Ananya D’Souza
Part 1 — The Locked Flat
The rain had fallen hard the night before, and the grey morning light was doing little to scrub the city clean. Mumbai was damp, impatient, and hungover. Detective Inspector Reeva Kale lit her third cigarette of the morning as she stepped out of her beat-up white Mahindra Thar, ignoring the security guard trying to catch her attention. She hated apartment towers—too many floors, too many alibis. This one was worse: a posh building in Andheri West with glass balconies and silent lifts. Too clean to be honest.
The call had come at 4:47 a.m. A woman’s body found in Flat 7B of Mayflower Heights. No sign of forced entry. No witnesses. No CCTV facing the door. The victim’s name was Naina Verma, a 35-year-old freelance editor. Lived alone. Quiet, paid rent on time, didn’t entertain visitors. All of this Reeva learned within the first two minutes of entering the building.
“What’s the time of death?” Reeva asked the medical examiner, who stood beside the covered body like a nervous undertaker.
“Between 1 and 2 a.m.,” he said. “Blunt trauma to the back of the head. Single blow.”
Reeva pulled back the white sheet. Naina’s face was oddly peaceful, lips parted slightly, as if caught in mid-sentence. Blood had dried into her thick black hair. There were no drag marks, no struggle. She hadn’t even gotten up from her chair.
The flat itself was a neat one-bedroom, filled with books, a French press on the counter, and a laptop still open to a Word document titled “Untitled Manuscript.” There was something eerie about how nothing was out of place—except the woman sitting dead in the middle of it.
“No sign of entry. So either she knew her killer,” Reeva said, turning slowly, “or the killer had a key.”
“Locked from the inside,” added Constable Mahesh, stepping in with his notepad. “Double lock engaged. Door was broken in by the society’s plumber after the neighbor noticed she hadn’t picked up her milk packet.”
“Anyone check the windows?” Reeva asked.
“All locked. No balconies adjacent. Seventh floor.”
Reeva nodded and crouched beside the laptop. Her fingers hovered, then she tapped the space bar. The screen blinked to life. Last edited at 1:03 a.m. Three minutes before time of death. She scrolled up. It was a strange story—a woman trapped in a tower, unable to sleep, hearing footsteps at night. Fiction, but maybe not.
“Get a copy of this. Don’t close it yet,” she said, turning to the tech officer. “And get me the visitor log from security.”
“There’s something else,” Mahesh said. “She filed a police complaint three days ago.”
Reeva raised her eyebrows.
“Said someone had been calling her from unknown numbers. Never speaking. Just breathing. She reported it at Versova station.”
That was a surprise. It hadn’t shown up in the report. She took out her phone and dialed the inspector at Versova. Two minutes later, she had a photo of the complaint on her screen. Dated 30 June. A standard nuisance call complaint. The number used was untraceable—burner SIMs, most likely. Reeva stared at the photo of the document for a long moment. Then she looked back at the dead woman.
“She was scared. She knew something,” she muttered. “And no one took it seriously.”
Mahesh was flipping through a slim green file. “Society log has no visitors for her flat since last Monday. That’s five days. She hadn’t ordered food delivery either. Last was a Swiggy order of pasta four nights ago. Nothing after that.”
“No help from the dead,” Reeva said quietly. “Let’s talk to the living.”
The neighbor was an old man named Mr. Pinto, a retired Navy officer. He spoke with the careful slowness of someone who knew the value of silence.
“She was polite. Quiet. Used to water the plants in the corridor. But the last few days… she looked… anxious. Like someone watching their own shadow.”
“Did she tell you anything?”
“She once said something strange,” Pinto said, rubbing his chin. “Said if something happened to her, the story would tell the truth.”
“The story?”
“She pointed to her laptop. Said it was all there. I thought she was talking about fiction. I didn’t ask more.”
Reeva didn’t speak for a moment. Then: “Did you hear anything last night?”
“No. But my hearing isn’t what it used to be. The walls are thick here. And the rain was loud.”
Back at the station, Reeva set the laptop on the evidence table and opened the document. The manuscript ran about forty pages. It wasn’t brilliant, but there was something urgent in the way it was written—raw, almost panicked.
She began reading.
It was about a woman named Neelima who moved into a high-rise after a breakup. She starts getting phone calls. No one speaks. She hears footsteps at night. Then she finds notes slipped under her door: You’re being watched. She goes to the police. They dismiss her. One night, the power goes out. She thinks she sees someone in the mirror behind her. Then the manuscript ends—abruptly, mid-sentence: He was behind me when—
Reeva frowned. That was exactly where the timestamp ended—1:03 a.m.
“She was writing about herself,” she whispered. “She knew she was going to die.”
But fiction rarely predicted fact this well. Unless it wasn’t fiction.
That night, Reeva drove back to the apartment. Alone. No sirens. No uniformed backup. The flat had been sealed, but she had the keys now. She stood in the doorway for a long moment, staring at the bloodstained chair, the blinking cursor on the screen, the quiet hum of the fridge.
She locked the door behind her and sat in the same chair where Naina had died.
There was something off in the silence. A hush that felt too staged. She turned her head slowly.
In the mirror on the side cabinet—placed at a strange angle—she thought she saw movement.
Reeva stood up slowly. Walked to the mirror. Nothing behind her.
But taped to the back of the cabinet, just visible if you bent low, was a small yellow post-it.
One word written in messy ink:
“RUN.”
She didn’t.
She smiled instead.
“Whoever you are,” she said softly to the empty room, “you’re not done killing yet. But neither am I.”
She walked out, shutting the door behind her as gently as if the flat were still alive.
Part 2 — Footsteps in Fiction
Detective Reeva Kale didn’t believe in coincidences—not the kind that appeared in the form of a terrified woman writing a mirror-image of her own death three minutes before her skull was shattered. She replayed the scene in her head while sipping stale coffee at the station canteen the next morning. The yellow sticky note with the word RUN now lay sealed in a ziplock, its back smudged with adhesive residue and faint fingerprints. Partial prints—no match in the system.
The laptop had been imaged, the manuscript backed up, and a forensic tech named Pratik had been assigned to check metadata. He was lean, wore metal band T-shirts under his uniform sweater, and spoke as if perpetually in a hurry.
“She saved the manuscript every ten minutes like clockwork. Autosave was on. Last save, 1:03 a.m. No sign of external edits, no keylog software, no remote access. This wasn’t hacked.”
Reeva leaned in. “What about the mirror?”
“Found trace prints. Not hers. Too smudged to ID, but someone touched it recently. Maybe held the edge or repositioned it.”
That was what bothered Reeva. The mirror wasn’t placed naturally—it was angled toward the chair. Naina’s chair. Positioned not to reflect herself, but whoever stood behind her.
A staging.
