Anik Roy
Chapter 1 – The Passenger List
The call came just after midnight, when Delhi’s power grid seemed to hesitate in the humid air and the fan above Rhea Mukherjee’s desk spun on with a wheeze. She had been staring at the blinking cursor of a half-finished article, something forgettable about municipal corruption that her editor had already threatened to cut, when the unknown number appeared on her phone. The voice on the other end was muffled, unsteady, as though the caller was speaking from inside a tunnel.
“You cover railways, don’t you?” the man asked. Rhea straightened in her chair. She hadn’t touched the transport beat in over a year, not since the new bureau chief arrived and carved up the desks like pieces of meat.
“Who is this?” she demanded.
“There’s a train missing,” he said, as if those words alone were enough to detonate her world. “Check Itarsi to Varanasi. Sleeper coach, number S-7. It never arrived. And by morning, it will never have existed.”
The line went dead.
For several seconds Rhea sat frozen, the glow of her laptop the only witness. She pulled up the Indian Railways online portal, the clunky government site that still bore stamps of the 1990s. Train 12448—Mumbai to Varanasi—had departed Itarsi at 19:45, on time. Arrival at Varanasi was scheduled for dawn. All bogies accounted for. All normal. Nothing amiss.
But something in the caller’s tone lingered, like a bad smell you couldn’t scrub off. She logged into a backdoor access she had never quite surrendered when she left the transport beat—a login gifted by a sympathetic clerk at Rail Bhawan. The system lagged, coughed, and finally loaded. Passenger manifests scrolled before her.
There it was. Coach S-7. Seventy-two berths. Names, ages, genders, origins, destinations. The digital list shimmered under her tired eyes—until, one by one, the lines began to vanish. Not blur. Not fade. Simply…disappear, as if someone were erasing the train in real time. Within a minute, S-7 was gone, replaced by a neat rearrangement of coaches. The numbering leapt from S-6 to S-8.
Her pulse hammered. She refreshed. Nothing. She checked the archival cache. Blank. She opened a screenshot tool with shaking hands and caught just one frame—fifty-three names still visible, the rest gone already. She scanned them, breath caught in her throat, until one name leapt out like a slap.
Ayan Mukherjee. Age: 29. Delhi to Varanasi. Berth 34.
Her brother.
Rhea slammed the laptop shut so hard the fan above seemed to pause. She had not spoken to Ayan in over three years, not since the night he had walked out after a fight about their father’s estate. He had always loved trains, as a boy sketching their engines in the margins of his notebooks. What was he doing on that route, that night? And why was his name now part of something vanishing?
Outside, the first horns of long-distance trucks moaned from Ring Road, and a dog barked somewhere in the dark. Inside, Rhea’s flat felt suddenly porous, as though unseen eyes were already watching her from the shadows.
She reopened the laptop, but the list was gone, scrubbed as though it had never been born. The official manifest carried no S-7, no record of its passengers, and certainly no trace of Ayan.
She thought of calling the newsroom, but dismissed it. No one would take her seriously without proof. Instead she opened her drawer, found her battered reporter’s notebook, and scribbled the only line that mattered:
“A train has vanished. And my brother with it.”
By dawn, she was on a bus heading east, toward Itarsi, the dust of Delhi still clinging to her shoes. The story was no longer just about corruption, or mystery, or even survival. It was personal. And if the voice on the phone had been right, by the time she reached the station, she might already be chasing a ghost.
Chapter 2 – The Black Line
Itarsi station did not sleep. Even at three in the morning, the platforms were a shifting theatre of chai vendors, coolies, and families wrapped in faded shawls, their luggage stacked like miniature fortresses around them. The air smelled of rust, diesel, and frying pakoras. Loudspeakers cracked with half-swallowed announcements.
Rhea stepped onto the platform, her overnight bus ride still knotted in her shoulders. She looked like every other traveler — jeans, a cotton kurta, a sling bag — yet the weight of the single line in her notebook set her apart from the hundreds around her. A train has vanished.
Her first stop was the enquiry counter, manned by a clerk who looked like he had been fighting sleep since the Emergency. She leaned forward.
“12448, Mumbai to Varanasi. What time did it leave here last night?”
The clerk tapped at the keyboard with the delicacy of a surgeon. “Nineteen-forty-five. On time. Next.”
“No missing coach?” she pressed.
He looked up, irritated. “Madam, this is Indian Railways, not ghost stories. All coaches accounted for. Next.”
She walked away, swallowing her frustration, and pulled out her phone. The screenshot glowed against the dim light: S-7, with her brother’s name. Erased now, but she still had the proof. She needed more.
She wandered toward the chai stalls, listening. Stations were gossip mills, and truth often hid in the mouths of night-shift workers. She bought a glass of sweet tea and casually asked the vendor, “Busy night yesterday?”
He shrugged, pouring milk with theatrical indifference. “Every night is busy here.”
But the coolie beside him, a wiry man with a red cloth slung over his shoulder, lowered his voice. “You’re asking about S-7, aren’t you?”
Rhea’s hand froze mid-sip. “What do you mean?”
The man glanced around before leaning closer. “We saw it. Then we didn’t. Simple as that. Coach was there, lights on, people inside. By dawn, gone. The numbering shifted like magic. But you won’t hear that from officials. They call it a clerical error.”
