[POV: Rajesh]
The Audi was in a discreet, expensive body shop, getting its face rebuilt. The bill would be astronomical. I'd told my father I'd swerved to avoid a cow. He'd sighed, the sound costing more than the repairs. "Liability, Rajesh. Always calculate for the unpredictable variable."
If only he knew.
The unpredictable variable was currently sitting cross-legged on the floor of my penthouse, her laptop balanced on my coffee table, eating my expensive Greek yogurt straight from the tub. Divya.
"It's not 'yogurt,' it's strained probiotic curd," I'd informed her when she'd raided the fridge.
"It's tangy spoon-goo," she'd replied, not looking up from her screen. "And your guy in the traffic department is a wizard. He found it."
It was a three-second clip from a working traffic camera two kilometers from St. Martin's. Dated the night Amit died. Time stamp: 19:01:05. Two minutes before the 911 call.
The footage was garbage. Grainy, pixelated, night-vision green. It showed the empty service road that branched off toward the school. And for three seconds, a figure walked into the frame, then ducked behind a collapsed wall, out of view.
A man. Average height. Wearing a hoodie, pants. Could be anyone. But the way he moved—purposeful, head down, disappearing just before the chaos—it wasn't a drunk or a vagrant. It was someone with intent.
"Can we enhance it?" Divya asked, shoving another spoonful of my €25 probiotic curd into her mouth.
"This is enhanced," I said, frustration simmering. "My 'wizard' ran it through every forensic filter the police use. That's all we get. A grey ghost."
She leaned in, her nose almost touching the screen. "Not grey. Look at the pants. Dark. But the hoodie… it's a different shade. Lighter. Maybe with a… pattern? A logo?"
I couldn't see it. It was a blob. But her artist's eye was seeing shapes in the noise. "What kind of logo?"
"Circular. Maybe. With a line." She looked up at me, her eyes wide. "The V_Spectra emblem."
A jolt went through me. The uniform emblem. Could he have been wearing a company hoodie over his uniform? Shedding the marked jacket after the act?
"We need a location," I said, pulling up a map. "He disappears here. The market at the old Ghazipur vegetable wholesale area is a five-minute walk. If he had a vehicle, he'd have parked somewhere discreet. That market is a maze. A perfect place to vanish."
"So we go," she said, closing the laptop. "Today. Before the trail gets any colder."
"We don't go," I corrected. "It's a massive, crowded, chaotic place. We split up. Double the coverage. We look for security cameras he might have passed, shopkeepers who might remember a guy in a light grey hoodie that night. I'll take the western alleys. You take the eastern perimeter."
She didn't argue. The warehouse incident had changed things. We were soldiers now. Brief, coordinate, execute.
"Comms?" she asked, pulling her hair into a tight ponytail.
"Wireless earpieces. Low-range, encrypted." I tossed her a tiny, flesh-coloured bud. "Channel two. Call sign 'Designer' for you, 'CFO' for me. Simple."
She caught it, a faint smirk touching her lips. "'Designer'? Not 'Loose Cannon'?"
"That's implied. Check in every fifteen minutes. If you see him, do not engage. You observe and report. Understood?"
She gave a sharp, mocking salute. "Sir, yes sir."
---
[POV: Divya]
The Ghazipur market wasn't a place. It was an organism. A throbbing, roaring, smelly beast made of shouting men, crumbling carts, mountains of potatoes, and rivers of muddy water. The air was thick with the smell of overripe fruit, diesel, and sweat.
My earpiece crackled. CFO: In position at west gate. No visual on any private CCTV. Moving in.
Designer: Copy. East side is a circus. Looking for camera angles.
I moved through the chaos, my phone out, pretending to take reference photos for my "urban textures" project. My eyes scanned every awning, every shop front. I needed a camera. A witness. A thread.
I saw a tiny paan shop with a dusty, dome-shaped CCTV camera pointed at the alley. Bingo.
I approached the old man behind the counter. "Uncle, that camera… does it work?"
He squinted at me. "Why? You police?"
"Design student," I said, flashing my university ID. "I'm doing a project on… night lighting in market spaces. I need to see how the lights look on your camera at night. For, uh, realism."
He looked supremely uninterested. "It works. But the recorder is broken. Only live feed."
My heart sank. No recording. "Do you work here at night? Maybe you saw someone? About a month ago? A man in a light grey hoodie?"
He stared at me like I'd asked him to recall a specific grain of rice. "Beti, I see a thousand people. I see grey hoodies every day. Now, you buying paan or not?"
I bought a disgusting mint supari I had no intention of eating and moved on.
Designer: First lead dead. No recordings.
CFO: Copy. I have a hardware store with a functional system. Owner is… negotiating a fee for the footage.