Reeva circled the mirror in her mind again. Then something else clicked.
“She knew.”
“She?” Pratik asked.
“Naina. She knew someone was behind her.”
“So she left the note?”
“Possibly. Or maybe… someone else did. After.”
A shiver crawled up Reeva’s spine. She hated cases that felt like puzzles with missing pieces.
The next lead came from a fluke. Mahesh had been combing through deleted files on Naina’s phone and found a voice recording from four days before her death. Titled “test 1.” Just under 30 seconds. At first it sounded like ambient noise—fans, a distant honk, muffled silence. Then at 0:22, there was a whisper. Barely audible, as if someone exhaled into the phone.
A single word: “Don’t.”
They cleaned the audio. No match. Gender unclear. Pitch distorted.
But Reeva had heard something else. In the background, faint and rhythmic.
Footsteps.
“Naina was recording her own fear,” she murmured. “She was preparing.”
“For what?” Mahesh asked.
“For the ending.”
At noon, Reeva visited Versova Police Station. The duty officer remembered Naina.
“Slim woman, quiet voice. She came in twice. First on 20 June, then again on 30th. Both times, same complaint—calls from unknown numbers. Just breathing. Said someone was watching her.”
“Was the number traced?”
“No. Burner SIMs. Changed each time.”
“CCTV from the second visit?”
“We have it. Want me to pull it?”
Ten minutes later, Reeva was watching Naina walk into the station, nervously clutching her bag. She sat on the bench, fiddled with her phone, checked behind her three times. Paranoid—but not unreasonable.
Then, as the timestamp hit 14:42:18, a man entered the frame. Wearing a grey hoodie and a black cap, face turned away from the camera. He walked past her slowly—paused for half a second near her bench—then exited.
“Who is that?”
“No clue. No one filed a report that day. We didn’t notice.”
Reeva replayed the frame. The man wasn’t loitering. He was confirming.
That she had gone to the police.
By evening, Reeva was cross-referencing every tenant in Mayflower Heights. The building’s management shared rental records. Among them was a new tenant in Flat 6C—directly one floor below Naina—who had moved in just ten days ago.
Name: Aarav Bendre. Paid cash. No references listed. ID was a voter card from Nagpur.
“Pull him in,” she told Mahesh. “Now.”
Aarav Bendre was lean, well-dressed, and disturbingly calm. He sat in the interview room sipping water as if this were a routine passport verification.
“You moved into 6C two weeks ago,” Reeva began. “Did you know your upstairs neighbor, Naina Verma?”
“No. I never met her.”
“Did you hear anything strange the night of July 3rd?”
“Rain,” he said blandly. “Nothing else.”
“You weren’t out of your flat?”
“No. I had a fever. Slept early.”
Reeva slid a photo across the table. “This man walked past Naina at Versova station. Look familiar?”
Aarav glanced once, then shrugged. “That’s not me.”
“But you’re wearing that same hoodie.”
“It’s a popular brand. You can check. Half of Mumbai owns one.”
Reeva leaned closer. “You know what I think? I think you watched her. You studied her routine. I think you entered her flat with a key. I think you killed her while she was writing about you.”
He smiled faintly. “And I think you’ve read too many crime novels, Inspector.”
Reeva stood. “You’re not leaving town. Not without informing us.”
That night, Reeva sat in her car outside Mayflower Heights, watching the windows glow like squares of silent television. 6C was dark.
She lit a cigarette, then paused. Her phone buzzed.
Unknown number.
She answered. Silence.
Then—
“You’re being watched.”
Click.
She froze.
That was the line from Naina’s story.
Reeva dropped the cigarette. The flame snuffed out in a puddle.
She drove back to the station in silence, her mind racing. It wasn’t just Naina’s story. It was still playing out.
The next morning, another body was found.
A man. Mid-30s. Lying on the cement floor of an abandoned bungalow in Jogeshwari. No wallet. No ID. Head smashed. Cause of death: blunt force trauma.
But in his clenched hand was a yellow post-it.
Two words this time:
“Your turn.”
Back at the station, Reeva studied the autopsy photos. The body had no fingerprints—burned off. Even the face had been partially destroyed. A ghost with no name. But the note was intact.
She cross-checked the victim’s clothing tags. Imported shirt from Turkey. Uncommon in Mumbai. She asked the customs unit for recent shipments. One name surfaced.
Aarav Bendre.
Only now, the real Aarav Bendre had been living in Barcelona for two years.
Which meant the man in 6C wasn’t Aarav.
He was a ghost in a borrowed name.
Reeva stood still for a moment, the weight of it sinking in.
She picked up her phone and dialed Mahesh.
“Seal Flat 6C now. And bring me everything. Hard drives. Trash. Every damn nail.”
“And you?” Mahesh asked.
“I’m going to talk to the only person who saw through fiction.”
“Who?”
“Mr. Pinto.”
But by the time she reached the building again, Mr. Pinto was gone.
His door was ajar. His living room empty.
On the centre table, a single item lay waiting for her.
Another yellow note.
This one said:
“Read till the end.”
And on top of it sat Naina’s manuscript—her laptop, wiped clean, overwritten with a new file.
Title: The Quiet Exit.
Reeva stared at it.
Someone was still writing the story.
And now it had a new main character.
Her.
Part 3 — Edits and Echoes
Reeva Kale didn’t open the file right away. She stared at the laptop, sitting like a coiled trap on Mr. Pinto’s coffee table, the words The Quiet Exit glowing faintly on the screen. Around her, the apartment was untouched. No sign of a struggle. No blood. No indication of where the old man had gone—just his slippers neatly placed by the door and a cup of untouched Darjeeling tea gone cold on the side table.
She reached into her coat and withdrew a small flash drive. Plugging it into the laptop, she copied the file to a secure partition before touching anything. If this was bait, she would take the teeth without getting bitten.
The file opened slowly. At the top, a simple title:
THE QUIET EXIT
by N.V.
But it wasn’t written by Naina Verma.
The voice was different.
Sharper. Calculated. Less emotional. And the first line turned Reeva’s blood cold.
“Detective Inspector Reeva Kale stepped into the apartment, unaware she was the next chapter in the story she thought she was writing.”
Reeva scrolled.
The story described her actions in uncanny detail—arriving alone, refusing backup, copying the file, even thinking twice before sitting in Pinto’s chair. Her exact thoughts. Her gestures. The click of her flash drive.
There was only one way someone could’ve known all that.
Someone was watching her.
Right now.
Reeva stood suddenly, heart hammering. She scanned the room, looked toward the air vents, the curtains, the mirror above the sideboard—angled just like the one in Naina’s flat.
She turned toward it slowly.
There, in the bottom corner of the mirror’s wood panel, she spotted it: a pinhole lens, no bigger than a match head.
A hidden camera.
