Aaryan Dastur
The Breaking Point
The newsroom of Global Pulse buzzed like a swarm of hornets, monitors flashing with real-time footage, phones ringing off their hooks, and the giant ticker on the far wall counting down the minutes to prime time. Rhea Sen stood at the heart of it all, arms folded, eyes fixed on the wall screen where rival network The Daily Eye was airing a bombshell report. Her jaw clenched slightly as Kabir Mathur’s voice boomed from the broadcast — sharp, confident, manipulative.
“Sources inside the Ministry confirm that the leaked budget documents came directly from the Finance Secretary’s office. We at The Daily Eye were the first to bring you this exclusive—”
Rhea turned off the volume. “They were not the first,” she muttered. “We had that lead three days ago.”
“Then why didn’t we run with it?” asked Vikram, her senior producer, hovering near her desk.
“Because we had two sources, and I wanted a third. We verify. They gamble.”
Vikram didn’t argue. In Rhea’s world, credibility wasn’t a luxury; it was a weapon. But now that weapon had become a shield, and shields didn’t win wars. The Daily Eye was surging in ratings, advertisers were pulling out of Global Pulse, and morale was thinning faster than trust.
Across town, in a glass tower dripping with opulence, Kabir Mathur leaned back in his leather chair, swirling his glass of wine as the newsroom behind him erupted in applause. His team of hungry young reporters — fresh out of journalism school with fire in their bellies and very few ethical scruples — were riding the high of another scoop. Kabir didn’t mind their inexperience; he cultivated chaos and rewarded risk.
“She’ll be livid,” said Mehul, Kabir’s right-hand man, grinning as he watched Rhea’s muted reaction on a rival feed. “Three days of digging, and we stole it in three hours.”
“Correction,” Kabir said, sipping. “We didn’t steal. We acted.”
Kabir had built The Daily Eye from a digital tabloid into the most-watched network in the country by weaponizing two things — speed and spectacle. Facts mattered, but not more than narrative. And in this war, narrative was everything.
Back at Global Pulse, Rhea was already drafting a counter-offensive. She picked up the internal phone. “Shalini, wake up Rajeev from Legal. I need to know if we can run with what we’ve got without naming the source.”
“You mean the whistleblower?” Shalini asked, her voice tense.
“No names, just the implication. If Kabir wants to play dirty, we’ll give them something to choke on.”
She slammed the receiver. A file lay unopened on her desk — a thick brown envelope marked “Confidential: 2017 Narmada Resettlement Report.” It had arrived that morning with no return address. Inside were documents, photos, a thumb drive, and a cryptic note that read: “Truth drowns in silence.”
It was explosive material — proof of state-level corruption in a multi-crore rehabilitation scam. If authenticated, it would not just crush political careers; it could collapse a government.
Rhea hadn’t shown it to anyone yet. Her instinct told her to wait, but now, with Kabir charging forward like a battering ram, waiting felt like slow suicide.
At The Daily Eye, Kabir was receiving another alert. “Sir,” Mehul said, holding out a phone. “One of our interns just spotted Rajiv Saxena — the bureaucrat from the Narmada panel — entering Global Pulse’s parking garage.”
Kabir’s eyebrows arched. “Now, what could Rhea be cooking up that requires a deadbeat bureaucrat?”
He took the phone from Mehul and dialed a number memorized long ago. “Get your camera van outside Global Pulse in five minutes. And find out who parked that red Honda. Now.”
Meanwhile, Rhea sat alone in her office, watching the footage from the USB drive. Each clip was more damning than the last. Displaced families living in flooded huts, forged signatures on compensation forms, missing funds, empty plots. The camera panned to a crying child sitting on a submerged school bench.
Rhea paused the frame. A lump formed in her throat.
She reached for her pen and began scribbling on a legal pad. “Segment one: Chronology. Segment two: Victim testimonies. Segment three: Political links…”
Her phone buzzed. Shalini again. “Rhea, you need to see this.”
On the office TV, a breaking ticker ran beneath Kabir’s grinning face: “Exclusive: Bureaucrat in secret meeting at rival network — what are they hiding?”
Rhea exhaled sharply. Kabir had made his move — and made her look guilty in the process.
That night, both networks opened with fire.
At Global Pulse, Rhea led with the Narmada story, hammering the system, naming no names but showing everything. Her voice was steady, firm, her eyes daring the audience to ignore what they saw.
At The Daily Eye, Kabir sneered into the camera, framing the bureaucrat’s appearance as a “deepening web of collusion,” and teasing a follow-up: “Tomorrow, we reveal the unedited footage and the mole within Global Pulse.”
The war had officially begun.
And neither side was planning to surrender.
The Mole in the Mirror
At 3:12 a.m., Rhea was still at her desk, cross-checking every file in the Narmada folder. The footage they had broadcast earlier had already stirred the nation, trending at number three on social media. Hashtags like #FloodedTruth and #PulseReveals were climbing. But not fast enough. Not compared to The Daily Eye’s explosive teaser about a mole inside her team. That single sentence had undone hours of credible journalism. Now the question on every viewer’s mind was no longer “What is happening in Narmada?” but “Who inside Global Pulse is leaking information?”
Rhea pressed her palms against her face. The newsroom behind her had long since thinned, but the few who remained looked restless and suspicious. She could feel it creeping in — the silent doubt, the invisible cracks. And the worst part? She had no idea who Kabir’s source was. It could be anyone.
“Who did you assign to background the footage?” she asked Shalini, who was curled up on the sofa in her office with a notepad on her lap.
“Devika and Anant. And Vivek helped pull some satellite data on water levels.”
“Pull up Devika’s access logs. I want to know what files she opened and when.”
Shalini stiffened. “You think she’s the leak?”
“I think Kabir Mathur doesn’t make empty threats. And someone gave him the name of that bureaucrat. That didn’t come from thin air.”
On the other side of the city, Kabir stood under the harsh white lights of The Daily Eye’s editing suite. The footage his team had secretly captured of Rajiv Saxena walking into Global Pulse headquarters had just been enhanced and sharpened. There was no sound, only timestamped images. But it was enough.
“Play it again,” he ordered.
Mehul clicked back to the top. There was Saxena, walking with a folder under his arm. Then a woman joined him in the parking lot — young, medium height, holding her phone tightly like it was part of her bloodstream.
“That’s Devika Sharma,” Kabir said with a slow smile.
Mehul glanced up. “You sure?”
“She used to intern here before Rhea poached her. And she’s been feeding me drips for months now. This—” he tapped the screen “—is a bomb waiting to go off.”
Kabir’s plan was surgical: don’t expose Devika yet. Tease. Provoke. Make Global Pulse implode under paranoia. Let Rhea investigate her own people. When the mistrust turned inward, the house would fall without a single push.
The next morning, Rhea stood in the middle of the bullpen. No smile. No small talk.
“We’re being watched,” she said, her voice cold. “And we’re being targeted. Someone here thinks it’s okay to leak sensitive information. If you have any doubts about where you stand, now is the time to walk out.”
Silence.
Eyes darted. Anant shifted on his feet. Devika stared straight ahead.
“Security has access logs. Every keystroke is being monitored. If I find a rat, I will personally drag them through legal hell. This is your one warning.”
She left the room without waiting for a response.