Rhea’s skin prickled. “Why would they hide it?”
The coolie’s eyes darted toward the tracks, as if afraid the steel itself was listening. “Because of the Kaali Rekha. The Black Line. Things cross it, and they don’t come back.”
She wanted to dismiss it as superstition, but his tone had the weight of lived fear. Before she could ask more, he melted into the crowd, leaving her with half a story and a full shiver down her spine.
By mid-morning, Rhea had secured a seat on a local heading east. She sat by the window, notebook on her lap, watching the central Indian landscape blur past: fields of yellow mustard, skeletal power lines, villages strung like beads along the track. The rhythm of the train usually soothed her, but now every jolt felt like a warning.
She replayed the past twelve hours. An anonymous caller. A vanishing coach. Her brother’s name. A coolie whispering of black lines. She had chased dozens of stories in her career, but none had ever felt like they were chasing her back.
At Jabalpur junction, she changed trains, heading for Varanasi. On the platform, she noticed a man in a dark jacket watching her. He wasn’t reading a paper, wasn’t pretending to wait for anyone. Just watching. When she shifted cars, so did he. When she boarded, he followed two coaches down.
Her instincts screamed. She had learned long ago to trust them. She kept her face neutral, but inside her chest a drumbeat rose. She texted a single word to her editor, though she knew it might be ignored: Shadowed.
The night train rattled on. At Satna, she tried to lose him in the crush of passengers disembarking, but every time she looked back, the dark jacket was still there, always just far enough to deny intent, always close enough to suffocate.
She clutched her bag tighter. Inside, her phone, her notebook, and the one screenshot that proved the impossible. Enough motive for someone to follow.
As the train rolled into Uttar Pradesh, she finally decided to confront him. She rose, walked briskly through the swaying corridor, and stopped at the junction between two bogies. The wind whipped her hair as she turned.
He was there, closing the distance.
“Why are you following me?” she demanded.
The man hesitated, then pulled something from his pocket. For one heart-stopping second she thought it was a weapon. But it was an ID card, held out like a talisman.
“Arjun Sen,” he said over the roar of the tracks. “Former railway police. Suspended. I know about S-7. If you want to live long enough to see Varanasi, you’ll hear me out.”
The train thundered into the dark, and for the first time Rhea realized the story had already pulled her far beyond her control.
Chapter 3 – Arjun Sen
They stood between the rattling coaches, the air torn by the rush of night. Rhea’s hand tightened around the steel railing, her pulse unsteady. The man’s ID card gleamed dully under the yellow corridor light.
“Suspended railway police,” she repeated, skeptical. “Convenient badge for a stalker.”
Arjun Sen slipped the card back into his pocket. His face was sharp, weather-beaten, with lines carved by years of fatigue rather than age. His eyes carried that distinct cop’s look—perpetual suspicion, scanning everything, trusting nothing.
“You think I enjoy tailing journalists?” His voice was flat. “If I wanted to harm you, I wouldn’t be introducing myself. I’d have waited for a quieter stretch.”
“Comforting,” Rhea muttered.
Arjun leaned closer, his tone low. “You’ve got something that makes you a target. That screenshot, am I right?”
Her grip on her bag faltered. “How do you—”
“I’ve been chasing this longer than you,” he cut in. “Trains that arrive missing a coach. Passenger lists that vanish mid-transit. Complaints buried before they reach inquiry. Every case linked, every witness silenced. They call it clerical error. I call it murder.”
The word hung between them, heavier than the shriek of the rails.
Rhea wanted to dismiss him. But the memory of S-7 flickering out of existence still burned behind her eyes, and her brother’s name etched itself deeper into her mind. She forced her voice steady. “So what are you after? A headline? Redemption? Or just dragging me into your personal crusade?”
Arjun’s jaw tightened. “I want proof. And I think you might have stumbled onto the trail that finally gives us both some.”
The train lurched as it sped into the darkness. Rhea studied him—his rough stubble, the faint scar running down his temple, the coiled tension in his stance. He looked like a man running on old fury. She had met enough cops to know when someone had been burned out of the system.
“Why suspended?” she asked finally.
Arjun gave a humorless laugh. “For asking too many questions. I filed reports about the vanishings. Superiors called me paranoid. When one of my own men disappeared during a routine inspection near Jhansi, I refused to close the file. Two weeks later, I was off the force. They called it misconduct. I call it pressure.”
“And now you’re shadowing strangers on trains.”
He shrugged. “Call it unfinished business.”
Rhea wanted to tell him to leave her alone. She wanted to say she worked alone, that she trusted no one, least of all an ex-cop with anger in his eyes. But when she pictured the coolie whispering about the Kaali Rekha, and her brother’s name swallowed by a blank manifest, she knew solitude was a luxury she couldn’t afford.
She exhaled. “Fine. Talk. What do you know about S-7?”
Arjun’s gaze darkened. “It’s not the first. Coaches vanish along central routes every few years. Sometimes entire buses, sometimes boats along the Ganga. People think it’s accidents, or dacoits, or superstition. But the pattern is too clean. The records aren’t just altered—they’re erased at the root. As if those passengers never bought tickets, never existed.”
