Infinitude Final

INFINITUDE

First published in 2014 by Hachette India(Registered name: Hachette Book Publishing India Pvt Ltd)

An Hachette UK companywww.hachetteindia.com

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Copyright © 2014 Ruchi Banerjee

Ruchi Banerjee asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

All rights reserved. No part of the publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system (including but not limited to computers, disks, external drives, electronic or digital devices, e-readers, websites), or transmitted in any form or by any means (including but not limited to cyclostyling, photocopying, docutech or other reprographic reproductions, mechanical,

recording, electronic, digital versions) without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

ISBN 978-93-5009-815-8

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Printed and bound in India by

INFINITUDE

by

Ruchi Banerjee

Ruchi Banerjee was born in 1978 and still continues to thrive. Ever since she first met Francine (the protagonist of her favourite novel, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn), Ruchi fell in love with the written word. At present, Ruchi lives in Brazil, speaks decent, if not quite fluent, Portuguese and really hates talking about herself in third person. This is her first novel.

To Usha and Yog Raj Sharma – for giving me the freedom to dream. 

To Abhishek – who always believes and who helped me put in a lot of the unbelievable stuff. 

To Neil – for being the best five-year-old in the whole ooniverse.   

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T IGER , T IGER

The Amazonia, 26 December 2173Mira struggles to catch up. A minute ago, she had

been right behind Neel chasing that dreadful sound, an eerie rustling that had filled her with darkness and foreboding. Now all she can see are the distant flashes of his shirt. Mira runs harder gulping the air in. The dank smell of wet rot weighs down on her lungs. Her clothes stick to her body drenched with the sweat of her exertions and her fear. Mira strives to draw strength from the towering trees surrounding her, but they seem to be struggling as well. They careen upwards like dementors, fighting to escape to the freedom of the skies above. Their dense canopy leaves nothing behind but a morass simmering with the static of all kinds of strange prehistoric insects.

Images of wiry antennas, feathery bodies and diaphanous wings fill Mira’s mind and she fights back a shiver. Her step falters as a stray beam of sunlight dazes her eyes. The halo stretches and then disappears. It just takes a second but as she focuses her eyes again, Mira draws in a sharp breath. Cold stark fear surges through her veins. The thumping of her chest resounds in her ears. It’s gone. The blur of white she had been following is gone.

Mira draws on the last reserves of strength she

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has left. Streaks of green and brown fill the corner of her eyes and her heart feels like an over-inflated balloon, just about to burst. She should have listened to Neel. She should have gone back home. Too late. Too late. Minutes pass and just when she’s about to give up hope, she sees a flash of Neel’s shirt again. Her shoulders collapse with relief and she sucks in a long shuddering breath. And then . . . one small misstep . . . Mira stumbles and twists her foot over a surface root. A sharp snap rings in her ears and a piercing pain sears through her ankle. Suddenly her whole body buckles and is . . . air-borne!

Mira shrieks, as much in shock as in pain. Her legs get bent upwards at an awkward angle, while her torso faces the ground below, pressed against something hard. Something that bites viciously into her skin.

As her whole body starts swaying, Mira looks down and realizes she’s about twenty feet above the ground! Panic strikes and she starts screaming, calling out to Neel.

A few seconds later, the terror of the moment passes and she quietens down.

No need to panic. Surely, Neel must have heard her. He must be on his way back right now.

She moves her fingers around to inspect but all she can make out is more of the same hard metallic rope that her face seems to be plastered on. As she feels the rope with her fingers, she begins to follow the crisscross patterns in it. Of course! It’s a net . . . a trap!

She curses at the sheer possibility of something like this happening to her and that too on a day when things had already been bad enough. Mira curses her wretched fate but doesn’t indulge in the self-pity for too long. Never one to just sit and fret, she resorts to action.

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Lifting her hands, she clenches the net above her head and concentrates all her energy on hoisting herself up. But as soon as she tries to straighten her legs, a sharp stinging pain shoots up her right ankle, throbbing all the way to her brain. A cry escapes her lips and she collapses back, singed with the wasted effort.

Weighed down with her bulk, the net sways making her dizzy, Mira closes her eyes and shouts out Neel’s name again.

What’s taking him so long? Maybe Neel covered a lot of distance when she fell? Maybe he needs just a bit more time. Then it occurs to her. All this while, she has just been shouting Neel’s name! He must have thought she was trying to stop him. He may not even realize that she needs help! Stupid stupid.

She starts shouting his name again, this time adding her pleas for help. Then she waits. A minute passes. Then another.

What if he hasn’t heard her? What if something has happened to him as well?

For the first time ever, Mira feels the terror. Naked and unadulterated terror. Stuck in this trap with a broken leg and with no one coming to rescue her! This can’t be happening!

Mira’s eyes glaze over with tears but she can’t wipe them. If she moves her hands, the whole thing will start swaying again and she doesn’t want to risk moving her leg, even by an inch. Judging by the amount of pain, her ankle is probably fractured. She blinks furiously to clear her eyes and tells herself to get it together. She can do this. She feels a tingle in her back and realizes that she has to do this. She can’t stay in this position much longer. Her spine is bent at an unnatural angle

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and sooner or later, she will have to move. Maybe, if she could somehow manage to sit, she would be able to think more clearly. She lies there for a second, dredging up her reserves, willing herself to move.

Nothing in her life has prepared her for this, but then nothing could have. She remembers a saying her mom often used to quote during one of their heart-to-heart ‘talks’.

Life never prepares you for a mishap. It just shapes you for dealing with the aftermath.

She never really understood its meaning. Until now. ‘Ow.’ Her back wrenches. Already she can feel the

beginnings of a muscle cramp. She has to move. Now.Mira grits her teeth, clenches the net and raises

herself. The pain is unbearable, like shards of glass coursing through her veins. Her body convulses, but she somehow wills herself to keep going. Twisting her torso, she brings herself into an upright sitting position. The net doesn’t allow her to stretch her legs, so she sits bundled up, drawing her knees to her chest. Then as the net slowly stills itself, she passes out.

The first stab of consciousness brings with it a scalding soreness in her leg that slowly starts spreading all over her body.

It’s definitely a fracture. It has to be. What else could cause such agonizing awful pain?

Mira sucks in a deep breath to brace herself before looking down at her ankle.

A glimpse of white tendons peeking out from behind crusted blood and she snaps her head up, trying to blank out the image that has just been seared on her mind. She brings her hands up to cover her eyes. And that’s when she notices the morphe on her wrist.

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Crystal veins thread across its surface like a tortured anatomical drawing.

Mira looks up at the canopy shrouding her. It is still as bright as it had been earlier, but now, with her morphe smashed, she has no way of knowing how long she has been unconscious. She checks her pockets in slow, clumsy movements, trying to take stock of her belongings.

She comes up with a bottle of water, a nutri strip and a repellent spray. The wedge between her chest and folded legs fills up with the meagre possessions.

Giving them a dejected look, she stuffs everything back into her pockets. Everything, apart from the bottle. After she was done putting back the spray and the nutri strip, she brings the bottle to her lips and sucks in a big gulp.

The rush of the water feels divine against her parched throat but she knows she has to be careful with it. She has to pace out all her rations however measly they might be because who knew when Neel might find her? Though find her, he will. He will have to realize she is missing, sooner or later.

Next she digs out the nutri strip and peels it open. Taking a bite, she sucks on it slowly, drawing it out, making it last. And that’s when she hears it.

A sound that tenses her body with foreboding. It is the same rustling sound which had led her to this trap.

Forgetting her resolve, she swallows the gloop in her mouth and looks around. Nothing moves, but then something rustles again. This time much closer.

She holds her breath and looks above. No one. An almost indecipherable soft thud comes from her right. Filled with dread, she turns her head and finds herself

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looking into a pair of impossibly wide, inhuman eyes. Orange flames speckled with gold dust, the feral irises gaze back at her and like pinpricks, they freeze each and every cell in her body. She wants to look away just so she can breathe, but she finds it impossible to tear herself away from those eyes. The eyes which bear the wild untamed gaze of a predator.

The faint rosette markings on its black hide shimmer as it crouches on a branch just a few feet away from her, standing absolutely still, as if carved out of a huge piece of obsidian. In a virtual world, she would have been awed by its magnificence, its potent strength and tensile tendons. But, this wasn’t cinematic beauty or a tame video game. This was a five-foot high, thickly barrelled predator with two sinister canines jutting out from its upper jaw and a primal look in its eyes. A look which firmly categorized her as prey.

As if to underline this terrifying reality, the beast moves forward on the branch, the thick sinews of its shoulders rippling with every step and just where the branch tapers off, still a good eight feet away from her, it pauses with its paw suspended in mid-air. Mira watches with rising panic as the beast then hangs its head low and giving her a good display of its killer mandibles, it . . . growls.

Mira has subconsciously been holding her breath all this while, but as she hears that primal guttural sound, she sucks in a sharp breath. She clasps a hand over her mouth to bottle the scream bubbling in her throat. Her eyes widen with terror as she realizes what the beast plans to do, right before it hoists itself in the air and with a terrifying sound of rage, lunges towards her. All the jungle sounds around her fade away, as she gazes

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in horror at the savagery of those eyes, now just a foot away from her face.

This is how I’m going to die. Stuck in a net, dangling from a tree, while a ravenous predator gouges and claws at my body. Death won’t be easy. It will be drawn out and very, very painful.

As these thoughts race through her mind, she suddenly realizes that the eyes which were focused on her a few seconds ago, have in fact . . . disappeared.

All the jungle sounds come rushing back to her and Mira kicks her feet in a belated reaction, her panic overriding any latent awareness of her fractured ankle. She tries to scramble back but her attempts only result in the net swaying wildly while a gut-wrenching pain in her leg wrings out a sharp cry from her.

Mira snaps her head around, expecting to see sharp claws clenching onto some part of the net, but no, thank the fates, she is out of reach. She looks down and sure enough the black beast is there, pacing below the net, circling it, as if expecting it to fall down. Startled at the thought, she looks up at the branch to which the contraption is tied. It looks sturdy and safe.

The rope seems to be tightly wound around the branch and when she brushes her fingers against the net, she realizes it is coated with a metal lining of some sort. The trap which holds her captive is completely breach-proof.

The knowledge makes her shoulders slump in relief. As the irony of her situation sinks in, she smirks to herself, but the tilt of her lips feels so alien, the humour so weary and her fate so doomed that even the absurdity of it all doesn’t succeed in making her smile.

The beast doesn’t try to pounce on her again,

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preferring to pace around on the ground instead. She watches the feline creature and thinks of the moment when it had roared at her. Long canines dripping with froth. Protracted talons impatient to score. An image of its gaping mouth and razor-sharp teeth flickers through her mind and a shiver runs down her spine. The predator baying for her blood down below is not just a beast but one of the new breeds. Stronger, deadlier and much smarter.

When the new breed stops pacing and stations itself under a tree, Mira uses the time to worry about what could have happened to Neel. As the daylight fades away, her despair escalates. Hunger starts gnawing on her insides till it feels like it is raking her open from within. Relenting, she opens the rest of the nutri strip and puts it in her mouth. For a few moments, she simply savours the weight of it on her tongue.

She had never imagined a moment like this. Snacking, while dangling twenty feet above the ground with a bloodthirsty predator waiting below to dine on her. A sudden deafening clap of thunder shakes her out of her thoughts.

‘Oh! Come on.’ She looks up instinctively, but of course, there is no sky to be seen. All she can see is the thick canopy of leaves above. Hopefully, it will shelter her from the impending storm.

It starts pouring, softly at first and then in torrents. She cowers in the net, her body convulsing as each roar seems to get closer and louder until she feels her sternum vibrate with every thunderous lashing. The canopy does protect her from a direct assault of the rain but the water soon starts dripping, forming steady streams, cascading from the channels of leaves and

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branches above her. She peers down and finds the new breed gone. Maybe the fates have finally decided to throw a little luck her way? But as the night approaches and the temperature drops drastically, Mira doesn’t feel so lucky anymore. Shivering in her drenched clothes with the cold intensifying her pain, she begs for relief.

The darkness spreads through the shower mist like dissolving ink, till it envelopes her firmly within its unyielding arms. She sits there helpless with her eyesight completely robbed. Her fingers fidget, seek her lips, trace them, rub against the curve of her chin, trying to make sure her body hadn’t dissolved into this absolute state of nothingness.

As the hours pass, Mira slowly submits herself to it. She lets the darkness turn into a crushing shroud and the rainfall into a dull rhythmic patter. She imagines her situation being played out in a movie. What would the actor do? Cover her ears tightly and stretch her mouth in a silent empty scream? Rock back and forth in extreme distress?

She contemplates these actions for a second, before snubbing the thought. She is much too physically worn out to attempt anything so dramatic. All she can manage is to sit motionless with her knees digging into her chest in a completely futile effort to preserve body heat.

The cold is as uncompromising and as unforgiving, as everything else around her. Even the beat of the rainfall soon begins to sound like an evil chant stabbing her ears, piercing straight through her brain.

Nature is a heartless badger, Mira despairs. It is not just about green dewy meadows and laughing waterfalls. It is also about ice that can chill marrows,

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forest fires that can melt skin off bones, floods that can rip apart limbs and droughts that can leave you parched, begging for mercy at her feet.

Mira realizes all this along with another certainty that she has refused to accept till now. No one is coming to rescue her, at least, not tonight. It would be impossible for anyone to tread through the jungle in this weather.

Shrinking into herself, she tries to capture some warmth but the icy despair is unrelenting. It soaks in through her skin, to her bones while she sits there stooped in her net, unbearably conscious through it all. The tears come. Silent desolation turning into wracking sobs. She cries for a long time, till there is nothing left inside of her, till her whole body feels frozen and anaesthetized. Till the numbness finally seeps into her mind and she surrenders herself to it.

An annoying buzz resounds in her head and for a second, she thinks it is the alarm on her morphe. The thought shakes her up from her slumber. Realization dawns as she opens her eyes and the glimmer that had risen in her heart is crushed. There are flies buzzing around her, attracted to the sweat and grime of her body.

Even though she tries to swat them away, the persistent beings keep gathering all around her. The repellent! Mira strains to get it out of her pocket and then sprays it liberally all over herself. Repulsed by the sharp smell of the chemical, the flies finally leave her alone.

Mira looks around. The rain has stopped but the greedy vacuous air still hangs onto the moisture. Her grimy clothes cling to her body but it doesn’t bother her.

What really worries her is the fever raging within her body, making her shiver, even in this sweltering heat.

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Maybe she’s caught a cold from being drenched through the night? The nagging voice in her head whispers otherwise. Infection. INfection. INFECtion. She covers her ears and blocks it out before she starts believing it. But Mira knows. If she isn’t freed by the end of the day, she might be in a bad shape. She can’t keep waiting to be rescued.

Mira takes a small sip from the bottle and looks up. The net is twisted on itself, effectively sealing her in. Maybe she can swivel herself around, make an opening and then try climbing out of it. Of course, she would have to do all this with just one leg and with every slight nudge feeling like a saw was grating through her fractured foot. But then it is better do it now, when she can at least think clearly than later, when the infection would clog all her senses.

Mira makes her decision. She doesn’t want to pass out and die, just sitting and waiting for someone to save her.

She starts jerking her body sideways, trying to make the net rotate on itself. She manages it on her fourth attempt. After a few minutes, when the world finally stills and the violent throbbing in her ankle slackens, she looks up to find a small opening in the net.

It’s just a small peek at the patch of leaves above but still it makes Mira smile. It makes her feel hopeful. It is her first step towards freedom!

Then Mira does something she’s always done since she was a kid. She closes her eyes and pictures her mother’s face. The sharp angle of her nose, the high cheekbones, the sparkle of her eyes, the wild shock of hair. Slowly, she brings her mother to herself, absorbing her strength, her will.

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Eyes still closed, she clutches the net above and pushes herself on her knees. The net swings around, rocked by her movements. The pain is blinding but she steels herself and carries on. Stretching her arms higher, she clutches the net again, dragging her body up on one foot. A hoarse sound pierces her skull and resonates through her brain.

When it stops, she realizes it was her own shriek. How can her own voice sound so alien to her ears? And how can it hurt so much? Will she eventually lose her leg? It seems improbable that the cause of such pain, such torment can ever be repaired.

She squeezes her eyes tight, trying hard to hold on to the faltering image of her mother. Tears streak down her face and she breaks down. She prays, promising to do anything it takes.

