stunned. “That’s classified.”
“Not anymore.”
Kabir handed him the transcript from the original vault setup. The colonel stared at his own bloodline in print.
“My father is gone.”
Kabir stared at him. “Then it has to be you.”
Ten minutes later – The Vault Opens
The coffin clicked open with a soft hiss. Inside, a collection of drives, tape reels, and a dusty leather folder.
Kabir took the folder and opened it.
Inside: surveillance photos, agent rosters, psychological reports—and a name circled in red:
“Project Bhairav.”
Clara frowned. “That wasn’t in any file we’ve seen.”
“It wouldn’t be,” Kabir said. “It was off-books. A rogue mission formed by Indian and Soviet defectors in the late ’80s. The idea was simple: train a generation of programmable agents. No names. No nations. Just commands.”
“Ghost operatives,” Clara said. “With no conscience.”
“Exactly.”
He flipped through the pages, his fingers tightening.
Near the bottom of the file was another familiar face.
Arun Joshi.
Next to it, a codename:
“REVENANT.”
Outside – Minutes Later
Snow fell softly as they emerged from the vault.
Clara pulled Kabir aside. “Why didn’t you tell me you suspected Arun was part of this?”
“Because I didn’t know until now. And if he’s Revenant, he’s not just bait…”
“He’s the weapon.”
Kabir nodded slowly. “And Mirov’s trying to wake him.”
Clara went pale. “A sleeper agent embedded in RAW? Activated after death?”
Kabir looked to the mountains, his voice grim. “Not death. Disappearance. We buried a lie. And now it’s digging its way out.”
A drone buzzed overhead.
Zharkyn’s men raised their weapons.
Too late.
The explosion hit the ridge—concise, professional, and silent. The vault’s entrance collapsed behind them.
A clean kill.
But not for Kabir.
He turned to Clara, already calculating.
“They’re following our moves. They knew we’d come here.”
“Then we’ve got a leak.”
Kabir shook his head. “No. We’ve got a watcher.”
Clara narrowed her eyes. “Inside RAW?”
Kabir’s jaw tightened. “Higher.”
Elsewhere – Unknown Location
A man in shadows reviewed the feed from a satellite uplink. He watched Kabir walk through snow and death like a ghost reborn.
He turned to the screen. Arun Joshi’s face appeared. Then Kabir’s.
Two codenames lit up below:
RAVEN
REVENANT
He typed a single word into the command interface:
“AWAKEN.”
Revenant
RAW Headquarters – New Delhi
Confidential Archives Sublevel B
It had taken Kabir seventy hours, two forged diplomatic stamps, and one exfiltration through Frankfurt to reach New Delhi. The city was boiling in June heat, but Kabir’s blood ran cold. Something in his gut told him the war hadn’t just followed him back—it had been waiting here all along.
The lift descended into the bowels of RAW’s secured archive, long past public corridors and into red-light zones even most directors never accessed. Clara walked beside him, silent but alert, her MI6 credentials barely enough to earn her entry.
At the door, a retinal scanner blinked.
“Codename?” the machine prompted.
Kabir hesitated.
“Raven,” he answered.
ACCESS GRANTED.
The door slid open with a metallic sigh.
Inside, walls of steel and silence stretched out before them. Here lay the ghosts—sealed case files, decrypted transmissions, lists of operations that had never happened and operatives who’d never existed.
Kabir led Clara down row after row until he reached a drawer marked:
PROJECT BHAIRAV – EYES ONLY
AUTHORIZED SIGNATORIES: CDR. MUKESH KHANNA | RAVEN
He opened it.
Inside: a single slim file. Yellowed. Fragile. Almost disappointedly light.
But what it held was nuclear in consequence.
TOP SECRET DOSSIER: PROJECT BHAIRAV
Initiated: 1987
Mission: Develop programmable field operatives via neuro-restructuring and memory manipulation. Codenames assigned. Primary prototype: SUBJECT 01 — “REVENANT.”
Last known status: presumed terminated (2016), incident classified.
Kabir handed Clara a photocopied page showing an agent dossier.
Name: Arun Joshi
Codename: REVENANT
Behavioral Modifications: Trauma-based disassociation, identity partitioning, conditional triggers.
A line scribbled in red ink below chilled them both:
“Sleeper will activate upon exposure to Codename RAVEN.”
Clara looked up, stunned. “That means…”
“He was never meant to stay dead,” Kabir said. “I was the kill switch. Or the ignition.”
“Which one are you now?”
Kabir stared at the sheet. “We’re about to find out.”
New Delhi – Private Safehouse, South Extension II
Later that night, Kabir sat in a darkened room alone. Clara had gone to liaise with the British consulate, but he needed silence. Reflection. Strategy.
He unfolded an old map of Kabul.
Marked in red was a location: Camp Shamshera. A ghost prison site once used by joint intelligence operations during the Afghan campaign.
It matched the terrain from the video Arun had appeared in.
So that’s where they took him.
But who had access to Shamshera now?
Not RAW. Not CIA.
Unless…
A thought flickered.
He pulled out his satellite phone and dialed a secure number.
“Hello?” came a cautious voice.
“It’s Raven.”
A beat.
“You’re supposed to be dead.”
“So is Arun Joshi. Listen—I need access logs for Camp Shamshera. All non-military visits for the past three months.”
“That’s a suicide request.”
“It’s a retrieval mission.”
Silence. Then: “You have twelve hours. After that, I never picked up.”
Meanwhile – Unknown Facility, Northern Afghanistan
Arun Joshi woke up in a room painted with screams.
The walls pulsed faintly, like lungs trying to breathe. One corner had a sink. Another, a camera behind mirrored glass.
He didn’t know where he was.
Worse—he didn’t know who he was.
Images flickered through his brain: fire, cables, birds in flight, a man’s voice whispering “Raven.” Then pain. So much pain.
He looked down.
Scars traced across his arms and ribs, like ancient code etched in flesh.
A voice crackled through an overhead speaker. Calm. Russian-accented.
“Hello, Revenant. Welcome back.”
Arun flinched. “Who are you?”
“You don’t remember. That’s by design.”
The lights flickered. In the mirror, a faint image began to form—grainy but deliberate.
A man in shadows.
Colonel Viktor Mirov.
“You have questions,” the voice said. “But answers require obedience. And obedience requires pain.”
Arun gritted his teeth. “I don’t take orders.”
“No,” said Mirov. “But you will.”
A low hum began. Ultrasonic. Pulsing like a heartbeat through his skull.
Arun screamed.
And somewhere, deep in the vault of his brain, a door began to open.
Back in Delhi – The Leak Reveals Itself
Clara returned to the safehouse with narrowed eyes.