But the seed had been planted. Doubt festered. Whispers bloomed like mold. And Kabir’s next strike came by noon.
A teaser clip went live across The Daily Eye’s digital platforms: a blurred image of a woman in a Global Pulse lanyard talking to Saxena.
Caption: “You trusted them. Should you have?”
The comments exploded instantly.
“Is this how Global Pulse gets exclusives?”
“Paid actors? Fake whistleblowers?”
“Kabir never lies. Rhea’s finished.”
Inside the newsroom, Devika went pale. “It’s edited,” she stammered to no one in particular. “That could be anyone. It’s not even clear.”
Vikram glanced at her, frowning. “You okay?”
“I’m fine. Just tired.”
She wasn’t. She felt trapped. Kabir had warned her months ago: one file here, one tip there — just enough to rattle the giant. She hadn’t expected to be the story. She was only supposed to be the thread.
At 4:00 p.m., Rhea summoned Legal. “Can we sue them for defamation?”
Rajeev from Legal shook his head. “They haven’t named us. They haven’t accused you directly. Legally, they’re in the clear. They’re playing chess.”
“I don’t play games,” Rhea said flatly.
“You may have to learn.”
Later that evening, Rhea sat alone in her office, staring at a photo from years ago — her and Kabir at a journalism fellowship in Berlin. They were idealists back then. Both had laughed at the idea of TRP wars and political payoffs.
Now, Kabir wielded noise like a sword. And she was left defending silence.
Her phone rang.
No caller ID.
She picked up. “Rhea Sen.”
The voice was raspy, mechanical. “If you want the truth about who’s bleeding your newsroom, meet me where the river divides.”
Click.
No name. No explanation. But Rhea knew exactly where that was — a tiny, forgotten ferry dock on the Yamuna, once a smugglers’ route, now buried under layers of neglect.
She grabbed her coat.
If this was a trap, she was ready.
If it was war, she was done waiting to be ambushed.
Where the River Divides
The ferry dock at Kalibari was just as forgotten as Rhea remembered—rusted chains drooped from rotting wooden posts, the water beneath black with sludge and reflection. The evening air smelled of damp leaves and unspoken things. Only the distant murmur of trucks on the expressway reminded her that Delhi was still nearby, though this place felt like a pocket outside time.
Rhea had arrived in a battered auto, alone, hood pulled up, a pepper spray can in her pocket, and adrenaline pacing her every breath. The note had been vague, the voice distorted, but something in its tone had carried a chilling finality—as though the caller wasn’t offering her a tip, but a choice.
She stood near the edge of the dock, staring at the water’s slow current, until a figure emerged from the shadows beneath the broken tin shed. Mid-thirties, lanky, wearing an old army surplus jacket and a baseball cap pulled low. His face was blurred by the dusk, but his voice—this time unmasked—was dry and sure.
“I didn’t think you’d come.”
“I don’t do cowardice,” she said.
He chuckled once, then pulled out a plastic folder from inside his coat and held it like a poker card. “They’re going to bury you with noise, Rhea. But if you know where to dig, you can bury them with truth.”
“What is this?”
“Call logs. Memos. Cab invoices. Bank transfers. Not everything, but enough to show how The Daily Eye funneled cash to two junior members on your team. One of them stopped last year. The other…” he paused, “is still very much on the payroll.”
Rhea stiffened. “Devika?”
The man didn’t blink. “You’ll find your answers inside. But be careful. You’re playing chess with a man who doesn’t care if he flips the board.”
“Why are you helping me?”
“I’m not. I’m helping the idea that journalism meant something, once.”
He turned, disappearing back into the smog.
Rhea stared at the file in her hands, heart drumming. She didn’t open it until she was back in her car. She flipped on the dome light and scanned the documents. Her pulse skipped.
Cab receipts from Devika Sharma’s ID to and from The Daily Eye’s building. Three bank deposits from a dummy firm linked to a known Kabir ally. And then, buried halfway through — an email.
It was dated six weeks ago.
Subject: Re: PulseData Drop 3
From: dsharma@globalpulse.tv
To: insider_reports@privateeye.net
No text. Just an attachment.
She swallowed hard.
Her phone buzzed.
Shalini.
“Where the hell are you? Kabir just went live. He’s showing the full clip. And he named Devika.”
“What?”
“He said she’s been leaking stories for almost a year. He has emails. Cab logs. Payment receipts. He just assassinated her on national television.”
Rhea blinked. So he had known she’d come into possession of the file. This was containment. Damage control. He had burned his own mole before she could.
She opened her laptop right there in the car and connected to the newsroom server.
At Global Pulse, chaos reigned. Vikram stood by Devika’s desk, where her chair lay overturned. She was gone. Her bag, phone, everything—vanished.
“She walked out,” a junior staffer said. “Didn’t even look back.”
By the time Rhea returned to the office, a dozen calls from HR, Legal, and even the Managing Director awaited her. Questions flooded her from all sides: Who knew? Why didn’t you act sooner? Are there more?
She shut them all down with a single sentence: “We go live in ten.”
At 9:00 p.m., Rhea stood in front of the camera. Not smiling. Not reading from the prompter.
“I want to speak to our viewers directly tonight,” she began. “An employee of ours has been accused of leaking sensitive information. While we do not deny her actions, we condemn the violation of her privacy, the manipulation of evidence, and the spectacle created by The Daily Eye at the cost of one young woman’s safety.”
She paused.
“But let us not forget why we are here. The Narmada files. The thousands still displaced. The questions still unanswered. That is the story we will not abandon. Because while others chase shadows, we chase facts.”
The segment ran raw, documentary-style. No anchors, no edits. Just the victims, their pain, and the truth.
When the broadcast ended, Rhea collapsed into her chair. She felt nothing. Not relief. Not triumph. Just fatigue.
Across the city, Kabir watched from his suite. He clapped slowly.
“She’s sharper than I thought.”
“She might survive this,” Mehul murmured.
“She will. For now. But she’s fighting a flood with a teacup. Let her paddle.”
In a dark corner of Delhi, Devika sat in a friend’s spare room, phone off, mind racing. Kabir had promised protection. Now she was a burned pawn. A disposable story.
But she wasn’t done yet.
Neither was the war.
Collateral Damage
The newsroom was quieter than usual the next morning. Not silent—just stunned. Like a battlefield after the smoke had cleared but before the wounded realized they were bleeding. Rhea walked in early, coffee in one hand, the weight of betrayal in the other. She had spent the night re-watching Devika’s reports, interviews, even her office security footage, looking for signs she’d missed. The girl had been good—too good. Every story she touched now looked like a potential leak, and every colleague she spoke to could have been compromised by association.
Vikram approached hesitantly. “The board’s asking for an internal review. They’re spooked.”
“Let them be.”
“They want to suspend everyone Devika worked closely with.”
Rhea stopped. “No. That’s not how this works. We don’t punish people for guilt by proximity. We investigate.”
“You think there’s another mole?”
“I don’t know. But Kabir let her burn too easily. If she was his only card, he’d have protected her longer.”
At The Daily Eye, Kabir was already two moves ahead. He was in a high-rise suite downtown, meeting with a senior cabinet minister whose name never appeared on official schedules. The conversation was laced with mutual benefit—Kabir offered distraction, scandal, public anger, and in return, the minister offered protection, access, and a little something for the war chest.
