Shanaya Rao
1
The fluorescent lights buzzed faintly overhead, casting an antiseptic glare over the chilled walls of the AIIMS mortuary. The smell of formaldehyde clung to every surface, a scent Dr. Ira Bhaskar had long since stopped noticing. It was nearing midnight, and the corridors were mostly deserted, save for the hum of distant refrigeration units and the soft thud of her footsteps echoing in the tiled corridor. Inside Autopsy Chamber 4, a body lay under a white sheet — Case #N-4521, a twenty-two-year-old woman named Niharika Sharma, found murdered in a park near South Delhi. The case had been on every news channel for days: brutalized, strangled, and left like discarded evidence. Dr. Ved Maheshwaran, the head of Forensics, had called Ira in personally for this one — “Too sensitive to trust anyone else,” he’d said. He stood over the body now, gloved hands poised, his lined face unreadable beneath the sterile mask.
As Ira assisted in positioning the body, she noticed a tension in Dr. Maheshwaran she hadn’t seen before. His voice was clipped, eyes darting occasionally to the door as if expecting someone. They worked in near silence, the scalpel cutting through skin and muscle with methodical precision. Niharika’s injuries were horrific, but it wasn’t just brutality — it was staged, theatrical. A cut running from her clavicle to sternum was oddly clean, unlike the struggle wounds on her arms. As Ira leaned in to measure the angle of a cranial fracture, Maheshwaran suddenly swayed. The scalpel clattered from his hand, bouncing against the steel table. “Sir?” Ira’s voice cracked the silence. He stumbled back, clutching his chest. For a moment, she thought it was fatigue — he often worked long hours — but then his knees buckled, and he collapsed against the cold floor. She rushed to him, calling out for help, fingers fumbling for a pulse. Nothing. A lifeless blankness stared up from his eyes as a smear of blood marked the corner of his mouth.
The next few hours were a blur of alarms, chaos, and institutional routine. Dr. Maheshwaran was declared dead — cause: cardiac arrest. The Director was called. The body was moved. The case, under heavy political pressure, was reassigned to Dr. Tiwari. But something didn’t sit right with Ira. She replayed those last moments over and over — the way he had held the scalpel with shaking fingers, the whisper he’d muttered before collapsing: “Check… the heel.” She returned to the autopsy room alone that morning, her gloves trembling as she peeled back the sheet from Niharika’s foot. At the base of the left heel, beneath dried blood and bruising, she saw it — a small, clean incision no more than a centimeter wide, expertly stitched shut. That wound had not been in the initial case notes. Her breath caught. Whatever it was Maheshwaran had seen in that body, it had killed him before he could tell anyone else.
2
The morning sun filtered weakly through the frosted glass of the AIIMS administration building, casting pale light across the steel and concrete façade of institutional silence. Ira sat in the waiting room outside the Director’s office, her fingers curled tightly around the edge of a clipboard she wasn’t reading. Everything had moved with alarming speed since Dr. Maheshwaran’s sudden death — his autopsy labeled complete, his cause of death signed off as a myocardial infarction, and his files on Case #N-4521 sealed within hours. Dr. Rameshwar Tiwari had been promoted as interim head without ceremony. “We must keep the department stable,” the Director had said brusquely. Ira wasn’t sure if it was stability or silence they wanted more. A nurse had casually mentioned that Maheshwaran’s body had already been transferred to the crematorium — no internal autopsy, no toxicology. That alone sent shivers down her spine. Protocol had been shattered. Something was being buried — not just the man.
Back in the forensics wing, Ira noticed small changes. Maheshwaran’s office had been locked and taped off “for documentation purposes,” and access to the mortuary database now required special credentials. Dr. Tiwari moved through the corridors like a man taking ownership, issuing instructions with mechanical efficiency. When Ira asked to review the full autopsy files on Niharika Sharma, she was denied — “Out of your scope now, Dr. Bhaskar,” he said with a cold smile. Even stranger was the presence of two men in plain clothes who lingered around the pathology block, rarely speaking but clearly observing. They didn’t wear badges, but Ira had worked with CBI investigators before; these men weren’t police — they were watchers. She received a message later that afternoon from ACP Kavya Rana, the lead officer on the Sharma case. The cop’s tone on the phone was blunt: “We’re closing in on a suspect. We have enough for the charge sheet. Don’t dig into things that aren’t yours, Dr. Bhaskar. Just sign off on the death and move on.”
