Rohan Mehta
Part 1
The rains had returned to Mumbai like an old enemy. Not with the promise of relief, but the murky stench of trouble. It was just past midnight when Inspector Alisha Ranade pulled up in her rain-splashed black Bolero outside the abandoned Crawford Mills compound. Her phone buzzed again—a message from headquarters: “Body found. Possibly political.”
She hated those two words. In her experience, “possibly political” meant either someone too powerful was involved or someone too disposable had been silenced. The scene was taped off by a lone constable who looked more scared than soaked. “Inside,” he whispered, pointing to the boiler room. No streetlights worked here. Only the pulse of red-and-blue police beacons flickered across the wet stone walls.
Alisha stepped inside, flashlight slicing through the damp air. The body lay slumped against rusted piping—male, mid-thirties, clean-shaven, a steel chain around his neck with a key and a pendant shaped like an eagle. His mouth had been stuffed with what looked like crumpled newspaper.
She pulled the paper out carefully. It was an old edition of Mumbai Chronicle. One word had been circled in red ink: Sparrow.
Behind her, Junior Inspector Ved Joshi entered, panting, drenched. “Ma’am… CID wants us to wait for them. They said it might be linked to—”
“Let them come,” Alisha said, still staring at the body. “But we won’t wait. This man didn’t die by accident. This was a message.”
Outside, thunder cracked across the Colaba skyline, lightning revealing the ruins of old textile glory. Once a hub of mill workers, Crawford had become an urban ghost town—perfect for someone who wanted to kill in silence.
Back in her car, Alisha pulled out her notebook. She had seen this pendant before—years ago, during the Operation Fireline case, which had gone cold after a whistleblower from the BMC vanished. That whistleblower had also mentioned a codename: Sparrow. Coincidence was a luxury she couldn’t afford.
The next morning, the news channels ran vague updates about an “unidentified man” found murdered. But Alisha knew better. Something about the way his hands had been positioned—palms open, wrists slashed but clean—suggested ritual. She had seen it once before, at a flat in Juhu, where a journalist had been found dead with classified documents in a hidden compartment. That case had also disappeared off the records.
She drove to the morgue at JJ Hospital, where Dr. Tara Menon, the city’s best forensic pathologist, was waiting. “You’re early,” Tara said, pulling off her gloves. “And impatient as ever.”
“What did you find?”
Tara lifted the sheet. “No signs of struggle. Tox screen clean. But the cuts on his wrists were too precise. Not suicide. Surgical, almost. And here’s the strange part—the man’s tongue was coated in charcoal dust. As if he’d been forced to chew burnt paper.”
Alisha flinched. “Message. Again.”
Tara nodded grimly. “I think someone’s purging records… the old-fashioned way.”
As Alisha left the hospital, she received a message on her personal phone—no caller ID, just a location ping. It led her to a nondescript tea stall near Oval Maidan. There, an old man in a Gandhi cap handed her a folded chit.
“They are watching from inside. Do not trust the Bureau.”
She scanned the crowd. Nobody unusual. Yet, the hairs on her neck stood on end. The city’s rhythm suddenly felt… offbeat.
At the station, she locked herself in her cabin and reviewed the cold case files linked to Operation Fireline. BMC corruption, illegal real estate deals, a missing file clerk named Neel Kamath. Last seen in 2017. Vanished after reporting fake sanitation bills worth crores routed through shell companies in the name of a defunct bird-watching NGO—Sparrow Foundation.
She searched the foundation online—nothing but a dead website and a registered office in Parel that now sold spare parts. But she found one article written by a freelance journalist named Armaan Deshmukh in 2019, titled “The House that Birds Built: A Shadow Trust in Mumbai’s Underbelly.” The piece had been taken down, but the archive still cached it.
Alisha picked up her phone. “Track Armaan Deshmukh,” she told Joshi. “Find out if he’s alive.”
That night, as the rain battered the city into silence, Alisha sat by her window, replaying the footage from the Crawford Mills CCTV that the tech team had salvaged. Most of it was blank, save one clip at 23:49—a hooded figure entering with the victim and leaving alone 12 minutes later. The figure moved with calculated grace, like someone used to silence. The camera flickered once just as they passed, distorting their face. But a reflection caught in a puddle showed something unmistakable.
A tattoo on the wrist.
A sparrow in flight.
Part 2
The image of the sparrow tattoo haunted Alisha as she walked into the dimly lit office of Mumbai Chronicle. She hadn’t visited the press since her own brother, a crime reporter, was killed in an unsolved hit-and-run five years ago. But Armaan Deshmukh had once been his friend, and if he was the last journalist to publicly mention “Sparrow,” then she had no choice.
The receptionist looked up lazily from her phone. “Armaan? He left months ago. Travels a lot. Some say he went underground after a piece he did on the Thane drug cartel.”
“Do you have a contact?”
She shrugged. “Ask Vibhor on the fifth floor. He was close to Armaan.”
Vibhor’s office was overflowing with paperbacks, cigarette ash, and clippings from a messier era of journalism. He was wiry, nervous, and didn’t meet her eyes.
“I’m not getting involved,” he said before she could even introduce herself.
“Too late,” Alisha replied, tossing a copy of the dead man’s photo onto his desk. “He was found with a pendant and the name ‘Sparrow’ in his mouth.”
Vibhor stared, then slowly exhaled. “I told Armaan not to dig so deep. He found something in 2019—links between shell NGOs, politicians, and a private security firm called Kestrel Ventures. It was supposed to be a wildlife trust. They did everything but protect wildlife. Money laundering, property grabs, even hush jobs.”