“They know we’re here.”
Kabir looked up. “Who?”
“Everyone. That video of you at the Raven Vault? It’s leaked. RAW is burning down its own archives. MI6 wants you detained. CIA’s gone dark.”
Kabir didn’t flinch. “They want to flush us out.”
“And kill the trail to Project Bhairav.”
He stood, gathering his gear. “Then we don’t give them the chance.”
She blocked his path. “Tell me the truth, Kabir. What’s your endgame here? If Arun’s broken, if this project was never meant to be found—why are you still chasing it?”
He looked her dead in the eyes.
“Because if they succeed, Arun won’t be the only Revenant. He’ll be the blueprint.”
Elsewhere – Mirov’s Command Post
Colonel Mirov stood before a massive screen filled with biometric data.
Arun’s vitals pulsed in green. Neural pathways lit up like a Christmas tree.
“Begin neural sequencing,” Mirov said.
A technician hesitated. “Sir, we don’t have full compatibility yet—”
“I said begin.”
The technician activated the sequence.
Inside his chamber, Arun convulsed.
Then… clarity.
He stopped struggling. His breathing slowed. He opened his eyes—now sharp, alert, and terrifyingly focused.
“Status?” Mirov asked.
The technician whispered, “He’s… stabilized.”
Arun spoke, softly. “Target?”
Mirov smiled.
“Codename Raven.”
The Hunter and the Hunted
Khyber Pass – Afghanistan-Pakistan Border
The chopper dipped low through jagged cliffs, its rotors slicing the dusk air like a scalpel. Kabir braced himself against the vibration, eyes scanning the canyon ahead. Below them lay a ghost corridor of ancient smuggling routes and long-buried secrets.
Clara sat beside him, headset on, her voice calm despite the tension.
“Camp Shamshera is ten clicks east. No comms, no signals. It’s a digital dead zone.”
Kabir nodded. “That’s by design. It was built to contain monsters, not hostages.”
The pilot, a CIA contractor with eyes like roadkill, glanced back. “Extraction in thirty minutes. No exceptions. If you’re not out, you’re on your own.”
“Understood,” Kabir replied.
The terrain ahead shifted, revealing a plateau nestled among rocks. A dark square marked the structure—half-buried, forgotten. A compound disguised as a ruin.
“Time to wake the dead,” Kabir said.
Camp Shamshera – Interior Holding Wing
Arun Joshi sat in the dark, shirtless, hands bound. The metal cuffs weren’t needed anymore—he wasn’t resisting. Not physically.
In his mind, a voice looped over and over:
“You are Revenant. Raven is your key. Eliminate the key. Open the lock.”
He whispered it aloud now, like a prayer he didn’t understand.
Mirov watched from behind glass, arms folded.
“He’s ready,” said the technician beside him. “Cortical restructuring is complete. He’s accepted the final layer.”
“Good,” Mirov said. “Then it’s time to set him loose.”
Outside – Kabir and Clara breach the perimeter
Kabir moved like a shadow, weaving through the sparse patrols with surgical precision. Clara disabled the outer sensor grid using a looped pulse generator.
“We’ve got twelve minutes before their system detects the spoof,” she whispered.
Kabir nodded. “We don’t need twelve.”
They reached the access tunnel. A biometric scanner blocked the way.
Clara looked at Kabir. “You still have the thumbprint data?”
He smirked and pulled a blood-stained glove from his jacket. “Lifted from Mirov’s second-in-command in Odessa.”
He pressed it to the scanner.
ACCESS GRANTED.
The door groaned open.
Inside, red emergency lights lit the passage like arteries. Clara pulled her weapon. Kabir moved with silent fury. The ghosts in this place weren’t just sleeping—they were waiting to be avenged.
Holding Wing
Kabir stopped outside a reinforced cell door. The surveillance monitor showed Arun—slumped, unmoving.
“He’s been sedated,” Clara whispered.
“No,” Kabir said. “He’s listening.”
He pressed the intercom. “Arun. It’s me. Kabir.”
Inside the cell, Arun’s eyes snapped open.
The voice. The key.
“Do you remember me?” Kabir asked.
A pause.
Then Arun stood slowly. “Raven.”
“Yes,” Kabir said. “You’re not what they made you. You’re more than this. We can get out. We can fight this.”
Arun’s jaw clenched. “They showed me everything. They showed me what I am.”
“They lied,” Kabir said. “They fractured your mind. But you’re still you.”
Clara glanced at the hallway monitor. “We’ve got company.”
Guards stormed the corridor, weapons raised.
Kabir cursed. “Can we open the cell?”
“No,” Clara said. “Not unless—”
Arun stepped forward.
Placed his hand on the scanner inside.
ACCESS GRANTED.
The door slid open.
He stared at Kabir. “I remember everything.”
Kabir met his gaze. “Then let’s finish what they started.”
Hallway firefight – Seconds later
The corridor lit up with gunfire. Clara dropped two guards with precise headshots. Kabir ducked behind cover, returned fire. Arun—barefoot, bloodied—moved like a ghost through chaos, disarming one soldier and breaking another’s neck with brutal efficiency.
They reached the stairwell. Clara shouted, “Rooftop! Chopper’s inbound!”
Mirov’s voice echoed over the PA.
“You can run, Raven. But Revenant belongs to me.”
Arun froze.
Kabir turned to him. “No. You don’t belong to anyone. Not anymore.”
Arun nodded—once—and turned away from the speaker.
Rooftop extraction
The chopper hovered above the compound, its cable line dangling. Kabir clipped on first, then Clara.
Arun hesitated.
Clara shouted, “Come on!”
But he didn’t move.
Kabir looked down at him. “Arun!”
“I can’t leave it unfinished,” Arun said. “Mirov won’t stop. Not unless someone stops him first.”
“You’re not ready,” Kabir said.
“I’m not broken either,” Arun replied. “I remember who I was. And I know what I need to become.”
With that, he turned and disappeared back into the stairwell.
The chopper began to lift.
Kabir gritted his teeth.
“He’s going to kill Mirov,” Clara said.
“No,” Kabir muttered. “He’s going to become what Mirov wanted him to be. Unless we stop him.”
Elsewhere – Mirov’s Secondary Facility
As Kabir and Clara disappeared into the night sky, Mirov stood watching a different screen—one that showed Arun, stepping over the bodies of guards, descending into fire.
The technician turned to Mirov, panic rising. “Should we evacuate?”
Mirov smiled coldly. “No. He’s coming home.”
Dead Men Don’t Forget
Location: Quetta Safehouse, Pakistan Border
36 Hours Later
Kabir hadn’t slept in two days.