That night, Ira returned to the lab alone. She knew the motion sensors in Autopsy Room 4 were shut off until renovation clearance came through. In the pale overhead light, she pulled up the limited log of Dr. Maheshwaran’s activity from the digital register. It showed no final report on Case #N-4521 — no scans, no images, just a single encrypted folder marked “A0-24 – Temp.” The name struck her. “A0-24” had never appeared in any of their official classifications. As she scrolled through backups, her screen flickered. The folder had just vanished — remotely wiped. Ira stood motionless for several seconds, her throat tightening with a fear she couldn’t quite name. Maheshwaran’s death had been too sudden, too clean. Now the files were disappearing, and the autopsy was being rushed to conclusion. Someone had buried more than just a body. Someone was tidying up. And Ira Bhaskar had just been marked as the one thread left dangling.
3
The power had gone out in the lower pathology wing — a common occurrence during late nights in the aging corridors of AIIMS, but tonight it felt like an omen. Ira Bhaskar stood alone in the dim emergency lights, a single battery-powered lamp illuminating Niharika Sharma’s preserved remains on the metal autopsy table. The body had been ordered for transfer the next morning, and this was her only chance. Her gloved hands moved with silent precision, eyes scanning every contour of the corpse. She returned to the heel — the place Dr. Maheshwaran had whispered about before he died. With a surgical blade, she gently reopened the neat incision, revealing something unexpected nestled deep inside the tissue: a tiny capsule, no bigger than a grain of rice. She extracted it carefully and held it up to the light. It was metallic, with a faint seam running down the side. Her breath caught. This was no medical implant. This was deliberate concealment.
Back in the privacy of her office, she used a sterilized scalpel to pry it open. Inside, tightly rolled, was a strip of microfilm. Her fingers trembled as she fed it into the old projector she kept for archival evidence work. The images that flickered onto the wall were grainy, but unmistakable — pages of typed reports, some in English, others in code. One showed an official forensic inventory list with annotations in Maheshwaran’s handwriting. Another displayed an autopsy sketch labeled “Case A0-24-B — Sharma, N.” The timestamp was marked the day before Maheshwaran’s death. At the bottom of the final page was a map fragment showing an underground wing of AIIMS — a decommissioned research lab, supposedly sealed after a 2009 fire. Ira’s heart pounded. Maheshwaran hadn’t been examining just a corpse — he had been uncovering something buried far deeper.
She didn’t sleep that night. Instead, she cross-referenced old case files in the restricted archive she’d once helped organize as a resident. There was no mention of any “A0-24” program. She called Anika Maheshwaran on a secure line and asked if her father had ever mentioned classified cases. “He talked about one that haunted him,” Anika whispered. “Said it started as a rape case but turned into something much darker. He called it ‘The one they won’t let me file.’” Ira closed her eyes, the pieces falling into a jagged, terrifying picture. Dr. Maheshwaran hadn’t died of natural causes — he’d been silenced. And now, with the discovery of the capsule, Ira had stumbled into the same invisible current that had swept her mentor away. The evidence was faint, hidden in flesh and forgotten hallways — but it was there. She knew now: the last body he examined hadn’t just held answers for a murder. It held the reason for his own.
4
The rain came down in thin, relentless sheets, soaking the courtyard between the main pathology building and the older, half-abandoned wing of AIIMS. Ira pulled her hood low, ducking into the shadow of the south annex where broken signage still read “Specimen Storage – Restricted.” Few came here anymore; this part of the hospital had been gutted in a fire more than a decade ago and left mostly untouched. But Ira had decoded the fragment from the microfilm, which led her precisely here. The corridor reeked of mildew and sterilizing fluid that hadn’t been replaced in years. With Ayaan Kapoor watching the entrance, she crept inside the old records room, flashlight in hand. Cabinets stood like ancient tombs, rows of rusted drawers labeled with indecipherable codes. Toward the back, hidden beneath a warped anatomy chart, she found a dusty computer unit covered with a plastic tarp. It powered on with a reluctant hum. Password prompt. She tried Maheshwaran’s birthday. Access granted.