“Kestrel?” Alisha blinked. “A predatory bird.”
“Exactly. Armaan got too close. Then one day, he vanished. Word is he’s living in Sewri under a fake name. I don’t know more.”
He handed her a photograph—grainy, zoomed, but unmistakably Armaan—leaning against a ferry docked at Mazgaon. Beside him was a woman with silver hair and thick spectacles.
“Who’s she?”
“Professor Aruna D’Souza. Ornithologist. Used to run the original Sparrow Foundation before it was hijacked. She went off the grid. Armaan said she knew what Sparrow really was.”
Alisha tucked the photo into her coat and left.
Later that night, under a grimy bridge in Sewri, Alisha waited in her car with Joshi beside her, nervously checking his pistol. The area was a maze of rusting trawlers, crumbling godowns, and sleeping dogs. She had tracked a man matching Armaan’s profile to a shack above a bait shop.
“He won’t come out if he thinks we’re cops,” Joshi muttered.
“I’m counting on that.” She stepped out alone and knocked once, twice. No answer.
Then the door opened an inch. “Go away,” a raspy voice warned.
“Armaan, I’m not here to arrest you. Someone’s killing people linked to the Sparrow Foundation. One was found with a newspaper article you wrote. Another might be next.”
The door creaked open further, revealing a gaunt man with sunken eyes and a patchy beard. He looked older than his thirty-eight years, worn thin by paranoia.
“You shouldn’t have come here,” he whispered. “They watch everything. Phones. Cameras. Hell, even goddamn drones.”
“Then talk fast.”
Armaan let her in, locked the door with three bolts, and motioned to a cluttered table. Maps of Mumbai were pinned to the walls—red circles around construction zones, abandoned hospitals, and slums marked for “redevelopment.”
“You think the city’s growing?” he asked. “It’s not. It’s being devoured.”
He pointed to a building marked in red: Darukhana Dockyards.
“Kestrel Ventures bought that land illegally. The original owner vanished. People who lived there were evicted overnight, and the press ran a story about a chemical leak. Lies. I was there. There were no chemicals—only trucks with no plates, coming in at 3 a.m.”
“What were they moving?”
“I don’t know. But one night, I saw them unload crates marked with old military codes. And men in black uniforms—not cops, not army—just… ghosts.”
Armaan reached into a drawer and pulled out a USB stick. “Everything I’ve found. Names, transfers, voice clips from old calls. Take it. But once you do, they’ll come for you.”
Before Alisha could respond, her phone buzzed.
It was Joshi. His voice was tight, hurried.
“Ma’am… CID just raided our office. Took all your case files. They said you were being reassigned. Internal complaint.”
“From whom?”
“Anonymous. Something about obstructing central intelligence.”
Alisha froze. It had begun.
Armaan turned pale. “They’re cutting your wings.”
Outside, the wind picked up. A black drone hovered high above the shack, its silent lens locked on them.
“We have to go,” Alisha said.
But it was too late.
The shack’s wall exploded inward.
A figure in a black coat stormed in, face covered, wielding a modified baton. Armaan tried to flee through the back, but was struck down. Alisha raised her gun—but the figure vanished through the smoke before she could fire.
Blood on the floor.
Armaan gasped, pointing to the USB still in her pocket.
His final words barely escaped his lips: “Professor D’Souza… they’ll kill her next…”
Part 3
Alisha ran through the fog and rubble with the USB pressed tight in her fist. Joshi met her by the bridge, eyes wide at the smoke curling behind her. She didn’t speak. They jumped into the Bolero and sped toward Byculla, weaving through late-night traffic and monsoon puddles like fleeing fugitives.
She didn’t trust CID anymore. Someone high up was pulling strings. Armaan’s death would likely be ruled as “accidental explosion,” and the file would sink to the bottom of an archive no one would touch. But the message was clear—they wanted the professor silenced next.
“Find me a safehouse,” Alisha told Joshi, tossing her phone out the window. “Not police property. No digital trail. We go old-school.”
They stopped at a Parsi guesthouse on Falkland Road, run by an elderly couple who owed Alisha a favour from a long-forgotten smuggling case. No questions asked. The room had wooden shutters, a rotary fan, and walls that smelled of rain and dust.
Joshi secured the door while Alisha powered up an ancient laptop she had stashed in her car’s glove box. The USB clicked in. Folders blinked open—labeled cryptically in shorthand: KSTR Contracts, Fireline Audio, RED CODE, D’Souza Tapes.
She played one file.
A woman’s voice crackled: “They used the bird sanctuary as a front. The funds were funneled through fake tenders. When I protested, they planted cameras in my lab, doctored footage. My reputation died before I could speak. But it’s not just about money anymore. It’s about something buried under Dock 13. Something they unearthed.”
Another voice: male, panicked. “What is it?”
Long pause. Then: “Not what. Who.”
The file ended. Alisha and Joshi stared at each other in the silence that followed.
The next morning, dressed in civilian clothes, Alisha and Joshi made their way to Versova where Professor Aruna D’Souza had reportedly moved after leaving academia. The building was old, washed in salty wind, with a sea view that somehow looked like exile.
She knocked.
No answer.
Then the sound of a cane tapping the floor. The door opened an inch.
“Yes?”
“Professor D’Souza. I’m Inspector Alisha Ranade. We need to talk. It’s about Armaan Deshmukh.”
The door opened fully. Aruna was older than her photographs—white hair coiled into a bun, a long cotton shawl wrapped around her like armor.
She let them in.