“We’re launching a campaign,” Kabir said. “Calling out media hypocrisy. Your voice would lend it credibility.”
The minister smirked. “And what do I get?”
“Tomorrow’s headline: ‘Minister Calls for Media Ethics Bill.’ Center stage. Outrage. Prime-time interviews. We shape the narrative.”
It was always about narrative.
Meanwhile, Rhea met Rajiv Saxena again—this time at an anonymous café near Connaught Place. He was nervous, his eyes flitting across the room like moths to a flame.
“You shouldn’t have aired that footage,” he muttered.
“It was the truth.”
“I’ve got two transfer orders and a legal notice waiting on my desk.”
“I’m not here to apologize, Rajiv. I’m here to ask—what else haven’t you told me?”
He hesitated, then slipped her a folded napkin. Inside, scribbled in tiny, shaky handwriting, were three names and a phrase: Operation Ashwamedh.
She frowned. “What is this?”
“Follow the trail. But be careful, Rhea. You’re not just up against Kabir anymore. This goes higher.”
Back at the Global Pulse office, the atmosphere shifted again. An anonymous email had landed in every inbox: “If Rhea’s truth is so pure, why didn’t she report that she and Kabir were lovers once?”
The newsroom erupted in gossip.
Rhea froze when she saw the subject line. She hadn’t expected it so soon—but she knew Kabir would eventually go there. Their brief, messy history during their Berlin fellowship was the kind of thing that could be twisted into motive, manipulation, scandal. He was banking on personal history muddying professional integrity.
Vikram was furious. “We should sue. This is character assassination.”
“Let it go,” Rhea said. “We have work to do.”
“Rhea—”
“Drop it.”
But the seed was already planted. Social media was ablaze. #PastPulse trended with memes, twisted timelines, and thinly veiled misogyny. Photos from old journalism conferences resurfaced. Kabir, of course, played innocent. On a morning talk show, he sighed dramatically and said, “It’s sad when past friendships are weaponized. But I respect Rhea’s courage.”
Rhea didn’t reply. She had a meeting with Forensics.
The thumb drive from the Narmada file had metadata. Buried deep, but not gone. An IP address—traced back to a government-issued laptop assigned to one of the three names Rajiv had written.
His name: Devvrat Malhotra. IAS. Cabinet Secretariat.
She felt a chill.
If he was involved, then the rehabilitation scam was not an isolated failure—it was part of a deliberate, sanctioned operation. Operation Ashwamedh.
Rhea turned to Vikram. “Drop everything else. This is the new target. Get background on all three names.”
That night, Global Pulse didn’t go after Kabir.
They went after the system.
The segment was clinical, precise, and brutal. They didn’t say the word “Ashwamedh.” But they outlined a pattern of decision-making over the past six years: displaced communities, delayed compensation, inflated contracts, ghost firms.
Rhea’s voice-over was measured, calm, lethal.
Across town, Kabir watched with narrowed eyes. “She’s not taking the bait. She’s rewriting the script.”
Mehul looked uneasy. “And pulling us into something bigger.”
Kabir didn’t blink. “Then we go bigger.”
He picked up his phone and dialed a number not saved in any contact list. “It’s time. Activate the documentary.”
“What name?”
“Kabir Mathur vs. Rhea Sen: The Price of Truth.”
The Price of Truth
The teaser dropped like a guillotine at 10:43 a.m.—across YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, and even SMS alerts. A slickly edited 55-second montage set to urgent strings and pulsing bass. Archival footage of protests. Split screens of headlines screaming corruption. Slow zooms into grainy footage of Rhea and Kabir, side by side in old conference panels, laughing, debating, sharing eye contact that now reeked of narrative manipulation.
At the end, a voiceover whispered:
“They were once allies. Now they’re enemies. But what if the truth isn’t what it seems?”
Title card:
Kabir Mathur vs. Rhea Sen: The Price of Truth
Streaming tomorrow, 8 p.m., The Daily Eye+ Originals.
Rhea watched the teaser in silence, standing beside Vikram, whose jaw clenched hard enough to creak.
“This isn’t journalism,” he growled. “It’s character assassination disguised as content.”
“No,” Rhea said quietly. “It’s strategy.”
The documentary was the latest weapon in Kabir’s arsenal. He was reframing the story—not around displaced families, not around truth—but around her. Making her the story. Her relationships, her past, her motivations. In the court of public opinion, facts were only as powerful as the emotions they carried. And Kabir had mastered that equation.
Back at The Daily Eye headquarters, Kabir sat with his creative team in a soundproof room, editing bay aglow with monitors.
“Cut the scene where she mentions ethics at that climate summit. Replace it with the footage of her at the post-award party.”
“You sure?” the editor asked. “That clip’s out of context.”
Kabir smiled. “Context is a luxury. We’re selling drama.”
Mehul added, “The trailer’s already trending. We’ll cross two million views before lunch.”
But not everyone in Kabir’s camp was smiling. In a cramped editorial office across the hallway, Saima, one of Kabir’s senior correspondents, stared at her screen with a knot in her stomach. She had spent the last year chasing stories that mattered—illegal mining in Rajasthan, missing funds in school schemes. But none of that was trending today. Today, the whole newsroom was feasting on the Rhea-Kabir drama.
She typed a text, then erased it. Then typed again.
To: Rhea Sen
Subject: Maybe you should know.
She hovered over Send. Then sighed. Deleted the draft.
Meanwhile, Rhea took her team to the war room—an unused conference room now lined with printouts, whiteboards, timelines. In the center: the names Rajiv had passed her.
Devvrat Malhotra.
Anita Verma.
Yashwant Singh.
Three high-ranking bureaucrats. All linked to infrastructure and rehabilitation. All with increasing wealth over the last five years.
Shalini had traced corporate ties. “Anita’s cousin owns a shell firm that got a 78-crore contract for river embankment work. No physical site, no employees, no tax records.”
Vikram added, “Yashwant’s wife registered a luxury real estate company last year. Three villas sold. Guess who signed the land clearance?”
“Malhotra?” Rhea guessed.
“Bingo.”
She stared at the pattern, heart racing. “They’re laundering the rehabilitation funds through family-owned firms. While the villagers rot in camps.”
“Do we go live tonight?”
“No,” she said. “We need visuals. Victims. Impact. I want a story so strong, even Kabir’s circus won’t be able to distract from it.”
They sent a field team to Madhya Pradesh immediately. Drones, interviews, old project files, satellite images. If they were going to take the story national, it had to be bulletproof.
But Kabir was already preparing the next strike.
Hours before the documentary dropped, he leaked an internal email from Global Pulse—a frustrated note Rhea had written months ago, after a segment had aired with an editing error. She had called the producer “reckless” and “unfit to handle national stories.”
Kabir’s team highlighted the words, stripped the context, and posted the headline:
“Toxic Culture at Global Pulse? Insiders Reveal Rhea’s Explosive Emails”
By 4 p.m., TV panels had picked it up. Debates raged: Is Rhea Sen cracking under pressure? Was her rise built on fear, not facts?
Rhea shut the door to her office and sat still for a long time. She wasn’t angry. She was tired.
She opened her email and saw a new message.
Subject: Re: Maybe You Should Know
From: saima.r@dailyeye.tv
No body text. Just one file attachment: kabir_voiceclip.mp3
She hesitated. Then played it.