“That’s impossible,” Rhea whispered.
“Not if the system is compromised. You journalists should know better than anyone—data isn’t truth. Data is what those in control want it to be.”
Rhea swallowed, thinking of the screen wiping itself clean, name by name. “Why would anyone erase people like that? What’s the purpose?”
Arjun’s voice lowered, almost drowned by the wind. “Because the dead leave noise—grief, police reports, lawsuits. But the erased? They leave silence. And silence is the perfect cover for power.”
A chill threaded through her spine. She thought of Ayan. His sketchbooks of engines, his restless arguments, his sudden disappearance from her life. If someone had chosen him for erasure, then every memory she held might already be a rebellion against an official blank space.
The train groaned into Allahabad junction, brakes screeching. Passengers stirred, gathering luggage, children crying against their mothers’ shoulders. Rhea glanced toward the platform, considering escape. But the crowd, the noise, the false safety—it all felt thinner now, a veil stretched over something monstrous.
Arjun touched her sleeve lightly. “Stay close. Whoever scrubbed that coach knows you’ve seen it. They won’t let you reach Varanasi alive with proof.”
Rhea pulled back, bristling. “I don’t need your protection.”
“No,” Arjun agreed. “But you need an ally. There’s a difference.”
They disembarked together. On the platform, Arjun led her to a quieter corner near the disused waiting rooms. He pulled a crumpled map from his jacket, spread it against the wall, and tapped a line drawn in red ink.
“Itarsi. Jhansi. Allahabad. Varanasi. Notice anything?”
Rhea squinted. The line cut clean across the map, running like a scar.
“The Kaali Rekha,” she whispered.
Arjun nodded grimly. “That’s what locals call it. Disappearances cluster along this stretch. Coaches vanish. Convoys lost. Villagers swear entire boats sink without bodies washing ashore. It’s not random. It’s a corridor. Something operates within it.”
Her breath caught. “And my brother is inside that corridor now.”
“Yes.”
For a long moment, she stared at the red line, as if sheer will could peel it off the page and reveal what lay beneath. Around them, the station noise dulled, replaced by the heavy drum of her own heartbeat.
“Then we go to Varanasi,” she said at last, folding the map with trembling fingers. “If the line ends there, that’s where the truth waits.”
Arjun’s expression softened, just briefly. “You’re braver than most journalists I’ve met.”
Rhea gave a bitter half-smile. “Bravery is just fear that’s run out of excuses.”
The whistle blew, echoing through the night. Together they boarded the next train east, shadows pressing against the windows, the red line etched into both their minds.
Somewhere beyond the dark fields, beyond the whistle and the hum of the rails, lay the answer. But also the danger. And as the coaches swayed and rattled, Rhea wondered if she too had already stepped across the Kaali Rekha without knowing it.
Chapter 4 – The Survivors
The train rolled into Varanasi at dawn, spilling passengers onto the platform like waves breaking against stone. Pilgrims in saffron, students with bulging backpacks, businessmen dragging cheap suitcases—all swept along the ancient arteries of the city. The air smelled of woodsmoke, wet earth, and the iron tang of the Ganga just beyond.
Rhea and Arjun slipped into the crowd, keeping their heads low. Sleep clung to her body, but adrenaline sharpened every nerve. The station announcements were a blur. She knew only one thing: Ayan had been bound for this city, and S-7 had disappeared into its shadows.
Arjun steered her toward the exit, his jaw set. “We can’t go straight to the police. They’ll laugh us out of the room, or worse, tip off whoever’s behind this.”
“So where do we start?”
“With those who’ve seen it,” he said. “The ones who lived.”
She frowned. “Lived through a vanishing?”
Arjun didn’t answer immediately. Instead, he flagged a rickshaw, muttered directions Rhea couldn’t catch, and they lurched into the chaos of Varanasi’s lanes. Narrow alleys twisted like veins, lined with crumbling temples, tea shops, and walls tattooed with fading film posters. The city pulsed with both devotion and decay.
They stopped at the edge of a sprawling slum, where the river bent in a sluggish curve. Children played barefoot in the dust, their laughter sharp against the hum of flies. Women squatted with baskets of vegetables, calling out prices in sing-song voices. But there was something off about the place—an undercurrent of silence in the eyes that followed them.
Arjun led her to a low hut, its walls patched with tin and tarpaulin. He rapped twice on the frame. After a pause, a man emerged, his hair silver, his body wiry, his gaze both weary and alert.
“This is Bhola,” Arjun said quietly. “He was a guard on a freight train that lost two wagons ten years ago. He should’ve been dead, but he wasn’t.”
The old man studied Rhea with suspicion until Arjun whispered something she couldn’t hear. Then Bhola’s face softened. He beckoned them inside.
The hut was dim, the air thick with incense. A small clay lamp flickered near a crumbling idol. Bhola motioned for them to sit.
“You’ve come about the Kaali Rekha,” he said in a low, gravelly voice.
Rhea’s pulse quickened. “What is it?”
He gave a hollow smile. “Not a line. A shadow. It falls where it chooses—on tracks, on roads, on rivers. Once it falls, something is taken. A coach, a truck, a boat. The rest moves on, untouched. And those taken are erased, as if they never were.”
Rhea leaned forward. “But you—how did you survive?”