Books stacked like fortresses lined every wall. A telescope pointed toward the sea, untouched in years. A framed award for conservation lay face-down on a table.
“I told Armaan this would happen,” she said. “I told him not to dig where the bones are still bleeding.”
“Bones?” Alisha leaned forward.
“You think Kestrel was built for profit?” Aruna chuckled. “It was built for secrecy. During the Emergency, a network of tunnels was created under Mumbai’s docks—escape routes for VIPs, storage for sensitive cargo. After ‘77, they vanished from maps. But someone remembered.”
“And now?”
“They’re reopening the tunnels. Not for escape. For control.”
She handed over a map—hand-drawn, yellowed, with strange Xs marked across the city. “Dock 13 is the center. Armaan found schematics for a chamber beneath it—sealed for decades. Rumor says it houses documents, photos, tapes. Proof of crimes that could bring down ministers.”
“Who controls it now?”
Aruna stared out the window. “Not who. What.”
Before Alisha could press further, Joshi’s burner phone rang. He answered, turned pale.
“They’ve issued a warrant for your arrest,” he whispered. “Charges: destruction of evidence, conspiracy, unauthorized surveillance. CID’s moving.”
Alisha stood. “Professor, pack a bag. You’re coming with us.”
“I’m too old to run,” Aruna said softly.
But Alisha had already made up her mind. “Then we’ll carry you if we have to.”
They exited through the back alley, but not before Alisha left a small surprise in the apartment—an audio feedback loop that mimicked conversation. A trick she’d learned from Armaan.
They drove east toward Chembur, where Joshi’s cousin ran a second-hand warehouse. It would be their new safehouse.
On the way, Aruna opened up.
“They call it the Aviary.”
“The what?”
“It’s what Kestrel calls their inner circle. Every operative has a codename—birds of prey. The man who killed Armaan? That was Falcon. There’s a Vulture, a Hawk, and… one called Raven. No one’s seen Raven. Some say he doesn’t exist. Others say he runs everything.”
“And Sparrow?”
“That was me. Before they turned the foundation. I used it as my sign-off on leaked reports. They used it against me.”
That night, in the Chembur safehouse, Alisha pulled out the USB again. Another folder, marked simply: BLACKBOX. Inside, a video.
Footage of a man—blindfolded, chained—being interrogated in a dark room. His voice was garbled, but the timestamp said 2015. The background showed the seal of the Ministry of Internal Affairs.
“Tell us where the master tape is,” a voice demanded.
The prisoner coughed blood.
Then he whispered, “Raven knows. Only he knows. But he won’t speak… unless you threaten the Sparrow.”
The screen froze.
Aruna turned away. Joshi looked like he’d seen a ghost.
“We need to get to Dock 13,” Alisha said.
“Tomorrow night,” Joshi replied. “Monsoon tide will be high. Perfect for sneaking in.”
Alisha nodded.
Because now she understood.
They weren’t hunting shadows.
They were being hunted by them.
Part 4
The air at Dock 13 smelled of salt, grease, and secrets. That night, the tide had risen enough to conceal the rusted stairwell descending beneath the pier. Alisha crouched behind a pile of stacked containers with Joshi and Professor D’Souza flanking her. Overhead, the dockyard buzzed with activity—men in reflective jackets loading unmarked crates into a private cargo ship named Nightingale. No logos. No documentation. No questions.
“Security’s lighter than expected,” Joshi whispered.
“That’s not good,” Aruna said. “That means they don’t expect anyone to come out alive.”
At 03:07, a floodlight on the southern watchtower shorted out—just as planned. Alisha and Joshi moved fast, crossing the slippery platform and unlocking the steel hatch Aruna had marked on the map. It creaked open with a sigh, revealing a stairwell plunging into darkness. The only sound was the soft hum of water lapping against stone.
Inside, the air was cooler—dry, dead. The stairwell curved sharply, built with British-era stones that bore graffiti in faded Marathi. At the bottom, the tunnel split. Left led toward the abandoned cold storage units; right, into the forgotten labyrinths beneath Mumbai.
Aruna pointed. “That way. Toward the chamber.”
As they walked, flashlights flickered across thick cobwebs and water stains. The deeper they went, the stranger it became. The walls bore carvings—birds in cages, blindfolded figures, and what looked like files being burned.
After nearly twenty minutes of walking, they reached a metal door marked ECHO ROOM.
Joshi’s breath caught. “Why does this place have a name like a horror movie?”
“Because this is where echoes go to die,” Aruna murmured.
The door wasn’t locked. Inside, the chamber was circular, with six chairs arranged in a ring, each one facing inward. Microphones hung from the ceiling like gallows. The walls were padded, soundproofed. In the center lay a single reel-to-reel tape recorder. Still functioning.
Alisha approached. A handwritten note had been pinned beneath it.
“For Sparrow. In case I don’t survive.”
It was signed: Raven.
Alisha inserted the tape and pressed play.
A distorted voice echoed:
“If this message is playing, it means the Aviary has turned in on itself. I was part of it once. I believed surveillance was necessary. Until I realized we weren’t watching criminals—we were creating them. Manufacturing chaos. Sparrows like you saw the truth. That’s why they hunted you. That’s why they’ll never let this tape surface. If you’re hearing this… burn it. Don’t let it destroy you like it destroyed me.”
Then, silence.
Alisha looked at Aruna, then at Joshi. “He was one of them?”
Aruna nodded. “Raven was the architect. But even he couldn’t escape the thing he built.”
Suddenly, the chamber lights blinked out.
Joshi spun, weapon drawn. “Someone’s here.”