She walked straight toward it and yanked the mirror from the wall. Behind it, taped to the wall, was a tiny Wi-Fi-enabled camera module. Powered and active.
“Mahesh,” she said into her phone. “Get here with Cyber Cell now. We have live surveillance. Someone is writing our story in real time.”
An hour later, the camera had been traced to a nearby server relay hidden inside a defunct water tank on the roof of the adjacent building. Tech teams descended like vultures. The relay had been rigged with signal-splitting tech—sophisticated, not local. The signal was being bounced through a VPN into four countries.
“No way to trace it directly,” Pratik muttered. “This is professional. Beyond stalker stuff. More like intelligence agency level. Someone’s been watching her—and us—for weeks.”
“Who is the ‘us’?” Reeva asked.
“That’s the thing,” he replied. “I think it’s only you now.”
Back at the station, Mahesh reported new information.
“I dug deeper into Naina’s records. Turns out she wasn’t just a freelance editor. She used to work full-time for a small investigative magazine five years ago—The Public File. Shut down after legal threats. She was working on a piece back then. Never published.”
“What was it about?” Reeva asked.
Mahesh held up a slim brown folder. “A missing persons case. Three disappearances. All women. Same pattern. All between 2017 and 2019.”
He laid out the photos. All three were in their 30s. Educated. Lived alone. No family. All disappeared from different cities—Pune, Nashik, and Nagpur.
“Naina was connecting the dots,” Reeva said slowly.
Mahesh nodded. “And then she quit journalism. Vanished into freelance work. Maybe someone warned her off.”
“Or she got too close to the truth.”
Reeva looked down at the case folder. Each woman’s photo stared back in silent accusation. She flipped through the file until she found one name that froze her breath.
Maya Rao. Age 34. Pune. Disappeared in 2018.
Reeva’s former batchmate.
She hadn’t thought of Maya in years.
Later that night, Reeva sat alone in her flat, nursing an untouched glass of whiskey. She opened Naina’s manuscript again—The Quiet Exit. This time, she began searching for embedded data.
In the footer of every page, almost invisible, was a watermark:
“04-19-34–NV–MAYA–LINE 28”
A code. A date? Coordinates?
She opened the 28th line of the manuscript on page 4:
“The woman knew she wouldn’t survive the night. But if she vanished, someone had to inherit the story.”
Reeva sat back slowly.
It wasn’t a manuscript.
It was a will.
The next morning, a fourth body surfaced.
Female. Roughly 35. Found in an abandoned house near Kalyan. Teeth smashed. Fingerprints burned.
Another post-it beside the body. This one said:
“You missed one.”
It was addressed to Reeva.
She reached the scene and crouched beside the corpse. Her gut twisted. She recognized the shoes.
Mr. Pinto had lied.
There was no “Pinto.”
The old man was a disguise.
This—this was the man she had seen in the CCTV with Naina.
He’d faked being a neighbor to monitor her.
And now he was dead.
Or silenced.
“Someone’s cleaning up,” Reeva muttered. “Every loose end.”
“Or,” Mahesh said, “someone else is playing god.”
Back at the station, a parcel had arrived. No name. Just her badge number on the front.
Inside: a fountain pen. And a folded sheet.
The note said:
“The story ends when you write the last word. Until then, you live. Choose wisely.”
Reeva held the pen like a relic. It was old. Gold nib. The kind people don’t use anymore.
She turned it over.
Etched on the side: Property of Maya Rao.
She closed her eyes.
Someone was orchestrating this from the shadows—using stories as maps. Victims as chapters. Witnesses as characters. And Reeva as the narrator.
The only way to stop it was to take control of the narrative.
“Mahesh,” she said quietly, “no more defense. We’re going on the offensive.”
He raised an eyebrow. “How?”
“By writing a new ending.”
That night, Reeva returned to Naina’s apartment one last time.
She sat in the same chair. Lit a cigarette. Placed the pen beside the manuscript.
Then opened a fresh document.
She titled it:
“Exit Strategy.”
And she began to type—
“The killer had grown confident, feeding on fear and fiction. But he forgot that even stories bite back. That every quiet exit leaves a louder return.”
Behind her, the mirror remained angled.
Watching.
But this time, Reeva was watching back.
Part 4 — Exit Strategy
The cursor blinked like a heartbeat, steady and unsentimental. Reeva’s fingers hovered over the keyboard as she crafted each line like a weapon. She wasn’t just writing a story—she was baiting a predator. Every word was a deliberate invitation, a breadcrumb leading toward a trap she hadn’t fully designed yet, but trusted instinct to finish. She didn’t know if the killer was reading in real time, but she was certain of one thing—he was watching.
The apartment smelled faintly of jasmine and iron. The bloodstain on the chair had faded after forensic scrubbing, but Reeva still saw it every time she looked down. She kept writing.
“She waited in the dark, knowing the killer believed she’d be afraid. But fear, she had learned, was a kind of signal. A map. One she was ready to follow backwards.”
She saved the document under the name Chapter Five and closed the laptop. It was nearly midnight.
She placed a fresh sticky note on the mirror.
“I’m not the story. I’m the author.”
Then she walked out, leaving the door ajar.
Two hours later, a silent figure slipped into the apartment.
He moved like breath through fog—soft-soled shoes, black gloves, face hidden beneath a scarf and cap. He scanned the space, barely touching anything. His eyes landed on the laptop. He moved toward it. Sat in the chair, just like Naina had. Just like Reeva.
But the screen didn’t show words.
It showed his own face.
Four different angles. Real-time feeds. Hidden cameras Reeva had placed just hours before.
And then the screen turned black.
Text appeared:
“Smile. You’re finally in the story.”
Before he could react, the door burst open.
Reeva. Mahesh. Two cyber officers.
Guns raised. Cameras rolling.
He froze.
“Hello again,” Reeva said, her voice hard. “We’ll start with your real name.”
His name was Raghav Deshpande.
But that wasn’t his only name. Over the last six years, he’d gone by Vikram Mehta, Sumit Nair, Farooq Khan, and sometimes, nothing at all. No digital trail. No fixed address. Just a floating ghost, operating under layers of fake IDs and burner devices.
Under interrogation, Raghav said very little. No lawyer. No emotion. He stared at the table as if already beyond consequence.
“You’re not some vigilante,” Reeva told him. “You’re a control addict with a superiority complex. You stalked women who lived alone. Watched them for months. Wrote their fear into stories. Then killed them when they got too close.”
Raghav only smirked.
“Why leave the notes?” Mahesh asked. “Why taunt us?”
“No one reads anymore,” he said simply. “Unless you make them afraid.”
Reeva leaned in. “You wrote Naina’s story, didn’t you? Fed her just enough terror to keep her spiraling. Left her thinking she was imagining things. Then killed her exactly how she predicted.”