Kabir’s voice, unmistakable. Cocky. Smooth.
“Get me whatever you can on the Saxena leak. I don’t care if it’s true—just make sure it implicates Rhea. This is about public theatre now. She needs to bleed.”
She closed her eyes.
There it was.
Not drama. Not rivalry. But admission.
Tonight, Kabir’s documentary would air.
Tomorrow, she would answer.
Not with tears.
With fire.
The Sound of Fire
At exactly 8:00 p.m., the digital premiere of Kabir Mathur vs. Rhea Sen: The Price of Truth began streaming across The Daily Eye+. Half the country tuned in. The other half shared it in real time—clip by clip, reel by reel. It had everything: grainy college photos, carefully sliced interview montages, dramatic reenactments with actors who looked just enough like Rhea to blur fact and fiction. The script was venom wrapped in velvet.
Kabir’s voice opened the film: “The truth is never objective. Especially when told by those who claim to own it.”
The first half painted Rhea as an ambitious, driven woman who had “cut corners” for big stories. An anonymous former intern suggested she forced him to source “quotes” from unreliable witnesses. A blurred-out man claimed she once asked him to pay a bureaucrat off the record. No dates. No names. Just insinuation.
The second half leaned hard on the personal. Footage of her and Kabir in Berlin, photos at press clubs, snippets of them debating on stage with banter that now seemed flirtatious in hindsight. The voiceover whispered: “Was this rivalry always personal? Or did betrayal birth ambition?”
It ended on Kabir’s own face—serious, soulful. “This isn’t an attack. This is an invitation. To rethink who tells your truth.”
The screen faded to black.
Then came the explosion.
#RheaExposed
#KabirSpeaksTruth
#JournalismOrVendetta
Rhea sat in her dark office, watching the entire piece without blinking. When it ended, she stood up, took a long sip of water, and walked to the newsroom. No hesitation.
“All teams in the war room. We respond. Tonight.”
Shalini followed her. “Are you sure? This is going to be ugly.”
“It already is.”
They went live at 9:30 p.m., not with Rhea at the anchor desk, but with a voiceover, over black.
“Truth, when twisted, becomes entertainment. Tonight, we offer you clarity.”
The broadcast began with the voice clip Saima had sent—Kabir ordering a staffer to implicate Rhea “even if it’s false.” They didn’t name Saima. They didn’t need to.
Then came the receipts.
Call logs between Kabir and his editorial team. Leaked emails showing fabricated talking points. Memos with doctored metadata, verified by an independent digital forensics firm.
And finally, the anchor calmly said: “What you watched tonight was not a documentary. It was a performance. Funded, edited, and released by a man more interested in ratings than responsibility.”
But that wasn’t all.
Rhea stepped in front of the camera for the final segment. No graphics. No edits. Just her, seated, direct.
“I have never denied my history with Kabir Mathur. We worked together. We debated, challenged, even inspired each other once. But I have never—never—used my past to manipulate public trust. What he released tonight wasn’t journalism. It was a character play. And it ends here.”
She leaned in slightly. “Now, let’s talk about Operation Ashwamedh.”
And with that, she dropped the real bomb.
Footage from the field team had arrived that evening—villagers holding ration cards dated 2017 with no actual supplies received. Interviews with local contractors forced to sign off on fake construction. Drone shots of barren land where “completed” embankments were supposed to be.
They played it all. Each segment linked to a bureaucrat. Each official name tied back to a fake company. Each company traced back to either a political donor or a relative of one of the three officials. And the thread connecting it all? A task force approval document, signed in a blurry scan by Devvrat Malhotra, with the words “Ashwamedh – Phase I” scribbled faintly on the top corner.
Kabir didn’t see it coming.
He was still basking in Twitter applause when the tide turned.
#Ashwamedh
#DailyEyeLied
#WeStandWithRhea
Saima sat at her desk, breathing slowly. She hadn’t expected Rhea to use the voice clip so swiftly—or so precisely. But she felt no regret.
Across the studio floor, Mehul stormed into Kabir’s office. “She dropped everything. Names, footage, documents. It’s real. Operation Ashwamedh is trending on national platforms.”
Kabir’s face darkened. “Call Legal. We deny, discredit, and delay.”
But for the first time, he didn’t sound confident. He sounded cornered.
Later that night, Rhea received a message.
Unknown number.
“Nice move. You’ve won this round. But wars don’t end in six.”
—K
She stared at it.
Then deleted it.
And sent out a newsroom memo:
“From tomorrow: full investigation team on Ashwamedh. No distractions. This is the story now.”
The war had shifted.
The price of truth was no longer her reputation.
Now it was survival.
The Ashwamedh Files
It started with a spreadsheet.
The morning after her broadcast, Rhea stood before a whiteboard in the war room while Vikram projected the decrypted file onto the glass wall. It was an unassuming Excel sheet—names, dates, allocations. But in those dull grey cells lay the bones of Operation Ashwamedh.
“Seventy-two villages marked for rehabilitation,” Vikram explained. “Fifty-eight of them never received actual relocation support. Twenty-six have no trace of any sanctioned projects. And look here—every third disbursement was routed through one of these three shell firms.”
Shalini took over. “All three firms are headquartered in different cities. Different names. But the bank accounts lead to the same trust—‘Aaranya Development Fund’—registered in Lucknow. Guess who’s a trustee?”
Rhea didn’t flinch. “Devvrat Malhotra.”
“Bingo.”
This was more than scandal. This was systemic rot, bureaucratic laundering disguised as policy. And with The Daily Eye distracted defending its own crumbling narrative, Global Pulse had a clear path forward—if they could stay ahead of sabotage.
Which Kabir was already preparing.
That afternoon, The Daily Eye ran a breaking segment: “Operation Ashwamedh—Conspiracy or Political Stunt?” It featured one retired civil servant, a digital “ethics consultant,” and a media analyst who once tweeted Rhea was a “feminist bulldozer.”
They questioned the authenticity of the footage. The timing. The “coincidence” of Rhea’s exposé airing right after Kabir’s documentary. They called for an “independent audit,” which conveniently would take weeks—long enough to blunt the impact.
But Rhea didn’t bite.
She released everything.
Within an hour, Global Pulse uploaded a dedicated microsite:
www.pulseinvestigates.in/ashwamedh
Public documents, redacted interviews, scanned RTI replies. No editorials. No voiceover. Just raw evidence.
The move was bold, unprecedented.
And risky.
She was daring the government to deny the documents.
And daring Kabir to follow her into the light.
But Kabir didn’t follow. He pivoted.
That evening, The Daily Eye aired an emotional interview with a young woman—face blurred, voice distorted—who claimed to have worked at Global Pulse five years ago. She spoke of a “toxic newsroom,” “pressure to exaggerate stories,” and a “culture of silence.”
The interviewer asked: “Did you ever feel unsafe?”
The woman nodded slowly.
Kabir wasn’t fighting the Ashwamedh story.
He was reattacking Rhea’s integrity.
But this time, it didn’t land the same way.
Because something else was now brewing.
A second whistleblower.
Rhea received the message at midnight.
From: unknown@protonmail.com
Subject: “Ashwamedh isn’t phase one. It’s phase three.”