Bhola’s hands trembled as he lit a bidi. “That night, my train was leaving Allahabad. Two wagons of coal vanished between tunnels. I was stationed at the junction coupling, seconds before the line went black. I saw the wagons detach, rolling into a fog that wasn’t fog. I tried to shout, to run, but the sound died in my throat. And then—silence. When I woke, I was in a field miles away. Alone. No wagons. No crew. My own records gone from the railway books. To the world, I was dead.”
Rhea felt the floor tilt under her. She glanced at Arjun, but he gave no sign of disbelief.
“Why tell us this?” she asked.
Bhola exhaled smoke. “Because I am not the only one. There are others. A whole settlement, hidden by the river. Survivors who crawled back, stripped of names, homes, proof they ever lived. Ghosts in flesh.”
Rhea’s voice cracked. “Take me there.”
The old man shook his head. “They don’t trust outsiders. They fear exposure more than death. But if you truly carry someone’s name from the line, they might listen.”
She pulled out her phone, opened the screenshot. Ayan Mukherjee. Berth 34.
Bhola’s eyes narrowed. “Yes. That is enough. Come after dark. Not before. The eyes are always watching in daylight.”
When they stepped out, the city roared back around them—bells from the ghats, chants of pilgrims, the endless call of hawkers. Yet Rhea felt as though she had already crossed into another realm, one where the erased walked beside the living.
They spent the day in silence, holed up in a cheap lodge near Assi Ghat. Rhea stared at the river through the window, watching boats drift lazily, while in her mind her brother’s name replayed like a mantra. Alive. Erased. Alive. Erased.
Night fell heavy. Bhola reappeared, leading them through narrow alleys into a stretch of marshland beyond the last cremation ghat. The smoke of burning pyres hung thick, blurring the stars. Dogs howled in the distance.
At the edge of the marsh, hidden among reeds, flickered the faint glow of lamps. A cluster of huts emerged, almost invisible against the black water. Figures moved in silence, shadows among shadows.
Bhola whispered, “The Basera. Shelter of the forgotten.”
As they entered, faces turned toward them—men, women, even children. Their eyes were hollow, their clothes mismatched, as though stitched together from discarded worlds. Rhea noticed one chilling detail: none wore anything with names. No ID cards, no school badges, no stitched labels.
A woman stepped forward, her hair streaked with grey though her face was young. “Outsiders are not welcome,” she said flatly.
Rhea’s hand shook as she held up her phone. “I’m not here as a journalist. I’m here as a sister. My brother was on the missing coach. Please—if he’s alive, if he’s here—”
A murmur rippled through the crowd. The woman studied the screenshot, then met Rhea’s gaze with eyes that held both pity and dread.
“You carry the mark,” she whispered. “That means the line has chosen you too.”
The settlement fell silent, and Rhea understood in that moment: she had not just come searching for survivors. She had crossed into their world.
Chapter 5 – The Erased Truths
The settlement had no name the world would recognize. They called it Basera, but even that was spoken softly, as if the word itself might be overheard by the river. Smoke from cooking fires curled against the night sky, but no sound of children laughing, no radios playing, no life as Rhea knew it. Only the whisper of insects, the crackle of firewood, and the weight of too many eyes.
The woman who had spoken earlier gestured for Rhea and Arjun to follow her. They entered a larger hut at the center of the cluster. Mats covered the mud floor, and on them sat a half-dozen figures—men and women whose faces seemed carved by grief and time.
“I am Kavita,” the woman said, settling opposite them. “We are the ones who slipped through the Kaali Rekha. We lived, but we lost everything else. The world has no memory of us. No papers, no bank accounts, no ration cards, no voter rolls. We are alive, yet we do not exist.”
Rhea glanced at Arjun, who listened grimly, his jaw tight. She turned back to Kavita. “How can that be possible? A government database can’t just—delete people.”
Kavita’s laugh was dry, bitter. “You think deletion is impossible in this country? Records here are more fragile than breath. A keystroke, a signature, and you vanish. And when powerful men need silence, they do not kill. They erase.”
Another man spoke up, his voice hoarse. “I was a schoolteacher in Mirzapur. My bus was taken on the Allahabad highway. Dozens of us, gone. When I tried to return, my house was occupied by strangers. They said no man of my name had ever lived there. Even my wife looked at me like I was a ghost.”
Kavita added, “Some tried to fight. Lawyers, petitions, court cases. All failed. The files never existed. Judges laughed them out of hearings. That is when we realized—what disappears into the line is not meant to return.”
Rhea’s throat tightened. “But some of you did return.”
A silence fell. Finally, Kavita said, “We were not supposed to. Those who crawl back are broken. Some wander half-mad. Some carry scars no doctor can see. We are the residue of a process not meant to leave residue.”
Arjun leaned forward. “Process. What process?”
Kavita’s eyes flickered. “You think this is superstition, ex-cop? That the line is a curse? No. It is machinery. A system. The disappearances are not random. They are chosen. Selected.”
“Selected for what?” Rhea asked.
Kavita hesitated. “For erasure—and for use. Some are discarded. Some are kept. The ones kept are taken underground.”
“Where?” Arjun’s voice was sharp.