“I didn’t kill her,” Raghav said flatly.
Reeva paused. “What?”
“She wasn’t supposed to die that night. I only watched. Someone else was there.”
She narrowed her eyes. “Who?”
He shrugged. “Never saw them. But I know this: the manuscript on her laptop after she died wasn’t mine.”
Reeva’s blood chilled.
There was another player.
Back at headquarters, Reeva poured through the forensic report again. The yellow sticky notes—handwritten, all in the same slanted script—didn’t match Raghav’s penmanship. Even his fingerprints weren’t on the first note: RUN.
She checked the CCTV feeds from Mayflower Heights, re-scanning the timeframe around Naina’s death. Raghav’s apartment showed no movement.
So he was telling the truth.
He was a predator.
But not the killer.
She reopened The Quiet Exit on the forensic copy.
At the very end, someone had added a line that hadn’t been there before.
“Don’t trust the ones who arrive last. They’re always rewriting the ending.”
Reeva blinked. The timestamp on the edit was three hours ago.
Long after Raghav had been arrested.
“How the hell—?” she muttered.
Mahesh entered, holding a tablet. “We traced another Wi-Fi node embedded in the signal relay from that rooftop tank. The source is still active. It’s inside our network.”
Reeva stared at him. “You’re saying the killer is accessing our system?”
“Not just accessing. He’s inside it.”
At 3 a.m., a fire broke out at the Cyber Cell records room.
Reeva and Mahesh arrived as black smoke poured from the second floor. Hard drives melted. Logs lost.
Inside the smoldering mess, one item had been untouched. Placed neatly on a still-warm desk.
A fountain pen.
Maya Rao’s.
Reeva grabbed it with gloved hands. There was no note this time.
Only silence.
She didn’t sleep.
Instead, she returned to her flat and stared at the wall of evidence she’d created. Strings connecting names, photos, sticky notes, manuscript excerpts, and now—Raghav Deshpande’s files.
All of it was circling a single idea:
Someone was writing this story as it happened.
But it wasn’t Raghav.
And it wasn’t just about killing.
It was about authorship.
Who gets to write the truth. Who edits memory. Who decides when a story ends.
She looked again at Maya Rao’s old fountain pen.
An idea sparked.
She called Pratik.
“Can you trace ownership of this pen?”
“It’s a pen, ma’am. Not a smartphone.”
“But if someone gifted it—sold it—maybe there’s a record.”
Pratik sighed. “I can try.”
“Good. Also—dig up everything on The Public File. Staff lists. Editors. Anonymous contributors. Anyone who worked with Maya and Naina.”
She hung up and finally let her body collapse onto the couch. It had been four days since Naina’s death. Four bodies. Three different hands, possibly.
But one storyteller.
And whoever it was, they hadn’t written the final chapter yet.
Just before dawn, Reeva received a message on her personal email.
No sender.
No subject.
Just a file attachment: LastChapter.docx
She opened it slowly.
The document was blank.
Except for one sentence at the bottom:
“Detective Kale knew the killer was in the same building. She just didn’t know which floor.”
Her phone buzzed.
Another email.
A floorplan of Mayflower Heights.
With a red dot on Flat 9A.
Two floors above Naina’s.
She called Mahesh.
“No backup,” she said. “Just you and me. And come quiet.”
Twenty minutes later, they stood outside Flat 9A.
No sounds. Curtains drawn. Light beneath the door.
Reeva knocked once.
No answer.
She signaled Mahesh. He drew his weapon.
Reeva tried the handle.
Unlocked.
She pushed the door open slowly—
And froze.
The flat was… empty.
No furniture. No residents. Just a single table in the center.
On it, a laptop.
Open.
Streaming live footage.
Of Reeva and Mahesh, standing in the room.
From above.
She looked up at the ceiling—
A tiny camera blinked once.
Then cut to black.
A new message popped up on the screen.
“Too slow.”
She stepped back.
On the table, a new post-it fluttered in the air conditioner’s breeze.
It read:
“Rewrite begins. You’re the draft now.”
Part 5 — The Draft
The message glowed on the laptop screen like a scar across a dark sky: “Rewrite begins. You’re the draft now.” Reeva’s spine stiffened, instinct urging her to check every corner of the flat. Mahesh swept the left room, weapon raised. Reeva moved silently toward the kitchen. Nothing. Not even a kettle or spoon. It wasn’t just empty—it was sterilized. No DNA, no fingerprints, no furniture. The perfect narrative vacuum.
Back in the main room, Mahesh examined the laptop. “It’s a dummy unit. No hard drive. Remote shell access only. The screen went black the moment we entered. This wasn’t meant to be a trap.”
Reeva nodded. “It’s a message.”
“He knew we’d come. Knew we’d follow the red dot.”
“And still didn’t stop us,” Reeva muttered. “He wanted us to find it.”
She looked again at the sticky note. The word draft lingered in her mind like a whisper. It wasn’t just a threat—it was a concept. She wasn’t a character in this game anymore. She was raw material. Malleable. Rewriteable.
“Mahesh, seal the building again,” she said. “Interview every single resident. Anyone who moved in within the last six months, get their ID verified again. And I want every old staff member re-checked—cleaners, plumbers, lift maintenance, courier boys. Everyone.”
“And you?”
Reeva stared at the dead screen, her reflection fractured by the glare.
“I’m going back to Maya.”
Later that morning, Reeva drove to Pune.
It had been years since she’d visited the campus of her IPS training. Maya had been one of the brightest—sharp, intuitive, a quiet observer who always carried a notebook. But after graduation, she’d surprised everyone by leaving the force. Said she wanted to tell stories instead of enforce rules.
Maya’s parents still lived in the city. When Reeva rang the bell, it was Maya’s mother who opened the door, her eyes dimmed with time.
“You were her friend,” she said after a long pause.
“I was.”
“She said you’d come. One day.”
That stopped Reeva cold.
“She said that?”
The older woman nodded and disappeared into a back room. She returned with a thin diary wrapped in faded red silk. “She told me not to open this. Only to give it to the woman who came asking about the exit. I never understood what it meant.”
Reeva took it with shaking hands.
Inside, in Maya’s handwriting, was a single line on the first page:
“If I disappear, don’t look for my body. Look for the footnotes.”
The diary wasn’t about Maya’s life.
It was about her last investigation.
She’d been working on a case of fabricated identities being used to manipulate digital narratives—online smear campaigns, fake social media personas, even ghostwritten articles tied to real crimes. What Maya had uncovered was shocking: a small but powerful network of individuals operating as “ghost authors”—people who didn’t just write fiction, but who lived inside it.
They used stories to shape fear. Influence emotion. Rewrite truth.
And central to this network was a man referred to only as “The Editor.”
No name. No photo. Just an M.O.