Attached: a PDF file named “PhaseZero.pdf”
The document detailed early meetings in 2016—before any official rehabilitation was announced—between politicians, land contractors, and certain civil servants. It even referenced pre-decided locations for flood damage. As if the flood wasn’t just a disaster—it was an opportunity.
Manufactured.
Or at the very least, manipulated.
The report ended with a handwritten note:
“Follow the dry riverbeds. They’ll show you where the money flowed.”
Rhea stared at it, spine prickling.
If this was true, Operation Ashwamedh wasn’t just a scam.
It was a plan—designed years in advance, targeting natural disaster zones, diverting development funds, and erasing entire villages.
This wasn’t a scandal.
This was a crime.
And someone inside the government wanted her to keep going.
At The Daily Eye, Kabir sat silently in his glass office, the noise of the newsroom distant. Mehul dropped a folder on his desk.
“What’s this?”
“Internal memo from the Ministry of Home Affairs. A task force’s being set up to verify Ashwamedh.”
Kabir’s eyes narrowed. “Who’s heading it?”
“Someone loyal. But not loyal enough to stop a leak if the public pressure builds.”
Kabir didn’t speak for a long moment.
Finally, he said, “Then we drag the battlefield somewhere else.”
He picked up his phone and called a contact in Mumbai. “I want a full background check on everyone funding Global Pulse. Especially foreign grants. Let’s see how clean their hands are.”
Because if Rhea wanted to play with fire—he would scorch the ground beneath her.
And somewhere, in an empty corner of Madhya Pradesh, a woman stood ankle-deep in cracked earth, pointing to where her home once was, telling a Global Pulse cameraman:
“They said they’d save us. Then they vanished.”
Cracks in the Flood
By dawn, the photograph had gone viral.
A wiry, barefoot woman in a yellow sari stood in the middle of a dried-up riverbed, one hand on her hip, the other pointing at nothing—and yet, at everything. The headline read:
“This Was My Home. Then the Flood Came. Then the Government Came. Then They Took Everything.”
The image, shared by Global Pulse’s official account, shattered the algorithm. It was not tragedy porn. It was resistance in a glance, grief wrapped in fury. The caption read only:
#AshwamedhTruth
Within hours, over 300,000 shares. Protest calls. Hashtag campaigns. College students marched in JNU. Villagers across Bundelkhand blocked highways with signs reading “No More Silence.” A Delhi-based artist stenciled the woman’s silhouette on walls across Connaught Place with the words “I remember water.”
Inside Global Pulse, the newsroom buzzed not with panic this time—but purpose. For the first time in months, they weren’t playing defense. They were the storm.
Rhea leaned over Shalini’s desk, whispering, “We need to start mapping flood zones from 2016 to now. Overlay them with contract data. Let’s see if there’s a pattern.”
“There already is,” Shalini said, eyes never leaving her screen. “Every major flood zone was marked for ‘emergency rehabilitation funding’—most of it released within 48 hours, without on-ground verification.”
“And who signed off?”
“Guess.”
“Devvrat Malhotra.”
“Bingo. Again.”
Rhea’s phone buzzed.
It was a journalist from The Washington Ledger, requesting an interview. Then The Guardian. Then Der Spiegel. The world had started watching. But Rhea wasn’t done digging.
She turned to Vikram. “Send a crew back to Khadipura. The villagers mentioned a construction site that was abandoned midway—apparently the foundation collapsed within days. I want footage, drone shots, receipts, everything.”
Vikram grinned. “Finally giving us budget to travel again?”
“You’ll thank me when the awards roll in.”
Meanwhile, Kabir’s mood soured by the hour.
He paced inside The Daily Eye’s boardroom, surrounded by silence and half-drunk coffee cups. His legal team stood waiting for instructions, but there was none.
“She’s winning,” Mehul admitted.
“Temporarily,” Kabir replied, though the word tasted like rust.
“She’s moved the conversation away from the documentary. From you.”
“I noticed.”
“We could pivot. Admit minor editorial bias in the documentary, position ourselves as advocates for media reform—”
“No,” Kabir snapped. “We don’t retreat. We reframe.”
He pulled out a flash drive from his coat and slid it across the table.
“What’s this?” asked the compliance head.
“Foreign funding records. Global Pulse has received over ₹12 crore from international media foundations in the last five years. Mostly legit, but two of those grants are tied to a think tank flagged by the Home Ministry last year. We leak it. Quietly. Let the government bite.”
“Accuse her of being compromised?”
“Accuse her of being foreign-funded. In this climate, that’s worse.”
The team nodded. It was ugly. But effective.
That night, The Daily Eye aired a quiet exposé—not loud, not sensational. Just a soft-spoken anchor holding up documents, murmuring concern about “foreign influence in Indian media.”
It didn’t name Rhea.
But it didn’t have to.
The insinuation landed.
Rhea saw it first on Twitter.
Then the calls came. One from the Home Ministry’s media cell. Another from an old classmate who now worked with the Foreign Correspondents’ Club. Everyone was asking:
Are you under investigation?
Do you need legal help?
Will the government revoke your FCRA compliance?
Rhea didn’t panic.
She went to her office, locked the door, and wrote a 12-line statement.
By morning, it was published in every major paper.
“We are not anti-national. We are not foreign. We are not silent.”
“We report for those who don’t make it to dinner table debates.”
“If journalism is to survive, it must ask questions that make power uncomfortable.”
The response was volcanic.
Over 300 journalists from across India—editors, beat reporters, anchors, and freelancers—signed a joint letter in support of Global Pulse. They released it with one line bolded in red:
“You cannot silence the river.”
But behind the scenes, pressure mounted.
Rhea received a veiled warning from a government contact: “Back off from Ashwamedh or prepare for income tax visits. You know how these things work.”
She nodded politely.
Then went back to work.
Because somewhere in Khadipura, bulldozers had returned. Not to build—but to erase.
And her camera crew had caught them.
Bulldozers and Broadcasts
The footage came in raw, shaky, uncut—exactly how Rhea liked it. It opened with a child’s scream off-camera, then the unmistakable churn of bulldozer wheels grinding against cracked land. A man shouted, “That’s my roof! Don’t touch it!”—but no one listened. The camera panned to two government officials holding clipboards, barely glancing up as a one-room mud house crumbled into its own dust.
Khadipura, once promised development and rehabilitation, was now being erased in broad daylight.
And Global Pulse had the exclusive.
Rhea sat in the editing suite with Shalini, watching the loop play again and again. Her jaw tightened every time the boy’s voice cracked.
“We’re running it raw,” she said finally. “No anchor, no cuts. The image speaks louder than we ever could.”
Vikram entered, holding his phone like it was radioactive. “You’re going to want to see this.”
He pressed play. A new report from The Daily Eye. A different tone this time—serious, low-lit, ominous. The anchor, carefully solemn, read from a teleprompter:
“Unconfirmed reports suggest Global Pulse’s investigation into Operation Ashwamedh may be based on doctored files. Sources allege inconsistencies in timestamps, metadata manipulations, and strategic leaks from anti-national actors abroad.”
Cut to a digital “media expert”—anonymous, voice scrambled—claiming that the PDF Rhea had received was “too conveniently aligned with political cycles to be credible.”
Rhea didn’t even flinch.
“He’s running out of room,” she said.
“Yeah, well, he just dragged you into a storm with the Ministry of Information. They’ve launched a formal audit of our newsroom’s funding.”