The safehouse was a derelict colonial bungalow left behind by the British Raj, now converted into a transient ghost zone for agents on the run. Outside, the winds howled with desert grit, and inside, the silence pressed against his chest like a loaded pistol.
Clara paced across the dusty floor, her phone to her ear. “MI6’s regional desk has nothing on Mirov’s fallback assets. The Russians burned all official ties to him a decade ago.”
“Because they knew what he was building,” Kabir said. “And they were afraid of what would happen if it ever woke up.”
He opened the worn case file again, staring at Arun Joshi’s face—eyes blank, mouth neutral, a ghost in the machine. Next to it, he scribbled one word:
“AWAKENED”
Clara hung up. “NSA intercepted chatter out of Kabul. Someone hijacked a local radio frequency—old Soviet spectrum. Looping a phrase in binary.”
Kabir looked up. “What phrase?”
She showed him the translation on her screen.
“I REMEMBER EVERYTHING.”
Meanwhile – Mirov’s Mobile Command Unit
Karakoram Highway
The convoy moved like a black serpent across the high-altitude road. Armored trucks. Satellite vans. And in the center: a mobile lab reinforced with encryption jammers and biometric scanners.
Mirov sat inside, drinking tea like a surgeon before an operation.
A map of northern India and Pakistan was spread before him, key points marked in red: Pathankot. Srinagar. Leh.
All high-value military nodes.
All within range of Project Revenant’s psychological payload.
His technician approached. “Satellite confirms Revenant crossed into Pakistan last night. He’s tracking your convoy.”
Mirov smiled. “Good. The neural tether is stronger than I hoped. He doesn’t even know I’m still in control.”
“Are you?” the technician asked.
Mirov’s eyes went cold.
“Ask him.”
He pressed a switch. A voice buzzed over the speaker—calm, flat, and terrifying:
“Target: RAVEN. Terminate.”
Quetta – Kabir’s Decision
“Arun’s not hunting Mirov,” Kabir said. “He’s hunting me.”
Clara frowned. “You’re not serious.”
“I am. The tether they installed in his mind—it’s active. Mirov embedded my codename as the primary cognitive trigger. Every time he hears ‘Raven,’ it resets the sequence.”
Clara went pale. “So what do we do?”
Kabir walked to the sink, splashed water on his face, and looked into the cracked mirror.
“We stop running. We flip the trigger.”
She blinked. “Meaning?”
“We lure him in. Force a confrontation. If there’s anything of Arun left, it’ll surface when it matters most.”
Clara shook her head. “That’s suicide.”
“No,” Kabir said quietly. “It’s redemption.”
Later That Night – Derelict Temple, Zhob Valley
A message was broadcast on every encrypted channel between Kabul and Islamabad:
“RAVEN AWAITS.”
Kabir stood alone in the ruins of a centuries-old stone temple, surrounded by shadows and silence. A single flare burned behind him, casting his silhouette on the wall like a sacrificial god.
Clara monitored drones from two klicks away, her hands trembling as she watched the motion trackers blink red.
Then—
A figure approached. Barefoot. Silent. Eyes black as obsidian.
Arun Joshi.
Kabir turned slowly. “Do you remember this place?”
Arun said nothing. But his steps slowed. His eyes flicked left—toward a charred altar.
“You were injured here in ‘09,” Kabir said. “IED in the ravine. I carried you five miles on my back. You bled into my shirt. Remember?”
Arun’s hands trembled.
“I had to lie to your wife,” Kabir continued. “Tell her you were just deep undercover. Not that they’d broken you in six places.”
Arun’s breathing quickened.
“You were my friend, Arun. My brother.”
A tear slipped from Arun’s eye—but his voice remained flat.
“RAVEN IS THE TRIGGER. TERMINATE.”
He drew a knife.
Kabir didn’t move.
“If you kill me, they win. You’ll be nothing but their ghost.”
Arun lunged.
Kabir closed his eyes.
But the blade didn’t strike.
Instead, a scream ripped through the temple.
Not Kabir’s.
Arun dropped the knife.
He fell to his knees, grabbing his head.
“MAKE IT STOP,” he cried. “I REMEMBER TOO MUCH!”
Kabir rushed forward. “Fight it, Arun. You’re not their weapon.”
“They made me watch. Every kill. Every lie. They turned my memories into commands.”
“You can take them back.”
Arun looked up. His eyes—red, pained—were his own again.
Kabir held him tight.
Then came the drone strike.
BOOM
The temple erupted in fire.
The last thing Kabir saw was Arun’s body shielding his own.
Darkness swallowed everything.
Somewhere—A Safe Hospital Bunker
Two Days Later
Kabir awoke, groggy and bandaged. Clara sat beside him.
“Arun?” he croaked.
She shook her head. “We found no body. Just ash.”
He nodded slowly. “Then he’s still out there.”
She took his hand. “You broke the tether.”
“No,” Kabir whispered. “He did.”
Epilogue – Location Unknown
A man sat alone in a small cottage in Nepal, staring at a fire.
In his hand: a photo of two men in RAW uniforms, laughing in younger days.
The firelight flickered.
Arun Joshi placed the photo in the flames.
Then turned and walked into the night.
Free.
For now.
Red Echo
Location: Langley, Virginia – CIA Black Briefing Room
Five Days Later
In a sealed sub-basement of CIA headquarters, seven people sat around a circular table. No names. No files. No phones. Just tension and the faint hum of a world unraveling.
On the center monitor: a satellite image of a Himalayan border outpost—reduced to ash.
A woman in a gray suit spoke first. “So Arun Joshi’s alive.”
A man beside her nodded. “Confirmed visual. Temple strike failed. The subject escaped. Again.”
Across the table, a grizzled CIA director leaned forward. “And Kabir Anand?”
“Injured, recovering in Delhi. Under RAW protection.”
“Convenient.”
The woman in gray frowned. “You think he let him go?”
The director’s voice was ice. “I think Anand’s off-book. Always has been.”
He tapped a file stamped PROJECT BHAIRAV – CLOSED.
“Except this file was never supposed to exist. And now one of its prototypes is walking free with a head full of classified kills and a list of voices that programmed him.”
A younger analyst spoke up. “There’s chatter that Joshi isn’t rogue. He’s reconstructing something. Following breadcrumbs.”
“What kind of breadcrumbs?” asked the director.
The analyst hesitated, then tapped his screen.
A symbol appeared.
A red raven.
Painted on the wall of a bombed-out hideout in Khyber.
Sprayed just hours after the temple blast.
The director paled.
“Jesus Christ… It’s not just memory.”
The woman in gray nodded.
“It’s ideology.”