Please, dear fate. Just let me get out of here. Just please.She opens her eyes and pulls in a deep breath. Then

snagging her left foot in the bindings of the net, she hoists herself up. The pain is almost unbearable but she keeps going. Her hands come nearer to the rope from which the net is dangling and as she reaches forward to grab it, a vicious spasm shoots through her hands. Then everything happens in a few seconds.

As she gasps and pulls back on a reflex, she loses her footing and plummets, landing straight on her back at the bottom of the net. The net starts swinging violently. And it takes a long time before it becomes still again.

Mira just lays there with her eyes squeezed shut. During the fall, she had twisted her broken ankle and now the pain is much, much worse. It’s unlike anything she has ever experienced before. She grits her teeth, grunting with the effort of reigning in her anguish and

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frustration. She lays there for a long time. A sense of numb defeat seeps through her until she no longer feels the despair, or the horror of it all. She just lays there motionless, feeling empty and for the first time, devoid of any hope.

Her fingers still tingle from the sharp pinpricks she had felt on clutching the rope. Thinking about it now, she snaps her eyes open and looks up at the rope. As her eyes focus on it, she realizes to her horror that it’s actually a fine barbed wire. How did she miss this before and why did someone set up such a sick trap in the jungle? Is it even meant for trapping animals? The possibilities seem chilling. Not what she wants to dwell on in her current state.

The baked morning air has dried up her clothes but her body quivers with fatigue and illness. Giving in, she drinks some more water, acutely aware of every drop going down her throat. Time passes and as the heat soars, it lulls her into a stupor.

When she opens her eyes again, bitter disappointment fills her. She’d been secretly hoping that when she would wake up, she’d be back at the house, tucked safely in her bed. Mira swallows the dry lump in her throat and wipes off her tears. Self-pity is not something she can afford to indulge in right now.

Judging by the stifling heat wafting through the jungle, it must already be noon and Mira knows she won’t survive another night here. It’s just sheer luck she even survived the first one and she cannot bank on being able to endure more near-misses.

The rain fended off the predators last night but the chances of that happening again are slim. And without the rain, the jungle will be a much livelier place tonight.

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Stuck in the trap with nowhere to go, she will be the easiest prey available.

A soft fluttering sound shakes her out of her dismal thoughts. Mira looks around in dread but relaxes when she sees a hummingbird hovering nearby. She watches as its long black bill pierces the stamens of a flower, searching for nectar. The bird lingers over the flower till it has had its fill. As she watches it fly away, an idea begins to form in her head. It’s crazy. Probably stupid and definitely suicidal.

Perhaps her traumatic situation is finally getting to her. Mira grins and brings her hand close to her mouth. A moment’s hesitation and then she bites down on it, hard. The skin doesn’t break even though it hurts a lot. Still not even a grunt escapes her lips. She needs all her reserves to do this right. Mira tries again, biting harder.

Molten rust gushes over her tongue and she resists the urge to gag. Instead she digs her teeth deeper, ensuring the blood doesn’t clot up too quickly. Then she holds her hand up and watches as the dark red weaves through the mud and grime on her hand, forming veins across her arms like a gory anatomical diagram. The blood keeps collecting in a big drop at her elbow, trying to gain enough momentum to break through.

Mira watches with quiet detachment as the drop finally trickles down disappearing into the sludge of the jungle floor below. Then she drops her hand and shuts her eyes. She’s done all she can now. The words from her favourite poem flash through her mind. ‘Tiger, tiger . . . the hand dare seize the fire?’ How fitting, she thinks. A hysterical laugh bubbles up as she clears her throat and then calls out in a hoarse sing-song voice, ‘Here kitty, kitty. Come out, come out wherever you are.’

I I

TWO WEEKS AGO

Archived News Excerpt, 13/07/2099: Aleksi Singh, Senior Biologist at Colum, has published a study elucidating the effects of monoculture amongst the human race. Aleksi states, ‘Our society has homogenized to an extent that all genetic edges have smoothed out, making our species susceptible to diseases, as seen by last year’s simian epidemic.’ Suzi Gupta, the celebrity government doctor, counters, ‘Natural genetic homogenization has domesticated society, making it easier to handle and more cost-effective for governments. It’s a godsend! Well, not literally speaking, of course. We as a collective race have worked extremely hard to get where we are today.’

Airway XIV, 13 December 2173One hour down. Three more to go. Destination?

A place where none of the rules I had lived by while growing up would apply. I had read enough material and seen enough archived videos to know that.

This was going to be a real jungle with grass that would actually caress my feet, wind that would rustle my hair, insects that could prick my skin and dangerous predators that could . . . skin me alive. Okay, no. Don’t go there.

I needed to think gutsy thoughts. Maybe with no distractions available, I’d ace my entrance tests to the

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Rebyt Institute and then live on the affluent side of our sector for the rest of my incredibly long life. Great! Now all I had to do was repeat it a hundred times and slap on a smile on my face.

I pressed my morphe waistband and a holograph of the standard home screen appeared. Flicking my finger on the entertainment section, I scrolled on to my approved stock of retro movies. I wasn’t particularly fond of the horror movies of the last century. Sprinkly fountains from sliced appendages worked fine, but a zombie with a rusted saw hacking and feasting on them didn’t quite do it for me. I chose a film by Hitchcock, the master of the suspense thriller. The movie I chose was about birds. Yep. That very one. It might have been considered an odd choice for someone trying to lull herself to sleep but not so in my case. Thrillers calmed me. Maybe it was because of the stark difference my uneventful, boring life made against them. I think watching stories of terror and carnage made me feel safe and protected within my planned and dull life.

Ironically, that wasn’t the case with the other archived news briefs. Those always managed to disturb me. They would make so many things bubble inside me that sometimes I felt like I would explode. Why didn’t the world stay as it had been? I had watched archived videos of an earth dressed in untamed fields of silken wild grass, shimmering oceans and smoking, fuming deserts. An earth that had disappeared as our earlier generations had been stupid enough to destroy it bit by bit. The nuclear wars, the viral outbreaks, the indiscriminate use of chemical weapons had necessitated the creation of safe-zones or sectors across the world. Sectors which were far, far away from contaminated sites. Sectors

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where people could breathe without fear of getting infected and could eat without fear of their insides melting off. These were the sectors where people had been constrained to live in since before I was even born.

Maybe that’s why nobody else in my grade was into digging up the archived stuff even though it was regularly updated by Rebyt. I think it made people feel unsettled. The movies described a time gone by, and a time that would never be. They offered a glimpse of a world we couldn’t reach out and touch.

They depicted so many possibilities, so many avenues and yet in our world there were none. Strangely, that was the exact reason my grandmother used to give me for liking them so much. She used to say, ‘Sometimes Mira, living in hope makes you stronger than living in the reality.’

I never really got that. Why live in make-believe and then let reality disillusion you? Because that’s exactly what happened when Mom told me that we were moving to another sector. One that had a real jungle within its perimeter! A living, breathing jungle free of any kind of contamination!

The minute she said that, I started visualizing myself dipping in waterfalls by the day and swinging in realm parties by night. That would be the life.

Of course, those fantasies were immediately wiped out when she grew cautious in response to my elation and started backtracking. She clarified that by ‘within its perimeter’ she actually meant a twenty-minute ride away and by ‘another sector’, she actually meant a stand-alone institute smack in the middle of an ancient rainforest. Basically, it was a place far, far away from realm parties or even human settlements of any kind.

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It’s not that I wasn’t thrilled at being able to travel outside Sector 51. I was ecstatic. That was because I had never flown before. Strike that. I had never been anywhere before. Ever. I had been stuck in Sector 51 since birth, to put it succinctly.

But I had hardly expected the first trip to be to a jungle out of all the places in the world? Really, dear rotten fate? Really?

About halfway through the movie, I felt a nudge and turned to my Mom lying beside me. She was fidgeting in her sleep. Crinkles relaxed, almost non-existent, lip-lines softened, forehead uncreased, Mom looked almost ten years younger as she slept. And thanks to the generous leg space available in the xeppel, she didn’t appear uncomfortable. Maybe it was just a bad dream then.

I turned back to my movie, sighing at the normality of the whole experience. Maybe I’d had unrealistically high expectations from this trip. No one I knew had ever flown on a xeppel before and as far back as I can remember, I’d fantasised about flying in one. I used to look up at those huge black metallic wasps and think that flying inside it would feel really miraculous.

It hadn’t been anything like that. At all.One moment we were on the ground, another we

were flying in the sky and I could tell the difference only because I had made Mom choose the see-through option for our side of the wall. Even that had turned out to be a let-down. The dark cloudy sky had made for an extremely drab view.

But then there was one interesting thing about our flight. We were sharing it with another passenger! A middle-aged guy who was a complete stranger!

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From where I came, meeting a stranger was about as much a rarity as opening a book and discovering a story the previous century had raved about.

I had been dying to ask him where he was from and where he was headed, but he had been pointedly ignoring us since he’d gotten on board. Broad-buckled jeans, white shirt, pale skin and a Stetson on his head. He looked like a cowboy right out of one of those classic westerns from the last century. Really, who dressed like that anymore? He probably thought he was making some cool fashion statement.

When he caught me staring, he looked right back at me and scowled. It was one of those lip-curling, teeth baring kind of looks and too shocked to say anything, I just shrugged and looked away. Really, he didn’t have to try so hard to fit into the bad component of the Eastwood classic, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Rot, he could even pass for the ugly bit.

Mom suddenly straightened and frowned at me. For a second, I wondered if she’d been able to hear my boorish thoughts. But then she took off the Mouldfom from her back and offered it to me.

‘M, try to get some sleep. If you don’t catch a few winks, you’ll be really tired by the time we reach. Use the Mouldfom, it’ll cushion your back.’

‘Don’t think that will help, Mom.’ I snapped off the medicated sedative patch from my arm and flopped back on my pod. ‘Even the med patch was useless. I give you my word, I’ll sleep for three days straight when we finally get there.’

Mom let out a deep sigh and got up, giving up on my travel-aggravated insomnia. I bent my knees slightly to let her pass. The row of pods in front of us was empty

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but we had preferred to sit together. It was the first time in a xeppel for my Mom as well. And still she’d let me take the aisle side. Being a fidgety teenage daughter had its advantages.

With long, lustrous hair and grey-green eyes, Mom was a head turner to say the least. She was also a certified nerd. I believe that could be a very attractive combination for some men.

Sometimes I think she created me in one of her labs because we had absolutely nothing in common. But then I wasn’t anything like my Dad either . . . a fact I knew only because of the photograph Mom had shared with me on my tenth birthday. It was my only connect to the father I’d lost to an accident when I’d been just four months old. Mom never really talked to me about him and I never pushed her on it. I guess it was too painful for her and much too taxing for me. That was the other thing we both differed on. I was all for easy going tranquillity while she was into inspiring, exciting life challenges.

In fact, with my black hair and standard dusky complexion, my brain was probably the only part that matched my Mom’s. And it was this geeky part of me that understood why she would want to give up her cushy research job in our sector, all for working in a jungle. Okay, maybe not in. It was actually a private institute built at the periphery of a rainforest, run by Mom’s old friend, someone called David Jain. She had studied under him during her graduation in bioscience and since then he had become her mentor. He was also the only other person that Mom knew, to have gotten a clearance on his travel papers.

Through approved and monitored communication

two weeks ago 21

calls, Mr Jain had not only assured Mom that this was going to be just a one-year stint but also that the new sector’s regulations would allow her to test her research results more independently. And just with that one line, he made this job a lot more enticing for Mom.

Mom was obsessed with her research and to be able to do it faster meant the world to her. She cribbed all the time about the constant approval requirements posed by security on her research text.

I was jolted out of my thoughts as a horribly pungent blast of air filled the xeppel. I peered in front and saw the hatch was open. Our transit sector had arrived. Mom and I started to peel off the layers of woollens we had been wearing. Even with just the tank top, my skin felt like it had been greased for cooking. The security, seemingly impermeable to the heat, were as usual completely masked and suited. I think they did that to prevent any risk of contamination. After all, the security was the one who kept all the sectors running and in order. The risks they faced every day while flying over Radres-infected areas were huge.

Two of the security people whisked us into waiting room of sorts but thankfully, before they left, they handed us a bottle of water and some nutri strips. ‘Your daily dose of nutrients,’ read the line spread across the shiny package of the nutri strip.

I smirked and took a bite of the strip. Chomping down, I glanced around the deserted room. It was all we would get to see of Sector 24. And maybe that was for the best. Because if this room was any indication, Sector 24 couldn’t be much fun.

Enclosing us was thick dull expanse of retro concrete walls. They had splotches of peeling paint that looked at

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least a century old. I couldn’t imagine being surrounded with such unresponsive gloom twenty four hours a day.

During the next few hours, sitting on an exceptionally unyielding hard chair with the spongy air soaking through my clothes, I came to two conclusions.

One, translucent concrete was definitely aces. Second, flying was highly overrated. To think of all those times when I had hoped to fly, this trip had been a serious disillusionment.

One of the tacky lights on the ceiling flickered, driving my point home. After a few minutes, it got fed up of its existence as well and sputtered off.

The dimmed light accentuated my tiredness but then, I was used to the weariness sleep deprivation brought. All through my growing up years, if one was to believe Mom, I had never been a good sleeper. Mom always blamed my congenital insomnia for her decision to never have children again.

The next flight we boarded lacked the sunny personality of our previous co-passenger. Lucky for him to have skipped this route because the xeppel we were flying was so dilapidated, I thought it would crumble mid-flight, leaving us strapped to our seats in a Dr Seuss-styled flying machine. If it actually did or not, I’ll never know, because all I remember is a few minutes after it took off, I finally dozed off.

I I I

CASA AMARELA

‘History is something that happens to other people, men rarely learn from it, children rarely read it.’

– Anonymous

Area IV, 14 December 2173As I opened my eyes, I saw something whirring

around on the ceiling. Could it be a fan? Thinking I was hallucinating, I rubbed my eyes and looked closely. It was a fan, with blades and everything. Feeling a little nervous of the operable antique droning over my head, I got up and then realized what I had been sleeping on. Not a pod, but a padded box with a headboard. And what a headboard it was with a massive jagged piece of wood. Real wood. I peered closer examining the dark nodules stretched across its entire length, etching time, marking its age. It was beautiful.

I glanced around the room. The three walls facing me were all old school. Concrete and opaque. But these, I liked. They looked clean, safe and sturdy. Their creamy continuity was only interrupted by a blue shuttered window and two doors. The first door, I guessed, was the exit and second, hopefully led to a bathroom.

I noticed a huge oval mirror hanging on the wall facing my bed. It was the only decorative item in

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the room. The wrought-iron frame was intricate in its design with vines entwined together in a bind, trapping reflections. It reminded me of the cages in my Mom’s research lab. I shivered instinctively at the unwelcome memory.

Staring at my grumpy reflection in the mirror, I noticed I was still wearing my crumpled travel clothes. Rot. I needed to take a bath before I started marinating in my own juices.

Having successfully managed to disgust myself, I swung my legs down and got up from the bed. Then something made me stop short. How had I shifted from the xeppel into this room? A note beeping on my morphe caught my eye.

M, your bag is in the closet. Freshen up and come for breakfast downstairs. My room is next door to yours but I got up early to talk to Mr Jain. See you!

I read Mom’s note again while thanking God that the security had allowed me to carry my Morphe. It had my entire movie and song collection. It had all my friends’ names, their numbers. It had a whole library full of books. My morphe and I were practically inseparable.

I opened my bag and picked out one of my old vintage jeans and a brand new tunic, part of the shopping-for-tropics purchases Mom and I had done before moving here. A sinful amount of ration points had gone into buying them.

Seconds later, I walked into the bathroom and found that it was fitted with the UV-Clean thingy for the toilet seat. Thank the fates! Now I wouldn’t have to hover over it or spend time doing craft work with toilet paper to cover the seat.

I did my business, took a shower and got dressed

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in record speed. The anticipation of discovering this new place was bubbling through me as I stepped out of my room.

I peered at the empty corridor stretching out on either side of my room. Paved with strange red tiles, it had a thick wooden railing lining it on one side. Feeling awed by the strange retro architecture of this place, I walked across and leaned over the railing.

It was a handsome house, two-storeyed with corridors running around an expansive central courtyard. An old mossy birdbath was set right in the centre of the yard and on one corner was a huge concrete barbecue grill. It was a setting straight out of a classic Hollywood movie.