What opened wasn’t a file directory — it was a hidden folder marked “A0-24: Internal Contaminants – Visual Logs.” One by one, images loaded. Autopsy photographs, unfiled reports, handwritten annotations. The first few files showed victims of apparent cardiac arrest — all young, all brought in under vague causes like “unknown collapse.” But each had consistent internal damage: punctured lungs, deep tissue bruising, and unusual surgical traces. In one scan, a body had an identical incision on the heel — the same as Niharika. Ira’s eyes widened. Maheshwaran had documented patterns stretching back years. She flipped through the logs, noting case numbers with no matches in official records. Her mentor had been building a covert dossier, assembling what appeared to be a series of manipulated deaths — forensic fictions orchestrated to hide something bigger. And all the bodies had been processed at AIIMS, some even under Dr. Tiwari’s supervision.
Suddenly, a faint sound broke the stillness — the soft creak of the entrance door. Ira killed the screen and ducked behind the filing cabinets. Footsteps. Slow, deliberate, stopping near the projector unit she’d used moments earlier. She recognized the silhouette: one of the silent men from earlier, the CBI-looking watchers. He scanned the room with a pocket torch, eyes narrowing on the disturbed dust near the terminal. After a tense minute, he left. Ira waited, breath held, before slipping out through a rear stairwell, heart racing. She met Ayaan outside, rain soaking both their clothes, and handed him a printout of one of the autopsy logs. “He wasn’t just looking at victims,” she whispered. “He was connecting dots no one else dared to see. This isn’t just about Niharika. This is something else. Something inside the hospital. And if Maheshwaran was right… we’re standing in the middle of it.” The thunder cracked over Delhi like a warning. The ghosts in the lab weren’t just dead. Some of them were still walking.
5
It was nearly 2 a.m. when Ira stepped into the dimly lit apartment of Anika Maheshwaran. The space was cluttered with camera gear, rolled-up protest posters, and shelves packed with books on political corruption and whistleblower trials. Anika offered black coffee and silence, then disappeared into her father’s study — a preserved corner of the apartment untouched since his death. She returned with a weathered leather journal and a yellowing envelope labeled “CONFIDENTIAL – DO NOT SUBMIT.” Ira unfolded the papers inside. The handwriting was unmistakable: Dr. Maheshwaran’s. The entries described a custodial death case from seven years ago — a young Dalit man allegedly beaten by police. The autopsy had revealed injuries inconsistent with the reported timeline, but his organs had been removed and replaced before documentation, apparently by order from an unnamed “research liaison” attached to the Ministry of Health. One line stood out, circled in red ink: “Violation 1 — surgical tampering prior to postmortem, justified under Project A0-24. Not logged. No consent. No trace.”
Ira’s pulse quickened. The envelope also contained rough sketches — a heel incision, a spinal needle mark, liver sample extraction points — all matching what she had seen in Niharika’s body. Her mind reeled. This wasn’t just malpractice or bureaucratic rot. It was a systemic, sanctioned violation of forensic protocol: illegal harvesting, unauthorized experimentation, and doctored reports. She returned to AIIMS under the cover of night and checked the access logs for the pathology cold storage. Dozens of unclaimed bodies had been tagged over the years as transferred to cremation without full records. Many had passed through Dr. Tiwari’s supervision. Ira knew the implications. If this was part of an off-books biomedical research program, they were dealing with something far more dangerous than just a corrupt official. This was institutional rot, hidden under layers of medical procedure and legal paperwork — and her mentor had tried to uncover it alone.
That evening, she confronted ACP Kavya Rana at her office. The cop sat stone-faced as Ira laid out the fragments — the heel wound, the sealed files, the A0-24 designator, and the tampered organs. Kavya leaned back, arms folded. “Do you know what you’re implying?” she asked. “That a central medical institution is colluding with a classified research division to cover up non-consensual human experimentation?” Ira met her gaze and nodded. “Yes. And I think Niharika found out. I think that’s why she died the way she did.” After a long pause, Kavya sighed. “You’re not wrong,” she admitted. “We’ve had whispers. Threats. Someone inside AIIMS has been untouchable for years. But if you want to go down this road, doctor, know this — it won’t just end your career. It might end more than that.” Ira stepped out into the corridor, her breath slow and steady. She was past fear now. The first violation had already been made — and she wasn’t going to let the last one go unpunished.