Delhi – RAW Internal Quarters
Kabir sat in a secure room with blinds drawn and bruises stitched.
Across from him sat the current RAW chief, Deepak Banerjee—an aging tiger with sharp eyes and a fading voice.
“You shouldn’t have gone dark, Kabir,” Banerjee said. “You should’ve reported Joshi the minute he surfaced.”
Kabir stared at the tea in front of him.
“And what would you have done? Activated Protocol 17? Put a bullet in his head like the last one?”
Banerjee didn’t flinch. “If a sleeper breaks containment, you neutralize. That’s not policy—it’s survival.”
“He wasn’t broken,” Kabir said. “He was trying to claw back to himself. And we turned him into a weapon before he ever had a choice.”
Banerjee’s gaze sharpened. “You sound like you want to absolve him.”
“I want to stop him. Because now, he’s not trying to escape the system.”
Kabir looked up.
“He’s trying to replace it.”
Location: Baltistan Highlands – Abandoned Radar Station
Arun Joshi knelt before a rusted signal tower, adjusting a solar antenna he’d rigged by hand.
The snow blew sideways, carving patterns across the mountainside.
Beside him, a battered laptop blinked to life.
He typed:
ECHO LINK ESTABLISHED
The screen buzzed, then a video feed shimmered into view.
Five faces.
Hidden in shadow.
Arun’s voice was calm. Focused. Controlled.
“Red Echo is live. Codename Revenant has disengaged from all handlers. Mission realignment begins now.”
One of the figures responded. A distorted voice: “What’s your first target?”
Arun stared into the snow.
“Raven’s past. And Bhairav’s architects.”
Another voice: “This is revenge?”
“No,” Arun said. “This is correction.”
He signed off.
And the Red Echo network went silent.
Later That Night – Kabir’s Apartment, Delhi
The city buzzed far below, but Kabir heard none of it.
He sat alone, watching an old surveillance video from 2011.
Arun and Kabir—side by side—raiding a terror cell in Balakot. Laughing after, bleeding and alive.
Brothers in shadow.
Clara stepped in quietly. She looked tired.
“He’s resurfaced again,” she said. “Old Bhairav site. Himachal border. Left a message.”
Kabir glanced up. “What kind?”
She handed him a photo.
The wall had been spray-painted in red.
“I REMEMBER WHO I WAS.”
Kabir’s hands trembled slightly.
Clara placed a hand on his shoulder.
“If we’re going to stop him, we have to think like him.”
Kabir nodded.
“No. We have to think before him.”
Final Scene – Somewhere in Moscow
A woman moved through a dark library beneath the Kremlin. She carried a folder labeled:
PROJECT SURYA – 1992
Inside: a photo of Kabir Anand.
And another.
A child.
Barely ten. Labeled Candidate 02.
The woman whispered into her comm:
“The Revenant isn’t the only one awake. Initiate Phase Two.”
Far away, somewhere between the mountains of Nepal and the rivers of Punjab…
Another sleeper stirred.
Ghost Protocol
Location: Himachal Pradesh – Bhairav Safehouse #04
Status: Breached
The scent of gun oil and scorched stone still hung in the air when Kabir stepped inside the ruined safehouse.
He moved quietly, sweeping the room with a flashlight. The walls were lined with decaying filing cabinets, scorched and rifled through. A large central table was overturned, one leg splintered. It had been turned into a barricade, likely useless against the drone strike that had followed Arun’s last transmission.
Clara stood behind him, scanning with a hand-held EMF sensor. “No active signals. Whatever Arun wanted from here, he took and torched the rest.”
Kabir ran a hand along the bullet-pocked plaster. His fingers came away dusted with soot and something else—charcoal black, but oily.
He lifted it to his nose.
“Graphene residue,” he said.
Clara arched an eyebrow. “So he burned encrypted memory drives.”
“Not just burned—melted them at the molecular level. He didn’t want any fallback data left behind.”
Kabir turned, eyes sharpening.
“Whatever he downloaded, he took it into the wind.”
RAW Crisis Command, New Delhi – Internal Ops Briefing Room
An emergency session had been called. Inside, Chief Banerjee reviewed the decrypted images left behind at the Himachal site.
A schematic of a building—modern, angular, sealed under layers of biometric locks. It bore no markings.
But the room went still when Kabir pointed to a small watermark in the corner of the schematic.
SURYA PROJECT | 1992 | INITIATION CELL DELHI
Banerjee stared at it, stunned. “That’s impossible. Surya was shut down before Bhairav ever began.”
“Was it?” Kabir asked. “Because that watermark was embedded into the floorplans Arun took.”
Clara stepped forward. “We ran a match on the building outline. There’s one facility with that shape, buried under false Ministry of Agriculture credentials in Gurgaon. Four levels down.”
Kabir nodded. “That’s where he’s going.”
Banerjee’s voice dropped. “That site doesn’t officially exist.”
“Then we won’t officially go in,” Kabir said. “We ghost in. Like he did.”
Gurgaon, India – Periphery of the Surya Cell Complex
01:34 Hours IST
They moved in three-person formation—Kabir, Clara, and a former Israeli Mossad tech expert codenamed Shin—through a storm drain that hadn’t been used since the early 2000s.
At the tunnel’s end, they reached a slab of concrete embedded with metal studs.
Shin crouched, unrolling a suction-rigged disc with a silent drill head. “This won’t make a sound. But once we’re in, we won’t have long.”
Kabir’s voice was even. “We don’t need long.”
As the disc cut through the barrier, Clara checked the tranquilizer cartridges in her modified Glock. “We’re assuming Arun’s still human enough to respond to talk. But if he’s gone full Revenant…”
“I’ll take the shot,” Kabir said.
“I know.”
Inside the Complex – Level -4
The door opened into darkness.
But darkness didn’t mean silence.
From deep within the corridor, a soft rhythmic sound echoed—like breath.
They moved cautiously, weapons ready. The hallway stretched ahead, lit only by backup strips glowing faint green.
Every door they passed was marked with strange code: C-12, D-07, S-03.
Clara whispered, “Test subjects. Cells.”
Kabir stopped outside a sealed vault door. On it, painted in blood:
“SURYA NEVER ENDED. IT JUST SLEPT.”
He touched the keypad.
It opened with a groan.
The Vault – Central Chamber
Inside was a circular room—half laboratory, half shrine.
Dozens of biometric data ports lined the walls. Cryo-tubes. Neuro-mapping terminals. In the center, a surgical chair—shattered.
And scrawled across the glass window in reversed ink:
“AWAKEN THE OTHERS.”
Clara stared, breath caught. “This wasn’t a data raid.”
“No,” Kabir murmured. “It was a jailbreak.”