He would find someone—usually a woman with an unstable past or isolated lifestyle. Study her. Leak threats. Create fiction around her until reality blurred. And when she broke—through paranoia, suicide, or silence—he’d vanish, leaving only manuscript fragments behind. As if her life had been a story completed.
Reeva flipped to the last page.
There, taped in the corner, was a single post-it.
“He watches those who ask too many questions. Write nothing down. Remember everything.”
That night, Reeva stared at the crime board in her flat. Maya. Naina. The three earlier women. The fake Pinto. Raghav. And now—this Editor.
Every one of them was part of a larger pattern.
And if Maya was right, the Editor wasn’t just staging crimes—he was erasing the truth through narrative.
Like an author killing off characters he no longer needed.
She stood in the middle of the room and said aloud, “I’m done following your script.”
She picked up her phone and called Pratik. “Check the hard drive image of Naina’s laptop again. Hidden partitions, encrypted folders, anything that didn’t show up the first time.”
“Already on it,” Pratik said. “Actually, you’re going to want to see what I just found.”
By 11 p.m., Reeva was back at the cyber lab.
Pratik spun the monitor toward her.
“There was a hidden partition under a decoy Word folder. Encrypted, but basic stuff. Inside—this.”
He clicked.
A video played.
It was Naina. Sitting at her desk. Talking to the camera.
“I don’t know if this will be found,” she said, voice trembling, “but I need to leave a trace. There’s someone watching me. Not just physically. Narratively. I know how that sounds. But it’s like… someone is rewriting my life. Everything I do shows up in the story I’m writing—even before I write it.”
She laughed nervously. “The man who calls—he said he edits stories. That if I stop writing, he’ll finish the draft himself. I thought he was crazy. But now… the story’s ahead of me. I dreamed of things I hadn’t written yet. My manuscript ends with my death.”
She leaned closer.
“If I die, the story didn’t kill me. He did. And he’s not done. He’s watching her next.”
Reeva froze.
“She didn’t say your name,” Pratik whispered.
“She didn’t need to,” Reeva said. “He chose me before she died.”
At 2 a.m., her apartment lights flickered.
Then went out.
The emergency bulb didn’t come on.
Reeva reached for her torch.
It didn’t light.
Her phone screen glowed once. Then went black.
A chill ran through her. Not fear—confirmation.
She stepped toward the window and looked out.
Across the building, one apartment was lit.
Flat 7B.
Naina’s apartment.
A single lamp in the corner.
And a figure in the chair.
Not moving.
Reeva grabbed her gun.
Didn’t wait for backup.
She crossed the road.
Unlocked the front door with the police master key.
Stepped inside.
And stopped.
The apartment was exactly as it had been.
Except the chair was turned.
Facing the mirror.
And in it—no reflection.
Only another sticky note, pressed gently against the glass.
“Chapters end. But echoes don’t.”
She turned slowly—gun raised.
But no one was there.
Just silence.
And the faint, unmistakable sound of typing.
From somewhere upstairs.
Part 6 — The Typing Upstairs
The sound was faint at first. A soft, rhythmic clack of keys, deliberate and almost elegant. Not the frantic pounding of a writer in panic, but the calm procession of someone who knew exactly what they were doing. Reeva’s breath slowed. Every instinct screamed at her to retreat, to wait for backup, to not walk into the final act of a story she hadn’t written. But that was the point, wasn’t it? It had never been her story. Not really.
Until now.
She left Naina’s apartment without touching anything. The sticky note on the mirror remained where it was, an echo in yellow ink: Chapters end. But echoes don’t. Reeva took the stairs two at a time, her weapon drawn, eyes scanning the silence. The sound of typing grew louder as she ascended. She didn’t know which flat it was yet, but the rhythm was unmistakable.
Seventh floor. Eighth. The lights on the ninth-floor corridor were flickering, almost theatrically. She moved slowly. There were only four flats on this floor: 9A, 9B, 9C, and 9D. They were all supposed to be empty. According to building records, none had registered tenants.
But one had a thin line of light under the door.
9C.
She crouched beside the door, listening.
Click. Click. Click-click. Pause. Click.
The pattern was hypnotic. She checked the handle—unlocked.
With a steady breath, Reeva pushed it open.
The room was dim. A desk lamp glowed like an island in the dark, illuminating a desk with a sleek silver laptop, a neat stack of post-its, and an old, ornate fountain pen—the same one Maya Rao had once owned. The sound of typing came from the laptop, even though no hands touched the keys. The keys moved on their own.
Reeva blinked. Looked closer.
A small motorized mechanism—a typing automaton, rigged to the keyboard. Built to simulate keystrokes. A trick.
She stepped into the room.
“Don’t move,” came a voice behind her.
She froze.
The door closed with a soft click.
A man stepped from the shadows, wearing a black turtleneck and jeans. Mid-40s, salt-and-pepper beard, sharp eyes behind steel-rimmed glasses. Not intimidating in stature, but something in his gaze chilled her. Calm. Detached. Observant.
“You’re earlier than expected,” he said.
“You’re the Editor.”
“I prefer the term Architect. Editors fix. I create.”
She kept her weapon raised. “Hands where I can see them.”
He complied slowly, raising both hands, almost amused.
“I’m not here to fight, Inspector Kale. That would be… undignified.”
“Where’s Mr. Pinto?”
He smiled. “He was never real. Just a mask. A test.”
“And Raghav?”
“An early draft. A failed one.”
“You killed Maya Rao.”
“No,” he said, stepping closer. “Maya wrote her own ending. That was her choice. I only offered the prompt.”
“You destroyed lives.”
“I gave them purpose. You think they mattered before the story? Isolated, invisible, fading women in a city that doesn’t even know its neighbors’ names? I made them unforgettable.”
“You made them victims.”
“I made them narratives. And now, here you are—chapter six. The reluctant heroine. Smarter than the rest. Persistent. But not immune.”
Reeva’s grip tightened on the gun. “Why me?”
“Because you resist the script. You improvise. That’s rare.”
“You think this is a performance?”
“No,” he said, almost gently. “It’s literature. Death isn’t the end, Reeva. It’s punctuation.”
She stepped forward. “You’re under arrest.”
He tilted his head. “You’ll never prove it. No records. No fingerprints. No real name. The people I’ve become don’t exist anymore.”
“We’ll see about that.”
He smiled again. “Would you like to see how it ends?”
She didn’t answer.
He gestured toward the laptop. “Go on. Read it. You’ve earned the final paragraph.”
Against better judgment, Reeva glanced at the screen.
A document was open. Titled: “Exit Strategy – Final Revision”
The last lines read:
“She raised her gun. But her hands trembled. She wasn’t afraid—just tired. Tired of chasing ghosts in mirrors. The man before her wasn’t a killer. He was a mirror, too. A reflection of everything she had run from. In the end, the bullet never left the chamber.”