“Let them.”
“And they’ve sent a notice to your personal tax file.”
That gave her pause.
For a moment, silence sat between them like smoke.
Then Rhea stood. “Fine. He wants to play that way? Let’s burn the map.”
She grabbed a folder from her desk and slammed it on the table. Inside were color-coded maps Shalini had prepared—satellite overlays of every flood-affected zone from 2016 onward, each matched with disbursed funds, contractor assignments, and ground reports.
“Every rupee spent. Every lie told. Every village erased. We’re going national tonight.”
“But we already ran the footage,” Shalini said.
“We run the whole operation now. One continuous exposé. Two hours. Cut the ads. Cut the talking heads. This is war journalism.”
They began building the timeline.
From Phase Zero to bulldozers in Khadipura, from cabinet memos to fake signatures, from ghost contractors to real graves.
At 8:00 p.m., Global Pulse aired the special.
It was called:
“Ashwamedh: The Flood That Never Left.”
No graphics. No theme music. Just testimony, silence, data, and dust.
A woman from Bihar held up a photo of her drowned child and said, “The water left. The pain didn’t.”
A former contractor admitted, face blurred, “We never built the walls. They paid us not to.”
By 9:45, hashtags like #FloodOfLies and #PulseOfThePeople dominated the digital space.
Kabir watched alone from his penthouse balcony, glass untouched.
The broadcast didn’t attack him.
It didn’t even mention him.
And that, somehow, was worse.
Because now, he wasn’t the villain.
He was irrelevant.
Mehul entered quietly. “Phones are ringing off the hook. Three advertisers just paused campaigns. Legal wants to talk about possible charges.”
Kabir didn’t move. “Do you remember why I started The Daily Eye?”
Mehul hesitated. “To challenge lazy journalism. To own the narrative.”
Kabir finally turned. “No. To matter. I wanted people to care. To listen. To need me. But Rhea… Rhea makes them feel.”
Across town, Rhea sat with her team, exhausted and hollow.
They had exposed Ashwamedh.
They had done what journalism was born to do.
And yet, she knew—this was only halftime.
Because in a country where outrage faded in 24 hours, truth needed momentum.
So when the newsroom lights dimmed, and the camera crews packed, Rhea didn’t leave.
She opened her inbox.
There, waiting, was another message.
From: unknown@protonmail.com
Subject: Phase Four
One line only.
“The next flood is already planned.”
The Next Flood
The message felt colder than the night air. The next flood is already planned. Rhea stared at the words, the cursor blinking below like a heartbeat. The attachment icon glowed ominously—one single PDF file, 11.4 MB, titled: Ashwamedh_P4_Classified.pdf
She didn’t open it right away.
Instead, she stepped out of her office into the now-empty newsroom. It was nearly 2:00 a.m., the kind of hour where thoughts echo louder than conversations. The wall-mounted clocks ticked on silently—London, Delhi, New York—places that seemed irrelevant in the face of what was coming.
When she returned to her desk, she downloaded the file onto an isolated, offline laptop. No risks. No trace.
Inside the document: a 29-page internal presentation, stamped confidential by the Ministry of Rural Development.
Title: Ashwamedh Phase IV: Accelerated Clearance Plan
Target regions: Assam, Uttarakhand, and parts of Eastern UP
Justification: “Annual monsoon risk. Potential population displacement zones. Suggested preemptive development tenders.”
Rhea read each word with growing horror.
The document didn’t speak of emergency response or disaster mitigation. It read like a blueprint for opportunity—suggesting that upcoming floods could be “leveraged for economic acceleration through strategic land repurposing.”
It even included charts of “Estimated Contract Value” per district, along with suggested partners—construction firms already tied to previous phases of Ashwamedh.
And then, one name chilled her to the marrow.
Mayaal Infrastructure Ltd.
A company that hadn’t appeared in any previous phase.
A company co-founded six months ago by… Kabir Mathur’s cousin.
She shut the laptop slowly.
This was bigger than a media war now. It wasn’t about headlines, or TRPs, or viral interviews.
It was about lives—thousands of them—who would soon lose homes, land, and identity under the excuse of nature, while someone cashed the checks before the rain even fell.
At 9:00 a.m., Rhea called an emergency editorial meeting.
No screens. No digital boards. Just a whiteboard, markers, and locked doors.
She drew three circles.
Truth
Power
Time
Then, she wrote across the top: Phase IV Leak.
“We’re not publishing this yet,” she said. “If we go public, they’ll call it fake. If we confront Kabir, he’ll vanish it. We need to go old-school. Field work. Discrete surveillance. Official denials on tape.”
Vikram frowned. “We’re supposed to sit on evidence that another fabricated flood is being planned?”
“No. We build the proof before they erase the signs. If this is happening, there will be whispers—engineers moved early, strange procurement orders, dry zones with sudden tenders.”
Shalini raised a hand. “We’ll need local stringers. Lots of them.”
“I’ve already called four from Guwahati and two from Pithoragarh. Discretion is key. No branded mics. No drones yet.”
Meanwhile, on the 33rd floor of The Daily Eye building, Kabir sat across from a man in a crisp government suit—not a politician, but a fixer. The kind who thrived in smoke, mirrors, and the space between press laws.
“They’ve gone quiet,” the man said. “That makes me nervous.”
“She’s too smart to blow the next phase without groundwork,” Kabir replied. “She’ll bide time. That gives us room to clean.”
“How dirty is it?”
Kabir smiled. “Let’s say… just below the flood line.”
The fixer placed a thick envelope on the table. “Then here’s your mop. Disappear Mayaal Infrastructure. Absorb it, rename it, reroute the trail. Also—shut down the funding leaks from inside.”
Kabir took the envelope and nodded. “And if she finds a new whistleblower?”
The fixer stood. “Then we remind her that truth is only powerful when someone survives long enough to tell it.”
Back at Global Pulse, Rhea’s team was already in motion.
The first intel arrived from Assam.
A civil contractor had received an unsigned letter last week asking if his firm was “ready for upcoming monsoon clearances.” No government letterhead. Just a reference number and a contact email ending in “@futuregov.in”
In Uttarakhand, a bridge reinforcement project had been fast-tracked near a village that hadn’t seen a flood in ten years.
And in Eastern UP, village officials were told to “preemptively clear occupants from low-lying farmland for their own safety.”
Pattern. After pattern. After pattern.
That night, Rhea sat in her car outside an old press club, watching the rain streak across her windshield. Her phone buzzed once.
It was Saima.
SMS: “You were right. Kabir knew about Phase IV. But he’s not running it anymore. Someone else is. And they don’t care about headlines.”
She stared at the message, pulse quickening.
This war had changed again.
It was no longer Kabir vs. Rhea.
It was Rhea vs. the storm behind him.
And this time, the flood wasn’t water.
It was silence.
Silence is a Weapon
The newsroom felt like it was holding its breath. Reports from Assam, Uttarakhand, and Eastern UP kept trickling in—small things, seemingly unconnected. Sudden contract approvals. Local officials disappearing for “training sessions.” School buildings quietly converted into temporary “relief centers” before a drop of rain had even fallen.
At 6:27 a.m., the first major confirmation arrived.
A stringer from Tezpur sent a photograph: over two dozen yellow-tarped trucks lined up at a government depot. The manifest, captured in a blur, listed them as “post-disaster rehabilitation vehicles.” But the date on the form was stamped two weeks before the region’s flood warning advisory.