Shin scanned the server core in the corner. “Multiple access points logged in from four different terminals. Each connected to a different subnet—Nepal, Eastern Europe, and…”
He paused.
“…Taiwan.”
Kabir looked up sharply. “That’s where the Surya genetic repository was rumored to be held.”
“And Arun just unlocked it,” Clara said.
They turned at a soft sound—a footstep.
And then a voice.
“You followed the past. Good. Now follow the blood.”
Arun stood at the upper balcony, silhouetted against a flickering red warning light.
He looked… changed.
Older, yes—but colder too. His eyes had none of the tremor Kabir had seen in the temple. His body language was composed, even regal. This wasn’t a fugitive.
This was a commander.
Standoff – Revenant and Raven
Kabir raised his hands, unarmed. “This isn’t who you are.”
Arun tilted his head. “You think you know who I am because we bled together? Because we shared a uniform?”
“I know you because I held your memories when you couldn’t.”
Arun’s voice darkened. “And still, you walked away. You left me in Bhairav.”
Kabir flinched.
“You think you were the only one betrayed?” Arun asked, descending the stairs. “They erased me. Bit by bit. Then sent me into death like I was a blueprint, not a man.”
“I never signed off on your death,” Kabir said.
“But you didn’t stop it either.”
A silence.
Then Kabir spoke, slowly.
“I came to stop the next generation. Before they repeat our sins.”
Arun stepped closer.
“But I came to replace it.”
He gestured to the console.
“Seven survivors from Surya are in cryo-stasis. Children. Sleeper candidates. Genetically modified. Mentally blank.”
Clara whispered, “You’re building an army.”
“No,” Arun said. “I’m building a firewall.”
Kabir stared at him. “Against what?”
Arun’s eyes flashed.
“Against the next war. The one no one’s ready for. The one being coded right now in Russian black sites and American think tanks.”
A beat.
“Only people like me can survive what’s coming.”
Kabir looked him in the eye.
“No. Only people like us can stop it before it begins.”
Gunfire – Ambush Triggered
The chamber erupted in chaos.
A hidden sniper round shattered the glass above—Shin collapsed with a chest wound.
Kabir shoved Clara behind a pillar.
Mirov’s voice echoed from the comms: “Revenant, abort retrieval. Target Raven is the objective.”
Arun’s face twisted. “You brought Mirov here?”
“No,” Kabir hissed. “He’s been following you.”
Outside, multiple reinforcements breached the complex.
Arun turned to the console. “If I stay, they’ll take this place. Rebuild it their way.”
He looked at Kabir. “But if I detonate the failsafe…”
“You’ll die,” Kabir said.
Arun smiled faintly.
“I already did.”
Final Moments – The Choice
Alarms screamed.
Mirov’s men stormed the halls.
Arun reached the terminal. His fingers hovered over the code.
Kabir stepped beside him.
“I won’t stop you. But if you do this… let me carry the memory.”
Arun nodded slowly.
Then pressed the key.
BOOM.
Three Hours Later – Debriefing Bunker, North Delhi
Kabir sat alone, wrapped in burns, a fresh wound across his ribs.
Clara entered.
“He’s gone,” she said softly. “No trace.”
Kabir nodded.
“He didn’t want to be remembered as a weapon.”
She handed him a photo.
Burned edges. Two men in RAW fatigues.
Brothers.
Final Frame – Somewhere in Belarus
A cryo-pod opened.
Inside, a boy blinked into the light.
On the wall: a logo.
RED ECHO.
And a phrase:
“The future remembers.”
The Serpent’s Tongue
Location: Warsaw, Poland – Foreign Intelligence Listening Post
The cold had teeth here. Kabir pulled his coat tighter as he stepped out of the unmarked van and looked up at the nondescript concrete structure. From the outside, it was a shuttered textile factory; inside, it pulsed with stolen secrets.
Clara walked beside him, a scarf wrapped tight around her neck. “This place monitors half of Eastern Europe’s unsecured bandwidth. If Arun’s new network is transmitting, we’ll find the tail.”
Kabir said nothing. His eyes were on the sky, where snow spiraled down in lazy silence. It was the kind of stillness that came before a storm—or a betrayal.
Inside, a thin man in glasses greeted them. He introduced himself simply as “Janek,” the Polish liaison to the RAW-CIA shadow cell.
“We’ve picked up fragmented transmissions,” he explained, walking them down a hallway lined with blinking servers. “Encrypted on a frequency range unused since the Cold War.”
He handed Kabir a printed sheet—binary clusters with only one decoded phrase:
“Phase Two is Awake.”
Kabir’s grip tightened. “That’s not just a signal. It’s an activation key.”
Clara read over his shoulder. “Phase Two of what?”
Janek turned on a monitor, showing satellite heat signatures across Central Asia.
“Look at the pattern,” he said. “We thought it was random—until this.”
He zoomed out.
The markers formed a perfect shape.
A raven’s wing.
Location: Red Echo Control Node – Belarus
The boy from the cryo-pod stood before a wall of monitors. His eyes were unblinking, pupils slightly dilated, skin marked by faint biometric implants.
Behind him, a woman moved like a shadow—elegant, precise. She was codenamed Tana, and her role was singular: mold the future.
“They know Arun’s gone,” she said quietly.
The boy—Unit 02—said nothing.
Tana continued, “You were never meant to wait for orders. You are the contingency. You are what comes after.”
She reached for a panel, entered a six-digit code.
One of the monitors shifted. Kabir Anand’s face appeared, taken from a surveillance drone in Poland.
“You see him?” she asked.
“Yes,” the boy answered, voice flat.
“What do you feel?”
A pause.
Then: “Familiar.”
Tana smiled.
“Good. That’s what he’s counting on.”
Warsaw – Listening Post, Hours Later
Kabir sat staring at a crude map sketched on a napkin. A new pattern was emerging. Every Red Echo ping corresponded to either:
- A decommissioned Bhairav or Surya facility
- A Cold War comms node
- Or a known blacksite used by non-state actors
This wasn’t just rogue agents reliving the past.
This was infrastructure being reactivated.
Clara tapped the map. “Why Belarus?”
Kabir looked at her. “Because that’s where the first version of Surya began. Before even India touched it. Soviet neuro-geneticists trying to design ‘memory-enhanced operatives’ using imprinting and cognitive rewiring.”
“Did it work?”
Kabir folded the map. “If Red Echo exists, then yes. And now they’ve improved it.”
Janek stepped in with a frown. “There’s been a breach. Twenty-six child operatives vanished from an Uzbek blacksite two days ago. No sign of who took them.”
Kabir stood.
“They didn’t vanish. They were collected.