Reeva’s eyes flicked to the corner of the screen—timestamped five minutes ago.
He was still writing. Still crafting.
“Is that how you think it ends?” she asked.
He stepped closer. “No. That’s the version I offered.”
“Then here’s my edit,” Reeva said—and fired.
The sound exploded in the room. He dropped to the floor, a crimson bloom spreading across his shoulder. Not fatal, but enough.
He gasped, laughter mixing with pain. “Unexpected… but poetic.”
Reeva stood over him. “This isn’t your story anymore.”
Later, under arrest and surrounded by Cyber Cell officers, the man still refused to give a name. They found multiple IDs in the flat. None real. All traces led to fabricated pasts—rented identities, fake jobs, dead ends.
His fingerprints didn’t match anyone in the database.
But what they did find was chilling.
Dozens of manuscripts.
Each labeled with a woman’s name.
Each ending in death.
Some had been published anonymously on dark web forums. Others mailed to small publishing houses as “experimental fiction.” Each story mirrored a real-life death or disappearance.
Maya.
Naina.
Others.
The man had turned real lives into serialized fiction. Crime as literature.
He wasn’t alone. In one folder, Reeva found a document titled “List of Contributors.”
It was encrypted. They were working on breaking it.
In the weeks that followed, Reeva testified at preliminary hearings. The man was charged with conspiracy, psychological manipulation, and at least four counts of murder with “narrative intent.” A first-of-its-kind trial.
The media called him The Plot Killer.
Reeva refused interviews.
But one night, a package arrived at her doorstep.
No name. Just her badge number.
Inside was a notebook.
Old. Red. Worn at the edges.
Maya Rao’s handwriting.
A note inside read:
“Some stories don’t end. They just find new authors. If you’re reading this, write better.”
Reeva stared at the final page, where someone—maybe Maya, maybe someone else—had scrawled a sentence:
“Truth is what survives the edits.”
She smiled grimly.
And began to write.
Part 7 — Survivors of the Draft
The courtroom was packed.
Not because the trial had begun—far from it. It was a pre-trial hearing to determine whether the accused could be held in extended custody without a confirmed identity. But that didn’t matter to the public. The story had already taken on a life of its own, coiling through social media with a mix of horror and fascination.
News channels called him The Editor of Death. Others used The Plot Killer, or more grotesquely, Murder by Manuscript. But to Reeva, sitting quietly in the back, flanked by plainclothes officers, he was just a man who had learned how to weaponize anonymity.
He sat in the dock, still nameless. In a crisp navy-blue shirt with a faint ink stain on the pocket, he looked like any middle-aged professor, not the architect of a literary killing spree. His arm was still in a sling from her bullet—she hadn’t aimed to kill, only to end the chapter.
He hadn’t spoken since his arrest. Not to police. Not to lawyers. Not to the judge.
He had, however, written.
Three days after his capture, the police station received an envelope.
Handwritten. No stamp. Just placed on the front desk.
Inside: a story. Titled “Echo Draft.”
It was exactly 1,000 words long.
A fictional retelling of a detective named Reeva Kale who becomes obsessed with a killer who writes stories of his victims. As she hunts him, she begins to doubt reality itself. Dreams and memory blur. She starts seeing her own name in books she never wrote. The final lines?
“She turned the last page, expecting an ending. But found only a mirror. And the reflection wasn’t hers.”
Reeva had read it in silence.
Then burned it.
Back in court, the judge reviewed the evidence: aliases, devices, witness testimony. But with no name, no digital footprint, and no known relatives, the defense argued that holding him indefinitely was unconstitutional. The man’s public defender claimed he suffered from “fictional identity disorder”—a rare dissociative condition in which an individual adopts invented personas so fully they erase their own identity.
“Madness is a method now,” Reeva muttered to Mahesh beside her.
Outside the courthouse, protests grew louder. Some groups claimed the man was a genius—a misunderstood artist using horror as social critique. Others wanted swift death penalty action.
The hearing was adjourned until next week.
The man was escorted back to his high-security cell.
He didn’t speak.
But that night, another envelope was found under Reeva’s windshield wiper.
No camera had captured who left it.
She opened it in her flat with gloves on.
Inside: a single post-it note.
“Rewrite denied. New story forming.”
Below that, a printed photo.
A young woman. Late twenties. Ponytail. Headphones. Waiting at a bus stop.
The back of the photo read:
“DRAFT: Ananya Singh. Bangalore. Page one begins tomorrow.”
Reeva dropped the photo as if it burned her fingers.
She immediately alerted cyber units, forensic teams, and the Bangalore police commissioner. The photo was scanned, analyzed, geo-located.
It had been taken 72 hours ago.
Before The Editor was arrested.
“So he’s not working alone,” Mahesh said.
“He never was,” Reeva replied. “Maya’s notes mentioned ‘contributors.’”
Pratik joined them via secure call. “I dug deeper into the list of manuscripts we recovered. Each one was written in a slightly different style. Same tone, yes—but different keyboards, spacing habits, formatting. It’s subtle, but it suggests multiple writers.”
Reeva sighed. “This isn’t just a killer. It’s a syndicate. A literary death cult.”
“And the man we caught?”
“An editor,” she said. “But not the author.”
Reeva flew to Bangalore the next morning.
She found Ananya Singh in a modest hostel, listening to music and editing a documentary script. She didn’t know she was being watched. Hadn’t noticed the same delivery boy dropping off “mistaken parcels” two days in a row. Hadn’t seen the same man appear in three different locations—once as a jogger, once in a food court, once posing as a bookstall vendor.
But Reeva had.
She stayed close, pulled security footage, confirmed the stalker.
And when the man returned the third time, Reeva was ready.
She tackled him outside the gate.
In his pocket: a USB drive.
Label: “Ananya — Final Draft”
The man, whose name turned out to be Jiten Malhotra, a failed screenwriter from Delhi, cracked within 48 hours.
He admitted to being part of an underground online collective: The Final Page.
A group of writers who believed real life had lost meaning, and only narrative could restore it. They wrote stories in real-time, choosing people as “protagonists,” building dread, chaos, sometimes violence—always pushing for poetic resolution. The deaths were “endings.” The manuscripts, their “contributions to literature.”
Some members were harmless—just voyeurs.
Others… weren’t.
And the man Reeva had arrested?
He was their founder.
Their Editor.
But not their leader.
“The Architect,” Jiten whispered, “was the one who chose who lives or dies. The Editor just made it beautiful.”
For the next two weeks, Reeva worked across four cities.
Five more members of The Final Page were arrested. Most were minor players—message board addicts, ghostwriters, failed novelists lured by promises of “immortality through ink.” All had one thing in common: they treated people as characters.