Wanting to explore more, I started walking down the corridor and soon discovered that it winded down into a spiral staircase which emptied into a room.

My step faltered on the last stair. It was the biggest room I’d ever seen. So big it probably sprawled across the entire length of the house. And right in its centre, facing a wide window was a large tan couch. Even though the couch was like nothing I’d ever seen before, it was the view outside the window that caught my eye.

Verdant fields of swaying grass stretched till the eye could see. I sucked in a breath, completely captivated by the beauty that reigned so effortlessly beyond the glass panes.

A soft murmur of voices pulled me out of my trance. My eyes trailed across the room to the other corner. A grand dining table had taken up all the space there. I followed its massive length and realized that much like the headboard upstairs, this table had also been chiselled out of a single slab of wood. I smirked. It seemed like a lot of trees had been felled to decorate

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this house. Even the abstract paintings covering the walls had thick mahogany frames and dominated the walls. Also, everything in this room was in superlatives of size. Was it genuine magnanimity on the part of the owner or simply a size complex?

A sharp burst of laughter pierced the silence of the room and drew my attention to the two people sitting at the table.

One was Mom and the other was a bulky, silver-haired man. They were so engrossed in their discussion they hadn’t even noticed my entrance. I sought to rectify that immediately. I cleared my throat and watched with satisfaction as their heads snapped in my direction.

‘M! Come on over, meet David,’ Mom said smiling at me before turning to the man, ‘David, this is my daughter, Mira.’

David Jain got up and squeezed my extended hand. ‘Ah! So this is the famous Mira Sharma. Delighted to meet you! Ria has been telling me all about you.’

Then to my surprise he tugged on my hand and enveloped me in a fatherly hug.

‘Err . . . glad to meet you too, Uncle,’ I croaked, feeling disarmed in the face of such a warm welcome. I had been expecting a nerdy vapid man, whereas here was someone who could easily fill in for the Man called Santa Claus from the North Pole. I’d read that he’d been big with the kids in the earlier century.

‘Your mother has been telling me about your brilliant performance in college this year. I promise your sabbatical here will be very fulfilling.’

‘Thanks, Uncle. I hope so too. It’s umm . . . lovely here.’Mom saved me from further embarrassment by

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interjecting, ’M, I’ve already had breakfast with David, but we need to discuss some things. Why don’t you go ahead and finish up? I’ll join you later.’

‘Yes, yes . . . the kitchen is just down this corridor,’ David said, pointing to another door at the far end of the room. ‘Go ahead. Maria has laid out a delicious spread today. But I’d better tell you, Maria is from down south so she speaks only Portuguese. Ria told me that you’re still learning the language?’

‘Actually Mom did give me a tutorial to read up. I guess I’ll just have to . . . test my skills.’ Then smiling as animatedly as I could, I swung on my heels and sprinted across to the kitchen. I hoped the effusive display of hospitality was reserved just for the first day. I was severely handicapped to reciprocate such exuberance.

The kitchen was in sharp contrast to the room I had just walked out from. The cupboards here were painted a radiant blue with matching pastel walls. Even the dining table in the centre was covered with a bright yellow cloth.

There is no blue without yellow and without orange. Van Gogh had written to Emile Bernard. I’m sure that had he been around, Vincent would have approved of this room.

Laid on the table, was the delicious spread Mr Jain had mentioned. And he had completely understated its magnificence.

There were cheese rolls, butter buns, a tall jar of juice and it didn’t end there. There was a plate piled high with grilled potatoes and strange looking sausages alongside a platter of fresh fruit. I had never seen so much food together in my entire life. The kind of breakfast we had in the sector was just the bare

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rationed minimal. Well, that along with a long list of medical supplements.

I poured a glass of juice for myself and turned around just in time to see a small, stocky middle-aged woman coming in through another door at the back. Her skin was the colour of warm gold and she was wearing a flowing white dress. This would have to be Maria.

She noticed me and smiled. ‘Bem vindo, querida. Voce ta bem?’

I had learnt just enough Spanish to figure out that she had said something along the lines of, ‘Welcome dear.’

I hoped that was what it meant. Well, Spanish and Portuguese couldn’t be that far apart? Right? When in doubt, smile and nod. And that’s what I did.

‘Umm . . . no Portuguese,’ I stammered, probably looking like a complete idiot what with my bobbing head and a dumb grin plastered on my face.

Maria just smiled again and nodded back at me. Then she turned to a stove in the corner and got busy stirring something in a large skillet.

Resolving to learn some elementary Portuguese, I picked up a bun and made my escape into the dining room. To my relief, I found Mom sitting there all alone reading something on her morphe.

I drew up a chair close to her. ’Mom, how does one say thanks in Portuguese?’

‘Obrigada. Hmm . . . I should have taught you some common phrases.’

‘Mom, it’s not your fault. I have that basic tutorial I’ve been planning to mug up. I’ll start on it today.’ I took a bite of the bun and asked her through a mouthful, ‘So . . . how was your meeting with Mr Jain?’

‘Even better than I’d thought. The diversity I’ll be

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able to study here is mind-boggling. It’s all perfect, except . . . I just wish there was a college here nearby, or just someone your own age . . .’

‘Aww, come on Mom. Not again. For the billionth time, this is my sabbatical! Time off from college, remember? And I promise you, I will be studying for my tests every day.’

‘It is not your tests that I’m not worried about. It’s just . . . everything is so new here. It’s so different from our sector and I will be busy . . .’

She turned and looked straight into my eyes. ‘Aren’t you already missing your friends?’

My shoulders slumped. We’d had this conversation so many times in the last few months. ‘Mom, for the last time, I’ll be completely fine here. How many girls my age get a chance like this? How many get to move out at all? And exploring a real jungle? Bring it on!’ I put on my best gung-ho expression but Mom just cocked an eyebrow at me. Okay, maybe I needed a bit more work on my acting skills.

‘Exploring the jungle, huh? We’ll see about that. Let me ask David about a local who can show you around.’

‘O-k-a-y, Mom.’ Then I remembered something I’d wanted to ask her. ‘Hey, who carried me to bed last night?’

Mom fidgeted on her chair. ‘It’s a bit strange actually because the last I remember, we were in the xeppel and then I woke up in my room this morning.’

I looked at her with my mouth agape. Both of us couldn’t have fallen in such a deep sleep at the same time. What did this mean?

Mom answered my unspoken question. ’I asked David about it this morning and he said that the

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security had probably given us a preventive vaccine of some sort. They were the ones who dropped us here yesterday. The vaccine might have caused some . . . umm . . . minor sedation but it’s going to protect us against any faint traces of Radres. So don’t worry, it’s all good!’

I flashbacked to the bottle of water and the nutri strips I’d so eagerly hogged down. Either of them could have been laced with drugs. It felt so horribly intrusive.

I scowled at the half-eaten bun in my hand. ‘We were drugged! They could have at least told us before knocking us out!’

Mom sighed. ‘I guess it was for our own good. The weather in this place is harsher than our own sector. Bolstering the immunity is always beneficial.’ I nodded even though Mom had sounded more like she was trying to convince herself.

I continued chewing as she switched off her morphe and dragged her chair back. ’Let me show you around. David gave me a long tour of the property in the morning. I still have an hour before my first day officially starts . . . so let’s go.’

We walked out of the house into a bright sun-filled porch. The cool morning breeze made the strong burn of the tropical sun almost bearable. I stood there drenched in gold, my skin stirring, my pores yawning and my eyes watering. Three days ago, around this time, I had been gazing at a patch of sunless, dreary sky from my college windows, while Mr Mani had trudged through the History class.

I stood there on the porch feeling the rush of the crisp air and sent a fervent thanks to the fates for bringing me here. As I looked up, I noticed something which

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looked like many tiny glass balloons hanging from the roof. Then I remembered being taught about them in school. These were incandescent bulbs, the preferred mode of lighting in the last century. Wow, first fans and now light bulbs. What a far cry it was from the mood-sensitive lighting in our apartment back home.

I grinned. This house really had them all. Relics and reliquaries. It all seemed quite fascinating for a history nerd like me.

After my eyes had adjusted to the blinding sun, I stepped off the porch and studied the building. It was a two-storeyed concrete structure with an overhanging roof. The house was positively shrimpy compared to the hydra-headed building we’d lived in back home. It was not intimidating in the least. But then that could also be because of the sunlight the whole building was bathed in, or the blue shuttered windows dotted all over its facade.

Studying our surroundings, I realized we were on a hillside. The swaying fields of wild grass which I’d seen from the window earlier grew all around the house, stretching for about a hundred meters till a spear-topped fence.

As far as my eyes could see, the entire length of the property was enclosed by this imposing fence, its continuity marred only by a tall gate. A gravel-topped road ran from this gate to the house. It was probably our only connection to civilization.

‘Isn’t it breathtaking?’ Mom said with a far-away look in her eyes and I realized she wasn’t talking about the house. I turned around to follow her gaze and as I saw what lay beyond the fence, an involuntary gasp escaped my lips.

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Facing the house was the widest expanse of lush green I had ever seen in my life. It stretched all around us, extending in each direction to the horizon and beyond. And for a few seconds, all I could do was stare at it. I gaped at the motley colours of green spread across the vastness and the perfect contrast this lush crew made with the cobalt blue above. At that moment I understood what being overawed felt like. Because right then, my life, its problems, everything seemed so . . . trivial compared to the overpowering beauty of what lay before me.

‘Rot! This is so A-1.’‘And you can see why it’s called Casa Amarela . . .

the Yellow House,’ Mom waved a hand back at the house before turning to fix a glare at me, ‘. . . and M, you should really try to shake off this weird swearing thing.’

Trust my Mom to focus on the swearing instead of questioning the archaic additions to my vocabulary. Truth was I liked to use such words. Words I had picked up from retro movies. A-1. Trufax. Awesome possum. Whack. Grink.

But then reading about the previous generations had also told me no parent had ever valued the fine mix of languages concocted by their offspring. I guess mine wasn’t about to start either.

I pointed to the house trying to divert Mom. ‘No towers or spires? Tsk, tsk . . . how disappointing.’

Mom’s eyes widened at my words. ‘Anything but that! David himself designed the house. Look at it! It’s like we’ve travelled way back in time.’

‘He designed the house? I thought you told me he was a researcher. Maybe sleighing with the elves sparked his creative side?’

Mom continued like she hadn’t even heard me.

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‘David is one of the brightest men I’ve ever known. You’ll like him once you get to know him.’

‘If he used to work in bioscience, how come I’ve never ever seen him before? I thought I knew everybody?’

‘He left our sector much before I had you. You know . . . your father also worked under him. David is the one who introduced us.’

‘Really? Father and you met because of him? You never told me that.’

‘Well, when David left so suddenly, we knew he’d be gone forever. We couldn’t have kept in touch because of the communication embargoes.’

‘Did . . . Dad like him? When he worked under him?’‘Like him? He loved him. Ram looked up to him! He

was so disappointed when David left.’‘So why did he leave?’‘A transfer notice was issued by Rebyt though

David never clarified why or what it said. Anyways, as it turned out, if he hadn’t left we wouldn’t be sitting here enjoying this view right now.’ Mom shook her head and gave a deep sigh. ‘He’s given me such an opportunity, M.’

‘Mom, he’s hardly doing you a favour. A head’s-up, you’re pretty good at what you do.’

Mom smiled indulgently and enveloped me in a hug. ‘You’re the best daughter in the world.’ The words hadn’t left her lips when she abruptly pulled back. ’Oh! I forgot. I have something to show you.’

Pulling on my hand, she led me along the porch to the back of the house. The scenery could not have changed more suddenly or more drastically. The wild grass was replaced by a well-kept, manicured garden with thick hedges all around the edges. To make it

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even more idyllic, there was a stone-carved love seat right in the middle.

An enormous tree overshadowed the entire garden. It even had a large white cloth hanging from one of its branches. The name came to me from a movie I’d seen long back. Hammock. It was a hammock.

I walked up to the tree and placed my hand on its thick gnarled trunk. Brown and black. Rough and furrowed. I looked up and found the branches laden with strange pear-shaped, coppery fruits.

I stood there looking up at them wondering how my Mom had been able to pull this through. Even though she had submitted our travel papers immediately after accepting this position, I’d secretly thought they would be rejected by Rebyt just like the countless other times when she had applied for permission for field trips. But then, just two days before we were scheduled to fly, all the paperwork had come through, not just to our shock but to everyone else’s around us.

Travelling outside the sector was unheard of. No one was allowed to fly, drive or go anywhere outside the perimeter of the sector they were born into. The world outside the sectors was filled with Radres – radioactive and viral residues. Only the security people managed by Rebyt, who brought in supplies through the filter-fitted xeppels could cross these perimeters and even they had to wear Radre-proof suits at all times.

And yet here we were in a completely different world and the best part was that I hadn’t seen a single security person as yet.

Mom came to stand right beside me. I realized this was as much her first time out of Sector 51 as it was

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mine. All this must be as exciting and alien for her as it was for me.

But then with my Mom, research always came first. I used to think sometimes she used it as a refuge. To forget about Dad, and to recover from Nani’s loss. Routines can be great soothers and the reassuring familiarity they brought could be terribly addictive.

As if on cue, she turned to me and said, ‘M, I really have to go now. I hate leaving you like this but there is an urgent matter that has come up at the institute. David was telling me about it in the morning when you came in.’

‘Everything okay, Mom? What situation?’‘David has discovered a local plant extract that might

be the breakthrough that could propel my research into the big leagues. I’m dying to have a go at it.’

I smiled at her. ‘Don’t worry about me, Mom. I’ll be fine. Go ahead. Breakthroughs or not, you shouldn’t be late on your first day.’

‘Thanks, M. I’ll ask Maria to put together some lunch for you. I’ll be back by the evening and then we’ll catch up.’

‘Okay, Mom.’She gave me a quick hug and then hurried back to

the house. I stood there watching her leave, thinking about where to pick up my studies from. History or Wars?

Somehow Wars seemed more appealing to my jet-lagged mind. I switched on my morphe and flicked on the notes. Perching myself on the hammock, I adjusted the display visibility and started browsing through the first page.

The warmth of the sun´s rays filtering through the fruit-laden tree and the lovely herby aromas

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from Maria’s kitchen lulled me into a state of perfect wellbeing. The calmness of the moment seeped into my very pores and my eyelids drooped in a delicious snooze. Relenting, I finally shut my eyes.

Suddenly something else equally delicious flooded my dream state. An intense feeling coursed through me. It was like my entire body had melted into non-existence and then, just as suddenly, it became sharper, turning into a tantalizing fireball, so excruciatingly believable that I could taste it. That was it! The root of this spreading warmth was my mouth and my lips. My heart was throbbing as I drew in a sharp breath and a musky, woodsy smell filled me, shaking me out of my delirium. I opened my eyes with a start and tried to stand up, completely forgetting that I was in a hammock. The realization only came as I tumbled and landed face down on the grass.

‘Oh!’ The landing hadn’t hurt me, the grass had cushioned it well. I was more worried about someone having witnessed my stupidity. I looked around. There was no one there. Thank the fates.

‘Rot! What kind of dream was that?’ I muttered to myself. The jet-lag must be seriously getting to me.

For a few minutes, I just sat there on the ground feeling dazed from what I had just experienced. A residual queasiness had me clutching my stomach which chose that exact same moment to rumble loudly. My shoulders slumped and I grinned. Just jet-lag, after all. I must have dozed off for a few hours and missed lunch time.

Switching off my morphe, I walked back to the house. Maria showered me with her warm smile as soon as I stepped in the kitchen.

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‘Sentar-se,’ she said waving a hand towards the dining chair. The table was already set with plates and cutlery. This would take some getting used to. The lack of having to fend for one’s own meals.

I followed her cue and took a seat at the table as she whipped out a dish from the oven and placed it in front of me with a proud flourish of her hands. We shared a goofy grin with each other before I mumbled my gratitude using my extensive knowledge of the Portuguese language. Which now extended to about three words.

Once Maria had gone back to her dicing, I took off the lid of the dish.

Delicious smells wafted up from a herb-and-cheese-crusted baked fish and assaulted my senses making my stomach growl almost painfully in anticipation. This belonged to the genus of dishes Mom reserved for special occasions. If this is what got served here for lunch every day, settling in was not going to be an issue at all.