Location: Red Echo Forward Site – Caucasus Mountains
Inside an underground dormitory lit by soft blue light, twenty-six children sat cross-legged in silence. No games. No screens. Just coordinated breath.
Tana walked between them.
“They will come for you,” she said calmly. “They will try to tell you who you were.”
She stopped beside a girl—maybe twelve, maybe younger—whose eyes flicked toward a small photo being projected onto the far wall.
A face.
Kabir Anand.
“They will say he is your father. That he loved you. That he bled for you.”
The girl didn’t blink.
Tana knelt.
“But what matters is this: He left you. And we did not.”
She stood again.
“Memories lie. We don’t.”
Warsaw – Kabir’s Revelation
The snowfall thickened as Kabir stood on the rooftop, watching the street below.
Clara joined him, coat zipped to her throat.
“You okay?”
He didn’t answer right away.
“Arun tried to stop this. That’s what I missed.”
Clara frowned. “What do you mean?”
Kabir turned to her, eyes glassy.
“He wasn’t trying to rebuild Bhairav. He was trying to dismantle it from inside. He woke them so they’d see the lie before they became weapons.”
“But they didn’t,” Clara said. “They became Red Echo.”
“Because someone else got to them first.”
He exhaled, a long breath clouding in the cold.
“We’re not chasing Arun’s ghost anymore.”
Clara looked at him.
“Then who are we chasing?”
Interlude – Classified Voice Log
Source: Tana’s Personal Device
[Start recording] SUBJECT 02: “Will he come?”TANA: “Kabir? Yes. He’ll try.”
SUBJECT 02: “Will I remember him?”
TANA: “Only if it serves the story.”
[End recording]
RAW Interim Headquarters – New Delhi
Emergency Conference
Chief Banerjee’s voice was weary but clear. “We’ve confirmed the original Surya DNA templates were stored off-book in Belarus—inside a Russian biogen lab that was never accounted for in the Geneva records. Someone’s accessed them.”
A hologram of the Surya icon rotated slowly.
“And there’s more,” Banerjee said grimly. “We’ve recovered data that suggests Kabir Anand himself was subject to preliminary cognitive exposure to Project Surya. In 1995. Age ten.”
Clara’s heart dropped. “That’s not possible.”
Banerjee shook his head. “He was listed as Candidate Zero. They didn’t proceed. Or so we thought.”
She stood. “Does he know?”
Banerjee hesitated.
“No. But Red Echo might.”
Final Scene – Rural Romania
A farmhouse. Quiet. Wind through trees.
Kabir approached the door, weapon holstered, heart thudding.
Inside, a woman—late 60s, stern face, hands ink-stained—sat at a table with a box of old files.
He entered slowly.
“You were the project lead,” he said.
She looked up.
“I was the warning they ignored.”
He pulled out the file marked Candidate Zero.
“Why me?”
She looked at him—truly looked.
And said:
“Because you weren’t supposed to survive it. But you did.”
Zero Point
Location: Rural Romania – Farmhouse of Dr. Emilia Drăgan
Time: 06:42 Hours
The farmhouse was quiet. Old floorboards creaked under Kabir’s weight as he moved to the center of the study. Outside, frost covered the windowpanes, turning the rising sun into fractured light. On the desk before him lay a faded folder.
PROJECT SURYA – CANDIDATE 00 – KABIR ANAND
Kabir stared at the page. A photograph of himself at ten, eyes wide, expression blank. Beneath it, crude handwritten notes:
> “Baseline: unusually high retention.”
“Responds to trauma with dissociation, not collapse.”
“Potential: Control vector?”
“Failed memory inhibition.”
He closed the folder.
“I was just a child,” he said.
Dr. Emilia Drăgan leaned back in her chair. Her eyes were old—heavy with guilt, not age. “So were they all.”
“You said I wasn’t supposed to survive the procedure.”
“You didn’t,” she replied quietly. “Not the version of you they created. That one collapsed. But the one that came after…”
She nodded toward him.
“…wasn’t ours anymore. You rewrote yourself.”
Kabir clenched his fists. “Why me?”
Emilia sighed. “Because your father volunteered you.”
Kabir froze.
Flashback – Delhi, 1995
A small boy sat in a sterile chamber. Through the glass, two men stood watching. One in a lab coat. One in a military uniform.
“He doesn’t remember the accident?”
“No. Car bomb took his mother. Massive trauma. Selective amnesia.”
“Perfect.”
“You’re sure he’s stable?”
“He’s a blank canvas. Surya needs those.”
The boy looked up.
The man in uniform gave a small wave.
It was Kabir’s father.
Present – Romania
Kabir stood motionless, the memory crashing over him like cold rain. “My father… He offered me?”
Emilia nodded. “He believed the future of warfare would be built on minds, not weapons. He thought you’d be the prototype of a new India.”
Kabir turned away. “He was wrong.”
“No,” Emilia said. “He was right. Just not in the way he expected.”
Meanwhile – Red Echo Substation, Ukraine
The boy—Subject 02—stood before a glass board filled with names, locations, and frequencies. Tana circled one name with red chalk:
Dr. Emilia Drăgan
“She will tell him everything,” she said. “He’ll know what he is. Who he was.”
Subject 02 said nothing.
Tana turned to him.
“He still matters to you.”
“I don’t know why,” he said.
Tana placed a photo on the board—Kabir and Subject 02, side by side. One older. One younger. Both with the same look in their eyes.
“He was the prototype,” Tana said. “You were the perfected version. The one we corrected.”
She stepped back. “Now you must erase him.”
Romania – The Escape
Kabir and Dr. Drăgan didn’t hear the drones until it was too late.
The farmhouse erupted with the whine of surveillance rotors. Kabir pulled Emilia down just as the window shattered with gunfire.
“MOVE!” he shouted.
Through the back exit, across the frozen field, under low brush. Two incoming figures, dressed in black, emerged from the trees—operatives. Not soldiers. Killers.
Kabir fired once, clipped one in the neck. The other dove behind a fence post.
“Keep going!” he shouted to Emilia.
She limped toward the treeline. Kabir turned back—and saw a third drone drop a canister onto the farmhouse roof.
BOOM.
The blast knocked him off his feet.
When he looked up, flames rose like a funeral pyre.
But Emilia was gone.
RAW Black Channel Transmission – Secured Comms
FROM: Kabir Anand
TO: Clara Mehra
> He knows. He’s coming for anyone who remembers the old Surya protocols.
Drăgan’s gone.
Find the original upload sites—Belarus, Taiwan, Manasarovar node in Tibet.
He’s not just erasing memories.
He’s replacing them.
CIA Listening Post – Krakow, Poland
Clara stared at the message, eyes wide.