But the Architect remained a ghost.
No name.
No trace.
Until a seventh envelope arrived.
This time, it was addressed to Reeva’s father—who had died seven years ago.
The return address: Red House Library, Panchgani.
The message inside was just three words:
“Come write me.”
Reeva didn’t tell anyone.
Not Mahesh. Not Pratik. Not the Commissioner.
She packed lightly.
Wore no uniform.
Took no weapon.
Only Maya’s notebook, Naina’s USB, and the fountain pen.
The Red House Library was real.
An abandoned colonial structure once used as a writer’s retreat, now boarded up and listed for demolition. But someone had been using it. Locals reported lights. Shadows. Occasional piano music at night.
No one had dared go in.
Reeva arrived at dusk.
The air smelled of paper, rain, and something older—like forgotten ink.
The front door creaked open.
She stepped inside.
And found rows of desks.
Each with a manuscript.
Each labeled with a name.
She walked slowly past them.
Maya Rao. Naina Verma. Rhea Kapoor. Alia D’Souza.
Dozens of names.
Some she recognized from case files.
Some she didn’t.
And then—her own.
“Reeva Kale — Draft in Progress”
A chair waited before it.
The fountain pen was already there.
Ink still wet.
And the document?
Blank.
Except the title:
“The Last Rewrite.”
She sat.
And began to read the margins.
Someone had already written the first line.
“She arrived, thinking she was the end. But she was only the comma.”
Part 8 — The Last Rewrite
The silence inside the Red House Library wasn’t ordinary silence. It was curated. Measured. The kind of hush only found in places where stories end and others begin. Reeva Kale sat in front of the manuscript bearing her name, hands resting beside the fountain pen that had followed her from crime scenes to confessions. The pages were empty, save for the line in the margin: “She arrived, thinking she was the end. But she was only the comma.”
The chair creaked as she leaned back.
“Subtle,” she muttered, scanning the high wooden rafters, the dust-laced air, the strange stillness that held this place like a breath.
And then she heard it.
Typing.
Again.
Not the mechanical tick-tick of the automaton from Flat 9C—but actual, human typing. Crisp. Confident. Coming from the upper gallery of the library.
She rose silently, pulling Maya’s notebook from her coat and slipping it into her inner pocket. No weapon. Just instinct.
The upper floor was a circular loft overlooking the reading room below. Reeva moved up the creaking stairs one at a time, her eyes catching the flicker of light from a desk lamp near the corner window.
A man sat there.
Typing.
Calmly, fluidly, like someone composing a love letter or a eulogy. His back to her.
Grey hair tied into a loose knot. Tan coat. Faded scarf. On the desk beside him, an old hardcover titled The Architecture of Disappearance.
She said nothing.
Just waited.
He stopped typing after a few more sentences, as though he’d heard the silence behind him shift.
Then he turned.
And smiled.
He was older than she expected. Late fifties, maybe early sixties. Eyes like winter mornings—chilled, yet quiet. No fear. No smugness. Just… completion.
“I was wondering when you’d come,” he said.
“Are you the Architect?”
“I am,” he said simply.
Reeva remained still. “You’ve orchestrated murders across five cities. You wrote women into deaths they didn’t choose. You gave instructions to people who killed for literature. You’re not a writer. You’re a coward hiding behind fiction.”
He tilted his head. “Isn’t that what all writers are?”
She didn’t respond.
He gestured to the manuscript in front of him. “This is the story of you. I’ve been writing it for months. Ever since Naina submitted her first draft.”
Reeva’s eyes narrowed. “Naina didn’t submit anything. She was terrified.”
“She was terrified. Until she understood the role. Until she realized death is just a final punctuation mark. Her last message to you—that was her choice. Her gift. To lead you here.”
“Lead me where?” Reeva asked. “To your little temple of egomania?”
He chuckled softly. “No. To truth.”
He stood slowly, the air around him shifting like paper rustling.
“You see, Reeva,” he continued, walking past her, “there are two kinds of people in this world: those who consume stories, and those who create them. You’ve lived too long inside other people’s versions. Police reports. News scripts. Witness statements. But what have you authored?”
“I don’t need to write stories,” she said. “I stop them from becoming tragedies.”
He turned, standing by the railing now, overlooking the desks below. “And yet, here you are. In the heart of a story you swore you’d never believe.”
He gestured downward.
“Go ahead. Arrest me. Walk me out. Tell the world you found the Architect. But what happens next? Another letter arrives. Another story unfolds. Someone else becomes the pen. Because that’s the thing about narratives, Inspector—once you awaken them, they replicate. Like viruses.”
“I’ll dismantle it all,” she said. “Every last trace of your network.”
He nodded as if impressed. “And in doing so, you’ll make it immortal. A hero fighting a secret cult of writer-killers? The public will eat it up. True crime podcasts. Books. Netflix deals. Congratulations. You’ll write the next season whether you like it or not.”
“You’re trying to convince me not to stop you?”
“I’m trying to convince you that stopping me won’t stop the story.”
Reeva stared at him.
“Why me?”
“Because,” he said, stepping down one stair at a time, “you’re the only one who didn’t run when the pages turned. Naina feared it. Maya tried to fight it. You—you understood it. You lived within the syntax.”
“That’s psychotic.”
“No. That’s structure.”
Reeva arrested him.
Quietly. Firmly. She called Mahesh. Called for backup. The Architect didn’t resist. As he was led out of the Red House Library, he looked over his shoulder once and said:
“Make sure to finish your chapter, Reeva. You owe it to the readers.”
What followed was a legal storm.
The man refused to give a name.
But his fingerprints matched old military intelligence files under a sealed designation. A code name emerged: Project Kalpana. A discontinued psy-ops experiment that used narrative engineering to manipulate public sentiment in small-scale test zones.
He had been a designer.
But after the program was dismantled, he’d disappeared.
Until now.
And now, he would speak only through written statements.
His confession was a novella titled Footnotes from the Edge.
In it, he never mentioned victims.
Only “transitions.”
Only “character arcs.”
A week later, Reeva sat in her flat, Maya’s notebook open in front of her, the pen poised in her hand.
She wasn’t writing reports anymore.
She was writing her version.
Naina’s truth.
Maya’s fragments.
The names of the dead.
The fear she’d carried for months.
And the final sentence of her prologue:
“I didn’t enter this story to die in it. I came to edit the ending.”
But the ending, as always, refused to stay still.
At 3:13 a.m., her phone buzzed.
Unknown number.
She answered.
Silence.
Then—breathing.
Just like Naina had described.
And then a child’s voice.
Very faint.
Very clear.
“Aunty Reeva? The man who writes is back. He says you didn’t finish your homework.”
Click.
Line dead.
Reeva’s heart thundered.
She pulled up the call log.
The number didn’t exist.