6
The rain had cleared by dawn, but the city still smelled of wet tar and exhaust fumes as Ira rode across Delhi on the back of Ayaan’s motorcycle, clutching a flash drive like it was a lifeline. Inside it was a hidden audio recording from Dr. Maheshwaran’s old dictaphone, found tucked inside the spine of his autopsy notes — audio that had never been logged officially. His voice was grainy, whispering like he knew someone might be listening: “Case N-4521 matches victim profile of A0-24-K. Same incision. Same staging. This isn’t a copycat crime. It’s a protocol repeat — someone is testing parameters.” Ira couldn’t breathe for a moment after hearing those words. Niharika’s murder hadn’t just been brutal — it had been methodical, almost ritualistic. The rape, the strangulation, the positioning of the limbs — all mirrored a case Maheshwaran had worked on in 2018. A case that had been abruptly closed after the suspect died in an ‘encounter.’
At the Central Police Records Room, Kavya Rana used her badge to get them inside the sealed case archive. The 2018 file — “Case A0-24-K” — had the same victim profile: young female journalist, evidence of sexual assault, toxicology inconclusive, organs tampered with. The suspect, a lab technician at a private research institute, had died before trial in a staged gunfight. But Ira saw the same wound on the heel, the same spinal trace. The conclusion was chilling: someone had replicated the crime scene to match a previous incident — not out of compulsion, but calibration. A protocol test. A procedure being rehearsed, measured, refined. “This wasn’t a murder,” Ira said aloud, “it was an experiment with a corpse as data.” She felt bile rise in her throat. It wasn’t just that Niharika had been silenced — her death had been engineered to perfection.
They left the station in silence, minds reeling. Back at the lab, Ira locked herself in the evidence imaging room and pulled up the CT scans from both cases, comparing skeletal trauma and internal incisions. They aligned with uncanny precision — the same force angles, identical tissue bruising, the same postmortem foreign substance residue near the injection sites. Ayaan stood behind her, pale and quiet. “This… this is being done by someone who knows the autopsy process. Intimately,” he said. Ira didn’t respond. She already knew what he was thinking. Only a pathologist or senior technician could stage something like this without leaving traceable errors. And most damning of all — both bodies had passed through AIIMS. Through their hands. Through his hands. Ira looked down at her gloves, trembling. It wasn’t just a killer they were dealing with. It was someone inside the system. Someone hiding in plain sight, rehearsing death like a performance. And Maheshwaran had been the first to recognize it. That recognition had signed his death certificate.
7
The mortuary wing was unusually quiet that night, the sterile stillness broken only by the occasional buzz of overhead fluorescents and the low whirr of cooling units. Ira moved like a shadow, silent and precise, guided by Nurse Lata Rawat through a forgotten corridor behind the chemical storage room. Lata had worked under Maheshwaran for years and knew every inch of the old lab. “He didn’t trust digital storage anymore,” Lata whispered. “Said real evidence should bleed ink and dust, not leave a trail online.” Behind a corroded cabinet, she revealed a wall panel with a false back. Inside, among dusty reagent bottles, lay a steel lockbox. Ira pried it open and found a handheld voice recorder, still intact, with a red sticker marked only “N-24.” She hit play. Maheshwaran’s voice was faint but firm. “If you’re hearing this, I’m likely dead. The toxin they’ve used is untraceable without a forensic trigger. They introduced it during the procedure — inside the surgical gloves. My fingertips started tingling before I collapsed. This was no accident.” Ira sat in stunned silence. Her mentor had left a forensic breadcrumb — a murder method disguised in plain sight, masked by routine.
She rushed back to the lab and retrieved the sealed autopsy gloves Maheshwaran had worn during Niharika’s procedure, stored out of habit in the biohazard archive. Under UV light, she detected faint crystalline residue along the inner lining — something that shouldn’t be there. She swabbed it and ran a preliminary tox-screen. The result was chilling: K17-Neurotoxin, a rare experimental compound known only to military interrogation units — non-traceable after 24 hours in the bloodstream, undetectable through standard lab protocols. Someone had slipped it into Maheshwaran’s gloves, triggering a slow, deliberate shutdown of his cardiac system under the stress of the autopsy. It was clean, efficient, and brutal. Ira’s hands shook as she documented the finding. This wasn’t just a silencing; it was a message: Stay quiet or die quietly.