There was no flood yet.
But the machinery for its aftermath was already in motion.
Rhea stood by the window of her office, staring into the smoggy Delhi skyline, sipping her fourth cup of black coffee. The city looked unchanged—horns, sirens, the low hum of anxious ambition. But underneath, the ground had shifted.
She turned to Vikram. “Has Kabir said anything publicly?”
“Nothing. No rebuttals. No counterattack. Not even a tweet.”
“Strange.”
“Or calculated. He’s not leading anymore. Someone higher has taken the reins.”
Rhea nodded. “We need names. Someone is orchestrating Phase IV from above—and Kabir’s just the decoy now.”
A low knock interrupted them.
It was Shalini, holding a plain brown envelope.
“This just arrived. No courier name. Just dropped at reception.”
Inside, a single page.
A list of five names.
All were IAS officers. All currently held mid-tier but influential posts in state disaster management cells. A sticky note was attached:
“Start here. Before they vanish too.”
Rhea didn’t recognize the handwriting. No signature. No sender. No return contact.
“Find out where they are. Now,” she said.
Within an hour, they discovered something chilling.
Of the five names:
One had applied for indefinite leave just yesterday.
One had been transferred quietly to a research post in the Ministry of Fisheries.
Two had gone “on field assignment” with no traceable location.
The last one—Shyam Sinha—was listed as “suspended for personal misconduct” three days ago.
Rhea scanned Sinha’s old interviews and policy papers. Unlike the others, he had written a column years ago questioning rapid urban expansion after floods. He had been quiet since.
“We need to find him,” she said.
While the search began, Kabir was spiraling.
He sat alone in his apartment, curtains drawn, multiple laptops open around him. The Daily Eye was functioning, but without fire. His name had become a liability—investors had stepped back, advertisers had fled to neutral channels, and his fixer friend had gone silent.
The worst part?
He felt something he hadn’t felt in a decade.
Irrelevance.
When Mehul called to check in, Kabir didn’t answer.
Instead, he drafted a message to Rhea.
“We both know this isn’t about us anymore. Call me if you want to know who’s really pulling the strings.”
He didn’t hit send.
Not yet.
Rhea, meanwhile, was watching the first official denial roll in. A brief press release from the Ministry of Rural Development claimed:
“The Ashwamedh Phase IV presentation circulating online is a fabricated document. No such initiative exists in any planning capacity.”
But Rhea hadn’t published the Phase IV document.
Yet.
She smiled coldly.
“They’re gaslighting a fire that hasn’t even started.”
Then, her phone rang.
A number from Himachal.
She answered.
A low, trembling voice spoke.
“Is this Rhea Sen?”
“Yes.”
“This is Shyam Sinha. I don’t have much time. They’ve already warned me. But I saw the depots. The dry rations. The water pumps. The contract logs. They’re preparing for something… that doesn’t exist.”
“Where are you?”
“I can’t say. But listen. It’s not about floods anymore. It’s about clearance. About land. The new directive says: ‘Return-to-zone settlements must not obstruct strategic corridors.’ You know what that means?”
Rhea froze.
Yes.
Strategic corridors.
Infrastructure belts. Border trade routes. High-speed rail projects.
This wasn’t just about siphoning funds anymore.
It was about geography as a weapon.
Create disaster. Remove the poor. Repurpose the land. Sell the dream.
“Shyam,” she whispered. “Can you send me the directive?”
There was a pause. Then static. Then silence.
The call ended.
She dialed back. No response.
Gone.
That night, Rhea aired a single 8-minute special.
No guests. No intro.
Just the image of a blank directive, over soft static.
Caption:
“The next flood won’t come from the sky.”
The newsroom erupted afterward.
Emails. Calls. Death threats. Leaked memos. Anonymous encouragement. Investigative teams from three foreign networks reached out. Students planned protests.
But through it all, Rhea remained quiet.
Until her phone buzzed again.
This time, it was from Kabir.
And it read:
“I’ll talk. But only off the record. And only in person.”
Off the Record
Rhea didn’t respond immediately.
She stared at Kabir’s message—“I’ll talk. But only off the record. And only in person.”—and let it sit, like a glass of wine she didn’t yet trust to drink.
The Kabir Mathur she had known—sharp, theatrical, hungry—would never surrender the narrative willingly. If he was offering answers now, it meant one of two things: either he was cornered, or the storm behind him was bigger than even he had anticipated.
She texted him back:
“Midnight. Connaught Place. The old observatory steps.”
The place had once meant something—a stone ruin where they’d once debated objectivity, drunk cheap rum, and watched Delhi flicker beneath a full moon. The irony wasn’t lost on her.
At 11:58 p.m., she arrived. The city was unusually quiet, the yellow streetlights casting ghostly halos across the broken stones of Jantar Mantar. She spotted Kabir before he saw her—slouched, thinner than she remembered, a half-burnt cigarette twitching between his fingers.
He looked up, offering a weak smile.
“I thought you wouldn’t come.”
“I thought you’d be in hiding.”
“I am,” he said, exhaling smoke. “Just not from you.”
Rhea stood still, arms folded. “Say what you came to say.”
Kabir stubbed out the cigarette and reached into his coat, pulling out a thin folder—one of those old press folders they used in pre-digital newsrooms. Inside: three pages. Photocopies. Annotated.
Rhea took them wordlessly.
“What is this?”
“Minutes from a closed-door strategy meet. Not cabinet level—off-books. Held in Pune, September last year. Six people in the room. One from the Ministry of Internal Security. Two from Commerce. One real estate consortium head. One state-level planner. And me.”
“You were in the room?”
“I was invited. As media. They called it Strategic Narrative Structuring.”
She scanned the first page.
It was blunt.
Objective: Transform unproductive zones into economically viable corridors. Method: Accelerated displacement post-natural crisis. Justification: National interest and economic upliftment. Media role: Controlled amplification. Avoidance of moral panic.
“They showed flood projections like stock forecasts,” Kabir said. “Picked villages like properties. Discussed rainfall as an asset class.”
Rhea’s grip on the paper tightened. “And you said nothing?”
“I did worse,” he muttered. “I agreed. I helped build the media cover.”
For once, Kabir didn’t posture. No irony. No flair.
“Why now?”
He looked away. “Because they’ve stopped needing me. And because you were always better at being dangerous.”
Silence stretched between them.
Then he said, “They’re planning Phase Five.”
Rhea’s breath caught.
“Where?”
“Bundelkhand. Part of Odisha. Two districts near the Chhattisgarh border. A new highway is coming. They need the land.”
She stared at him. “And what do you want in return?”
“Nothing,” Kabir said. “This is my confession. Not a trade.”
He stood. “They’ll come for you next, Rhea. Not your stories. Not your show. You. The woman. The name. The liability.”
“I know.”
As he walked away, she called out, “Why me? Why tell me?”
He paused, then turned slightly. “Because I once believed you. And that’s still harder to forgive than loving you.”
He vanished into the darkness.
Rhea sat on the cold stone step, folder in hand, heart pounding. The minutes were real. She recognized one of the signatories—a former policy advisor now heading a startup backed by foreign VC money and a Union minister’s son.
Back at Global Pulse, she woke the newsroom.