Kavita shook her head. “We do not know. Only that they are taken by men who do not wear uniforms, yet carry the power of those who do. Corporate, government, private contractors—they are all the same face. The erased are currency. Experiments. Labor. Secrets. Whatever purpose the powerful need them for.”
Rhea’s chest constricted. Her brother’s face swam before her. “Do you know if any coach disappeared last night? A sleeper coach, from Itarsi?”
Kavita looked at her for a long moment. “Yes. The river carried whispers today. People said an entire coach slipped from the line before dawn. If your brother was on it…” She did not finish.
Rhea clutched the screenshot on her phone like a lifeline. “Then he’s still alive. He has to be.”
Arjun asked, “Why let us in? Why tell us any of this?”
Kavita’s gaze hardened. “Because once you glimpse the line, you are already marked. You will never be free of it. Better you know the truth before it consumes you.”
The hut grew silent again, but outside, Rhea heard footsteps—uneven, dragging. She turned, and in the doorway stood a boy, no older than seventeen. His clothes were tattered, his eyes wide and unblinking.
Kavita rose quickly, trying to block him. But the boy stepped inside, pointing a trembling finger at Rhea. “She carries the name,” he whispered. “The name that is still warm. He is not gone. He is waiting.”
Rhea’s breath caught. “You’ve seen him? My brother?”
The boy shook his head violently. “Not seen. Felt. The line leaves traces. Echoes. Some of us hear them. I hear them all the time.” His voice broke into a high, haunted laugh. “Berth thirty-four. Window seat. Still there. Still there.”
Kavita grabbed his shoulders, steering him away, murmuring apologies. But the damage was done. Rhea’s heart raced. Somewhere in this shadow war, her brother’s presence still flickered.
When the hut emptied, only Arjun remained with her. He looked at her pale face, then at the dying lamp.
“This is bigger than either of us imagined,” he said. “Not superstition. Not just missing people. This is a machine that eats lives.”
Rhea whispered, “And my brother is inside it.”
Arjun’s jaw hardened. “Then we tear it open.”
Before she could reply, a noise split the night. A shout. Then another. The settlement stirred with panic. Outside, dogs barked, women screamed, and the crack of boots striking mud grew louder.
Arjun shoved Rhea behind him, eyes narrowing. “They found us.”
Figures in black surged into the camp, flashlights cutting through the dark. They moved with military precision, their silence more chilling than any shouted command. Survivors scattered into the reeds, their voices swallowed by the night.
Rhea clutched her bag, the screenshot still glowing faintly on her phone. For the first time, she realized the truth: she was no longer just a journalist chasing a story. She was part of it now, and the line had begun to close around her.
Chapter 6 – The Raid
The lamps of Basera flickered out one by one as shadows poured into the settlement. Heavy boots thudded in rhythm, flashlights slicing through the reeds, the sharp beams scattering across mud walls and terrified faces. The air reeked of smoke and panic.
Rhea’s breath hitched. Arjun grabbed her wrist, pulling her down low. “Stay close. Don’t make a sound.”
The survivors fled in silence, as though they had rehearsed this terror countless times before. No shouts, no calls for children—just the eerie, efficient scramble of ghosts who knew that even noise might betray them. A mother clutched her infant, pressing a palm over its mouth as she slipped into the marsh.
Rhea felt the mud suck at her shoes as Arjun dragged her toward the back of Kavita’s hut. A flashlight beam skimmed past, so close it lit the sweat trembling on his jaw. He held still, his breath shallow, until the beam swung away.
Then came the sound—a low, metallic crackle, like electricity chewing on air. Rhea risked a glance. The intruders carried rods, short and black, with faint blue sparks spitting from their tips. Not guns. Something stranger. She watched one press the rod against a fleeing man’s back. There was no scream, no collapse. The man simply froze mid-stride, his body rigid, his face wiped clean of expression, before crumpling like a puppet whose strings had been cut. Two men lifted him into a waiting truck, its back already half-full.
Her stomach twisted. This was no raid to intimidate. This was collection.
Arjun’s grip tightened. “Move.”
They crawled along the hut’s edge, ducking into a narrow gap between walls. The earth was damp and sharp with reeds. A child crouched beside them, eyes wide with terror. Rhea reached for him instinctively, but Arjun shook his head—no time. He mouthed, keep going.
They broke into a run, weaving between huts. Behind them, Kavita’s voice rose in defiance, sharp as a blade: “Leave them! They are nothing but ash already!” It was a distraction, Rhea realized—her sacrifice to draw the hunters away. The sound of a scuffle followed, then silence.
Rhea wanted to stop, to turn back, but Arjun pushed her forward, harder now, until they burst through the last line of reeds and stumbled onto the marshland’s edge. The Ganga spread before them, black and endless, its surface glittering faintly under a fractured moon.
Arjun scanned quickly. At the waterline, an old wooden boat bobbed, tethered to a crooked post. “There.”
They sprinted, splashing through mud. A flashlight beam locked onto them. Shouts rose. The crackle of rods drew nearer. Arjun shoved Rhea into the boat, slashing the rope with a knife pulled from his jacket.
“Row!” he barked.
She grabbed one oar, he the other, and together they fought the river’s weight. The current seized them, dragging them into darkness. Behind, the beams danced, shouts fading. But Rhea’s chest was still clenched with terror.