The next morning, she attempted to report her findings to the Ethics Committee — only to find herself summoned for an internal disciplinary hearing. The charges were vague but damning: “unauthorized file access, procedural breach, tampering with evidence.” At the center of it all was Dr. Rameshwar Tiwari, his tone dripping with bureaucratic menace. “You’re overstepping, Dr. Bhaskar. This isn’t about justice anymore. It’s about protocol. Procedure.” Her protests were dismissed, her credentials temporarily revoked, and her access to the forensic archives frozen. As she packed her belongings under silent surveillance, Ayaan slipped a note into her coat pocket: Meet me tonight at East Campus Archive. I have something. Maheshwaran didn’t just leave a message — he left a map. Ira’s resolve solidified into steel. They could erase her from the system, but they couldn’t erase what the dead had already told her. Maheshwaran had performed his own autopsy in death. And now, Ira was ready to carry out the postmortem on the truth.
8
The East Campus Archive stood like a forgotten relic on the edge of the AIIMS compound — a four-storey block of dusty rooms, termite-eaten ledgers, and faded patient files no one had touched in over a decade. Ira arrived under cover of darkness, the building eerily still, save for the tapping of leaking rainwater in a distant corner. Ayaan was already there, pale and breathless, holding a folded blueprint that looked like it had been smuggled out of a Cold War vault. “This is what Maheshwaran left,” he said, voice hushed. “A floor plan from 2009. Before the fire. There’s a tunnel connecting the old pathology wing to the decommissioned psych lab. That’s where Project A0-24 was run.” Ira unfolded the map on a dusty table. The space beneath the mortuary had always been rumored to hold abandoned research zones, and now she had proof. Alongside the blueprint was a hard drive — encrypted — but labeled with one chilling phrase: “Trial Logs – OrgMod/PatientX – Internal Only.” The files had timestamps, medical charts, and names — some she recognized from old unclaimed body reports. The leaking wound wasn’t just a metaphor anymore. It was literal. This hospital had been bleeding secrets beneath its foundation.
The same night, a news bulletin hit national channels: the alleged rapist in Niharika’s case had “confessed” in police custody and died by suicide within hours. The case was declared closed. Ira felt sick. It was too neat, too quick — a scapegoat manufactured to seal the file shut. She tried to contact the journalist she had previously passed information to — but he was missing. Two hours later, his body was found in the Yamuna, wrists slit, declared “accidental drowning.” Ira understood then: the noose was tightening. This wasn’t just about silencing whistleblowers. It was about purging anyone who came close to the truth. The hospital was bleeding — and someone was stitching it up with lies.
As fear crept into the hearts of those around her, Ira confronted Tiwari one last time in the pathology corridor, their voices barely above whispers. “You knew what was happening. You signed off on the storage orders, the tissue removals, the cremation overrides. Maheshwaran was going to expose you.” Tiwari’s face didn’t flinch. “Do you really think one body matters?” he said coldly. “This was bigger than him. Bigger than you. We were saving lives — in ways you’ll never understand.” Ira’s fists clenched. “By turning the dead into lab rats?” His eyes narrowed. “By preventing ten thousand more from dying the same way.” He walked away without another word, leaving her standing under the flickering corridor lights, the stench of formalin thick in the air. Ira knew now that the rot had roots stretching into corridors of power far beyond AIIMS. But she also knew something else — Maheshwaran hadn’t died for nothing. His wounds had started leaking. And she was going to make sure they never healed.
9
It began with a noise.
A quiet hum inside the refrigerated chamber below the decommissioned autopsy wing — a chamber long sealed, its magnetic lock overridden with Ayaan’s makeshift code. Ira stepped inside, the chilled air biting through her coat. Steel cabinets lined the walls, some labeled in black marker, others with faded barcodes — “UNCLAIMED – 2007,” “OB-EX/HC-LUNG,” “PARTIAL TISSUE / TOX-SERIES A.” She moved through the aisles until she found it — Drawer 17-B. It opened with a hiss, revealing what remained of Patient X: a fragment of spinal bone, two preserved molars, and a jar labeled “OrgMod-V3.2/NF.” This wasn’t a morgue drawer. It was a ledger of what had been taken — and what had been tried.
Ayaan plugged the decrypted hard drive into his laptop, the screen filling with dated interface windows and folders titled “Psy-Resistance Trials,” “Gene Drift,” “Neural Override.” Each folder contained clinical videos — one showed a sedated man flinching involuntarily while synthetic nerve agents were injected into his spine. Another showed a woman, eyes rolled back, screaming as her neural responses flatlined. Ira watched in silent horror. The voice conducting the procedures wasn’t Tiwari’s. It was calm. Measured. Familiar. She increased the volume.