Literally.
Shalini arrived in pajamas. Vikram brought a toothbrush.
They circled the whiteboard again.
Rhea placed the three pages at the center.
“Everything leads here,” she said. “Ashwamedh wasn’t an operation. It was a pilot. The real plan is just beginning.”
“We’ll need proof,” Shalini said. “Actual footage. Names. Voices.”
“We get them,” Rhea replied.
She sent a team to Bundelkhand that morning. Another to Odisha. She called an old friend at a telecom watchdog and asked for tower pings near the September Pune meeting.
By noon, her team had compiled a list of all attendees who had flown into Pune within 24 hours of the meeting. Five of six matched. The sixth? A corporate fixer under investigation for a separate land acquisition scam.
It was all coming together.
The rot.
The river.
The reasons.
At 3:45 p.m., she received a legal notice.
Subject: Show Cause—Threat to National Unity via Irresponsible Reporting
Signed by the Ministry of Information.
At 4:00 p.m., she held a press conference.
Calm. Calculated.
She read directly from the minutes Kabir had given her.
Then she said, “If exposing corruption is a threat to national unity, then perhaps the nation needs a new definition.”
The cameras rolled.
The feed didn’t blink.
And somewhere deep inside a secure room in the Prime Minister’s Secretariat, an aide muttered, “She’s gone too far this time.”
His superior replied, “Then we go further.”
The Last Broadcast
They came at 5:12 a.m.
Unmarked cars, plainclothes officers, a warrant printed on thick off-white paper that still smelled like the ministry printer. The charge: National Security Violation through the unauthorized possession of classified government material.
Rhea wasn’t surprised.
She had already packed a small go-bag—hard drive, clean clothes, press ID, two burner phones, and the memory stick with Kabir’s minutes from the Pune meeting.
As they banged on her apartment door, she sent a single text to Vikram:
“Broadcast the file. 6 a.m. sharp. No intro. No voice. Just truth.”
Then she opened the door.
The lead officer didn’t meet her eyes. “Ma’am, you’re under investigation for the illegal dissemination of sensitive documents. Please come with us.”
She didn’t resist. She didn’t argue.
She just whispered, “Let’s go.”
Back at Global Pulse, the newsroom looked like a battlefield of blinking screens and sleepless faces. Vikram sat in the anchor chair, pale but steady.
At 6:00 a.m., they aired The Last Broadcast.
The screen was black for ten seconds.
Then the documents appeared—one by one.
Phase IV’s classified directive
The minutes from the Pune strategy meet
Satellite overlays of planned infrastructure corridors
Voice recordings from displaced villagers
Testimonies of local officials coerced into silence
Bank records
Drone footage
And finally: a timestamped image of bulldozers parked in dry fields, waiting for rain that hadn’t come.
No narration.
No drama.
Just a subtitle:
“This is not a leak. This is what remains when silence fails.”
Social media detonated.
#FreeRhea
#AshwamedhFiles
#WeArePulse
#JournalismIsNotASin
By 7:13 a.m., over a million viewers had tuned in.
By 8:47, the Editors Guild of India issued a statement demanding her immediate release.
By 9:30, Amnesty International and Reporters Without Borders had tagged the Indian Government in open letters.
But inside the interrogation room, none of that mattered.
Rhea sat across from three officers—one Ministry liaison, one CBI man, and one silent bureaucrat whose expression suggested he was merely here to observe history unfold.
They questioned her for two hours.
“Who gave you the files?”
“Did you know these documents were classified?”
“Are you working with foreign media?”
“Have you received funding from overseas intelligence?”
She didn’t flinch.
“I am a journalist. Not a spy. Not a saint. And definitely not a pawn.”
They didn’t like that answer.
But they had no arrest warrant—only a detain-and-question order. After a call came from above (no one said who), they let her go.
“You’ll be watched,” the silent bureaucrat said as she stood to leave.
“You already were,” Rhea replied.
Outside, hundreds had gathered.
Students. Retired journalists. NGO workers. Curious passersby.
Some held signs:
“Truth Doesn’t Need Permission.”
“Stop Flooding the Lies.”
“We Are All Rhea Sen.”
She didn’t wave. Didn’t smile.
She just walked through them, straight to a waiting bike that Shalini had brought.
No interviews.
No drama.
Just momentum.
Back at the Global Pulse newsroom, Vikram hugged her silently.
They had won something—but it wasn’t a war. It was the right to keep fighting.
In the corner, a young intern asked, “So what now?”
Rhea looked at the wall.
The whiteboard still held the old marker stains:
Truth
Power
Time
She picked up the pen and wrote one final word beneath them:
Rain.
Because it would come.
And when it did, they would be ready.
To tell the story.
Again.
And again.
Until the water couldn’t wash it away.
After the Rain
The monsoon came early.
Not with a thunderclap, but with a slow, unrelenting whisper. The skies over Bundelkhand darkened, and for five days the rain fell like an old truth finally remembered. It crept into tin roofs, ran down muddy lanes, flooded fields that had been dry for years. But this time, when the water reached the villages, people didn’t just run.
They recorded.
They uploaded videos. Tagged media handles. Called stringers. Pointed their phones at government trucks and bulldozers hiding under tarps. Even as the electricity snapped and signal bars vanished, a network of witness had already formed—louder, bolder, irreversibly awake.
Back in Delhi, Rhea stood in the newly renovated studio of Global Pulse. The newsroom had changed—new lights, upgraded servers, security protocols tighter than most military bases—but the heartbeat was the same.
Truth. Urgent. Defiant. Alive.
A week had passed since The Last Broadcast, and the tremors were still shaking the corridors of power.
Four mid-level officers had been suspended. A parliamentary committee was formed. Opposition parties demanded a white paper on Ashwamedh. The Home Minister called the entire saga “an unfortunate media distortion,” but few believed him.
And Kabir Mathur?
He had vanished.
No interviews. No new shows. The Daily Eye feed ran on autopilot—weather, markets, reruns of lifestyle debates. The man who once set the national conversation had gone mute. Some said he left the country. Others claimed he was still in Delhi, negotiating immunity in exchange for silence.
Rhea hadn’t tried to find out.
She had work to do.
That morning, she stood in front of the cameras again, for the first time since her release. The teleprompter was off. The newsroom quiet.
She spoke directly to the audience.
“Seven years ago, a project began under a name that sounded noble—Ashwamedh. But behind that name, there were no horses, no rituals, no honor. Just homes broken for highways. Floods turned into fortune. And silence made sacred by fear.”
She paused.
“We did not break this story. The people who lived it did. We were only the mic. The lens. The echo.”
Then she smiled, just faintly.
“And we’re not done.”
They cut to footage from Odisha—fields still intact, villagers now organizing councils to resist “preemptive clearance orders.” A new movement had begun. #MyLandMyVoice trended within hours.
That evening, Rhea visited Jantar Mantar again.
Same steps. Same stones.
But this time, she wasn’t alone.
Shalini sat beside her. Vikram joined them later. A few reporters from other media houses stood nearby, quietly nodding.
And in the shadows, unseen by all, Kabir watched.
He didn’t approach.
Just stood there, hands in his pockets, half a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth.
Then he turned and walked away.
No headlines.
No goodbyes.
Just the hush of rain falling gently over an old city and a newsroom that had chosen not to drown.
END