Without further thought, I wolfed down a large helping. I wanted to talk to Maria, ask her questions about

the house, the inhabitants, but I guess for that I’d have to quit lolling around in hammocks and get started on the language tutorial.

Twenty minutes later when my stomach was full to the point of bursting, I walked up to my room.

When I stepped inside the room, I found that the day had suddenly turned sticky and humid. The cool breeze flowing in from the window did nothing to alleviate the situation.

I looked up and scowled at the useless piece of junk called the fan hanging from the roof. The ugly metal contraption would have come real handy, if I’d only

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known how to switch it on. Earlier I’d kept waving my hands under it to activate its motion sensors, searched for any remote devices in the room but had come up with nothing that would activate it.

Now with no other option, I just sat and sweated by the window and plunged into my course material.

Hours later, I was still engrossed when I heard a knock on the door and Mom peeped in.

‘How’s it going?’ She walked in and flicked a button on the wall which I had completely overlooked before.

The fan came to life, whirring out a blissful breeze. It had been as simple as that. I looked down at the tunic plastered to my body and scowled.

Mom mistook my stunned silence for deafness. ‘So . . . how was your day?’

I nodded my head. ‘Good. Yours?’ ‘Busy but great. David showed me some of the

research ideas he’s pursuing and it all looks interesting. What did you do all day?’

I knew she was checking to see if I had been bored to death and I decided it was only fair to answer her truthfully. ‘It was umm . . . interesting.’

‘Oh?’My cheeks burned at the thought of what I had

experienced in the garden but it wouldn’t be smart to elaborate on my craziness, especially to Mom.

‘I slept off in the hammock under the tree, had an awesome lunch and then studied Wars. What more could one ask for in life?’

She smiled in relief. ‘Maria is a great cook, isn’t she? Hey, I forgot to tell you in the morning, David has invited us to a barbecue in the courtyard tonight. He said he has a surprise for you.’

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‘Oh! No. ‘A surprise from David Jain did not sound like a good idea.

Mom smiled, as she immediately figured out what I was thinking. ‘I know he is a little . . . umm . . . effusive but trust me, he’s a great person once you get to know him.’

‘You keep saying that but it’s going be majorly tiresome going through an entire evening of ho!ho!ho!’

‘Really, M!’ She put a hand on her mouth, covering her giggles. ‘Come on, don’t be such a spoilsport!’

‘Alright, Mom. Any clue on what this surprise is?’‘He refused to tell me. Maybe he’s cooking for us . . .

who knows?’‘That’s just great! O-k-a-y, I’ll be down by 7 p.m.’‘Right. I’ll go freshen up. See you.’I got up from my bed and stretched. It was half past

six. I still had half an hour. I decided to take a long bath. The novelty of soaking in unheated cool water hadn’t worn out just yet. And as I lay there dissolving the day’s sweat off my skin into a fragrant bath, I was sure it wasn’t going to wear out anytime soon.

I changed into an old summer dress. It had been a birthday gift from my Mom who loved yellow anywhere except on herself. It was a little short for my new height and fit snugly in all the right places, however, it was perfect for this humid place. Anyway, there was no one apart from Mom, Maria and Mr Jain to see me here.

I stepped out into the corridor and was greeted by the inviting aromas of meat roasting over charcoals. Hmmm. So the barbecue grill was not just a relic after all. I looked down at the long corridor. The daylight was almost gone but the lights from the courtyard

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down below lightened up the darkness a bit. I leaned over the railing and peered down, careful not to draw attention to myself.

Mom was standing with Mr Jain in one corner of the courtyard. At the other end, two boys and a girl were sitting in a huddle, watching something on a scroll-up. My eyes widened as I realized that they looked around my age. Mom hadn’t told me anything about them! Who were they?

I stepped back from the railing, intending to go down to find some answers but then I looked back at the dark corridor and changed my mind. It seemed like a good time to explore the rest of the house while all the occupants were clearly enjoying themselves downstairs. I walked in the opposite direction and passed by what was probably Mom’s room.

Turning right, I noticed two more closed doors before stepping into the corridor directly opposite my room. One of the doors here was open but the room inside was dark.

However once my eyes adjusted to the darkness, things became much more discernible. It also helped that the window shutters were open, letting in some moonlight.

Peering inside, I realized this room was very similar to mine. There was the same set of table and chair, cream-coloured walls and a magnificent wooden bed. The room was empty but I still hesitated at the doorway feeling like an intruder. And that’s when I saw them.

Stacked one on top of the other in one corner of the floor. Books! Real printed ink and paper books. Musty, dog-eared and crinkled books!

I debated stepping inside and having a look at them.

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It wasn’t the right thing to do but how often did one come across such a loot?

What the heck! Just a quick peek at the titles and then I’d go downstairs. Cross my heart and swear to fie.

I stepped into the room and headed straight for the pile. What a collection! I had stumbled upon the mother of all treasures here. There was Orwell, Tagore, Ghosh, Fitzgerald.

I had read many of them on my morphe but then there was something to be said about being able to feel their weight in between my hands. I picked up one of my old favourites kept right on top of one of the stacks – A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith.

I was about to open it and read the opening line, when a sudden sound from behind froze me to the spot. The prospect of being caught going through someone else’s possessions seemed scary and embarrassing all at once.

I slowly swung around on my heels, filled with dread. My body stilled as my eyes tagged the dark

silhouette covering the doorway. The stranger was a few feet taller than me. His shaved head sloping into distinct ear lobes, a thick neck and broad masculine shoulders. I tilted my head up, to catch a glimpse of his face but it was completely shrouded in the dark. Maybe he realized my predicament because right then he stepped closer.

I instinctively stepped back. My heart skipped a beat as I stared at the face now swathed in moonlight. Massive brow, sparse eyebrows, deep-seated eyes, a broken aquiline nose and a ruddy jaw. Everything was a bit disproportionate. It was not a handsome or even a cute face. It was . . . menacing. A face you would

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run away from in a dark alley. But then, there was something there that would make you look back. Just once. Just to be sure.

Maybe it was the eyes that did it for him. It was hard to describe their colour. Brown but also black. They were dark but more translucent, like two blazing luminous oceans. As they gazed into mine and held them captive, I realized what they reminded me of.

A painting I had seen once in an old article in the archives A tumultuous black sea flecked with frothy yellow and brown. Tempest, was what the artist had named it.

‘Your name?’ he asked in a deep voice.I blanked out. He is asking for your name. Your

name. Which is . . . ‘Mira!’ I spluttered out. ‘Err . . . Mira Sharma.’‘M-y-r-a-h Sharma.’ He rolled my name on his

tongue, drawing it out, making it sound exotic. He pronounced it My-rah and not Mee-ra, like it was supposed to. I had no intention of correcting him. Ever.

‘Not Tempest then?’ he asked with a straight face.Rot! Had I said that out loud? Oh, horror! ‘Err . . . no. It’s definitely Mira Sharma.’‘So what is Mira Sharma doing in my room in the

dark? Is this an ambush?’ He arched up an eyebrow. ‘Should I be scared?’

I stared back at his face which looked like it had been set in stone but then I noticed the wicked glint in his eyes. Good. Now, this, I could handle. I was the queen of belligerence after all. ‘I was raised learning hand-to-hand combat. That does scare most people.’

I crossed my arms over my chest and jutted out a hip while secretly wondering what his response was going

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to be because he looked like someone who couldn’t be put out that easily.

And I was right. He nipped his lips to suppress a smile and rubbed

his jaw. ‘Terrifying, I’m sure. So, I guess you usually assail your victims with literature?’ He gave a pointed look at the book I still clutched in my hand.

I immediately flipped the book on the bed and glared back at the stranger. ‘Well, words are like weapons . . .’

‘. . . and it’s dangerous to borrow them from the arsenal of the enemy,’ he finished the quote without missing a beat.

I glowered into his eyes with all the indignation I could muster. I hadn’t expected this. I’d never had much of a competition back home, intellectually speaking.

The stranger looked down at me with his forehead scrunched up. ‘Impressive, Ms Sharma. I didn’t know George Santayana was a part of the academic program these days.’

‘Mira,’ I corrected him. ‘And no, he isn’t.’He didn’t say anything except to lean against the

door, blocking any chance of escape.‘Okay now, I was just looking through these books

here. I won’t, if you mind it so much.’ I frowned up at him but then a second later, regretted my childish reply because the stranger chuckled and said, ‘Mira, which grade were you studying in?’

‘Actually, I’m in college and am old enough to know it’s rude to ask people about their age even if you go about it in a circular and conniving way.’

Now this could have been a really witty retort if my stomach hadn’t let me down at that exact same moment by rumbling loudly.

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Oh! Come on! What was up with my gusty innards? I stood there fervently wishing for my body to wither

away and dematerialize itself.Completely expecting another snide remark, I

looked up at him, but to my surprise I saw a smile spread out on his face. And I’m sure he didn’t know the potential of that slow, lazy smile of his. Because it was a smile that once bestowed upon a person could make him or her feel like the most glorious thing in the world. Unfortunately, at the moment, that person was me and I was embarrassingly close to hyperventilation.

‘I think you should come with this conniving enemy of yours to get some grub,’ he said softly and before I realized I was being escorted downstairs with my arm held firmly in his. The gall!

Okay, not really upset at the idea of being escorted by his gloriousness but he could have at least asked before taking my arm. I sneaked a peek at him as we walked down the stairs, ogling at the blue shirt, the corded arms, the crumpled vintage jeans and the worn down black boots. He totally had the dark and dangerous vibe going for him. Even the way he moved had a certain feline litheness to it.

I moved back up to his face and decided that was where his beauty lay.

The jaggedness of his nose was so imperfect and just so, so right.

He probably felt my infallible sidelong scrutiny because right then I saw him lift his hand up and scratch his forehead self-consciously. I started and snapped my head around to face forward again.

What was wrong with me? Drooling over a boy! I

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couldn’t believe I was displaying such infantile infatuous behaviour?

‘Like what you see?’ he muttered in a deep, amused voice.

Utter, complete mortification. I wracked my head for a witty response and came up with, ‘What?’

Wow. Real natty of you, Mira.‘What?’ he asked me back, raising an eyebrow in

challenge.If he planned to call me out on the drool fest I’d just

indulged in, he would have to spell it out for the both of us. Surely, that would be embarrassing for him as well, right? Right?

I gulped down the lump in my throat and shrugged nonchalantly. ‘Yep. What?’

Yes, stick to your guns girl. You might need them later to shoot yourself with.

He just smiled and shook his head probably feeling amused at the most inane conversation he’d ever had in his life. Aces, Mira. Way to go.

As we entered the courtyard, I noticed Mom was still standing next to the grill talking to Mr Jain. The younger group was seated on the dining table closer to where we stood.

I felt the blood rush up to my cheeks as everybody’s eyes first noticed and then assessed us. I felt conscious of my too-short sundress and wished I had chosen something less . . . girly. Unperturbed, the stranger led me towards my Mom, walking past the others, completely ignoring them. When he finally let go of my arm, Mom was looking at me with her eyes wide, searching my face for clues. I just shrugged. Thankfully, Mr Jain spoke up and covered my awkwardness.

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‘Ah! Mira, you’ve already met your surprise.’Mr Jain walked up to Neel and clasped him across

his shoulders. ‘This is one of my best students, Neel.’ Oh, I hadn’t even remembered to ask his name! Neel. My surprise? And just Neel? No surname? Why didn’t he have a . . . Oh! For fate’s sake! What did I care?

Mr Jain clasped my Mom’s hand next and gave her a warm smile. ‘And this is the talented Ria Sharma.’

Neel shook hands with my Mom, bowing a little. Yup, bowing a little. ‘It’s a pleasure to meet you, Ma’am.’

For a second, I thought he was going to kiss her hand. Which made me wonder what it would be like if he kissed my hand. Rot! What was wrong with me? I tried to concentrate on what my Mom was telling him.

‘. . . .met your friends earlier and looks like you’ve already met my daughter.’

‘Yes. We ran into each other upstairs,’ Neel said and turned to throw a devilish grin at me. I pursed my lips and looked away though my heart was beating so wildly, I almost expected it to sprint away from my body.

Mr Jain wasn’t quiet finished lavishing praises on his student.

‘Neel completed his studies in bioscience last year. A top performer!’

Mom smiled at the both of them. ‘That’s great. Taken after his mentor, I see.’

‘Better, I hope. He and his friends have been pursuing a research project here for the last few months. In fact, they just returned this morning. Ria, you needn’t worry about Mira anymore,’ said Mr Jain turning to Neel, ‘Why don’t you introduce her to your friends?’

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Great. A pity play date.Neel nodded and waved a hand towards his group

of friends. ‘Absolutely. Mira?’‘Sure,’ I mumbled. He didn’t take my arm this time

and the sliver of disappointment I felt at that was surprising.

We walked across to the table where his friends were sitting. Just like before they were intently watching something on the scroll-up screen. I couldn’t make out what because it probably had the selective viewing angle thing on.

I first noticed the girl. She was, in dimwit boy parlance, a stunner. But that wasn’t the reason I noticed her first. It was the oversized hot pink hat perched on top of her head which what had caught my eye. But even though the hat drowned out most of her head, her face still managed to stand out. Clear olive complexion, long slender neck and a shapely torso which, no doubt, extended into lengthy lower appendages as well.

At least her eyes are plain black like mine, I consoled myself, cringing at my shallowness that same instant.

The boy sitting next to her looked younger. Closer to my age. The broad shoulders oddly placed on a lanky frame and the shaved head aside he could have been any one of the gawky teenagers found in abundance in my college. I could even imagine him cracking those nerdy jokes. The ‘life is pointless without geometry,’ kind.

Sitting by his side was his antithesis. A big-boned, beefy looking guy trying too hard to be proclaimed an Adam incarnate. Cupping his chin, he gave me a bored once-over. Arrogant. The bandana on his head had ‘Keep Out’ inscribed on it. Vain. He was the first one

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to get up and grab my hand in a tight grasp. Freakishly tall, I added to my list.

‘Easy there, Firdaus. You wouldn’t want to dislodge Mira’s arm.’

Ignoring Neel’s remark, Firdaus gave me a rakish grin. ‘Mira, is it? Firdaus.’ He nodded at the other two. ‘Soni. Anil.’

I exchanged smiles with all of them, which was then followed by an uncomfortable stretch of silence. Maybe they were waiting for me to say something. ‘Umm . . . so, what are you guys watching? Anything interesting?’

Soni flicked the rim of her hat and said in a sing-song voice, ‘B-o-r-i-n-g.’

I saw Anil quietly reach out and roll up the film.Wow. It was fifth grade all over again. Stares, secrets

and smirks. Sigh.‘Mira?’ Neel was holding a chair out for me.‘Oh! Thanks.’ I took my seat as he placed himself

on a chair facing mine.‘Which institute were you studying in your . . .

sector?’ Anil asked.‘The only one there is. Which sector are you guys

from?’ Their accents had completely thrown me. I had never heard anything like it in any of our social studies classes nor in any of the movies I had seen. And I’d seen plenty.

I realized Anil had still not answered my question but was instead looking at Neel, and waiting for his . . . approval? Weird.

Neel gave me a wry smile. ‘What are your guesses?’ he asked with exaggerated patience, as if not really expecting me to get it.

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His tone and caginess completely set me off. ‘I don’t know about the others but you seem to have been evicted from la-la land.’

Everybody looked stunned for a second and then burst out laughing. Even him. Instead of taking offense, he was actually grinning. Aarghhh!

‘It seems I forgot to tell you Mira’s last name . . . Marple.’ He bowed his head and did a mock curtsy while the other three exchanged baffled looks between them.

‘Is not!’‘Is too.’‘Not.’‘Is.’I snapped my mouth shut. He was playing me.

Successfully trying to make me sound like a ten-year-old. I made a disgruntled sound. ‘Hmphh.’

‘Krakabam,’ Neel said.‘What?’‘What?’ he replied, eyes dripping innocence.I sighed and asked in a staccato voice. ‘What-is-

krakabam?’‘Since you made a comic sound, I decided to answer

in kind.’‘I may regret asking this, but what’s a comic sound?’‘Do NOT tell me,’ he held his palms up and shook

his head disbelievingly. ‘Don’t tell me you’ve never read a comic.’

I just stared at him for a few seconds while everybody bobbed their heads between him and me, probably as stupefied with this whole exchange as I was.