“Subject unresponsive. Proceeding to cortical strip harvesting. Administer Compound A0-24 at 80cc.”
It was Dr. Sameera Sethi — former department head of Neuropathology. Deceased in 2012 in an alleged car accident. But this video was from 2013.
That was the final fracture.
Ira and Ayaan dug deeper, pulling personnel files from old medical archives. Sameera had signed over dozens of “informed consent” documents on behalf of patients in Ward 44 — all declared criminally insane and unfit for trial. Most had no family. No identification. Just numbers. Names erased. The government contracts funding these trials came through a shell NGO: “Sanjeevani Regenerative Trust,” fronted by a pharma giant now absorbed into an international biotech firm. Their headquarters? London. Ira finally understood. This wasn’t just rogue research. This was export-grade experimentation. Clinical horrors packaged as intellectual property. The dead were being turned into patents.
Late that night, Ayaan received a message on an encrypted loop. A single PDF. “Internal Audit Log – MORTALIS.” Inside were references to shipments: “Tissue Vol: 40kg – Dest: Cambridge – Clearance: PMRO/NMO-S-03.” Signed by someone named “V.K. Raman.” Ira’s hands trembled. Raman was now the Chief Health Policy Advisor. The man shaking hands with global CEOs on primetime news. The rot hadn’t just festered in the basements of AIIMS — it had climbed into the veins of the nation.
Ira stared at the final image on the hard drive — a coronal CT scan of a brain with unnatural growth in the amygdala. The label said “Test Subject: N.K.” She knew that name. Niharika Kashyap. Her best friend. Her file had been switched, her death scripted, her identity recycled. She had been Patient X all along. And the wound — the one that never healed — had a name, a face, and a cry that still echoed. Ira closed the file. It was time to burn the ledger. Or bleed the whole system dry.
10
The corridor outside the AIIMS mortuary was unusually silent for a Tuesday morning. News vans still camped near the gate, waiting for an official statement that never came. Inside, Dr. Ira Bhaskar stood over the final autopsy table, her gloves stained, her expression resolute. On the slab lay the exhumed body of Neeraj Singh, the businessman whose death had kickstarted the series of cases. The body had seemed unremarkable until Ira noticed something under the dermis behind his left ear—a tiny incision with scar tissue not listed in the original report. She carefully probed and pulled out a microtransmitter, no larger than a fingernail. The same frequency tag matched the one she’d found buried in Dr. Krishnan’s office drawer. It wasn’t a coincidence. Someone had planted the device, and whoever monitored it knew Krishnan had discovered it. That’s why he had to die.
Before she could analyze the device further, the power flickered. Then, a sudden creak came from the adjoining chamber. Ira tensed, grabbing the scalpel. Footsteps. Calm, deliberate. And then he emerged—Dr. Sameer Walia, her colleague from toxicology, calm as ever, holding a small metal case. “Ira,” he said, almost sadly, “You should’ve left it alone.” He revealed the contents of the case—vials of custom-engineered toxins, undetectable by conventional autopsy techniques. “This was never about the girl in the morgue. It was about the network Neeraj Singh was part of. Human trafficking. Drugs. Krishnan found a way to trace the ring. That transmitter recorded conversations, files… too much. We were told to contain the fallout. You weren’t supposed to dig this deep.” Ira backed away, adrenaline sharp in her veins. “So you killed him? Your own mentor?” Sameer didn’t flinch. “It was necessary. He refused to stop.”
Outside, sirens wailed—louder, closer. Ira had triggered a silent alarm in the lab ten minutes ago. She knew she might not survive long enough to explain. As Sameer advanced, she threw the metal tray at his arm, cutting his wrist. He dropped the case. A scuffle broke out—shards of glass, scalpel slashes, blood on tile. But Ira was faster. She jabbed the empty syringe from the table into his neck, a momentary bluff that startled him long enough for security to storm in. He was restrained. She collapsed in the corner, trembling. Hours later, in a press briefing, Ira revealed everything—the trafficking link, the autopsy cover-ups, and Sameer’s confession. Dr. Krishnan’s death, once labeled a stroke, was now officially ruled homicide by poisoning. The transmitter and files were handed to CBI. AIIMS saw a sweeping internal investigation. And Dr. Ira Bhaskar, though haunted, continued her work—quietly, persistently, her mentor’s words echoing in her mind: “The dead don’t lie. We only need to learn to listen.”
End