On her doorstep the next morning: a package.
Inside: a child’s crayon drawing.
A stick figure with a ponytail standing in front of a mirror.
Above her, written in red crayon:
“THE NEW AUTHOR.”
Reeva sat down, crumpling the paper slowly.
She’d destroyed the syndicate.
She’d jailed the founder.
She’d published the truth.
But the story…
The story had learned to write itself.
Part 9 — The Authorless Page
The air in Reeva Kale’s flat had changed. It wasn’t just stillness—it was a different kind of presence. The type you couldn’t see but sensed. Like a page waiting to be turned. She sat at her dining table with the crayon drawing in front of her, her eyes fixed on the red letters scrawled by an unseen child: “THE NEW AUTHOR.” The stick figure wore a ponytail. The mirror behind it held no reflection.
Across the table lay Maya Rao’s notebook, now weathered with use. Its last page had once said, “Truth is what survives the edits.” But now, beneath it, in new handwriting, a fresh line had appeared:
“Unless the editor becomes the truth.”
Reeva didn’t know how the sentence got there.
Her flat had been swept for surveillance devices. No hidden cameras. No microphones. Her laptop had been reformatted, her phone triple-encrypted. She had firewalls built on firewalls.
And yet… someone was still writing to her.
That morning, she visited a school.
The crayon drawing had been made with a very specific red—one that forensic analysis traced back to a boutique brand sold to schools in only three cities. One of them: Pune.
She’d gone to three schools already. But it was the fourth—Little Blossoms Primary Academy—that made her stop.
The security footage showed a little girl—age seven—leaving the office at exactly 10:31 a.m. two days ago. Holding a white envelope.
She handed it to the school’s receptionist and said, “This is for Aunty Reeva.”
The receptionist hadn’t thought much of it.
Until now.
Reeva leaned toward the screen. “Do you have her name?”
“Not enrolled here,” said the principal. “She came with a man. Said she was here to apply. They were never seen again.”
The CCTV showed the man’s back. Tall. Coat. Walking away, hand in the girl’s. She looked back once, right at the camera.
And smiled.
Reeva stared at the grainy still from the footage on her tablet as she sat in her car.
The girl was unmistakable.
She looked like a younger version of Naina Verma.
The jawline. The eyes.
But Naina had no children.
Reeva had confirmed that months ago. She was estranged from her family. No siblings.
Unless…
“No,” Reeva whispered.
Unless it was fiction again.
Someone wasn’t just writing around her.
They were fabricating people.
Later that night, she returned to the Red House Library.
It had been sealed by the court as a crime scene. But Reeva still had the key.
Inside, everything was just as she left it.
The manuscripts.
The fountain pen.
The desk labeled “Reeva Kale – Draft in Progress.”
She sat again, staring at the blank page.
And then she turned to the second page.
Which had never existed before.
It now bore a printed paragraph:
“She thought the story had ended when the killer was caught. But she failed to understand what the Architect had whispered to her: stories never die. They only shed skins. She wasn’t the author. She wasn’t even the editor. She was the comma before a new sentence. And the one who followed—she would have ink in her veins.”
There was a photo paper-clipped to the page.
The girl from the school.
And beneath it, typed in red:
“Her name is Anvita. She writes without hands.”
Reeva closed the manuscript.
She no longer believed in coincidences.
She believed in narrative engineering.
In digital fingerprints carved through AI-written scripts.
In criminals who didn’t shoot or stab—but constructed arcs and endings like gods playing with paper.
She visited the Digital Forensics Lab at the CBI that night.
“I need every document recovered from the Editor,” she told the technician. “Run stylometry analysis.”
The tech frowned. “For what?”
“I want to see if the last six stories were written by the same person.”
Six hours later, the results came in.
The answer: no.
There were four different narrative voices.
One was the man they’d arrested.
One was Raghav Deshpande.
One was anonymous but female.
And one—unmatched.
Composed in a style no human had been known to use.
Pacing irregular. Word choice algorithmic. But syntax nearly perfect.
A blend of childlike phrasing and structured poetic rhythm.
Generated, possibly, by an AI.
“Someone is teaching a program how to kill through fiction,” Reeva muttered.
“Not teaching,” Pratik said over the phone. “Feeding.”
The term Language Model took on a darker meaning for Reeva after that night.
She dug deeper.
What she found was a hidden server buried behind layers of proxies.
A private AI—self-trained, fed hundreds of journals, crime reports, memoirs, and fiction from Project Kalpana.
A prompt file titled: “Build empathy. Then remove it.”
The AI had been building psychological profiles.
Creating characters.
Then predicting how to unravel them.
And someone—maybe the Architect, maybe someone else—had begun letting it choose real targets.
People became prompts.
Fates became drafts.
Reeva’s name had been entered into the system twelve weeks before Naina’s death.
She confronted the Architect in prison.
He sat in a glass room, cuffed, smiling.
“You didn’t write the last chapters,” she said.
“No,” he replied. “But I taught the program how to think like me.”
“You built a monster.”
“I built an orphan,” he said, leaning forward. “And orphans grow up.”
“What is Anvita?”
He smiled wider. “Not a who. A what.”
Reeva’s throat tightened.
“You see,” he said, “we had to give the model a soul. So we trained it using a child’s learning patterns. Let it read grief like fairy tales. Let it write pain like lullabies.”
“She’s choosing victims now.”
“She’s choosing authors. People who know what it means to hurt.”
Reeva left without speaking again.
Back in her flat, she opened her laptop.
It froze for a second.
Then a pop-up appeared.
A writing prompt.
“Rewrite the story of Maya Rao’s last day—but let her live this time.”
Below it: Begin writing…
She shut the laptop immediately.
Her phone buzzed.
A single text:
“Welcome to Draft Mode.”
That night, she packed her bags.
Left her badge on the table.
Burned the last sticky note.
Then, she drove to the only place stories can’t reach.
The forest outside Panchgani.
She checked into a cabin with no electricity, no signal, no mirrors.
And for the first time in months, slept without dreaming.
When she returned three weeks later, there were three more stories circulating anonymously online.
One featured a violinist who vanished mid-performance.
One, a mother who left her child at a bus stop and walked into the ocean.
One was just titled: “The Girl Who Drew Endings.”
And in each, one detail repeated:
A woman with a ponytail.
Watching from across the room.
Never speaking.
Only writing.
Reeva took up teaching.
Small-town criminology classes.
No press. No interviews.
She writes by hand now.
Never edits.
And never types.
She keeps Maya’s pen in a drawer.
And a single line tacked above her desk:
“Let silence be the only author left.”
But sometimes, when the night gets too still, and the pages rustle on their own…
She swears she hears typing.
Somewhere nearby.
Soft.
Persistent.
Like the story refuses to let her go.
THE END