‘No, seriously, tell me you’ve read a comic!’‘What’s a comic?’ I asked slowly, already feeling the

pain of ignorance about to be lashed at me.

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Neel gaped at me. ‘Unbelievable!’ Then tilting his chair back, he crossed his hands over his chest. ‘It seems I’ll have to take it upon myself to read comics to Miss Marple.’

Soni clasped a hand on her mouth trying to cover her giggles and then explained to Anil and Firdaus. ‘I think it’s a character from one of those old books he keeps reading.’

Understanding cleared their faces while I gave Neel a glare that could have burnt towns. He seemed bent on making me look like an adolescent but then he didn’t know me at all, did he? I was my mother’s daughter and a firm believer of the diktat that a rebuff was more efficient than confrontation.

‘So, all of you have finished college?’ I asked, turning to the rest of them and completely ignoring the obnoxious person sitting in front of me.

‘Yup. Been there, done that,’ Firdaus replied.‘What project are you guys working on?’ They all

did that exchange-glances-and-stare-at-chieftain thing again. I groaned inwardly. Maybe they were all part of some fellowship or cult and Neel was their Gandalf . . . Yoda or Dumbledore. Maybe Captain Kirk would have been more befitting but then that was just my opinion.

At that moment, the leader of ye dubious antecedents leaned forward towards me, about as much as the table allowed. His eyes gazed into mine and the intensity in them damned all my cynicism to hell. ‘Don’t worry, Mira. I’m sure I can still find the time to educate you,’ he said.

I knew it was just a jab, a ploy to evade my questions, but the way he had said it? He’d made it sound extremely suggestive. I had the extreme urge to fling

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something at him but I desisted. He was clearly trying to stoke me so it wouldn’t do to give him the response he expected. I slowly leaned forward on the table, mimicking his pose and looked straight in his eyes.

‘Actually, I’m aiming for things way above the average. Anything less wouldn’t quite cut it for me. So, no thanks.’ Then I pursed my lips and leaned back in my chair. There was a moment’s silence before both Firdaus and Anil shouted, ‘Burn!’

I looked at Soni. She was grinning at Neel as well. I followed her gaze and realized that all my snide remarks hadn’t even caused a dent. In fact, Neel was sitting back in his chair with that damnable slow smile on his face while his eyes . . . well, they were still fixed on mine. Something bumped against my knee and I glanced under the table to check. His long legs were stretched around mine, encircling them in a way that was very intimate, very improper. My body heat ratcheted up by a few points and I was just about to melt under the strain of my situation when Soni’s cool hand landed on mine.

‘Don’t be bothered with him, Mira. He’s just being obnoxious. Come on, let’s get something to eat.’

The rest of the evening was spent sitting by the grill and talking to Soni. Mostly her questioning me about my college, my friends, Sector 51. All I gathered about her was that she had met the rest of them while completing her studies. When I asked her how they had managed to get their travel papers, she said something vague about their project being approved by Rebyt which did not make much sense. I knew of many people in our sector, my mother´s brilliant co-workers included, who had never managed to get their travel papers for any of

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their ground-breaking projects. I didn’t push her on the topic, though. Admittedly, I was much too distracted to pursue my own line of questioning.

The distraction in question kept sitting at the table with Anil and Firdaus who had opened their scroll-up again and were watching something on it. I wondered why they had hidden it from me.

Engrossed in my thoughts, I hadn’t realized that all this while I had been staring at Neel. To my great misfortune, at that moment he happened to catch my stare. Lips twitched, eyes crinkled and he winked at me. My heart thudded to a halt and I think my mouth must have fallen open because I saw his smile broadening at my reaction.

Oh! The nerve! Smug frog! About to ignite with all the fire building up inside me, I looked away and realized Soni was staring at me, waiting for some kind of response.

‘Huh?’ I hurriedly corrected myself. ‘I’m sorry, what?’She gave me a look that questioned my sanity. ‘I

asked if you have a boyfriend.’‘Err . . . nope. No. None at all,’ I told her and then

quickly made up an excuse about jet-lag and needing some shut-eye. After finishing with Soni, I got up and started walking towards Mom. She was now talking to a wrinkled old man. Dressed in grubby overalls and a large straw hat, he stood there disinterestedly, cradling a drink.

‘Mira, meet Hari. He helps David with all the jobs around the house. Hari, esta e minha filha, Mira.’

Hari gave me an awkward smile and nodded his head at me. ‘Prazer.’ Pleasure.

I gave him a wide smile and nodded back at him, thanking the fates for the less gregarious, socially

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handicapped personalities he was throwing my way. Took one to know one.

‘Mom, I’m quite tired. I think I’ll go crash.’‘Wait M, I’ll come with you.’‘Don’t worry Mom. I know my way around. See ya

tomorrow. Boa noite, Hari. Prazer.’I swung around on my heels, feeling smug about

having dished out the right Portuguese. Planning on making a speedy exit, I started walking towards the stairs and was already halfway through the courtyard when Mom called out loudly from behind me. ‘M, remember to brush your teeth, turn on the fan and open the shutters before you sleep.’

I stood still for a second, too stunned to respond. Mom had been reminding me to brush my teeth since I’d discovered the beauty of the opposable thumb so she probably hadn’t wanted to break the sanctity of our nightly ritual. And why would a thing like my absolute and complete humiliation deter her in any way? My own Mom! Aargh!

Hoping for the second time that night that I had the power to wither away at will, I kept my eyes focused on the stairs and all but sprinted up to my room imagining all the while how the group downstairs would be snickering at me.

As soon as I was inside my room, I leaned against the door and just practiced even breathing for a few minutes.

When my breath finally steadied, I switched on the fan, changed into my pyjamas, brushed my teeth and collapsed on the bed.

And here I’d thought I was the only one who’d read Santayana and Christie. This was the last thought that flitted through my mind before I fell asleep.

IV

THE CREST

Archived News Excerpt 13/07/2029: Immortal cells are not a myth. Discovered in 1954, they came from a woman named Henrietta Lacks. Her cells had the ability to proliferate indefinitely outside the human body. They were utilised in 1954 to develop the cure for polio and in 2022 to develop the cure for cancer. Today, they continue to be used in researching AIDS and simian flu. Is it too improbable to expect more immortal cells to be out there? Could it be you? Have you gotten yourself checked for immortality yet?

Area IV, 15 December 2173Waking up, the first thing my mind registered was

the whirring of the antiquated fan. The next was the cacophony coming from outside, growing livelier with the lightening sky. The clamour of an unchanged, ancient ritual of birds heralding the jungle dawn since time unknown.

As I sat up, I discovered my clothes were plastered to my body. Rot! I’d forgotten to open the shutters in the night. Now the trapped air inside the room had become uncomfortably spongy. My evaporated sweat had probably contributed to half of its saturation.

Mentally gagging at that thought, I quickly got off

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the bed and opened the shutters. As the view outside revealed itself, I stopped in my tracks.

Below was the thrilling freshness of the lush dewy green. Above, the sun hadn’t fully risen yet. Steamy wisps of orange and red swirled lazily, unwilling to leave. I stood there for a few minutes watching them curl, fade and then melt away under the heat of the rising sun, the gold slowly simmering into a white roar. How could a simple thing like a sunrise seem so magical? Maybe because this was all real? I was here. Physically here, witnessing this miracle unfolding.

It was like when I’d first seen the statue of Christ the Redeemer during one of our virtual study trips.

Gazing at its majestic height towering over me, I’d felt something in my heart. Like a fever blooming inside, burning into sheer need, for once, I didn’t want to feel the usual standard pinpricks but the actual grating roughness of the concrete on my fingertips.

Witnessing that statuesque miracle had stoked my view about the lives we were being made to lead. Closeted and constrained, all the people in our sector were living their lives like robots. And my fear was if I didn’t do anything soon, I’d end up just like them. I was twelve years old at that time. The perfect age for a rebellion.

Two days later, Asha and I had tried trekking across our sector, just to peer over a gate in the perimeter wall. We had been hearing about this gate from some of the older kids at school.

They said it was a forgotten rusty gate, a few kilometres down Mart Street. Nobody noticed it because of the huge pile of scrap lying in front of it. They said if you managed to climb on the scrap and

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stood on top of the gate, you could see a bridge. A real bridge. Like the one we’d seen in one of the study trips. This one wasn’t red but it was huge, they said.

Maybe it was peer pressure, maybe it was curiosity or just a simple need for defiance because suddenly, catching a glimpse of this bridge became the mission of our lives. Asha and I hatched a plan and thought about it for two whole days. On the third day, right before the activity class, we snuck out from school. I still remember the feeling. Like agitated soda cans being popped open, bubbling with the exhilaration of sudden freedom, fizzling with the anticipation of our deed.

We were flagged down by security even before we reached the gate. Even seeing them had been a first for us. The security never physically patrolled inside the sector. Streets, buildings, schools, offices, every nook and cranny was loaded with surveillance cameras. Indiscipline was rare and severely punished with demotions and cutting of rations. Even so, the security personnel that had stopped us hadn’t looked menacing at all. Dressed in blue scrubs and masks, they looked more like they had stepped off another planet.

If we hadn’t been so scared out of our wits we probably would’ve clutched our tummies and rolled in laughter right there on the road.

They, however, were not amused in the least and had promptly called our parents, issuing stern warnings.

A few minutes later, Asha’s parents and my Mom had shown up looking horror-struck. Couldn’t really blame them. The sight of one’s offspring clad in blue acrylic sheets being held hostage by Martian lookalikes could have unnerved anyone.

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Thankfully, they had missed the entertaining part where one of the masked creatures had shoved our clothes in biohazard bags and sprayed us with a vile-smelling chemical.

Asha and I had been too stunned to react at first but one look at our parents and all our bravado had melted into slobbery goo. We had bawled the rest of the walk back to our building, promising never to repeat our actions under any circumstances.

The next day, Asha and I had pretended like it had never happened.

Asha. It wasn’t the first time I’d wondered about her. Did she miss me? As far back as I could remember we had always been together, scoffing at the morphe games-obsessed geeky boys and rolling our eyes at the together-forever giggly girl brigade. But that was until she had decided to join them.

Then it was all about Asha and her Ned. I went through it all. The evening of self-deprecating ‘he’s too good for me and I’m Jane Doe’ whining, the step-by-step analysis of ‘he looked at me and smiled!’ moment and finally the ‘he asked me out!’ ecstatic body-crushing hug. After that, I sort of gave up on her. My last evening out with them had been just a day before my flight. If I close my eyes, I can still picture that evening. Ned wearing one of his motion-sensitive suits and the bright red vintage Jordans that I sometimes thought were welded to his feet, hunched up with Asha, munching on pepperoni globes. We had spent the rest of the evening dancing in a 12hk-induced club realm.

And 12hk? It was just another thing I’d have to live without for a while.

Like it was for Mom, 12hk had never been just a

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dismissive new-fangled gadget for me. That tiny black box had been my much-needed escape from reality creating such realistic holograms that it often became hard to distinguish between virtual and real life. The pre-loaded realms in 12hk were fantastical. Each of them had different experience zones like the one where you could hang out with your friends in a virtual club or the ones about experiencing hobbies, workshops and workouts. For me, the redux realm was the best of them all. The redux helped us experience the world as it had been in the past.

Oh, it felt spectacular, walking through the buzzing street markets of the earlier century, bearing the crisp chill of the ice lands before they dug it all up, breathing in the muskiness of the blue oceans before they turned grey and toxic, witnessing a world from before the viral outbreaks and the Radres. A blue, brown and green world.

My fingers reached up to touch the spot where the iSmeltz chip was embedded in my nose. The iSmeltz was what had helped 12hk become such a success. With just this tiny chip in your nose, you could detect the exact smell of the place you were visiting in a realm.

At the moment though, it was completely useless. The chip didn’t work without the 12hk receptor, which the security hadn’t allowed us to carry on the xeppel. Apparently, it interfered with the flying equipment.

Feeling nostalgic and thoroughly dejected, I walked into the bathroom with drooping shoulders Instead of my usual soak, I decided on taking a cold shower.

I put on my clothes, grabbed my morphe and stepped out of my room. My eyes immediately scanned

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the corridor opposite mine where his room was, but the door was closed and the hallway was empty. I knocked on Mom’s door but even she wasn’t in.

I headed straight to the living room and found her sitting on the couch. As usual, she was reading something on her morphe. I tiptoed closer and gave her a tight hug.

‘M! You’re up! I came to check in on you in the night and again in the morning, but you were fast asleep.’

‘I was completely zonked out, Mom. I think it’s the jet-lag. Did you sleep well?’

‘I did. Although in my case it was the extra wine that I had drunk last night. You know how I get with just two glasses.’

‘So, where is everybody? Soni and . . . the rest?’ I asked, trying to sound casual which made me feel all the more annoyed with myself. What was the need for all this slyness?

‘They should be in the kitchen having breakfast. That girl . . . Soni? She’s sweet. She told me they were planning to go to some research site today.’

‘And what exactly is this research about?’ My curiosity was heightened with all the evasiveness of yesterday.

‘David did mention it last night. Something about soil erosion dynamics on the banks of the river that flows through the jungle. Sounds interesting, doesn’t it?’

I rolled my eyes. ‘Sure it does. To you, Mom. Anyways, I’m starving. Have you had breakfast?’

‘I did. I have to get to the institute early today.’‘Cool. I’ll see you in the evening then?’‘You go ahead, M. Have your breakfast, I want to

finish this article before I leave.’

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‘Okay. See ya.’ A peck on her cheek and I headed for the kitchen.

Neel, Firdaus and Anil were sitting on the kitchen table snarfing down food from their plates. Though considering the amount of food heaped on them, feeding troughs would have been more appropriate.

The chair next to Neel was empty. As I started walking towards it, our eyes met and I floundered mid-step. What was it about him that unnerved me so much? He probably noticed my hesitation because he immediately got up and pulled out the chair next to his. He even held the back of the chair until I had seated myself. It seemed a bit excessive to me but maybe Neel was just being well-mannered. Well, I wouldn’t know anything about that. My old college had not made for a very courtly enterprise.

Firdaus and Anil grinned at me, said their heys and went back to the chomping. Habitually a slow eater, I always took time finishing my meals but today my pace was further slowed as I witnessed what could only be described as a food marathon. I watched in amazement as Neel after having devoured three sausages, moved on to two eggs sunny side up, following it with a banana and a big bowl of sliced fruits. Where did it go?

After about fifteen minutes of synchronized chewing, I was just about to lose my mind when Anil spoke up, ‘I was thinking we could all go to the crest today.’

‘The crest? . . . Hmmm . . . I don’t know,’ Neel muttered between bites.

Firdaus threw his hands up in the air. ‘Aww, come on. Are we gonna stay cooped up in the house all day?’

‘We’ll go together,’ Anil said, pushing away his

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empty plate. ‘There’s not much in the jungle that can stand up to the Fearsome Foursome.’

‘Maybe we’ll even catch some game for Mr Jain to barbecue,’ Firdaus added.

I blanched at that comment and the casualness with which it had been made.

Of course, Firdaus picked up on my dismay. ‘Mira can be the bait,’ he snickered before shoving a forkful of scrambled eggs in his mouth.

Neel threw an apple at Firdaus who lifted up his hand and caught it, just as smoothly.

Noisily biting off a large chunk of the apple, he then waggled an eyebrow at me and asked, ‘Are you ready to be the meat, Mira?’

I rolled my eyes at him. ‘Err . . . what exactly is the crest?’

Anil’s eyes widened. ‘You haven’t seen it yet?’ ‘No. What is it?’‘Nothing much,’ Neel said half-heartedly, clearly

trying to dissuade any plans of visiting this place, whatever it was.

‘Nothing much? Sure it isn’t man!’ Firdaus exclaimed.Anil turned to me. ‘You won’t believe it until you

see it yourself! It’s just so spectacular!’‘For all the freckled frogs in the world, will you just

tell me what it is already?’ I nearly screamed.For a second, they all looked shocked and then

they . . . burst out laughing. Firdaus laughed so hard his whole body convulsed and he actually fell off his chair.

Well, wasn’t this peachy? I pushed my chair back but stopped as I felt a restraining hand on my shoulder.

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‘Mira, what was that expression you just used?’ Neel asked, trying hard to wipe the mirth from his face.

‘What expression?’ I asked but realized my mistake that same instant. My old habit had finally come around to bite me in the bottom. Mom had tried hard to cure me of my geeky vocabulary in expletives but I still managed to slip up sometimes.

