The morning smelled like soap and lemon. Dad had already arranged his teaching corner: a small foldable table, a stack of neat notebooks, a sharpener that made a satisfying sound, and a ruler placed like an old habit. Vahni moved through the kitchen with the efficiency of someone who had long ago catalogued the city's dangers and learned to build rituals around them.
"Smile when they arrive," she had told him without turning.
He nodded, practiced the smile in a tiny mirror, then walked to the door to meet their visitor. Tejas and Anaya were in the living room, Anaya glued to a glue stick as if she'd been born with craft supplies in her hands. The poster they were making looked like a protest for good grades—loud headings, crooked stars, and an enthusiasm that smelled of glue and sugar.
When Kiran and his mother arrived, Vahni greeted them at the threshold with the warm calm of a hostess who had practiced empathy as armour.
"Please come in," she said, and her voice was smooth like a surface that would not crack under pressure. She took the mother's bag with the grace of someone ensuring everything looked normal. Dad introduced himself as Raghav with the ease of a man who had once stood at a lectern and had entire rooms listen. He treated Kiran like a boy who could be straightened with patience and small wins.
Kiran's mother said she wanted a gentle approach and nodded when Dad explained the plan in a voice full of the old teacher's cadence. He showed her the corner where he would teach, how the lighting was good, how he preferred calm and small steps. The mother relaxed in the way people relax when they discover competence.
Throughout the hour, the house hummed with ordinary life: the ticking of a clock, the scratch of pencil on paper, the small murmur of conversation. Kiran wrote sums and read aloud; his shoulders loosened. Dad had that quiet magnetism professors sometimes have—the ability to make confusion look like an instruction step rather than a failure. The mother watched with the kind of gratitude that makes strangers speak kindly of you later.
Anaya pretended to be absorbed in the poster but watched with the curiosity of someone cataloguing patterns. When the mother left, promising to return next week and clutching the small stack of biscuits she'd bought as thanks, Vahni walked her to the gate and smiled like any good neighbour. No sharp words in front of visitors. She kept the performance flawless.
As soon as the door clicked shut, the façade slipped like a curtain. Vahni folded her hands once, a micro-ritual, then took Dad aside.
"No more unvetted visitors into the house," she said softly. Not angry—never loud in public—but firm as a rule.
"It's only one child," he replied.
"One child can become two. Two becomes a pattern. Patterns are dangerous," she answered. "We present as family, yes. But we do not let our performance invite curiosity."
He agreed. He knew the value of discretion now the way a man knows the value of his own shadow. They had rehearsed this life: earnest smiles outside, careful words inside.
Anaya finished the poster, declaring it "museum-quality," and flung it on the table with the drama she lived for. "Your house is top-tier secret office," she declared, folding her legs and looking pleased.
"Don't call it secret," I said.
"Private then," she corrected. "Private offices are cooler anyway."
She paused, then tilted her head toward me. "You're warmer today. Not a fever-warm. Just—comfortable-warm. Like a cup of chai."
"Stop trying to make metaphors," I muttered.
She grinned. "You know I'll write that down."
That small warmth was nothing notable. It was the kind of detail a close friend notices but keeps as an anecdote, not an alarm.
Evening edged toward gold when Anaya finally left with the poster rolled under her arm and a promise to return tomorrow. Dad stood at the gate like someone who had rediscovered a role he loved. He watched them go, smiling without fatigue for the first time in days. The sight of him beaming was a small relief that felt almost dangerous because it was so thinly held.
When the house quieted, Vahni called me into the kitchen.
She didn't scold. She never scolded in front of guests. She did the hard work of protection privately.
"We will continue the tuition," she said. "One student. You will not interact with them unnecessarily. You understand?"
I nodded.
She watched my face for a long moment. "We act like a family. We behave like a family. Outwardly, we are exactly that. Inwards, we keep what we must keep hidden."
"Okay," I said.
She touched my forehead once, a private seal. "Be careful. Do not draw attention."
Outside our little street, a building of glass pulsed with artificial light. Inside, rows of analysts watched thermal maps and streams of data. The Cinder Division's monitoring team had grown patient and mechanical. They treated stray thermal anomalies the way a doctor treats a minor fever—note it, record it, decide if it ever becomes dangerous.
Meera, an analyst with tired eyes and a predisposition for curiosity, flicked between overlays on her screen. What caught her attention was not a spike. It was a low, steady pattern—nothing dramatic, just a flat warmth that rose gently and then dipped. It appeared near a residential block, then near a small school, then next to a grocery stall, then under the playground lights. All points were within a small radius inside Green Park Colony.
She overlaid the traces, watched the maps redraw, and frowned. "It's moving," she said.
Her senior glanced at the traces. "Could be an industrial process. Or a truck with an oven. Or sensor drift. Lots of things create this kind of noise."
Meera zoomed in. The triangulation markers showed a slight jitter—sensors overlapping and assigning the source to different nodes. In dense urban grids, overlapping receivers sometimes misattribute a single source to several nearby locations because timing and signal strength can confuse the algorithm.
"Schedule for technical review," her supervisor ordered. "Low priority. Track it. If it stabilizes or spikes, escalate. Until then, it's a calibration issue."
Meera tagged the trace with "mobile low-steady source; check triangulation." She saved the file with a small notation: too little confidence for action. It went into a queue of curiosities—things for someone else to worry about later.
Back at home, the evening meal was quiet and careful. Dad placed a small jar of the day's earnings on a shelf as if each rupee had a weight that needed to be judged. They ate as a family on purpose, cups clinking, small jokes exchanged to feed the illusion.
Later, when the street's light dimmed and the city softened into an uneasy hush, Vahni locked the balcony door and checked the small leather pouch that rested in the bottom of a locked drawer. She touched it like one touches a relic that might sing if the wrong thing is said. Then she put it away and set extra precautions in motion: the balcony latch double-checked, the window curtains drawn, the door bolted from the inside. She paced a route in her head where no unexpected footsteps would come without being noticed.
When she turned to me, she folded her hands. "You will not let anyone touch the balcony. No exceptions."
"No exceptions," I echoed.
She nodded. "If you ever feel exposed—say so. We will move. We have the plan."
We had a plan. Plans were good. Plans were safety.
In Green Park Colony the signal Meera had flagged remained ambiguous on the glowing screens. It hopped from node to node, always within a small neighbourhood. The analysts called it a curiosity. They offered hypotheses about refrigeration trucks and electrical transformers. No one called it a person. No one connected it to anything old or dangerous. For now it lived as a low-priority question on a long list.
For now, we had a house that looked like any other. For now, we had a father teaching again, a mother smiling politely at the gate, a daughter-friend who made posters, and a boy who was only a little warmer than usual.
That warmth could be a joke, a detail, a notice in a notebook. It could be nothing more than a cup of tea held too long. Or it could be the first breath of something that would not remain small.
For now, we chose the safest thing: to keep the truth contained, to act like a family, to fold secrecy into the careful choreography of ordinary life. The machine would hum in its building of screens, and the analysts would tag the trace with low priority. We would continue to breathe and perform and prepare.
Tomorrow would test how well performance could hide a life.