“What happens to them?” she gasped, voice shaking.
Arjun didn’t look up from the oar. “You saw. They’re not killed. They’re taken.”
“For what?”
He exhaled harshly, muscles straining. “That’s what we’re going to find out.”
The river pulled them downstream. The settlement was gone, swallowed by silence. The only sound was the hiss of the oars and the ragged pull of their breaths.
Hours later, they dragged the boat into a thicket on the opposite bank. Rhea collapsed against a tree, her limbs trembling. Her mind replayed the frozen faces, the lifeless bodies hauled like cargo. The survivors of Basera were gone, scattered or captured. Kavita—dead or worse.
Arjun crouched beside her, his eyes hard but not unkind. “This is what I’ve been telling you. Whoever runs the line has resources—men, weapons, trucks, silence. They move like the state but wear no uniform. This isn’t myth. It’s operation.”
Rhea pressed her palms to her face. “And my brother is inside it.”
Arjun nodded. “Yes. Which means we still have a chance.”
She looked up sharply. “A chance?”
He drew the map from his jacket, the one with the red corridor. He tapped a point east of Varanasi. “There. The tunnels. Abandoned since the British. Locals say no train passes through anymore. But I’ve heard whispers—trucks go in, never come out. If they took the Basera survivors anywhere, it’s there.”
Her skin crawled. “You’ve been waiting for proof.”
“And now we have it,” Arjun said grimly. “They don’t just erase people. They harvest them. And if your brother’s coach was taken, that’s where we’ll find answers.”
The first streaks of dawn cut across the sky, pale and indifferent. Birds stirred in the branches overhead. For a fleeting moment, the world seemed ordinary again, as if last night’s horror had been a fever dream.
But Rhea knew better. The screenshot on her phone burned like a brand, proof of the impossible. The boy’s whisper still rang in her ears: Berth thirty-four. Window seat. Still there.
She turned to Arjun, her voice steadier than she felt. “Then we go to the tunnels.”
Arjun folded the map, his eyes locking with hers. “Yes. But once we cross into them, there’s no turning back. The line won’t just watch us. It will hunt us.”
Rhea drew in a slow breath, tasting ash and river. She had been a journalist, a seeker of stories. Now she was something else—a trespasser in a war no one admitted existed.
And if the line wanted her, it would have to fight to erase her.
Chapter 8 – The Codex of Silence
The tunnels breathed like lungs. Damp air pulsed in and out with every gust of wind that swept through the arching mouths of stone. The British had carved them a century ago, but what lingered now was no relic of empire—it was something colder, more precise.
Rhea followed Arjun into the darkness, her flashlight trembling against the walls. Graffiti from forgotten decades scrawled across bricks—political slogans, lovers’ names—layered beneath fresh paint. Only one symbol kept repeating: a black diagonal slash, clean and deliberate, like a wound across the stone.
“The mark of the line,” Arjun muttered.
They moved deeper. The echo of their footsteps was swallowed too quickly, as though the tunnel had grown ears. Somewhere ahead, machinery hummed—a low vibration in the ribs of the earth.
Rhea’s breath misted. “This isn’t abandoned.”
“No,” Arjun said grimly. “It’s alive.”
They rounded a bend and froze. Beyond a mesh gate, floodlights burned against the cavernous space of a hollowed chamber. Trucks were parked in neat rows, their sides unmarked. Men in black moved with military precision, unloading crates. Not weapons—documents, hard drives, servers sealed in plastic.
Arjun whispered, “They’re not just erasing people. They’re erasing memory. Archives, proof, history itself.”
Rhea’s pulse quickened. She spotted something else: a line of passengers, heads bowed, wrists bound. Survivors of Basera. A child clung to a woman’s sari, his face blank with exhaustion. Guards shepherded them toward a steel door at the far end, beyond which the humming grew louder.
She gripped Arjun’s sleeve. “They’re alive.”
“Not for long, if we don’t act.”
They ducked behind a rusted generator. Arjun pulled binoculars from his bag, scanning. His face tightened. “Look there. Security checkpoint. Retinal scans. This isn’t a camp. It’s a processing station.”
Rhea’s stomach churned. “Processing into what?”
He lowered the binoculars, eyes dark. “Into nothing. Once they pass through, they’ll cease to exist.”
Before she could answer, a shout cut through the chamber. Two guards dragged a man forward, his shirt torn, his face bloodied. He fought with desperate strength, spitting curses.
Rhea’s heart lurched. The man’s voice, though hoarse, was unmistakable.
“Ayan,” she whispered.
Her brother.
He was thinner, wilder, his eyes burning with defiance, but it was him—Berth 34, the boy who sketched trains, the man who had walked out of her life in anger. Now he was shackled in the grip of erasure.
Rhea surged forward instinctively. Arjun caught her arm, holding her back. “Not yet. One wrong move and they’ll take you too.”
Tears stung her eyes. “I can’t just watch—”
“You want to save him? Then we need to dismantle this machine, not die in its gears.”
From their vantage, they watched Ayan dragged toward the steel door. He fought with every step, shouting words that echoed through the chamber.
“You can’t erase truth! You can’t erase me!”