Footsteps above. Fast. Coordinated.
The tunnel entrance slammed shut.
Trapped.
Then the voice came—through a speaker embedded in the chamber wall.
Soft. Calculated. Male.
“I warned you, Inspector. Curiosity kills. But you didn’t listen.”
Alisha recognized the tone instantly.
Commissioner Aryan Malhotra.
Her superior.
“The Bureau thanks you for collecting the last piece. Now leave the tape and walk away. Or none of you leave at all.”
Aruna stepped forward, trembling but defiant. “You stole my life, Aryan. You silenced the truth. You buried it under cement and lies. But not this time.”
The tape recorder hissed to life again. A second recording played—of Aryan himself.
“Make her look unstable. Plant narcotics in her drawer. The press will crucify her. No one listens to a mad professor anymore.”
Proof.
Joshi stared in disbelief. “He ordered it…”
The speaker crackled again. This time louder. Closer.
“You’re making a mistake, Inspector.”
“No,” Alisha said, pocketing the recorder. “You did.”
With Joshi’s help, they pried open the ceiling vent—narrow, rusted, but just wide enough for one person at a time. Aruna went first, whispering something in Latin under her breath.
Alisha followed. Joshi covered the rear.
From below came the sound of boots—heavy, relentless.
Falcon had returned.
They crawled upward for what felt like miles, through rust and rat-nests, emerging in an abandoned signal room at the edge of the dockyard.
Alisha threw a crowbar across the door.
“We need to go public.”
“Media won’t help,” Joshi said. “They’re part of the spin cycle now.”
“I know someone who might.” Alisha pulled out an old business card—once handed to her at a seminar on ethical journalism. Shirin Dutt, Senior Editor, The Wireline.
“Does she still trust you?” Joshi asked.
“She hates me.”
“Perfect,” Aruna smiled. “That means she’ll print the truth.”
As they fled into the rainy streets, dawn began to break over Mumbai. The city woke to a thousand headlines, none of which told the real story.
But something had shifted.
A sparrow had survived.
And somewhere in the shadows, the Raven was watching.
Part 5
The newsroom of The Wireline was humming, but Shirin Dutt sat motionless at her desk. The USB lay beside her like a coiled serpent, dangerous and powerful. Alisha stood across from her, soaked to the bone, her eyes defiant and exhausted.
“This,” Shirin finally said, “could dismantle half the ministries.”
“I’m counting on it.”
“And what makes you think I won’t end up dead in a gutter tomorrow morning? Like Armaan?”
Alisha didn’t flinch. “Because if you publish this, everyone will know. If you don’t, they’ll pick us off one by one. Quietly. Neatly. Without headlines.”
Shirin studied her for a long moment, then looked at the files again—government seals, voice samples, surveillance tapes, the audio of Commissioner Aryan Malhotra ordering a smear campaign. Everything laid bare.
“I’ll need 24 hours. My legal team needs to vet this. My editors need assurances.”
“You don’t have 24 hours,” Joshi cut in. “They’ve already killed Armaan. They tried to take us out at Dock 13. They know we have the tape.”
Shirin tapped her keyboard, encrypted the USB contents into a separate drive, and locked it in a safe under her desk.
“Fine. I’ll go dark. But if I die—this story still goes live.”
She handed Alisha a burner phone. “This number is your lifeline. Don’t lose it.”
Outside, the city roared on, indifferent. But Alisha’s nerves buzzed with danger. Every car felt like a threat. Every pedestrian a watcher.
They drove south, toward an old railway bungalow in Matunga owned by Aruna’s late uncle. It was a forgotten space, nestled between coconut trees and silence. No electricity, no Wi-Fi. Perfect.
That evening, Alisha sat under a slowly turning fan, trying to piece it all together. Joshi paced like a caged animal, and Aruna quietly scribbled into her weathered notebook.
Suddenly, Aruna spoke.
“It wasn’t just money. It never was. Kestrel Ventures has ties to a firm in Switzerland—Keller Systems. A shell that runs cyberintelligence software.”
“What kind?” Joshi asked.
“The kind that predicts unrest. It models civil disruption, protest hotspots. Then feeds that data to private players who use it to discredit or eliminate potential agitators—journalists, unionists, whistleblowers.”
“Social engineering,” Alisha muttered. “They’re not just suppressing truth. They’re anticipating it.”
“And stopping it before it forms,” Aruna added. “The Aviary didn’t just inherit the tunnels—they inherited the algorithms.”
Alisha’s phone vibrated. A new message on the burner from Shirin.
“We have a problem. The USB backup is gone. Someone broke into our office. We’re still safe. But the drive was wiped.”
Joshi cursed. “How is that even possible?”
“They’re watching everything,” Alisha said. “This was never just about evidence. It’s about staying one step ahead.”
The burner rang again. This time a call. Shirin’s voice was sharp.
“You have to run. Now. The police just issued a red alert—nationwide. You’re on every terminal. The warrant’s been upgraded to terror charges. They’ve linked you to a foreign hacking cell.”
Alisha blinked. “They’re fabricating an entire narrative.”
“They already did,” Shirin whispered. “And they’ve announced a press conference. Commissioner Malhotra’s going on record in one hour. He’s going to bury you.”
Click.
Alisha stood. “We have one shot.”
Joshi looked up. “What?”
“We break into CID HQ.”
Joshi gaped. “Are you mad?”
“There’s a secure server in Malhotra’s private wing. Aruna said they used AI modeling—predictive surveillance. That data’s not just in Geneva. It’s in Mumbai. If we can find the black terminal, we can prove they’re rigging public sentiment, engineering arrests, assassinations.”
