[POV: Rajesh]
The city fell away like a discarded skin. The smooth, lit avenues gave way to potholed service roads, then to a cracked, single-lane path that seemed to resent the car's intrusion. I turned off the music. The only sounds were the low growl of the engine, the occasional sickening thud of the suspension bottoming out, and our own tense breathing.
Darkness. Not the friendly dark of a city night, but a thick, swallowing dark. My headlights cut two desperate cones of yellow through it, illuminating crumbling walls, graffiti that looked like old wounds, and the skeletal remains of factories.
"Keep going," Divya whispered, as if speaking too loud would wake something. She was leaning forward, peering into the gloom. "It should be up ahead on the left. The school."
"I see it."
And I did. St. Martin's Residential School. The sign was hanging by one rusted chain, creaking in a non-existent wind. The building itself was a monstrous silhouette against the marginally lighter sky—a three-story tomb of broken windows and jagged rooflines. It looked less like a building and more like a fossil of misery.
"This was a bad idea," I muttered, navigating around a pile of bricks.
"It was the only idea," she countered, but her voice lacked conviction.
The air felt colder here. The dread that had been a knot in my stomach was now a solid block of ice. This wasn't just worry. This was a primal, animal sense of wrongness. The shortcut felt less like a path and more like a descent.
"His phone," Divya said suddenly, her voice tight. "His location. At the metro. It's a straight line from there… to here."
I didn't want to think about what that meant. "Coincidence. The tower probably just—"
"Rajesh."
She said my name. Not Malhotra. Not 'CEO'. My name. And in it was a warning so profound it stole the breath from my lungs.
I followed her gaze, ahead and to the right, past the hulking shadow of the school.
There were lights.
Not the steady glow of a distant building. These were erratic. Strobing. Blue and red, painting the underbelly of the night sky in pulses of emergency.
Police lights.
My foot eased off the accelerator. The car slowed to a crawl. The ice in my stomach was now liquid nitrogen, freezing me from the inside out.
There was a crowd. A swarm of dark shapes against the flashing lights. The silhouettes of news vans. The stark white of an ambulance.
A scene.
"No," I breathed. The word was a puff of air, meaningless.
"What is that?" Divya asked, her voice small, childlike. "An accident?"
We were closer now. I could make out figures in uniform. Yellow police tape, fluttering like a sick party decoration, cordoning off an area near the base of the school's front wall.
My brain, the efficient, analytical machine, started making connections against my will. Abandoned building. High wall. Police. Ambulance. Crowd.
Jumpers.
The city had a history with this place.
I stopped the car entirely, about fifty meters away, half-hidden in the deeper shadow of a fallen lamppost. The engine idled, a nervous hum.
"We should… we should see," Divya said, but she made no move to get out. She was staring, transfixed, one hand creeping to the door handle. "Maybe… maybe someone saw something. About Amit."
"Divya, don't." My hand shot out, gripping her wrist. It was the first time I'd intentionally touched her since the dance. Her skin was like ice. "Let me go. You stay here."
"Like hell I will." She shook off my grip, her eyes blazing with a new, terrible fear. "If it's an accident, maybe he stopped to help! He would! You know he would!"
That was the hope she was clinging to. The noble, stupid, Amit-like hope. That our best friend wasn't missing, he was just being a hero.
Before I could stop her, she was out of the car, her bare feet hitting the broken asphalt. She started walking, then jogging, towards the chaos, the dark pashmina streaming behind her like a flag.
"Divya! Damn it!" I killed the engine, scrambled out, and ran after her.
The sounds hit us first. The static crackle of police radios. The murmured buzz of the crowd. A reporter practicing a stand-up in a low, dramatic voice. And underneath it all, a low, mechanical whine—the sound of the ambulance's idle.
We pushed to the front of the crowd. No one noticed two more shocked faces. All attention was focused on the taped-off circle.
And then I saw it.
A shape on the ground, covered by a sheet. Not fully covered. From where we stood, we could see a foot. A shoe.
A very specific, hand-stitched, midnight blue Oxford shoe.
The world didn't slow down. It didn't go silent. It simply… shattered.
Every color, every sound, every sensation ripped away, leaving only that patch of dark blue leather under the harsh white of the emergency lights.
I heard a gasp beside me that wasn't really a gasp. It was the sound of a soul being torn in two.
Divya's hand flew to her mouth. Her entire body began to tremble.
My own limbs felt numb, detached. My CEO brain, my strategic mind, my entire being… short-circuited. There was no plan for this. No protocol.
A policeman was talking to a man in a crumpled shirt—a passerby. "…heard a loud thud, sir, like a sack of cement… looked over and saw him lying here… no, no one else was up there… just him… must have jumped…"
Jumped.
The word was a nail gun to my temple.
No.
Amit didn't jump. Amit didn't jump. He loved life with a ferocity that shamed the sun. He loved her. He loved…
He loved…
Divya took a step forward. Then another. She was moving towards the tape, towards the blue shoe, in a hypnotic trance.
"Ma'am, stay back!" a young constable said, putting out an arm.
She didn't seem to hear him. Her eyes were locked on the shape under the sheet. "Amit?" The name was a feather, a breath. "Amit… that's your… I made those…"
I found my body. I lunged forward, grabbing her shoulders from behind, pulling her back against me. "Divya. No. Don't look."
She fought me, a sudden, wild strength in her. "Let me go! That's his shoe! I stitched that! I KNOW THAT SHOE!" Her scream ripped through the night air, silencing the crowd murmur for a second.
Heads turned. Camera lenses swiveled.
The constable's face hardened. "Family?"
I couldn't speak. My throat was sealed shut. I just held onto Divya, who was now sobbing, her fists beating weakly against my arms.
An older man in a white coat—the emergency doctor—walked over, his face grim. He looked from Divya's shattered expression to mine. He didn't need to ask.
He just gave a small, weary, definitive shake of his head.
"Time of death," he said, his voice clinical, final, "approximately two hours ago. I'm very sorry for your loss."
Loss.
The word was too small. It was a teacup trying to hold an ocean.
Divya went utterly limp in my arms. All the fight, all the sound, drained out of her. She was just… weight.
I held her up, my own vision blurring, the flashing lights melting into streaks of meaningless color. I stared over her head at the covered shape.
Amit...
My brother. My only color.
Under a sheet. On the cold ground. In front of a forgotten school.
The cold dread that had settled in my stomach hours ago now exploded, flooding every cell, freezing me where I stood. This wasn't the end of the search.
It was the beginning of a different, darker forever..