(Devraj POV)
The dead don't stay silent.
People do.
For ten years, that lesson had carved itself into my spine every time I walked into the small, dim café behind the South Gate of Cinder Division Headquarters. I knew the smell better than my own home—burnt coffee, mop water, and the quiet stench of bureaucracy rotting under fluorescent lights.
Officer Mahesh Desai always arrived late, always sweating, always pretending he wasn't terrified of me.
Today was no different.
He slid into the booth across from me, breathing hard. "Traffic," he said.
Traffic.
He'd been using that excuse since I was sixteen.
Before I could grow stubble, before I could shift metal in my bones, before I even understood why Dhruv's death twisted something sharp inside my ribs.
Same excuse.
Same cowardice.
Same man.
"Did you bring it?" I asked.
Mahesh flinched like the words slapped him.
He placed a small data chip on the table and covered it with his palm, eyes darting to the door.
"You didn't get this from me," he whispered.
His hands shook.
Not from guilt—Mahesh had none—but from greed. He wanted the envelope in my coat pocket more than he wanted air.
I slid it across.
Ten years.
Ten years of envelopes.
Ten years of begging crumbs from the same corrupt dog.
He pocketed the bribe with embarrassing speed, then leaned forward.
"This is recent," he said. "You asked for anything new… anything that wasn't edited by the higher-ups."
"What is it?"
"A raw data extraction from the new grid."
I frowned. "The heat-mapper?"
Mahesh nodded. "Not officially operational yet. Still testing. They haven't filtered the junk signatures."
He wiped his forehead again. "Don't make this more important than it is. Ninety-nine percent is useless. Kitchens. Factories. Generators. It's all noise."
He pushed the chip toward me and stood so quickly he spilled water across the table.
"Mahesh."
My voice stopped him mid-step.
He froze.
"Ten years," I said quietly. "Ten years of meeting me in this miserable café. Ten years of taking my money. Ten years of telling me nothing."
His throat bobbed.
"Why give me this now?"
Because he was scared of losing his job.
Because he was scared of Cinder's new internal sweeps.
Because he needed one last envelope before disappearing.
But he said:
"It's useless data. If anyone asks, you got nothing from me."
And then he left.
Coward.
I sat alone for a long time, staring at the sweating glass of water he'd abandoned.
Ten years of nothing.
Ten years of unanswered questions.
Ten years of hearing the same phrase from the elders:
> Let it go, Devraj.
The hybrid died.
Children with that much fire burn out within months.
Your father's death is closed.
A hybrid child.
Six years old.
Half Ember, half nothing.
Impossible to survive past six months.
I told myself the same thing.
Every year.
Every month.
Every night.
But obsession doesn't die.
It waits.
I left the café and stepped into my car.
Inserted the chip.
Projected the data in the air.
Mahesh wasn't lying—
it was junk.
Thousands of heat logs:
cooking fires
welding stations
laundry steam
underground ducts
bakery ovens
tea stalls
Low.
Steady.
Low.
Noise.
I sifted through hours.
Then days.
Then weeks.
Nothing.
Not a single spike worth noting.
Not a single Ember signature.
Not a single anomaly.
Then—
My fingers froze.
Line 16,432.
A sequence too structured.
Too rhythmic.
Too deliberate.
Low → steady → low → steady → low.
Then one tiny spike.
A single second.
A flicker.
And the steady returned.
Cold slid down my spine.
I zoomed in.
The pattern sharpened.
The rhythm aligned.
The drop curves matched an image etched into my memory for a decade:
The reverse-flame anomaly from Dhruv's death.
The one Cinder dismissed as "faulty reading."
The one no one believed.
The one that survived the explosion.
My breath caught.
It wasn't identical.
It was older.
More controlled.
Sharper.
Like a child's heartbeat grown into an adult's.
But the signature was the same.
It was him.
The hybrid.
The impossible hybrid.
The child who should have died in six months.
The boy Cinder erased.
The mistake they buried under reports and lies.
Alive.
Alive.
ALIVE.
Ten years of silence shattered like glass inside my chest.
I replayed the spike again.
And again.
And again.
My father's killer lived.
And he had just awakened.
The world outside my window blurred.
My reflection stared back—calm, composed, burning with an old, quiet rage.
The first real clue in ten years.
And it was enough.
I whispered into the empty car:
"Found you."