In the vault two floors below, the lights did not simply come on.
They exploded into life.
One instant the hall was a tomb of perfect black. The next, every single frosted bulb along the tunnel and across the ceiling detonated with blinding amber fire, as though someone had thrown a switch that connected straight to the sun itself. The sudden glare ricocheted off thousands of glass boxes, turning the entire chamber into a furnace of golden light.
Then the books moved.
The five thick diaries on the small wooden table snapped open at once. Pages whipped forward and backward with the speed of machine-gun fire, paper slicing air, raising a wind that howled between the racks. Dates blurred: 1892, 1918, 1934, 1953, 1971. Ink lifted off the pages in black spirals, swirling upward like startled crows. The diaries slammed shut again in perfect unison, the sound of five gunshots echoing across the hall.
That was only the beginning.
Every grain of dust that had settled over fifty-two years rose at once, yanked from floors, shelves, and the tops of sealed boxes. It gathered into thick, writhing columns that spun faster and faster, forming miniature cyclones that screamed as they raced along the aisles. The dust streams found the hidden vents (narrow slits disguised as cracks in the concrete high along the walls) and poured into them with a roar like a train entering a tunnel. Within seconds the air was scoured clean, sterile, sharp enough to sting the lungs.
The boxes began to shake next.
Not just the oldest ones now. All of them. Thousands of glass prisons rattled on their shelves, some rocking so violently they threatened to topple. The etched dagger inside its case spun like a compass needle gone mad. The preserved squirrel leg uncurled and thrashed against the glass. Something in a box labelled "Calicut – 1921" beat leathery wings that had not moved since the British were still collecting taxes in opium.
A low, rising hum filled the vault, deep enough to rattle teeth.
In the exact centre of the hall, directly beneath the brightest bulb, the last of the dust abandoned the floor and shot upward in a single perfect column. It thickened, compressed, folded in on itself with impossible speed.
Boots formed first (solid, black, polished).
Then the tall legs.
The pathani kurta, blood-dark and freshly pressed.
The kirpan at the waist, silver so bright it looked wet.
Finally the face: high cheekbones, calm eyes, the scar across the left eyebrow still pink, as though the wound that caused it had been earned only yesterday.
Vikramaditya Shinde took his first breath in fifty-two years.
He did not stagger. He did not blink. He simply opened his eyes and looked around the vault with the quiet authority of a man stepping back into a house he had never truly left.
One look (no gesture, no shout, just a slight narrowing of those ancient eyes) and every box fell instantly still.
The dagger stopped spinning.
The squirrel leg curled obediently back into its foetal shape.
The winged thing folded itself away.
Even the vents sealed themselves with soft metallic clicks, as though invisible hands had turned hidden keys.
Silence dropped like a curtain.
The lights dimmed from furnace-bright to the warm, steady glow of a study lamp. The air was clean, cold, waiting.
Vikramaditya inhaled once more, slowly, tasting the familiar dryness of his sanctuary. He walked the three steps to his old table, ran one finger across the cover of the topmost diary (no dust remained to mark his touch), and allowed himself the smallest exhale that might have been relief.
Then he turned and looked straight up, through two floors of concrete and steel, through the false-bottom almirah, through the locked shutter of Shop 81, directly into the wide, terrified eyes of the boy clutching a motorcycle key on a folding cot.
Vikramaditya Shinde did not smile.
He simply inclined his head, once (an acknowledgment, a command, a promise).
The vault was awake.
The hunter had come home.