Ayesha Malhotra Part 1 – Silence After the Flare The desert had always been quiet, but after the flare, silence was something else entirely. It pressed against the windows, settled on the roof tiles, thickened the air between words. Before, there had been the hum of ceiling fans, the tinny burst of radio jingles from the next-door grocer’s shop, the shriek of kids playing cricket on the dust-patched street. But the morning after the sky burned orange and green, none of that returned. The fans sat useless. The grocer closed his shutters. The cricket bat lay abandoned in the sand.…
-
Sayan Chanda Chapter 1: The Breach The rain had been falling over Delhi like a shroud, soft but relentless, turning the city into a hazy reflection of itself. Inside the Cyber Crime Monitoring Cell, the fluorescent lights hummed over rows of analysts, their eyes glazed and fixated on flickering data streams. At exactly 2:17 a.m., an alert blinked red on the mainframe—an unauthorized data access breach from a Level-4 secure server housed within the Research and Analysis Wing. The room froze. The breach wasn’t a foreign threat; it had originated from a local IP in Noida, cloaked under multiple VPN…
-
Meher Aftab Part 1: The Flag That Doesn’t Wave The sun hung over the capital city of Ruvana like a bloated wound, casting a hazy orange over the skyline of glass ministries and concrete ghosts. Somewhere between the Parliament dome and the military cantonment, truth had gone missing. And Naveen Rahatkar, senior political correspondent for The Varshana Ledger, was beginning to smell its corpse. He sat in the pressroom of the Central Secretariat, watching the white-and-saffron flag of the Republic of Varshana flutter on the giant LED screen. Outside, the real flag was limp, unmoving despite the breeze. Symbolic, he…
-
Neel Kashyap Part 1: The Minister Who Knew Too Much The monsoon had arrived early in New Delhi, but the rain did little to cool the simmering corridors of power. The South Block offices glistened under streetlights, guarded by protocol and paranoia. At 2:03 a.m., a white government Scorpio pulled into the back entrance of the Ministry of Parliamentary Affairs. Inside, Minister Prabir Kundu sat motionless, his lips taut and fingers trembling over a brown leather file embossed with the Ashoka emblem. He shouldn’t have had this file. But he did. Earlier that evening, Kundu had received an anonymous courier…