“But that place is a fortress.”
“Then we find a crack.”
By midnight, they were outside CID headquarters at Nariman Point—tall, glinting, flanked by commandos. But Alisha had been here long enough to know its rhythm. The third-floor fire escape had a sensor that reset every 120 seconds. The east-wing camera on the eighth floor lagged by half a second every 15 frames.
They waited for the shift change.
Then moved.
Through metal grates. Into ducts. Past alarms. Joshi disabled a heat sensor using chewing gum and copper wire—a hack he’d learned from a retired thief they’d once arrested.
By 01:33 a.m., they were in the server room.
Aruna moved with surprising speed for her age, pulling out a micro-adapter and plugging into the main terminal. The screen bloomed into codes, dashboards, facial maps, behavior prediction graphs.
“What the hell is this?” Joshi whispered.
“Probability charts,” Aruna said. “They’re labeling citizens with threat scores. Based on what they search, who they meet, what rallies they attend.”
Joshi froze. His own name flashed across a quadrant.
Threat Index: 0.69 — Potential Subverter. Watchlist Tier 3.
“They were watching me?” he said, stunned.
“They’re watching everyone,” Alisha said.
She started copying files onto a fresh drive. Halfway through, a message popped up.
INTRUSION DETECTED. LOCKDOWN INITIATED.
“Move!” she shouted.
Sirens blared. Doors slammed. Red lights spun across the ceiling.
They ran—past empty corridors, through emergency exits, down four flights of stairs. Alisha fired her weapon at a lock, breaking it clean.
Outside, the night was drenched in monsoon chaos.
But they were alive.
With a copy.
And now… the city would know.
Part 6
Rain fell in sheets as the trio disappeared into the underbelly of Mumbai. Alisha’s fingers trembled around the USB drive, now warm from her palm, as if it pulsed with the weight of lives already lost and those about to be. Joshi drove like a man possessed, weaving the car through back alleys and broken lanes, avoiding CCTV blind spots. The city behind them was no longer theirs—it was a map of eyes and traps.
“We can’t go to another media house,” Joshi said. “They’ll be watching all the newsrooms. Shirin’s safehouse was compromised, remember?”
“I’m not going to a newsroom,” Alisha said, her voice steady. “We go live.”
Aruna looked up from the backseat. “How?”
“Through chaos.”
They stopped at a rundown cybercafé in Dadar that Alisha had raided years ago for illegal server hosting. The owner, Jignesh, had switched sides since then—no longer hacking telecoms but protecting whistleblowers with his underground proxy chain.
Jignesh stared at them through thick glasses. “I should charge you for every time you drag the end of the world through my front door.”
Alisha smiled grimly. “You’ll get your name in the history books. Maybe a cell named after you.”
He grunted. “You have one hour. After that, this place gets ghosted.”
Inside, a fanless terminal hummed to life. Aruna and Jignesh started unpacking the raw data from CID’s black terminal. Graphs turned into visual dashboards—names, faces, metadata, timestamps. The Aviary wasn’t a myth. It was a functioning apparatus—an AI-powered political cleansing machine.
Alisha typed a message into a secure TOR overlay:
“To every Indian who’s ever been afraid to speak, this is for you. #OperationSparrow #AviaryExposed”
Attached were encrypted files, visuals, names—including Commissioner Aryan Malhotra’s voice ordering illegal surveillance, and flight records linking Kestrel Ventures to offshore accounts in the Caymans. Within minutes, the files were scheduled for upload across decentralized platforms—Telegram drops, Reddit threads, even a dormant Wikileaks mirror.
She hit Send.
Then the power cut out.
Jignesh cursed. “EMP spike. They just fried my grid. Someone traced us.”
Outside, a motorcycle roared down the alley. Then another. And another.
Alisha grabbed her pistol. “They’re here.”
Joshi handed Aruna a Kevlar vest. “We move. Now.”
But the café’s side wall exploded inward as a tear gas canister rolled across the floor.
“Go!” Alisha shouted, firing blindly into the smoke.
They exited through the rear alley, climbing over broken scooters and steel drums. Joshi pushed Aruna ahead as Alisha covered the rear. One figure in black body armor appeared from the mist—Falcon again, unrelenting.
He raised his weapon—but Alisha ducked and fired.
Falcon fell.
They didn’t stop to check.
A rusted Ambassador waited at the next corner—Jignesh’s last favour. The keys were taped to the wheel. Joshi drove, fast, through Parel’s storm-drenched lanes toward an old signal tower by the Eastern Express Highway.
It had been abandoned since the Metro project began.
They crashed through the gate and dragged themselves inside.
Alisha slumped against the wall, heart pounding. The drive was gone, uploaded. The world would wake up to the truth.
Or so she thought.
Her burner phone buzzed.
A new message from an unknown number.
“Too slow, Sparrow. Files intercepted. You never uploaded a thing. Raven always flies ahead.”
Attached: a looping video.
Shirin Dutt—gagged, blindfolded, in a windowless room.
Joshi swore aloud. “They got her?”
Aruna stared at the screen, horror spreading across her face. “Raven’s still in control.”
Alisha crushed the phone in her hand.
“What now?” Joshi asked.
“We stop being hunted,” she said. “And we hunt the hunter.”
Joshi blinked. “You mean…”
“I’m going to meet him. Face to face.”
Aruna shook her head. “You don’t find Raven. He finds you.”
“I know.” Alisha stood, blood dripping from a shallow cut on her temple. “But he made one mistake.”