‘Oh, please! Like you guys don’t curse.’Maybe that was the wrong thing to say because they

all started howling with laughter again. Then Neel and Anil high-fived each other and THAT was it. I’d had enough. I got up and saw Firdaus sitting on the floor, wiping away his tears. Scowling, I turned to get away but Neel grabbed my hand.

‘Okay, okay, sorry. Hey, let’s do it! Let’s go see the crest. We’ll all go together.’

I glowered at him. ‘Maybe . . . I might decide to go if you finally tell me what this place is all about!’

‘I think it’ll be better if you see it for yourself. Let it be a surprise,’ Neel said, making me roll my eyes again.

From what they had christened this place, I pictured a jagged mountain peak overlooking a vast expanse of a dense green jungle thicket. A majestic view of the untamed wild just like something straight out of The Jungle Book.

Neel had already started passing out the instructions. ‘Firdaus, we’ll carry the usual stuff just to be sure. Anil you need to get together some grub for later and also get Soni on the same page. We’ll meet here in half an hour.’

Firdaus and Anil nodded at Neel and left to follow through on their tasks. I noticed they didn’t mind the assumed authoritative tone that had crept into Neel’s voice. It was almost as if they . . . expected it from him.

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‘Let’s go get you dress-ed for the cr-est,’ Neel said in a sing-song baritone.

‘Real mature,’ I muttered while wondering why I needed to change for wherever we were going. We went back upstairs and Neel paused in front of my room. I looked up at him questioningly and was surprised to see him looking uncomfortable. He fidgeted with the strap of his morphe, stalling for time. Then abruptly, he shoved his hands in his pockets and snapped his head up. ‘Do you have some sort of a swimsuit?’

The question took me by surprise. ‘Err . . . Yes.’ His shoulders slumped in relief. ‘Great. Put that on

under your clothes. I’ll wait for you here.’‘Oh . . . okay. Are we going swimming?’ His response

was to smile, usher me inside my room and close the door.

I fished out the only swimsuit I was carrying. It was a brand new one-piece that my mother had bought about a year back for me. I went to the bathroom carrying the swimsuit, just to put some more distance between Neel and me. Somehow the thought of being unclothed in my room, with him standing just outside, was extremely unsettling.

I quickly changed into the swimsuit and was just about to leave the bathroom when I threw a glance at the mirror.

I had to slap a hand over my mouth to muffle my shriek. The amount of cleavage I was displaying was

positively criminal. Either the thing had shrunk since I had last tried it on or thanks to Maria’s lip-smacking casseroles, I had put on some pounds in all the right places. I chose to go with the latter possibility.

The fact remained that I was much too snug in this

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thing and the bright carmine did little to disguise that fact. Only if Mom had gotten a more sensible black, I could have avoided looking like a trollop. Oh well, there was nothing to be done.

I quickly covered the scandalous costume with my tank top and pants and squared my shoulders as I walked out of the room. Now that the fates had decided to embarrass me to death, I had no choice but to face my destiny. Neel was waiting outside leaning on the railing. Instead of waiting for him to say anything, I walked past him straight down the corridor.

Halfway across, I looked back and asked, ‘Coming?’Then I turned and continued down the stairs,

grinning at my rocking femme fatale move. My grin got wider as I heard him follow after uttering a loud long-suffering sigh.

We reached downstairs to find Firdaus and Anil waiting by the front door along with Soni. I walked outside and saw a small xeppel parked near the main gate of the house.

A xeppel for a trekking trip! Unbelievable! How did this group manage to get such privileges so easily?

I trailed my fingertips along the glossy black metal of the xeppel, marvelling at how different it was from the ones that had flown into our sector. Its insides had the usual eight-seater setting but from the outside, it looked a lot more compact. I came back to the front noticing that Firdaus had already gotten in the back row while Anil and Soni had occupied the middle one. I was wondering where to sit when Neel opened the front passenger door and motioned me to get in. The front seat? But that was always reserved for the security. Talking of which . . .?

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I occupied my place in the entourage and before I could question him about the lack of any security, my attention was captured by the strange interiors of the xeppel.

‘What is this?’ The control panel, the seats, everything was . . . translucent.

‘Aerogel,’ Neel said, drumming his fingers on the panel.‘Ah!’ I had never heard of it before but I wasn’t

going to make that evident. ‘Out of sync, out of sight’ was what I had learnt very early from the unofficial survival guide of Sector 51.

Neel ran his fingers over the control panel. ‘Aerogel is the strongest material we have in the world today. And it’s not only about strength. It’s also ultra-light and has very low thermal conductivity. So rest assured, you’ll be having a very, very safe flight today.’

‘No hints on where we’re going?’ I looked at the others at the back. ‘A little help?’

‘Okay. Here’s one. You’ll be wet, it’ll be dark and there will be lots of corners for doing dark deeds.’ Firdaus grinned at me but then quickly put on a deadpan expression as he caught Neel’s glare in the reflector.

The next hour was spent doing ‘express digestion’ as Firdaus called it, though in my books it could have been a part of some extreme endurance program.

We were bouncing up and down like yo-yos, as Neel flew us above the jungle performing his version of aerial acrobatics. He had even put on some heavy alternative music. Appropriate, considering how wild things were getting inside.

At first, I found the music a bit too jarring but then I got distracted watching Neel sink his teeth into his lower lip and head bang to his favourite bits. Very, very

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sexy. On one exhilaratingly catchy number, he started singing along and I held my breath. If watching him bite his lip had made my stomach clench, the deep rough resonance in his voice turned it to jelly. His voice wasn’t conventionally melodious but it had this early morning raspiness to it that was just heart melting. Thankfully, the others soon joined in to sing the chorus and I was able to breathe easy again.

For the last few minutes, we flew over a rugged road until we reached a point where it tapered off into a rough trail going deeper in the jungle. Neel landed the xeppel right at the mouth of this trail.

As I was unbuckling, he handed me a tube of mosquito repellent, ‘Better put this on. The critters here are a few millimetres long.’

Everybody else started getting out of the xeppel. Hmm. Maybe they had applied the stuff earlier.

I smeared a generous amount of the oily cream on my exposed arms and face, not wanting to accentuate my fragile upbringing by coming down with something nasty by the end of the day. As I got out, I noticed that Neel and Firdaus were carrying knapsacks on their back while Anil and Soni were carrying . . . nerve guns. The kind that security used to carry around in my sector back home. One shot and it could paralyse whichever part of the body it had targeted.

I was about to ask how they got their hands on this dangerous weapon when Neel suddenly turned to me. ‘You didn’t cover your back.’

I stared at him for a few seconds, wondering what he meant when it hit me.

‘Oh! Right. I had missed that.’ I had forgotten to apply the repellent on my back. But how did he even

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know about that? Had he been watching me put it on? I was thinking about how absolutely freaky that was when Neel came to stand in front of me with the repellent in his hand.

‘May I?’I must have nodded in the affirmative because the

next thing I felt were his cool hands on my neck and then the exposed part of my back. I tried to ignore the nudges that Firdaus and Anil were giving each other and the tingles that his fingers were sending through me. To his credit he was very brisk and nippy about it. But just as he was about to finish he came close to my ear and whispered, ‘It’s tinted you know.’

Uh-oh. So that’s how he knew! Not a stalker then. Just a mind reader with good observation powers.

I think I must have looked like a raw basted turkey right then what with the hot blush on my skin and the oily orange repellent clogging my pores.

After he had put the tube back in the xeppel, Neel straightened up his knapsack and declared, ‘Mira will be behind me, followed by Soni, Anil and Firdaus.’

Then with a huge powered machete in hand, Neel started hacking away at the dense growth. Forming a file just like he’d ordered, we followed behind. At first, I felt comfortable with the pace at which he was going. I felt happy thinking that all the hours clocked in activity classes hadn’t been a waste after all.

Ten gruelling minutes later, I had a different story to tell. Crescent-shaped marks bloomed under my arms and my breasts. The stifling stickiness in the air along with the sea of foliage swarming all around started to feel claustrophobic.

Midway, Neel halted and much too distracted with

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the oppressive heat, I bumped into him. Losing my balance, I tripped and landed on the ground in a heap. Soni and Neel quickly came forward and helped me up. Great! I was already the official klutz of the group.

‘My bad. I should have given a heads-up . . . drink this.’ Neel handed me a bottle of water.

Firdaus called out from behind, ‘Yes. It’s important for you to be hydrated.’

I hadn’t really missed the mocking tone behind the inflection but he didn’t stop there. ‘Unless you secretly fantasize about me carrying you.’

I had been busy glugging down the water, so I almost choked on a mouthful of it. Soni thumped my back as I coughed and spluttered. I saw Neel throw an exasperated look at Firdaus.

After splashing some of the water on my face, I raised my head and gave Firdaus the dirtiest look I could muster. In response, he just puckered his lips and smacked them at me. I gave up. There were subjects in which I just couldn’t ace Firdaus. Innuendo being number one.

We continued trudging along the trail and after about fifteen minutes, I became aware of a distant static noise. It got louder as we went further ahead. A river, I thought to myself. That would explain the swimsuit. After a few more minutes, the dense growth gave way and a delicious breeze wafted across my face. After the close confines of the jungle, the open space felt like freedom. I stepped forward, relishing the misty air. A wide rocky plateau stretched out before us, levelling off into the horizon.

I walked forward for a few steps wanting to get a better look at the view. As I’d expected, it was breathtaking with a bird’s eye view of the jungle in all

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its glory. The varying hues of green, created a living and breathing canvas. As I looked down from the edge of the plateau, the view below made me gasp. It was a really steep drop. But even though it was frighteningly high, probably equivalent to three skyscrapers, it didn’t scare me all that much. The fact that had shaken me was that I seemed to be standing on top of a waterfall which was emerging from somewhere below, from someplace within the cliff.

‘Say hello to Baby Blue,’ Soni said from behind me. Uh-huh. Baby, indeed.I turned around and noticed Neel and Firdaus

hammering in small metal bolts in the rocks near the edge. Anil was busy taking out ropes from one of the knapsacks while Soni had started collecting what looked like metal loops from the other bag. I recognized the loops, realizing what they planned to do.

‘Rappelling!’ I shrieked. I had done it before both in reality and in the virtual realm but never outdoors, never on a cliff of this size and never ever with an angry waterfall pounding under me.

‘Are you planning on rappelling down this cliff?’ I shrieked again.

‘No, of course not.’ Neel gave a last clunk with his hammer and faced me. ‘We are rappelling down this cliff.’

‘In case you haven’t noticed, there is a waterfall down there. How are you going to rappel around little Baby Blue?’ I asked.

Firdaus straightened up with a wicked grin on his face. ‘Oh, we’re not gonna rappel around it. We’re gonna rappel into it.’

‘Huh?’ I stood there with my mouth agape while all of them chuckled away.

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Soni rolled her eyes. ‘Don’t freak her out. Mira, there’s a cave down there from which Baby Blue comes out. We’ll rappel down into the cave. You’ll be fine. No sweat.’

I watched as Anil took out some kind of padded black ropes. As he handed one set to me, I realized it was a harness, one that I had never used before. They were really planning on doing this! Rappel into a waterfall! These people were crazy!

My nerves frayed, I kept fumbling with the various belts of the harness trying to snap them together somehow when a pair of steady hands reached out to help me. With two swift motions, the harness was wrapped around my waist and buckled snugly. The leg loops of the harness came next and were quickly wrapped around my thighs. Successfully cosseted, I looked up and found myself staring into Neel’s stormy eyes. It was like being caught in a photograph where the background had blurred but Neel and I remained in sharp focus. The need to touch him, to test his reality was compulsive.

I stretched out my fingers and met his halfway. Hands clasped, we stood there looking at each other, completely oblivious of our surroundings. Seconds later, someone coughed interrupting our moment of enthrallment. I drew in a ragged breath realizing only then that I had been holding on to it all this while.

As Neel stepped away, I occupied myself with unnecessarily tightening all the buckles. When I looked up, I saw Anil looking at me with a wide grin plastered on his face. Well, at least Soni and Firdaus had been too busy with their own harnesses to notice anything.

Once they were done, Neel spoke up, ‘Okay, here’s

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how we run this. Firdaus goes first, then Anil, Soni, Mira and I. Soni . . . Anil . . . both of you need to manoeuvre Mira into the cave. This being her first time, she might not have a smooth landing.’

Everyone nodded and Firdaus started walking towards the edge of the cliff. I watched as he pulled a rope through the metal loop and knotted it to his harness. As soon as Firdaus was poised on the edge to rappel down, I panicked. Dangling from a cliff that was three skyscrapers high, all at the mercy of a hook and a rope! It hadn’t really sunk in, till I saw Firdaus teetering on the edge like that.

‘Relax. We’ve done this before,’ Neel whispered in my ear. I realized I had been digging my nails in his wrist. I immediately let go, turning my eyes to Firdaus again, who was now smirking at me. He gave an exaggeratedly courteous bow and shouted, ‘So long Mira! It was nice knowing youuuuuUU . . .’ He’d bounced off the edge, out of my sight.

I had been scared for Firdaus a few minutes back but now I almost wished a rock would bump his head. Then I realized everybody around me had gone silent. Right. They probably expected the fragile girl to swoon and faint with fear.

It was time to break some ill-conceived notions. I stepped forward to the edge and peered down. Sure enough, Firdaus was there. With his head bent, he was completely focused on rappelling his way down.

‘Firdaus!’ I called out to him and he stopped to look up. ‘I think you’ll have better success with what you had in mind if you dumped the rope. Here, let me help you.’ I bent down and gently shook his rope making him sway a little.

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Not frazzled in the least, he grinned up at me. ‘That’s real badass of you, Mira.’

I beamed back at him and then straightened up as he continued to rappel down. When he reached the mouth of the waterfall, he stopped and jumped onto a broad ledge right beside the frothing mouth of Baby Blue. After a few seconds, I heard him yell an ‘all clear’ and Anil quickly stepped up to the edge, pulling the rope back up.

In the next twenty minutes, Anil and then Soni effortlessly rappelled their way down. Then it was my turn. I tried to tie the rope to my harness but my fingers had developed a mind of their own. Ugh. All my pretences at being cool and confident were rendered useless, just because my stupid hands refused to stop trembling. Neel stepped in again and quickly tied up all the knots.

He placed his hands on my shoulders forcing me to swallow the dry lump in my throat and look up into his eyes which were brown, black and blazing. As always, they held me captive.

‘Mira, we wouldn’t be doing this if I wasn’t sure about you being able to handle it.’

I nodded, not trusting my voice to give me away.‘You’ve already seen how it’s done. You balance

yourself on the edge and just try to walk backwards. Simple.’

Right. Simple. I had a word in my mind at that moment and none of its synonyms stood for simplicity. I wisely kept my thoughts to myself and went forward to the edge. Whirling around quickly, I closed my eyes before I got tempted to take a peek below. Words flashed in my mind. Deathtrap . . . Infernal pit . . .

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Smashed bones . . . Stop! No good would come out of thinking like that. I tried something else. Opening scene: Grand Canyon . . . Black tank top . . . Dang ding Dong . . . Again the words flashed in my mind . . . Twisted neck . . . Blood spatter . . . Brain fluid . . . Gah! This was no good.

I had been standing on the edge for about five minutes now, sure of the fact that Firdaus was staring at my frozen butt from below and laughing his guts out. Not that I was going to hazard a look to check.

When I finally opened my eyes, I saw Neel looking at me. ‘Trust me Mira. Just take a step back. It’s that simple.’

Well, when he put it like that everything sounded easy. It was also refreshing to have him not treat me like a porcelain doll. The first boyfriend had been like that and I hadn’t had much self-esteem at that time to get him to back down. The overbearing attitude and the poodle treatment had been so formulaic.

At least that was one thing this experience could never be called. Walking down a cliff with a waterfall raging down below was anything but formulaic.

Keeping my eyes locked with Neel’s, I did just as he had said. I took a step back and then another. And to my surprise, it was easy. I just kept on walking backwards, firmly planting each step on the cliff, my hands threading down the rope, till the roaring, simmering Baby Blue was just a few feet away from me. I smiled in elation. The rush of adrenaline that thumped through my veins was heady.