A guard slammed the rod into his ribs. Ayan staggered, but he didn’t fall. His voice carried, ragged but unbroken:
“They can cut names, not blood. They can burn papers, not memory!”
The prisoners stirred, some raising their heads, their eyes flickering with something dangerous—hope.
Arjun’s jaw tightened. “He’s giving us the opening we need.”
“What do we do?” Rhea’s voice trembled.
Arjun scanned the chamber. “Generators. Power grids. The line feeds on control. Kill the power, and we buy chaos. In chaos, we move.”
Rhea wiped her eyes, forcing her hands steady. She was a journalist, not a soldier, but the story had already swallowed her whole. She nodded.
Arjun leaned closer, whispering the plan. “On my mark, cut the main switch. Then run. Find your brother. I’ll cover.”
The chamber hummed with its mechanical heartbeat. Floodlights glared. Guards tightened their grip.
Rhea braced herself, feeling the pulse of the earth beneath her palms. Somewhere ahead, beyond steel and silence, the truth waited.
The line had taken her brother.
Now she would take him back.
Chapter 9 – The Blackout
The hum of the tunnel was like a second heartbeat, steady, relentless, alive. Rhea crouched beside the generator, her palms slick with sweat, her breath fogging in the cold subterranean air. Arjun knelt across from her, eyes fixed on the mesh of cables snaking out of the control panel.
“Remember,” he whispered. “The second the lights go, everything collapses—alarms, gates, scanners. We’ll have minutes at most. Find your brother, and don’t stop running.”
Rhea nodded, but her stomach twisted. She was no saboteur. She was a journalist with a notebook, not a soldier with a plan. Yet here she was, about to plunge an underground facility into chaos.
Arjun’s knife glinted under the fluorescent glow. “Ready?”
Before she could answer, a shout echoed across the chamber. Guards were forcing the prisoners toward the steel door again. Rhea spotted Ayan—bloodied but unbroken, still fighting every step. The sight hardened her resolve.
“Do it,” she whispered.
Arjun slashed the cable. Sparks hissed, a sharp metallic cry, and then—darkness.
The floodlights blinked out, the humming stuttered, and the vast chamber fell into black silence. For a heartbeat, the world held its breath. Then pandemonium erupted.
Prisoners screamed. Guards shouted in confusion, their rods crackling as they sparked blindly in the dark. Trucks honked as drivers slammed ignitions, headlights cutting jagged beams across the chaos.
“Move!” Arjun grabbed Rhea’s wrist, dragging her through the confusion. They darted behind a truck, crouched low as a flashlight beam cut across the air above them. The ground shook with the stampede of boots and fleeing feet.
“There!” Rhea pointed. Ayan was struggling against two guards, one trying to pin him down. The steel door loomed behind them, half-open, its frame glowing faintly with unnatural light.
Arjun shoved her forward. “Go!”
She ran, lungs burning, shoving through the panicked crowd. A guard spotted her and raised his rod, but Arjun intercepted, slamming into him with brutal force. Rhea barely looked back. She fixed her eyes on Ayan.
“Ayan!” she screamed.
His head jerked up, disbelief flickering across his bruised face. For a second he looked like the boy she remembered—the boy sketching locomotives in the margins of his schoolbooks, grinning when he caught her stealing his pens. Then the moment shattered as a guard struck him across the shoulders.
Rhea lunged. She swung her flashlight with all her strength, the metal body connecting with the guard’s temple. He crumpled with a guttural cry. She grabbed Ayan’s arm.
“It’s me. It’s Rhea. I’m here.”
His chest heaved, his eyes wide with shock. “You… you shouldn’t be here—”
“No time,” she hissed. “We’re getting out.”
Arjun appeared beside them, blood on his knuckles, urgency in his eyes. “Move. Now.”
They barreled through the chaos, dodging flashlights and shouts. The prisoners had scattered, some clawing at locked gates, others vanishing into shadows. A horn blared as a truck surged forward blindly, scattering guards like insects.
But the reprieve was short-lived. A siren shrieked, piercing the darkness. Emergency lights flickered on, bathing the chamber in pulsing red. Shadows leapt across the walls, grotesque and jagged.
“They’ll seal the exits!” Arjun shouted.
They sprinted toward the far end of the chamber, where a rusted maintenance tunnel branched off. Rhea clutched Ayan’s arm, half-dragging him. His breath came ragged, his body weakened, but his eyes burned with stubborn fire.
“I told them they couldn’t erase me,” he muttered through clenched teeth.
Rhea tightened her grip. “And they won’t.”
The tunnel narrowed, damp and foul with stagnant air. Behind them, the red glow grew stronger, the sound of boots closing in. Arjun shoved a rusted door shut behind them, jamming a metal bar through the handles.
“That won’t hold for long,” he warned.
They stumbled deeper, the passage twisting into the belly of the earth. Water dripped from the ceiling. Rats scattered underfoot. Every breath tasted of iron.
Finally, the tunnel opened into a cavern lit only by the pale shimmer of groundwater pooling at its center. The sound of rushing river filtered faintly through cracks in the rock.
Rhea collapsed beside her brother, clutching him tightly. “I thought I lost you.”
Ayan gave a bitter laugh, wincing. “They tried. They took everything—my ID, my name, even my signature from records. When I shouted, nobody believed me. I was a ghost in my own life.” His eyes darkened. “But they’ll never bury the truth. Not while I breathe.”