“What’s that?” Joshi asked.
“He thinks I’m alone.”
Part 7
By dawn, Mumbai was a city on edge. The news channels remained quiet—no mention of the Aviary, no trace of the leak. Not even a whisper of the professor, the journalist, or the inspector who had dared to break the system’s silence. It was as if truth itself had been erased.
Alisha watched the grey light filter through the cracked windows of the signal tower. Her mind wasn’t racing anymore. It was sharp. Still. Like the moment before pulling a trigger.
She had one objective now: find Raven.
Aruna sipped weak tea beside her, nursing a bruised rib and scanning the damage. “If Raven sent that message, it means he knew about our every move. Before we made it. That’s not human.”
Joshi nodded, pulling up surveillance patterns they’d copied from the CID servers. “It’s an AI protocol. Codenamed SANGRAH. Pulls predictive behavior from GPS, CCTV, even banking habits. If Raven has access, he doesn’t need spies. He needs patterns.”
“But humans leave noise,” Alisha said. “Emotion. Impulse. That’s the crack in his code.”
They went through everything again. The tape from the Echo Room. The old voice logs. The transcript from Raven’s monologue. Somewhere, something had slipped.
Then Aruna froze.
“Wait… rewind the Echo Room tape. Five seconds before he says ‘destroy me.’”
Joshi replayed it.
A sound.
Faint. Metallic.
Clang… Clang… Pause.
“Port bell,” Aruna whispered. “I used to live near Ferry Wharf. That sound? That’s the boat signal—used only by two old private docks. One of them is at Gunpowder Island.”
Alisha’s breath caught.
“You think Raven’s there?”
“No one goes to Gunpowder. It’s been off-limits since the navy shut down that munitions depot. Even fishermen avoid it.”
“Exactly why he’d be there,” Joshi said.
They moved fast. By midday, they reached a dock in Sewri where Aruna bribed an old fisherman with more cash than he’d seen all year. His hands trembled as he handed them life jackets.
“You go there,” he muttered, “you come back ghosts.”
Alisha didn’t respond. She just boarded.
Gunpowder Island rose from the mist like a haunted fortress—half-drowned, overgrown, marked by rusted fences and signs that screamed DEFENCE PROPERTY – DO NOT ENTER.
They docked quietly and moved inland, cutting through wild grass and crumbling bunkers. Every step felt like trespassing into a forgotten war.
At the heart of the island stood a squat concrete building. No guards. No wires. Just silence.
The door was unlocked.
They stepped in.
The space was circular—like the Echo Room—but colder. Cleaner. Every surface lined with screens. Surveillance feeds of every inch of Mumbai blinked across the walls—railway stations, school yards, even the inside of police precincts.
And at the center—Raven.
He stood facing a massive console, back turned, hands clasped behind him. Dressed in a tailored black kurta, head shaven, he looked more monk than monster.
“You came,” he said softly.
Alisha raised her pistol. “Hands where I can see them.”
He turned.
And her breath caught.
Commissioner Aryan Malhotra.
Not a recording. Not a voice over a speaker.
The man himself.
“No mask this time,” he said, calmly. “You always wanted a face.”
“You’re Raven,” Joshi muttered.
“I am the last piece,” Malhotra said. “The only one who can balance the system.”
Aruna stepped forward, eyes burning. “You balanced nothing. You erased lives. Controlled outcomes. Played God.”
“I prevented collapse,” he replied. “You see corruption. I see stability. What would this city be if every truth was known? Chaos. Panic. Blood on the streets. I chose the lie that saved millions.”
“You chose murder,” Alisha snapped.
He walked toward her slowly, eyes sad. “And what will you do now, Inspector? Kill me? That won’t shut down the Aviary. The system runs itself now. It’s coded into the heart of your institutions.”
Alisha lowered the gun slightly. “Then give me the access key.”
Malhotra smiled faintly. “You’ve grown since the academy. But still naïve. I am the key.”
He tapped the side of his neck. A small implant glowed beneath his skin.
“SANGRAH is bio-locked. It ends with me.”
Joshi stared. “Then there’s no way to shut it down?”
“There’s one way,” Aruna said, suddenly.
She looked at Alisha.
“Unplug him.”
Malhotra didn’t move. “If I die, the system collapses. Mumbai will go dark. Transport, hospitals, even power grids run through the SANGRAH fail-safe. I am the heart. Pull me out, the body seizes.”
“Then we make it bleed,” Alisha said.
And pulled the trigger.
Part 8
The shot rang out like thunder trapped in a bottle.
Malhotra staggered back, a red bloom spreading across his chest as he fell against the console. Sparks erupted. Screens flickered. And then—silence. Every camera feed vanished. The heart had stopped.
For a second, no one moved.
Then came the noise.
A deep, whirring hum from beneath the floor—like a dying machine gasping for one last breath. The lights above sputtered. The console crackled and then burst into flame. Alisha leapt forward, dragging Aruna back just before a power conduit exploded behind them.
Joshi ripped open a metal panel in the wall and found a switchboard.
“We need to kill the grid before the island ignites,” he yelled.
“Do it!” Alisha called, pressing down on Malhotra’s chest with both hands. He was still breathing—just barely.
“You shot to wound,” Aruna whispered.
“I need him alive,” Alisha replied. “He said SANGRAH was bio-locked. If he dies before we extract that key, the system rebuilds somewhere else. Maybe offshore. Maybe underground. We lose everything.”
Joshi pulled the emergency cut-off. The whirring stopped. The screens went black for good.