Of course. Negotiating. Leveraging.
I pushed deeper into a narrow alley stacked with empty crates. The crowd thinned here. And that's when I saw him.
Leaning against a wall, smoking a cigarette. Average height. Wearing a dark jacket now, but the hood pulled up. And underneath, a flash of light grey fabric. He had a tattoo on his wrist—a geometric design I couldn't make out.
My blood turned to ice. It was the posture. The way he held himself. It matched the blurry green ghost on the screen.
Designer: CFO, I have a visual. East alley, near the potato wholesalers. Male, dark jacket, grey hood underneath. Tattoo on right wrist. He's just standing there.
CFO: Do NOT approach. What's your exact—
But the man pushed off the wall. He dropped his cigarette, crushed it, and started walking. Not hurried. Just… moving.
"He's on the move," I whispered into the mic, following at a distance, my heart hammering. "Heading south, deeper into the crates."
CFO: I'm two minutes from your position. Do not lose visual but maintain distance. I'm coming to you.
The man turned a corner. I sped up, peeking around the edge of a towering stack of wooden crates.
He was gone.
The alley forked. Left, toward the main market roar. Right, into a dim, covered passage that seemed to lead to the loading docks.
"He vanished at a fork," I hissed. "Left or right?"
CFO: Stay at the fork. I'll take right. You watch left. If he appears, just point.
I stood there, frozen, my eyes darting between the two openings. The noise of the market felt miles away. The covered passage on the right was silent, dark. The left was bustling.
A figure in a dark jacket emerged from the left alley, head down, walking fast. Him.
Designer: Left! He's going left, back to main market!
I started to follow, but as I passed the dark passage on the right, a hand shot out and grabbed my arm, yanking me into the shadows.
I gasped, stumbling, as I was pulled behind the crates. I raised my shears from my pocket—
"It's me." Rajesh's voice, low and urgent in my ear. He was breathing hard. He pressed a finger to his lips, his eyes wide.
We stood frozen, hidden. A second later, the man in the dark jacket—the one I'd been following—walked right past our hiding spot, back the way he'd come. He hadn't gone left at all. He'd doubled back.
It was a different man. Similar build, similar jacket, but no tattoo. A market worker.
We'd been played. He'd used the crowd, the doubles, the chaos.
CFO: The ghost is gone.
We waited until the man passed, then Rajesh pulled me out of the alley, his grip tight on my wrist. We didn't speak until we were back in the sea of people, the anonymity of the crowd swallowing us.
He stopped, turning to me, his face a mask of furious frustration. "You said left. You were sure."
"I was! He looked the same!"
"He wasn't! You engaged without backup! You almost led us on a chase after a vegetable vendor!"
"I was following your order! Maintain visual!"
"The order was to observe, not to get close enough to confuse him with a random guy!"
We were inches apart, hissing at each other in the middle of the market, people flowing around us like we were rocks in a stream.
"We lost him because we're splitting up!" I shot back. "Your 'tactical' approach doesn't work in a place like this! You need to blend, not… not strategize!"
"Blending is what got you grabbed in a warehouse!" he snapped. "My approach keeps you alive!"
"Your approach is slow and rigid and we're losing! He's out there, laughing at us, while you're negotiating with hardware store owners!"
A vendor selling plastic toys watched us with amusement. "Lover's fight? Very good drama. Only five hundred rupees."
We both turned and glared at him. He shrunk back.
The fight drained out of me, replaced by a cold, sickening realization. Rajesh was right. I'd gotten excited. I'd seen a ghost and charged after it. We'd lost the real one because of me.
"I'm sorry," I muttered, looking at the grimy ground. "I screwed up."
He was silent for a long moment. When he spoke, his voice was quieter, exhausted. "We both did. I was too far away. My intel was late." He rubbed a hand over his face. "He knows this terrain. We don't. We're playing his game on his field."
I looked up at him. The infallible CEO looked lost. Defeated. For the first time, I saw the sheer, staggering weight of what we were trying to do—two kids hunting a professional killer in a city that didn't care.
"So we change the game," I said quietly.
He met my eyes. "How?"
I didn't know. But as I stood there in the stinking, glorious chaos of the market, surrounded by a million secrets and a thousand hiding places, an idea began to form. Not a CEO's idea. Not a designer's idea. Something in between.
"We don't find the ghost," I said slowly. "We make the ghost find us."
He stared at me, the strategist in him warring with the desperate ally. "That's called bait. And it's a terrible plan."
I touched the bracelet under my sleeve. "Yeah," I said. "But it's our terrible plan."
A flicker of that grim, terrified respect returned to his eyes. He gave a single, resigned nod.
The chase was over. For now.
The trap was just beginning.