I had reached the mouth of the huge hole in the cliff and now I was . . . stuck. I tried to remember how the others had just bounced on the rock with their feet and

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swung themselves on to the ledge but at that moment with the thunder of the waterfall down below and certain death beyond, I was not feeling very buoyant. This was not 12hk. This was reality. I could really get hurt doing this. My limbs could get mangled, or I could get disabled or even die.

I heard Soni and Anil shouting at me, trying to reach out but I couldn’t move. It was as if someone had flicked pause and I was just stuck there in suspended animation. After what felt like an hour but was probably just a few minutes, I felt someone hugging me from behind, trying to break my trance. My head cleared and I realized Neel’s voice was hollering in my ears.

Rot! How had he managed to climb down so fast? And with what? Only one rope had been anchored to the rocks!

I sucked in a deep breath, trying to focus my scattered thoughts.

‘Easy, Mira. That’s it. Breathe. Now just relax your body and lean into me. I’ll get us into the cave. Okay?’ He was shouting in my ear, trying to make himself heard above the din of the waterfall.

‘I . . . I’m sorry Neel. I didn’t mean to freeze up . . . and you had to come down . . . how did you climb down? I’m using the rope . . .’

‘Mira, listen . . . just lean into me and let me lead.’I nodded. Stupid coward me. Princess Snow White

could have done a better job. Thumbelina could have probably aced it.

Neel clutched the rope above my hands and I arched my back into him. I felt his feet build the momentum by thrusting us forward towards the cliff and then in one swift manoeuvre we landed on the broad ledge. After

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making sure I was steady on my feet, he snapped me free of the harness.

‘That was one ill-timed rigor mortis,’ Firdaus quipped.

‘Zip it, Firdaus!’ Soni snapped, scowling at him.‘Welcome to Baby Blue,’ Anil announced and that’s

when I noticed my surroundings for the first time. As I looked around, my mouth fell open at the magnitude of the sight before me. The walls of the cave were humongous, stretching all around us like a giant cavernous mouth, extending endlessly into the depths of the earth.

The whole cavern was resounding with the gushing sounds of the river. Frothing at being unleashed to the world, the water had eroded the bedrock of the cave and formed a self-contained canal for itself. A rocky path bordered this canal and extended outwards to form the ledge that we were all standing on.

My attention got diverted from studying the cave to Anil who had just dug out strange-looking pairs of gloves from his knapsack. They looked almost translucent and had these strange criss-cross patterns on them. Anil handed everybody one pair.

Reluctantly, I put mine on and was taken aback as a bright light immediately started beaming off from my hands.

Once everyone had put on the gloves, we formed a file and started making our way down the rocky path. I walked warily, almost hugging the wall of the cave, mortally scared of being swept away into the strong currents.

We kept going deeper into the cave, no jokes, no banter from anyone. Strangely, the deeper we went,

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the calmer I felt. The puffs of our breaths, the patter of our footsteps and the gush of the river, everything set up a soothing rhythm.

After some time, the tempo of the river slowed till it gradually trickled into a steady stream. It was like its ferocity had finally surrendered itself to the peace of the earth’s womb.

Five minutes later, I discovered the point of origin of Baby Blue. It was spouting from a gully flanked by rocks on all sides. I thought we had reached a cul-de-sac but then Neel climbed on top of a huge rock arching above the gully and squeezed through a small opening there. I followed him without any hesitation.

‘Just a few more minutes now,’ Neel said once I’d climbed in behind him.

The walls had started closing in a while back and now we had to stoop down to avoid bumping our heads on the roof. I wondered about what was left to be seen. I had seen the crest, Baby Blue, the cave . . . now what? I got my answer just a minute later, when the walls of the cave abruptly disappeared and were replaced by pitch darkness. The light from my gloves showed I was still standing on a rock but around me there was just emptiness. A ceaseless vacuum of nothingness!

I panicked but then my eyes seemed to pick up something. A strange blue halo stretched ahead of me. I stared at it feeling both mesmerized and unsettled. It just seemed so alien, so unnatural. Someone clasped my hand and blocked my view. Neel’s face filled my vision for a second and then we were moving again, towards the right this time. A stone wall loomed ahead and Neel raised his hand and waved in front of it. I heard a soft click and then a bright light blinded me.

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They’d put in motion-activated lights inside this cave? But why?

My eyes slowly adjusted to the change, the black spots shrinking and then disappearing altogether. Once the spectre fully unravelled before my eyes, I gasped.

It was like we’d entered some strange parallel universe where the world around us had been blown out of scale making us look like midgets in comparison.

All of us were standing a few meters away from the edge of a rocky platform which was like a pip contrasted with the size of the cavern before us. It was so huge it could probably accommodate the whole of Sector 51 and then some.

The cave I’d seen earlier was nothing compared to this. The immensity of this geological formation enthralled me. The walls were almost a mile high here, filled with red and black crags and cuts.

The ethereal bluish glow I had seen earlier was radiating from the bedrock of the cavern. It was softer now, less hypnotic than before. I stepped forward and looked down. It was a lake, an expansive mass of the bluest blue I had ever seen. A misty radiance was coming off of it as if the water had been lighted up from below.

‘Welcome to the crest,’ I heard Neel utter from behind me. So this was the crest. Not the one I’d seen earlier.

‘Isn’t it awesome?’ Anil asked.‘Amazing,’ I said. ‘Are there lights below the lake?’‘Not lights. Phosphorescent . . . algae.’ Anil’s voice

sounded strangely muffled. I looked back and found him standing there in his trunks. ‘Whatareyou?’

In fact all four of them were in various states of undress. Firdaus was in his trunks and in the process of taking off his shirt. Soni was just stepping out of her

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shorts revealing a teeny white two-piece. I turned my head to look at Neel. Instead my eyes rested on a pair of thick collar bones nestled on top of a wide expanse of . . .

‘You’ll need this,’ he said and handed me a diving mask and a snorkel.

‘O-k-a-y.’ Wipe the drool off your face, Mira. I clutched on to the mask and the tube as if my life depended on it and fled into the safety of the small tunnel from where we had just entered. I took off my clothes and tried to shimmy up the neckline of the swimsuit I had underneath. I managed to pull up the neckline a bit after a vigorous jiggle but then realized that the lower part had ridden up to become a thong. Worse. Much worse.

In the choice (not) of showcasing my bust or bottom, I settled on covering up the latter.

Just as I re-adjusted my swimsuit, I heard a loud splash from inside the cavern. Picking up my clothes, the gloves and the snorkelling gear I squared my shoulders and walked back inside, right in time to see Firdaus jumping off the edge. Neel and Soni were also standing there, peering down.

A ‘woohoooo’ and then a second later I heard another splash.

These people were stark raving mad! I had thought they were going to rappel down again into the lake but diving? Was this lake even deep enough? Considering the echoes of Firdaus’s animated chortles I guessed it was but diving from this height? Mad. Definitely. Not a doubt about it.

I put my clothes on top of a knapsack and held on to the snorkelling stuff. As I straightened, I saw Neel looking at me with his lips parted in surprise. My belly

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did a mean little flip as I saw him staring at me intently with a strange look in his eyes.

I don’t know why but there was something about that look that made me tremble to my very core. I stood there rooted, thinking I would never be able to tear my eyes away from those dreamy languorous eyes, but Soni turned at that exact moment and proved me wrong.

‘Wow. Risqué. Love it!’ She waved to me. ‘Come over, Mira. I’m next!’

I walked towards her, avoiding looking anywhere else. ‘How deep is this lake? It doesn’t seem safe.’

‘Safe? Yes. Foolproof? No. But then what is?’ she turned to look at Neel who was still staring at me. She followed his gaze back to me and I saw her chest heave slightly, as if she had just sucked in a breath. Something in her eyes hardened, but then, all too quickly, she marshalled her expressions. As I got close, she stuck a smile on her face.

‘You know it’s not really a lake in the truest sense. It’s actually an underground river. It widened up over the years to fill up the pit in the bedrock.’ She clasped my hand and together we walked towards the edge.

Then she lowered her voice. ‘The flow is hardly noticeable and anyone who isn’t in-the-know would think the water is static. These waters run very deep but that doesn’t mean you won’t get hurt. Be careful, Mira.’ She gave me a strange look as she squeezed my hand and I had a feeling she wasn’t really talking about the river or its dangers. Was she warning me off Neel? Why would she do that? Questions and doubts jumbled my mind.

Maybe I was just overthinking things as usual. I glanced over at Neel who was now busy pulling something out of his knapsack.

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‘Anyhow . . . here I go now. See you down there,’ Soni said as she backtracked a little on the platform and then broke into a sprint. Stretching her arms over her head, she dived straight into the lake. It was a shock to see her lithe body hurtling down and then hitting the water with a loud splash.

A few seconds later, she surfaced. After sparing me a glance, she swam towards Firdaus and Anil who were busy dunking each other. I felt a cool breath on my shoulder and whirled around to see Neel standing right behind me. Be careful, Mira. Soni’s warning rang in my ears.

I stepped away from him edging sideways towards the safety of the wall, completely unable to break the hold of his eyes. They tracked me, simmering with unsaid, toe-curling possibilities. I kept stepping back with his body shadowing mine till I felt the hard rock hitting my back. Neel stopped just a foot away from me and I felt every muscle in my body tense with anticipation. Then he stretched out his hand.

A belt was lying on his palm and he held it out, his lips twitching.

‘You can hook up your snorkelling duct on this when you dive.’

‘Oh! Err . . . thanks.’ I took the belt from him and tied it around my waist, keeping my head bent for longer than was necessary. Think of something to say, Mira. Something. Anything!

‘Why aren’t you guys carrying any of this snorkelling stuff?’ I blurted out perhaps a bit too loudly.

He looked taken aback, with my question or with my sudden exuberance, I couldn’t tell.

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‘We don’t need it. Um . . . we’re more . . .’ his smile changed, turning wicked, ‘shall we say, experienced?’

Oh! Enough with the innuendos and the evasions! ‘Right,’ I smirked. ‘So am I next?’

‘. . . or you could be the last.’I shook my head. ‘No. That won’t be me.’I walked up to the edge, reeking of bravado. After

all, I had to make up for the frozen butt thingy on the cliff. I stretched my arms up, feeling the knot at the base of my neck, the clench of my calves and the pressure on my toes. In tenth grade, I had been rated a kinaesthetic at school. Good at sports, dance and arts. All non-resourceful activities as per Rebyt.

I had read up all about it. Earlier people with kinaesthesis had been branded as having attention deficits. Too much physical energy and pain-in-the-butt curiosity. I took a deep breath in. Time to shine for the deficient. And I jumped.

Then for a few precious seconds I felt what it was to be a bird. Soaring. Weightless. Unburdened. But all too quickly, gravity suckered me in. Adrenaline pumped through my veins and a scream of pure joy broke through my lips. And before I knew it, it was over. I crashed into the water and it enveloped me. I came up scrambling for air. And then it all got a bit hazy. I think I might have hugged someone in my blissed-out state. When I looked up, I saw Neel standing there with a disapproving look on his face. Puzzled, I looked down and realized I was clutching on to Firdaus who was smiling broadly with his eyes fixed attentively on my cleavage.

I jerked my arms off of him and swam away. Something splashed into the spot I had just cleared and

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a second later Neel emerged. Pointing a finger to the edge of the lake, he gestured me to follow him. Feeling a bit hesitant, I followed him but when I reached the rocky banks, he was nowhere to be seen. I stood there looking around wondering where he had disappeared.

I started walking along the bank to reach the other side. I had just taken a few steps when I saw something that made me falter. A hand had emerged out of the wall ahead. Then as if in slow motion, the hand slowly waved at me. I groaned. Neel was missing a brain but at least he made up for it with gimmicks. I walked forward and realized there was a well-camouflaged crevice in the wall. The hand beckoned me again. I grinned and started walking towards it.

As I entered the crevice, I discovered that it led into a small chamber. A chamber that was teeming with odd-looking shrubs. The shrubs were not only swarming across the ground, their thick vines also extended across the walls of the chamber covering almost every inch of free space.

‘Did you get spooked again?’ Neel asked cheerily and I scowled.

‘No! Just disappointed with your childish tricks.’‘You’d rather be entertained with grown-up

ploys then?’I gulped while trying to think of a witty repartee.

‘What kind of plants are these?’ At least, it was a valid question. The leaves of the shrubs were unusually thick and glossy, unlike anything I had ever seen before. Some of them had berries stringing on their stems. I plucked one of them, fascinated by the colour. Unsullied white, like my Nani’s pearls. I popped it in my mouth and a citric lush sweetness exploded on my tongue.

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‘Phyllae Virdit. We have to carry some samples of the fruit for your Mom and Mr Jain’s research. He’s . . .’ Neel broke-off as he turned to face me. ‘Did you just eat one of the berries?’ he asked, his eyes wide with shock.

‘Err . . . yes. Why?’His shock turned to mirth. ‘If Mr Jain finds out, he’ll

be so mad.’I gave him a puzzled look and he explained with

exaggerated patience, ‘These berries have a path-breaking plant enzyme in them that is not only vital for your Mom’s and Mr Jain’s research but also crucial for the people on this planet. This is the only season when these shrubs flower and bear fruits. And to make matters a whole lot worse, this is the only area in the world where we’ve found them so far. So you see . . . you might have gobbled up the most priceless scientific discovery ever made.’

I stood there with my jaw touching the floor. The gobbling up of a priceless discovery part didn’t astound me. I was more shocked with the information Neel had just shared about my Mom’s research.

Since I was a child, she had never talked about her research with me. I remember defying all her rules once and barging into her research lab. One look inside and I never ever ventured there again. Cages of trapped white mice screeching and whining had haunted my dreams for months.

So of course I hadn’t known what she had been working on, let alone that it was a project of this magnitude.

Neel was still standing in front of me with a smirk fixed on his face. He probably expected me to cower from his threat of ratting me out to Mr Jain. Before he

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could stop me, I quickly plucked another berry and put it in my mouth.

I didn’t bite on it though. I just placed it under my tongue and gave him a wide grin. Neel sighed and did the universal exasperated guy gesture of running his hand through his hair.

Still smiling, I turned and walked back towards the big cavern. As soon as I was out of his sight, I took the berry out of my mouth and placed it inside my belt pouch. Then I stood there watching Firdaus, Anil and Soni have fun splashing water on each other. A few minutes later, Neel stepped out with a small bag which I assumed was full of those precious berries.

‘What does this plant enzyme do anyways?’‘Provides immortality,’ he muttered.I must have looked shocked out of my wits because

he hastened to correct himself, ‘In a highly concentrated form, of course. Two berries won’t do the trick.’

‘Provides immortality? That’s just foggy.’‘Mira, did you know that most of the med patches

we use are in one way or another derived from plants? So why is this so implausible?’ Neel sat down on one of the rocks and motioned me to sit next to him. I complied and sat down still thinking that what he was saying was just plain ridiculous.

I shook my head. ‘You don’t get it. The plant enzyme part is fine. It’s the immortality part I can’t believe. That’s just a . . . a crazy fantasy!’

‘Fantasy,’ he mulled over the word and then turned to me with a gleam in his eyes, ‘Have you read any of the retro tales? You know the ones about the fountain of youth?’

‘Fountain of youth? That’s a mythical idea for fate’s

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sake! A wild goose chase for the Holy Grail which exists only in books.’

‘How can you be so certain? Maybe the fountain of youth or the Holy Grail wasn’t a literal reference but just an indication of where one could find it.’ He waved his hand around at the lake and at the cavern.

I turned and gazed at the unassuming calm waters of the lake which was really a river bubbling up from the innards of the earth. The fountain of youth? I thought about the berries growing just beside it. Providers of immortality? It all seemed a bit too improbable to me.

‘How does this plant enzyme work . . . how does it make one immortal?’

‘The enzyme doesn’t provide immortality. It’s just a catalyst. What it does is to turn on the master gene in our body. The gene that keeps the cells in a perpetual state of youthfulness. Your Mom is the one who found the master gene and Mr Jain is the one who discovered the plant enzyme.’

‘So now they’re working together to come up with some sort of an immortality potion?’

‘A pill . . . which has to contain a very high concentration of the enzyme to work. That’s why they’re trying to make a synthetic version of it at the institute.’