She turned to Janek. “We need to act now.”
Janek shook his head. “We can’t get ahead of them. Every time we move, they’ve already been there.”
Clara tapped her tablet. “Then we go where they haven’t.”
Janek leaned in. “Where?”
She showed him a map—an old Cold War satellite relay buried under ice in northern Tibet.
“Project Surya’s final memory vault. Sealed and abandoned.”
Janek nodded slowly. “You think Subject 02 is headed there?”
“No,” Clara said. “I think he’s already inside.”
Location: Tibet – The Vault
Subject 02 moved through the chamber like a ghost through a cathedral.
He stood before a wall lined with cryo-vaults. Each one labeled:
S-01 through S-20
Inside, motionless forms.
The rest of Red Echo.
Tana stood at his side. “If you activate them, there’s no going back. The world as it is will end.”
Subject 02 looked down at the control panel.
A red button pulsed slowly.
“Did he ever press it?” he asked.
Tana frowned. “Kabir?”
“Yes.”
“No,” she said. “He never could.”
The boy stared at his reflection in the glass.
“I am not him.”
Then pressed the button.
Back in Romania – Aftermath
Kabir stood over the wreckage of the farmhouse.
A fragment of paper fluttered at his feet. Half-burned.
A child’s drawing.
Stick figures: a boy, a man, and a woman. A family.
Written at the bottom, in a child’s handwriting:
“KABIR – MAA – BABA”
He sank to his knees.
The lies, the wars, the reprogramming—beneath it all, there had been a boy who just wanted a family.
Clara’s voice crackled over the secure line.
“Kabir. They’ve gone dark in Tibet. I think they’re awake.”
He stood slowly.
“Then it’s time I go home.”
Final Scene – Himalayan Airspace
A stealth chopper soared between the peaks.
Inside, Kabir loaded a custom rifle, strapped a data drive to his chest, and stared at a monitor showing the Tibetan vault.
He tapped into his comms.
“This ends where it began.”
Then whispered to himself.
“Zero meets zero.”
And jumped.
The Vault Below Silence
Location: Southern Tibet – 42 Nautical Miles from Manasarovar Memory Node
Time: 02:03 Hours IST
Kabir landed hard, boots crunching against a snow-swept ridge.
Below, nestled in the crevice of the mountain, was a long-forgotten complex — the final Surya Vault, shielded by rock, silence, and a signal-dead zone so vast it swallowed even drone telemetry.
He checked his comms. No signal. That meant one thing:
They were already inside.
He moved fast.
Through snow that bit like teeth. Past prayer flags fluttering from a ruined gompa nearby — ancient blessings for peace and silence, now standing guard over a war born in secret.
By the time he reached the outer gate, the air was thin and cruel.
But the door — a titanium blast seal — had already been forced open. Melted.
Laser precision.
Tana. Subject 02. Red Echo. They were here.
He stepped into the dark.
Inside the Vault – Surya Core 03
Lights flickered on via motion sensor, illuminating decades of dust.
This was no ordinary bunker. It was a memory mine — servers embedded with neuro-signatures, consciousness fragments, and profile snapshots from every operative tested during the early Surya years.
Kabir walked past pods labeled with long-erased names:
S-12: DISCARDED
C-03: MEMORY DISSOLUTION FAILURE
K-00: INCOMPLETE INTEGRATION – RED FLAGGED
He stopped.
K-00.
His.
The pod was cracked, as if someone had tried to destroy it and failed.
Inside, a chair — empty — and walls scorched with claw-like scrapes.
Behind it, carved into steel:
“I REMEMBER.”
Elsewhere in the Vault – Red Echo Activation Room
Subject 02 stood before the central console, palms pressed against the biometric gel pad.
All around him, cryo-chambers hummed.
Tana watched, face unreadable.
“They’re ready,” she said softly. “Your brothers. Your sisters.”
He blinked slowly.
“This place… it knows me.”
Tana nodded. “Because it was made for you. You are Surya’s final syntax — memory without mercy. Identity without past.”
He looked down at the control key.
Activate All – Y/N?
Behind him, a soft footstep.
Tana turned — her hand went for her weapon.
Too late.
Kabir emerged from the shadows.
Confrontation – Raven and Echo
Guns weren’t raised.
Not yet.
Kabir looked at Subject 02 — the boy he might’ve been. The ghost built from his DNA, trained in his shadow, made from everything he buried.
“You don’t have to do this,” he said.
Subject 02 didn’t move. “I was never given a choice.”
“You still have one.”
“No,” the boy said quietly. “You did. You ran. I was made.”
Kabir stepped closer.
“I remember what they did to me. The tests. The silence. The isolation. But it didn’t make me like them. It made me fight them.”
The boy’s hand hovered over the key.
“You’re not like me,” he whispered. “You forgot.”
Kabir pointed to the wall behind him.
“I carved that. The night they tried to erase me. I remember everything now.”
Silence.
Then:
“Even your name.”
The Name
Subject 02 blinked.
“What… name?”
Kabir took a breath.
“You weren’t just a subject. You were a child. When they extracted your memories, some slipped through.”
He reached into his coat.
Pulled out a faded strip of cloth — burned, bloodstained — but still legible.
AARAV
Kabir held it up.
“Your name is Aarav. You were taken from a safehouse in Kashmir in 2014. Your mother died protecting you.”
The boy’s eyes widened.
No fury. No rage. Just a flicker of… recognition.
Then the console blared:
Auto-activation in 90 seconds. Manual override disabled.
Tana shouted, raising her pistol. “He’s lying! There is no past for you! Only function!”
Kabir turned, firing once.
The bullet struck Tana’s shoulder — not fatal, but enough.
She crumpled to the ground.
“You told him he was built for war,” Kabir said, approaching the console. “But he wasn’t.”
He turned to the boy.
“You were built to survive. Now choose what survival means.”
Inside Aarav’s Mind – Fragment Playback
Voices.
A woman laughing.
A small house with red doors.
Mountains in the distance.
Warmth. Smell of rain on stone.
“Aarav, come inside! It’s late!”
The boy gasped.
Clutched his chest.
Then looked at Kabir.
Tears welled up.
“I remember her.”
Kabir nodded. “She remembered you.”
Final 10 Seconds
Aarav stepped forward.
Entered a code.
The console beeped:
ECHO OVERRIDE – MEMORY PRESERVATION MODE INITIATED
CRYO SUBJECTS PLACED IN STASIS LOCKDOWN
MASTER CONTROL NEUTRALIZED
Silence returned.
Tana groaned behind them.
Aarav turned to Kabir.
“What now?”
Kabir looked at the vault walls — lined with silence, shadows, and ghosts.