Aruna knelt beside the console, her fingers dancing over the glass interface. “There’s a secondary access route,” she said. “An analog failsafe. He was paranoid. He built a backdoor.”
“What does it need?” Alisha asked.
“Retina scan. And a voice command.”
They turned to Malhotra.
Blood foamed at his mouth. His lips trembled.
Alisha leaned close. “You don’t get absolution. But you can choose how this ends. Help us shut it down.”
Malhotra’s eyes met hers. No remorse. No redemption. But something else—relief?
“You’ll never save them,” he rasped. “They don’t want to be saved. They want to be told who to hate. Who to love. Who to blame.”
Alisha pressed her hand harder against his wound. “That’s not your choice anymore.”
He smiled weakly. Then blinked.
The console scanned his eye.
“Voice print, please,” the system asked.
Malhotra whispered, “Let the city breathe.”
A soft beep. Green light. Access granted.
Outside, the storm returned. Monsoon winds lashed the island as the trio carried Malhotra’s body down the broken slope toward the dock. He was unconscious now, barely clinging to life. But the console’s core had been extracted—its AI severed.
Aruna held the extracted bio-module—a small glowing chip—in her hands like it was a ticking bomb.
“Where do we take it?” Joshi asked.
“Nowhere,” Aruna said. “We destroy it.”
Alisha hesitated. “Wait. If we wipe it completely, they’ll say we fabricated everything. That this was all a rogue operation.”
“Then we leave a trace,” Joshi said. “Something irrefutable. Not a bombshell… a breadcrumb.”
By morning, a single news alert appeared on an obscure public domain site: “System Error: Aviary Root Access Breached.”
It linked to a series of anonymized data packets—user logs, intercepted calls, contract sheets—just enough to spark suspicion. Just enough to start a fire.
By afternoon, Parliament was ablaze with debate. The Home Minister denied everything. But independent journalists began circling the term Aviary. Anonymous hashtags trended. College protests reignited. Whistleblowers emerged.
The city breathed again. Uneven. Wounded. But real.
Two weeks later, Alisha stood at the edge of Marine Drive, staring at the sea. Joshi joined her, holding a folded newspaper.
Front page: “Commissioner Malhotra in coma. CBI takes over CID Mumbai. Inquiry underway into covert surveillance program.”
Aruna had disappeared again. Some said she fled to Goa. Others said she was working on a book. Alisha knew better—some stories are too heavy to write down.
“Do you think it’s over?” Joshi asked.
“No,” Alisha said. “But now they know someone’s watching the watchers.”
She turned away from the water, the city rising behind her like a machine too big to fix in one life.
But still worth fighting for.
Part 9
The rains had slowed. But the city hadn’t.
Mumbai moved as it always had—between puddles and promises, between secrets and survival. Yet something had shifted. Small, almost invisible. A pause between breaths. A flicker in the machinery.
In a corner of the CST station, behind a broken locker panel, a phone buzzed to life.
No SIM.
No fingerprint.
Just a blinking message:
“Raven compromised. Initiate Protocol: VULTURE.”
Meanwhile, Alisha walked through the CID headquarters again—but this time as a visitor. The corridors had changed. New faces. Temporary reforms. Cameras removed. Scrutiny heightened.
Commissioner Aryan Malhotra lay in a secure hospital wing, monitored 24/7. Still in a coma. Still holding the secrets of a thousand silenced files in a brain that no longer responded.
But Alisha knew better than to believe in happy endings.
She carried a hard drive now. Not with evidence—but with code. The remnants of SANGRAH that she and Joshi had managed to recover. It had been fractured, broken into fragments.
But even broken glass can cut.
She visited Shirin Dutt that evening. The journalist was still shaken—sleepless, restless—but alive.
“They erased the footage of my abduction,” she said. “The media thinks I took a sabbatical.”
Alisha handed her a file. “You ready to come back?”
Shirin smiled faintly. “I’m coming back louder.”
In another part of the city, Joshi met with a hacker collective called Crowsight—teenagers mostly, but brilliant ones. Together they decrypted the last layer of a hidden SANGRAH partition.
What they found wasn’t just surveillance data.
It was planning models—simulations for upcoming elections, mass protest scenarios, riot-prevention forecasts. But more chilling were the “intervention templates”: pre-written media spin campaigns, staged propaganda triggers, even assassination contingency plans.
It meant Raven was not alone.
It meant the Aviary had survivors.
Joshi rang Alisha immediately.
“Part of the code mentions an asset: VULTURE-09. Embedded. Operational. Still active.”
“Where?” she asked.
He hesitated. “It just says… ‘Colaba Sector.’”
Alisha stood that night at Café Leopold, watching crowds sip overpriced chai, unaware of the city they were truly living in. She scanned faces, corners, rooftops. The Aviary may have lost its leader—but birds fly in flocks.
She knew VULTURE-09 wouldn’t be a thug. He—or she—would be a bureaucrat. A quiet signature on a policy. A name that appeared in no headlines but wrote all of them.
She left a note under her cup.
“The Sparrow still flies.”
And walked away.
The next morning, she received a courier at her rented flat—no return address. Inside, a velvet box.
It contained one thing:
A small feather. Jet black. Not from a sparrow.
From a vulture.
And a note beneath it:
“Your move.”
Part 10
The black feather sat on Alisha’s desk like a silent dare.
She stared at it for hours, its fine strands catching the morning light, almost shimmering. Whoever sent it wasn’t just taunting her—they were sending a message. A precise one.
We’re still here. We’re still watching.
Joshi entered without knocking. “Checked all delivery CCTV—nothing. The courier service claims the package was prepaid in cash. No fingerprints. No prints on the box either.”