Arjun crouched, scanning the cavern. “You won’t have long to breathe if we don’t get out. There’s an exit somewhere. These tunnels always connect back to the river.”
Boots pounded against the barred door behind them. Metal groaned. Voices barked orders.
Rhea rose, her fear sharpening into something else—rage. “Then we find the river. And we tell the world what’s happening here.”
Arjun nodded grimly. “If the world still wants to listen.”
The door splintered. Red light spilled into the cavern, painting the stone walls like blood.
Rhea grabbed her brother’s hand, her other clenched around the screenshot still glowing faintly on her phone. It was more than proof now—it was survival.
“Run,” she whispered.
And they did, plunging into the dark as the line itself roared after them.
Chapter 10 – The River Escape
The cavern narrowed into a fissure of rock, the walls slick with moisture, the air sharp with the tang of riverwater. Rhea’s hand slipped in her brother’s, but she refused to let go. Behind them, the door had already splintered, boots crashing into the chamber they had just left. The red emergency light pulsed like a hunting beacon.
“Faster,” Arjun hissed, his flashlight jerking wildly as they stumbled over uneven stone. “We’re close.”
The roar of water grew louder with every step. The tunnel sloped downward, the ground trembling faintly as if the river itself was alive, waiting.
Ayan stumbled, breath ragged. “I can’t—”
“Yes, you can,” Rhea snapped, dragging him forward. She had spent years resenting him, years pretending she didn’t care if he stayed gone. Now the sight of him broken and hunted lit a fire inside her stronger than fear. “You survived them this long. You’ll survive tonight.”
They rounded a bend—and stopped dead.
The passage ended in a jagged opening, where black water surged through a break in the rock. The Ganga had forced her way underground here, wild and furious. The current thundered into darkness beyond, no path, no bridge, only water clawing at stone.
Ayan staggered back. “We can’t—”
Arjun’s jaw tightened. “It’s this or the men behind us.”
Shouts echoed closer. The beam of a flashlight spilled around the bend, swinging like a sword.
Rhea looked at the torrent. Her stomach clenched, but she forced herself to nod. “We go.”
Arjun shoved his bag into her hands. “Hold it above your head. Don’t let go. There are air pockets downstream. If we survive the first drop, the river will spit us out.”
“And if we don’t?”
Arjun’s eyes flickered with something like regret. “Then at least we’ll vanish on our terms.”
The first shot rang out—loud, sharp, ricocheting against stone. A bullet whined past, sparking against the wall. The hunters had arrived.
Rhea grabbed Ayan’s hand with both of hers. “Together.”
He met her eyes, bruised and hollow but still fierce. “Together.”
Arjun didn’t wait. He leapt first, plunging into the current. The water swallowed him instantly.
Rhea and Ayan followed, the roar of the river drowning the gunfire. The cold struck like knives, dragging them under. Water filled her ears, her mouth, her chest. She kicked wildly, clinging to the bag, her brother’s grip slipping and tightening again in frantic rhythm.
The current spun them like dolls, smashing them against stone. Rhea’s lungs burned. Darkness pressed in. She opened her eyes briefly—saw only bubbles and black. For a moment she thought this was how it ended—not by erasure, but by drowning.
Then, abruptly, the river flung them upward. They burst into an air pocket, gasping, coughing, clinging to jagged rocks slick with moss. Arjun’s hand appeared, hauling them toward a narrow ledge.
“Keep moving!” he shouted over the roar. “It’s not done yet!”
The current dragged again, pulling them off the ledge, tumbling them forward. The world became a blur of water and stone, noise and panic.
And then—light.
They exploded out of a fissure in the cliffside, hurled into open air. The Ganga caught them, raging and foaming, tossing them downstream like twigs. Rhea clung to Ayan, the bag wedged between them, her chest seared raw by every desperate breath.
Minutes—or hours—later, the current spat them onto a sandbank. They lay gasping under the first gray light of dawn, their bodies bruised, lungs ragged, but alive.
Rhea rolled onto her back, coughing riverwater. The sky above was pale, indifferent. For the first time since the call, she allowed herself a trembling smile. They had survived.
Arjun staggered to his feet, scanning the river. “No time to celebrate. If we made it out, so did they. And they’ll be hunting harder now.”
Rhea pulled the bag to her chest. Inside was her notebook, her phone, the single screenshot still glowing faintly with her brother’s name. Proof the world had to see.
Ayan sat up slowly, his eyes hollow but burning. “You don’t understand. They won’t let it out. Not the story. Not the truth. They’ll erase anyone who carries it.”
Rhea met his gaze, her voice steady despite her trembling hands. “Then let them try. Because I’ll write it in fire if I have to.”
Arjun looked at both of them, then at the rising sun bleeding across the river. “The line knows you now. It won’t stop. So neither can we.”
Somewhere behind them, deep in the tunnels, the hunters regrouped. Somewhere ahead, the world continued—ignorant, indifferent, waiting for its morning trains.
And on the sandbank between, three fugitives sat drenched and shaking, the weight of a truth heavier than the river itself pressing down on them.
The vanishing line had failed to consume them.
For now.
END
