The sky was the colour of ash.
It had not rained, but the air carried that heaviness — the kind that sits on your chest and does not move. The kind that makes breathing feel like a task.
Raj's funeral was held at the cremation ground on the edge of the city. Not many people came. His parents, a few relatives who had travelled overnight, some neighbours who barely knew him. A handful of classmates who stood awkwardly at the back, unsure whether they were grieving or just witnessing grief.
Rudra stood at the front.
He had not slept. He had not eaten since the night they found Raj in Sector 12. Arjun had tried to get him to drink something — water, tea, anything — but Rudra had just looked through him like he wasn't there.
He watched them carry the body. He watched Raj's mother collapse into her husband's arms, a sound coming out of her that Rudra had never heard from a human being before. He watched the fire start.
And he felt nothing.
That was the worst part. He had expected to cry. He had prepared for it, in a strange way — braced himself like you brace before a punch. But the tears didn't come. There was just a hollow, terrible stillness inside him, like something had been scooped out and the wound had gone too deep to bleed.
He stood there until the fire burned down to nothing.
---
He found his father waiting outside.
Rudra had not called him. He didn't know how his father had found out — maybe someone from the neighbourhood had told him, maybe he had seen the news. It didn't matter. He was there, standing near the gate with his hands folded in front of him, wearing the same old grey kurta he always wore to serious occasions.
For a long moment neither of them spoke.
His father looked older than the last time Rudra had seen him. The lines around his eyes were deeper, his hair more silver than black now. He looked at Rudra the way only a parent can — taking in everything at once, the dark circles, the hollow cheeks, the expression that was not quite an expression at all.
"Come," his father said quietly. "Let's walk."
They walked along the road outside the cremation ground, past a chai stall that was still setting up for the morning, past an old man walking a dog too slowly for the cold air. Neither of them spoke for a while. That was the thing about his father — he never rushed. He always gave silence the room it needed.
Finally Rudra said, "It was my fault."
His father didn't react immediately. He kept walking. Then he said, "Tell me."
So Rudra talked. Not about Horns, not about P.R.I.S.M., not about any of the details he couldn't share. But around it — the edges of it. He talked about how he had been doing something dangerous. Something that mattered to him, but something that had put the people around him at risk. He talked about how Raj had been caught in the middle of it. How Raj had never asked to be part of any of it. How Raj had just been there, the way he had always just been there, since they were kids.
"He was my oldest friend," Rudra said. His voice came out quieter than he expected. "He used to drive me crazy. He never shut up. He had opinions on everything." He stopped walking. "I didn't even know how much I needed him until —"
He couldn't finish the sentence.
His father stopped beside him. He didn't put a hand on Rudra's shoulder. He didn't say everything happens for a reason, or he's in a better place, or any of those hollow things people say at funerals. He just stood there, present, and waited.
"I can't stop," Rudra said eventually. "What I'm doing. I can't stop it."
His father looked at him. "Why not?"
"Because if I stop, then what happened to Raj meant nothing." Rudra's jaw tightened. "And there are more people who are going to get hurt if I don't finish this. I know that. I can feel it."
A long silence passed between them.
"You're talking about being a hero," his father said.
It wasn't a question. Rudra looked at him, surprised, and his father gave a small, tired smile.
"I'm your father, Rudra. I've known something was different about you for a while now. You think I don't notice when my son comes home at strange hours with injuries he doesn't explain?" He shook his head slowly. "I didn't ask because I didn't want to know the answer. That was my mistake."
Rudra said nothing.
His father started walking again, slowly, and Rudra fell into step beside him.
"You know what I used to think about heroes?" his father said. "When you were a child and you used to watch them on the news — you'd stand on the sofa, you remember that? You'd point at the screen and say 'Papa, I want to be like that.' And I used to think — those people have given up their lives. Their families. Their safety. Everything ordinary. And I would look at you, this small ridiculous boy standing on my sofa, and I would think — not him. Not my son."
Rudra's throat tightened.
"Because I was afraid," his father continued. "I raised you alone. You are everything I have. And fear makes people selfish, even when they don't mean to be." He paused. "I still feel that fear. I want to tell you to stop. I want to lock you inside the house and never let you out." He exhaled slowly. "But you are not that small boy on the sofa anymore."
They had reached the end of the road. Beyond the railing was the city, sprawling and grey and indifferent, beginning to wake up in the thin morning light.
"Is this what you want?" his father asked. "Not what you think is right, not what you feel you owe anyone. What you, Rudra, want."
Rudra looked at the city.
He thought about Raj laughing too loud in the back of class. He thought about Arthur handing him a necklace in a torn-down house. He thought about Arjun crying in the dark and asking for help for the first time in his life. He thought about every person in every street he had run through, every face in every crowd that had looked up and seen him and felt, just for a moment, less afraid.
"Yes," he said.
His father nodded. Slowly, like a man making peace with something he had been fighting for a long time.
"Then it's your life," he said. "And you have to find your own path." He turned to look at Rudra, and his eyes were wet, though his voice stayed steady. "Just promise me something."
"What?"
"Come home when it's over."
Rudra looked at his father for a long moment. This man who had worked every day of his life quietly, without complaint, who had given up things Rudra would never fully know about to raise him. This man who had never asked for anything.
"I promise," Rudra said.
His father reached out and placed his hand briefly on the back of Rudra's neck — the way he used to when Rudra was young, when he was scared of something. A gesture that said I'm here without any words at all.
Then he let go.
---
Rudra returned to the apartment in the late afternoon.
Arjun was sitting at the table, a map of the P.R.I.S.M. facility spread in front of him, along with the copied key and a small notebook filled with handwritten observations. He looked up when Rudra came in.
He didn't ask how the funeral was. He didn't ask about his father. He could read Rudra's face well enough to know that questions weren't what was needed right now.
Rudra sat down across from him. He looked at the map. He looked at the key. He looked at the notebook, at Arjun's small, careful handwriting listing guard rotations and camera blind spots and entry points.
"Tonight?" Rudra said.
Arjun held his gaze. "Tonight."
Rudra reached across the table and turned the map toward himself. He studied it without expression — the corridors, the stairwells, the upper floors where the private archives were buried. The place where the answers were. The place where Raj's death would either mean something, or not.
Outside, the city hummed with its ordinary noise. Cars. Voices. The distant sound of a horn.
Inside, there was only silence, and the map, and the two of them.
Rudra was not angry anymore. He was not crying. He was not the boy who had stood at the funeral staring into a fire, hollow and lost.
He was something quieter than all of that.
He was ready.