“It was never meant to be traced,” Alisha murmured. “It’s not about the delivery. It’s about the timing.”
She flipped open the newspaper. On page five, in the lower corner: ‘Emergency Bill Passed in Maharashtra Assembly – Rapid Deployment of Facial Recognition Technology across Mumbai Local Stations’.
“Vulture’s working through legislation now,” she said. “Public consent isn’t needed when fear does the job.”
Joshi sat across from her, defeated. “How do we fight something that writes the rules?”
“By rewriting them first.”
That night, they met with Shirin and the Crowsight collective at an abandoned film studio in Goregaon—soundproofed, forgotten. On the projector, Shirin outlined their plan.
“This isn’t about bringing the system down anymore,” she said. “It’s about infecting it. Truth won’t spread fast enough. But doubt? That travels like wildfire.”
She unveiled their new tool: SANDSTORM—a digital ghost program created by the Crowsight team. It would implant contradictory data inside Aviary’s remaining nodes—internal leaks, fake whistleblowers, counter-narratives—all designed to fracture trust within the network itself.
“Think of it like psychological warfare,” one of the teens said, grinning. “They built a tower of glass. We throw pebbles.”
“Where do we launch it?” Joshi asked.
“From inside the Ministry’s data relay center,” Alisha answered. “We get one shot.”
Two days later, at midnight, Alisha and Joshi approached the heavily guarded data relay building near Bandra Kurla Complex. Shirin had secured media credentials under fake names, giving them a five-minute entry window before night maintenance closed the firewall.
Inside, floor by floor, they climbed—dodging motion detectors, piggybacking behind delivery personnel, cracking access codes with stolen key cards.
On the twelfth floor, inside a server room chilled like a morgue, Joshi plugged in the SANDSTORM drive.
The screen blinked. A spinning icon appeared.
Injecting cognitive dissonance module… 7%… 14%…
Then static.
Alisha’s heart skipped.
“Don’t stall now,” she whispered.
At 26%, the terminal screen changed.
A new window appeared.
LIVE CHAT:
[VULTURE_09 has entered the conversation]
A single message typed itself slowly:
“Nice try, Sparrow. But you’re not the only one who learns.”
Joshi froze.
Another message followed:
“You chose noise over silence. Chaos over control. Your rebellion has been noted.”
The cursor blinked once. Then twice.
“Now it ends.”
The lights shut off.
Emergency alarms blared.
The building went into lockdown.
Alisha pulled her gun. “He’s here.”
“No—he’s everywhere,” Joshi said. “He’s in the code. He is the code.”
But then… another screen lit up.
SANDSTORM COMPLETE: 100% UPLOADED.
A final line blinked beneath it:
“The sky belongs to no one.”
The servers sparked.
And somewhere inside Mumbai’s digital skeleton… doubt began to grow.
Part 11
The city didn’t burn.
It unraveled.
Not with fire or blood—but with silence. And suspicion.
Within hours of the SANDSTORM upload, internal emails within ministries began contradicting themselves. Parliamentary records showed motions that were never proposed. Police rosters reshuffled themselves. CCTV archives looped over events that hadn’t happened yet. Whistleblower hotlines rang at offices that no longer existed.
The digital face of Mumbai had fractured.
And the Aviary?
It began to eat itself.
From a safehouse in Girgaum, Alisha watched the storm unfold on muted screens. One channel showed a public protest outside Mantralaya—youngsters holding placards with a single phrase: “Who Watches the Watchers?” Another ran a blurred recording of a junior IT officer claiming he was instructed to delete thousands of public records… by a voice on a headset that never gave a name.
Joshi stood by the window, listening to a torrent of encrypted messages from the Crowsight network.
“They’re panicking. Purging files, burning back-ups. Some Aviary assets have already fled the country.”
“What about Vulture-09?” Alisha asked.
Joshi shook his head. “Offline. Ghosted.”
“He’ll surface,” she said. “They always do.”
At the hospital, Commissioner Aryan Malhotra finally opened his eyes. He was no longer a threat—just a man surrounded by guards, wires, and a story the world had stopped believing. The world had moved on.
But Alisha hadn’t.
She stood by his bedside one evening. Just the two of them.
“You built a perfect machine,” she said. “Too perfect. That was your mistake.”
He didn’t speak. Just looked at her. As if he knew this was his end—not in death, but in irrelevance.
She left the room without looking back.
One week later, Shirin published The Aviary Dossier—a 108-page exposé that pieced together fragments of SANGRAH’s operation, Kestrel’s financing, and the city-wide web of predictive policing. It went viral within minutes.
The government denied it.
But the people didn’t.
Protests surged.
Internal reviews began.
And for the first time in years, no new facial recognition tenders were issued.
Alisha returned to her modest flat in Dadar, stripped of her badge and title. She was no longer Inspector Ranade. Just another citizen with a scar above her eyebrow and a city in her bones.
She kept the black feather inside a small notebook. A reminder.
On its final page, she wrote:
“The sparrow does not fear the hawk. It flies lower, but it sees everything.”
Far away, in a high-rise office overlooking the Arabian Sea, a man in a crisp linen suit scrolled through footage of the protests. His face was calm. His phone buzzed once.
Incoming message:
“Asset lost. Protocol failed. Awaiting further instruction.”
He typed:
“Do not engage. Let them believe they’ve won. Real birds don’t fly in flocks.”
He closed the laptop.
Outside, the city flickered with neon, thunder, and rain.
The game had ended.
And somewhere… another had just begun.
THE END