“We get you and the others out. We dismantle what’s left. Brick by brick.”
Aarav shook his head.
“I can’t go back to the world.”
“You’re not going back,” Kabir said gently. “You’re going forward. On your own terms.”
Aftermath – RAW Mobile Command, Ladakh Border
Clara stood on the observation deck as the evac choppers lifted off.
Inside one of them, twenty-five children slept — memories preserved, trauma suspended.
Aarav sat among them, wide awake, watching the sky.
Kabir stood beside her.
“It’s over?” Clara asked.
Kabir nodded.
“For now. Surya’s systems are burned. Red Echo is fractured. Tana’s in custody.”
“And him?”
Kabir looked toward the chopper.
“He’s not a weapon anymore.”
Clara touched his shoulder.
“You didn’t just stop a war, Kabir. You saved the next generation.”
He looked down.
“No,” he said.
“I gave them back their names.”
Final Scene – Unknown Location
A flash drive inserted into a terminal.
A new file begins uploading:
“REVENANT ARCHIVE – CODE: PHOENIX”
A silhouette stands in the dark, watching the progress bar.
And smiles.
“Let’s see what else the past buried.”
The Phoenix Directive
Location: Undisclosed Data Farm – Black Sea Coast
Time: 03:09 Hours IST
The cursor blinked steadily on the screen, completing the upload:
REVENANT ARCHIVE – CODE: PHOENIX – STATUS: ACTIVE
The room was dark, save for the glow of cascading code on a dozen servers. The silhouette stood still, backlit by digital fire. A voice, male and steady, spoke into a satellite phone.
“Project Surya has been neutralized.”
“Red Echo?”
“Stabilized. But not destroyed.”
“And the boy?”
“He remembers.”
The voice on the other end replied coldly.
“Then initiate Phoenix.”
RAW HQ – New Delhi
The room was tense. Everyone stood. Banerjee, Clara, Kabir, Janek — the surviving heads of the now-exposed Project Surya cover network. All of them bore scars, physical or otherwise.
A holographic display showed the globe peppered with red dots — dormant Surya caches that had been reawakened briefly in the past 48 hours. Then shut down. Too clean. Too synchronized.
Banerjee pointed at the screen. “Someone’s sweeping the table. Not destroying it — just clearing it for something new.”
Clara nodded. “We have a name: Phoenix Directive. Something hidden even from Surya.”
Kabir stared at the flashing nodes.
“This isn’t just a continuation.”
He looked up.
“It’s a reset.”
Location: Temporary Refuge Facility – Northern India
Aarav sat at a window, sketching.
His pencil moved without pause — lines, arcs, curves — building a bird in mid-flight.
Outside, other children played.
But he watched the sky.
Kabir approached slowly.
“You draw well,” he said.
Aarav shrugged. “She used to say I was drawing birds before I could write my name.”
Kabir smiled gently. “You remembered more than they meant for you to.”
Aarav looked at him. “Why does remembering hurt?”
Kabir sat beside him.
“Because truth is heavy. But it’s the only thing that makes us real.”
The boy said nothing.
Then passed him the sketch.
“It’s a phoenix,” he said.
Kabir blinked. “Why that bird?”
Aarav stared out the window.
“Because it dies, but never disappears.”
CIA Safehouse – Istanbul
Clara scrolled through intercepted Phoenix fragments. What she found chilled her.
A single manifesto-like document appeared again and again, attributed to an anonymous figure called “The Architect.”
One line was always bolded:
“Human memory is flawed. Controlled memory is peace.”
She looked at Janek. “They’re not stopping at operatives. They’re going for public infrastructure. Schools, social networks, cloud backups, even personal histories.”
Janek frowned. “Mass cognitive control?”
Clara nodded.
> “Global revisionism, written in neural ink.”
Banerjee’s Final Briefing – RAW Command
“All Phoenix candidates,” Banerjee said, “are sleeper agents selected from failed Surya trials. They were never activated… until now.”
He pulled up twelve profiles. All deceased. But new surveillance showed them alive. Changed.
“Ghosts,” Clara whispered.
Kabir stepped forward.
“Then let’s become ghosts too.”
Mission Initiation – Operation Ashwake
A multinational task force was authorized within hours.
RAW. CIA. Polish SIGINT. Mossad.
Twelve targets. Twelve cities.
“Phoenix must be stopped at the root,” Kabir said. “Because next time, there won’t be another generation to save.”
He picked one target for himself.
Codename: The Architect. Location: Geneva.
Final Mission – Geneva, Switzerland
It was snowing again.
Kabir moved through the abandoned UN comms center repurposed as a data lattice node.
The walls hummed with redirected internet flows — a silent current of thoughts, histories, identities. The future of memory, rewritten in real time.
The Architect sat calmly before a terminal. A woman. White hair. Ice-cold eyes.
“You’re late,” she said without turning.
Kabir raised his weapon. “You tried to rewrite humanity.”
She stood. “I tried to protect it. Truth is chaos. Controlled memory is order.”
He advanced. “Control isn’t protection. It’s war.”
She stepped aside, revealing a console blinking with an ominous countdown:
PHOENIX SEED: 00:01:58
“You can kill me,” she said. “But the seed is already sown.”
Kabir fired once — clean shot, center mass. She crumpled.
Then he lunged toward the console.
Only one option left:
Override by DNA key.
He jammed his finger into the scanner.
IDENTITY CONFIRMED: K-00
OVERRIDE ACCEPTED
PHOENIX SEED ABORTED
The screen blinked black.
Just silence.
Then the servers began to self-destruct.
Epilogue – One Week Later
Location: Himalayan School for Displaced Children
Aarav stood before a chalkboard.
He was teaching.
Simple things. History. Numbers. Names.
Behind him, the wall bore an inscription:
“Truth begins with memory.”
Kabir watched from the hallway.
Clara stood beside him.
“They’re calling it Ashwake’s End,” she said.
He shook his head. “It’s not the end.”
She looked at him.
“No?”
Kabir stepped forward.
“It’s the beginning of remembering who we are — without someone else deciding for us.”
She smiled. “And what about you?”
He looked at the sky.
“I’m done being a weapon.”
He pulled a small pendant from his coat — the burned cloth with Aarav’s name.
“Time to be human again.”
Final Scene – Unknown Server Room
One server, unmarked, still runs.
Inside, a single file glows:
SURYA – PROTOCOL REMNANT – NAME: KABIR ANAND
Below it:
STATUS: DORMANT
OVERRIDE: UNAUTHORIZED
MEMORY LOCK: PERMANENT
Until a new cursor appears.
And begins to type.
“This story isn’t over.”
THE END