‘Wow!’Neil nodded. ‘Yep. That about sums it up.’We sat there for some more time looking at the others

tire themselves out in the water.‘You like reading?’ he asked suddenly.I looked at him, puzzled by the sudden change in

topic. ‘Y-e-s.’‘What do you like about reading?’‘Oh! Everything.’ Actually I had never really

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thought about it. The usual follow-up question in such a conversation had always been about what I read, not why I read. I tried thinking back and remembered the day when I was five years old and had hidden behind a couch to watch my Nani read a book. I remembered seeing a small private smile on her face that day that I’d never seen before. Then after some time, I had watched fascinated as her face changed, growing sad. She was usually very stoic, my Nani but during those twenty minutes watching her face was like witnessing a fizzling explosion of fireworks. It was mobile and charged with an electric, animated effervescence. I wondered what it was in that book that affected her so much.

I told Neel about that day and about a whole lot else.‘They show me a world that did exist before, a world

that was possible. They help me escape to places I could never see or even dream of. The feel of paper, the smell . . . it comforts me . . .’ I stopped short. Too much information, Mira. Maybe I should have kept the smell bit to myself. I sneaked a glance at Neel. One of his eyebrows was arched up.

Yup. Should have definitely kept it to myself.Then I heard him say softly, ‘Pine and polish.’I grinned as I turned to look at him. ‘Burnt wood and

autumn leaves.’‘Wine and hay.’‘Now that’s just lame,’ I said and nudged his

shoulder. It didn’t give.We sat in comfortable silence for some time. A

beat later, Neel spoke up again, ‘So are you in touch with Asha?’

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My back went ramrod straight and I felt him stiffen beside me in response. How could he have known about Asha? Had he been reading my diary? Maybe Mom had told him? I was about to ask him about it when a big wave of water splashed on me so hard, I lost my balance and fell. And as was my luck, I fell down on a jagged rock which jutted into my back so hard it almost felt like it had spiked through it.

I grunted in pain as Neel clambered towards me. ‘Myrah! Are you okay?!’ He helped me sit up and inspected my back, ‘No scratches or anything. Are you in pain?’

I shook my head. ‘No biggie. Just a bump.’Firdaus appeared in front of me looking sheepish for

a change. ‘I’m sorry, Mira. I was just fooling around.’Neel got up in a flash and placed a finger lightly on

Firdaus’s neck, just below his ear. Then in a voice that made me shudder, he said, ‘Enough.’

Firdaus stood extremely still as if he was wary of what Neel’s finger might do to him.

I felt freaked out by the charge in the air even though I could not make much sense of the scene playing out before my eyes. Firdaus was easily the heftier guy and he could have easily taken on Neel. Then why was he being so watchful of Neel’s pointer?

‘I said . . . I was sorry,’ Firdaus said stiffly.‘Hey! No need for this! I’m not hurt or anything,’ I

said trying to pacify the situation. When they still didn’t budge, I quickly got up and stepped in between. It was like being wedged in a mountain furrow.

‘Hey, it was just a joke. Come on,’ I said smiling reassuringly at Neel whose eyes were still blazing with

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anger. The haze cleared up a bit as he looked down and focused on me. Seconds passed and he seemed to recover himself completely.

Then withdrawing his hand, he swung on his heels and walked away. Firdaus turned away as well but before he did, I caught a flicker of relief cross his face.

In the next few hours, we ate the sandwiches Anil had packed for everyone and then we just splashed around and snorkelled. Neel showed me the bio-luminescent algae floating around in the water. He called them fire blips.

With a fluid movement of his hand he wrote something in the water and for a few seconds, a word glowed in front of me. Myrah. His name for me scintillated and sparkled like a trick birthday candle. The look we shared at that moment could have melted a few icebergs. It was the most perfect day of my life. And like all good things it ended much too quickly.

When it was time to head back up to the platform, we climbed our way through a slightly steep gully in the cavern wall. After the exertions of the day, my legs quivered and my calves ached with every step. The others might have noticed my exhaustion but they didn’t say a word.

Though admittedly, it would have been kind of hard to miss what with all the huffing and puffing I did on our trek back to Baby Blue.

When we reached the mouth of the cave, Neel, Soni and Firdaus climbed up the cliff to fix a pulley for me while Anil waited below. I had begun to feel a strange kinship with him. Maybe it was because he looked younger, or maybe because he was a nerd who was

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into adventure sports. Like me he was someone who couldn’t be neatly tacked in a specific category.

As we stood waiting, I asked him about Neel’s face-off with Firdaus.

‘So what’s the deal with Neel and his finger?’ I asked, thinking there was no point sugar-coating it.

Anil looked at me like my brain was mashed. ‘Huh?’ ‘Why was Firdaus so scared of Neel’s finger during

their face-off?’‘Because Neel knows Hoda Korosu,’ he said and

then crossed his arms over his chest, considering the matter closed.

I rolled my eyes and waited for him to explain. Birds chirped, insects twittered and reptiles seethed. Ten seconds later I gave in. ‘So what is Hoda-whatever?’

Anil grinned and got the excited geek look that guys get when talking about new gits. ‘Self-improvised defence. He knows all the acupuncture points in our bodies. Anything from a piece of paper to a toothbrush can be deadly, if he’s the one holding it.’

‘Wow. That seems like a useful skill to have. Who taught him?’

I saw him hesitate and debate on whether to answer me. He must have deemed it safe because he replied quietly, ‘His father. He’s a master at it.’

A rope dangled in front of us and we got busy making our way up the cliff.

By the time we all got back to Casa Amarela, it was way past dinner time. And even though I had munched on some of the fruit and cold cuts Soni had packed for everybody, I was still famished. So while everybody went upstairs to their rooms, I decided to raid the kitchen first.

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Thankfully, Maria was still there and realizing my starving state, she took no time in handing me a plate piled high with food. I took it without any complaint thanking the fates that there was no one else around to watch me devour it.

Fifteen minutes later, I walked back to my room swaying and staggering. The buzz of the dinner and the burden of the day made my whole body feel like lead. I checked on Mom but she wasn’t there. Probably still at work. Anyway, I was in no condition to grill her about her research right then.

I made it inside my room and collapsed in a heap on the bed. As every muscle and joint in my body protested, I promised myself that in this lifetime, I would never rappel, dive, run, walk, or even wake up again. Nothing that would make me move and leave this bed. Ever.

The last image I had in my mind before I fell asleep was of Neel’s finger casually placed on Firdaus’s throat and Soni’s words resounding in my ears.

Be careful, Mira.

V

THE D ISAPPEARANCE

Stinger dated 13/12/2173: The CDT (Centre of Derived Technology) has given a go-ahead on eradicating the remaining sectors housing the Homo Sapiens. The sectors had initially been formed with a two-pronged objective. One was to capture the existing mechanisms and processes developed by humans and transcend them into the level of technology suitable for our race’s progress. The other was to utilize the human stock living in these sectors for potentially useful scientific studies. A CDT Rep said projections from all sectors have been met and they have fulfilled their purpose.

Area IV, 25 December 2173A week passed before I saw any of them again. A

day after our trip to the crest, Neel and his friends left for their research project to a nearby sector. At that time, I’d thought it was all for the best. It would give me time to get over my stupid juvenile fantasies and help me get on with my prep work.

My daily piecemeal schedule divided into study time, reading time and exploring time did make sure I had no stamina left for any wayward thoughts.

In the beginning, I had been a bit doubtful of my ability to explore a real jungle on foot. I hadn’t really

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enjoyed trekking in the 12hk trips before and I was not sure if I could actually do it for real in a rainforest, but then there was only so much hammock time your brain could take till it started wobbling around inside your skull.

The best thing was that I had managed to convince Hari to be my guide. Hari had been with Mr Jain for over fifteen years and knew the jungle like the back of his hand. Whatever that meant. I had never really spent time studying that part of my anatomy. My nose and the infinite amount of pores on it? Yes. The back of my hand? Not so much. Perhaps it was another one of those terribly unfathomable idioms from the last century that Mr Jain seemed to love spouting.

But even though Hari looked deceptively shrivelled and crinkly, he was amazingly fit for his age. He’d even managed to appease all of Mom’s fears.

Initially, Mom had been hesitant about my hiking through the jungle, but Hari had stressed that he had never spotted a predatory animal on any of the fenced-in safe trails and that the trails stretched only a few metres away from the house. And with my speed and expertise, that was exactly how far we went each time.

I was looking forward to the hike that day because Hari had promised to show me a waterfall a little further away from our usual trails. I picked up my morphe and went downstairs. The morphe didn’t catch any signal here so I couldn’t really use it as a phone but it still told time. Plus, it was packed with all my life’s worth of archived movies and reading material. How could I ever part with it?

Hari was already waiting at his usual spot by the main gate in the front. What wasn’t usual was the

vintage rifle casually slung over his shoulder. Perhaps it was an added safety measure?

‘Boa tarde, Hari,’ I said with a spring in my step, feeling quite upbeat at the prospect of a real adventure.

Hari beamed and gestured at me to follow him.We began on one of our usual trails. It started from

the east side of the house, stretching along the jungle. Mom had told me Mr Jain and Hari had made these

trails while they were building the house. All of the trails had been made for essential practical purposes. One led to a waterfall which was the main source of fresh water supply to the house. Another led to a fenced-in kitchen garden and the third led deeper into the jungle for setting up traps for wild game. I had already seen the other trails but I guess Hari had been saving the waterfall as a special treat.

We reached the midway mark of the trail but instead of turning back, Hari kept on going. The mark was actually a boulder splashed with white paint. And it looked exactly like that. Like someone had stood there one day and decided that painting it would take too much time and just chucked a bucket of white paint on it.

Walking past it now, I felt the excitement buzzing in my head. A real waterfall! Maybe this one would be even bigger than Baby Blue?

We walked on and on till my tank top and khakis felt like an unwelcome second skin. I guess I still hadn’t gotten used to the heat. Taking a big gulp of air and a generous swig of water from the bottle I was carrying, I looked around. All around me, the thick mass of cedar and rubber trees looked like they were trying to suck in their fill of the air and water as well. It was the survival of the fittest at its finest.

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We kept a brisk pace but were slowed down because apart from frequently glugging down water, I also kept stopping to snap pictures with my morphe. But who could have blamed me? There were just so many sights to take in.

I was even able to capture a family of parakeets and a new breed of elk that Hari happened to spot beyond the electric fence. The parakeets seemed friendly enough but when the elk noticed me, it bared its long canines in a sneer so chilling it made me worry about the sturdiness of the electric fence between us. As I thought about it, I realized these elks were nothing like the ones I had been taught about in school.

As we turned around a bend, I heard soft gushing sounds. It wasn’t anything like the roar of Baby Blue. It wasn’t even the tinkling or lapping sounds that books often attribute to waterfalls. Actually it sounded more like someone peeing. Noisily.

A very prosaic description, yes, but very exact.Then a few steps later, it came into my view. Barely

about ten feet wide, it had a narrow stream of river water feeding it. Beautiful as it was, the term waterfall was clearly an overstatement. Hari held up his hand motioning me to stop before we got any closer. He slid the gun off his shoulder and walked around the pool, inspecting the fence surrounding it. I guess watering holes were the hot spot for predatory activity. Though how he expected any of the four-footed animals to break through the tall electric fence was beyond me.

Hari gave me a thumbs-up and then knelt on a rock to drink the water by cupping it in his hands. I stepped closer and switched on my morphe to get some decent shots. I was planning on showing these photographs

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to Mom to entice her into coming here the next time as she had been spending far too much time holed up at the institute.

A strange rustling sound pulled me out of my thoughts. I looked up. The rock on which Hari had been kneeling a few seconds ago, was now vacant. I looked around in surprise. It wasn’t like him to let me get out of his sight on a trail.

‘Hari?’I whipped my head around waiting for an answer

but the only response I got was the constant buzzing of insects broken by the occasional shrill cry of a bird. I called out again, an edge of anxiety creeping into my voice.

‘Hari!’I walked across to the rock where he had been

kneeling and looked around. The rustling came again. Fainter this time. It was coming from behind me, from somewhere beyond the fence.

I froze with fear, unable to move my limbs. But the creepy sound didn’t stop. This time it came from somewhere further down.

It was moving away from me! And then just as suddenly as it had begun, it stopped.

I turned around slowly, dreading the worst but there was nothing beyond the electric fence, at least nothing that wasn’t hidden by the dense motley green of the jungle. I peered into the thicket, fearing something horrific would emerge from it at any moment. I waited for what seemed like ages but nothing happened. Nothing came out from the dark shadows of the trees. The dry lump in my throat bottled down the scream threatening to rise up and my ears rang with the deafening static of the jungle.

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Now what? Someone or something had reached out over the fence and had taken Hari, but which animal was capable of doing that? These fences were after all state-of-the-art technology, their chain links only an aesthetic throwback to earlier times. They had motion detectors, infra-red capabilities and weight sensors. I’d been told the only way to turn it off was to call back at the institute.

Apart from these emergency situations if it was on then anything that didn’t meet the calibrations fed into the system, would be fried to a crisp in an instant. What if it was an unknown new breed of animals that was more intelligent than the others? I couldn’t be certain of anything except that every minute I stood here debating, was a minute too late for Hari.

It took all my strength to move from that spot but my survival instinct eventually overrode the terror. At first all I could manage was to walk slowly towards the trail, dreading that any sudden movement would attract the attention of whatever it was that had taken Hari. I had to get help. I had to. A wave of fear gushed through me and I started running down the trail back towards the house. I ran faster than I’d ever run before in my life.

Minutes later, as the boulder came into my line of sight, relief surged through me at having crossed the midway mark. Then suddenly, my foot snagged on something and I fell. My elbows managed to break my fall but my forehead bumped against something hard, stunning me for a moment.

I got up unsteadily, my head throbbing to an agonising rhythm but the pain only made me think of Hari and what could have happened to him. He might be hurt and in desperate need of a rescue.

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I started running again putting everything I had into it. I was able to keep my pace for a few more minutes before my vision started wavering again. As the dizziness became worse, my only hope was to reach the house and tell somebody about Hari before I passed out.

Seconds later, my right eye started getting blurry and my laboured breaths echoed sharply in my ears as the trail stretched and swayed before me. When the trees started closing in on me, my steps faltered. It was a frustrating feeling. My mind willed me to run but my body refused to follow the command.

Unable to hold myself up any longer, I slumped and the last thing I saw was the ground reeling up to greet me. My eyes closed instinctively and I submitted myself to feel the force of the impact but . . . it never came.

Instead of crashing into the ground, my head was suddenly cushioned by something soft. Then a hand touched my forehead and I shook myself from my delirium to relay the emergency.

‘Help! PLEASE! Waterfall . . . help!’ My high-pitched babbling sounded incoherent even to my own ears.

‘Myrah, what happened? How did you get hurt?’ The voice stirred something in me and I opened my

eyes. Neel! He was kneeling on the ground with my head cradled in his arms. I blinked hard trying to focus on his face. As he examined the wound on my head, I winced. The pain brought it all back with a jolt.

‘Hari! We have to help him. We were by the waterfall and then he disappeared! And I heard something . . .’ I shivered, remembering the eerie rustling sound. ‘Please, we have to hurry! We have to help him!’

I tried to sit up and he helped me by putting his

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hands under my arms. Then he clicked a button on his morphe and started talking to someone.

‘It’s Hari. He’s disappeared . . . near the waterfall.’ He glanced at me and looked away. ‘Ask Mr Jain to send people from the institute. We need to organize a search party.’

He had the speaker on so I heard a staccato voice replying, ‘Will you meet us there?’

I thought it was Firdaus’s voice but then I couldn’t be sure of anything at that time.

‘No. I think I’ll have to carry Mira back to the house. I’ll join you later, okay?’

‘Okay.’When the call disconnected, I looked at him. ‘I don’t

think you’ll need to carry me. You can go on ahead. Hari might need . . .’ Thinking about him brought back the hysterics. My hands started shaking again and tears clouded my other eye.

Neel kneeled down next to me. ‘It’s going to be okay, Myrah. Don’t worry. Firdaus and Anil are getting together a search party. They’ll find Hari. They’ve done this before.’

‘Before? This has happened before?!’‘Yes but never so close to the house and never on the

trail. This is a first. I’m relieved you’re . . .’ He looked at me and a strange look crossed his face. He placed his hand on my cheek and gazed into my eyes, his face grim. Then as if snapping out of a dream, his face relaxed and he dropped his hand.

As he pulled me up on my feet along with him, he said, ‘I thought people from Sector 51 were better at handling pressure situations?’ He gave my hand a light squeeze and I knew he was trying to reassure me.

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Even though I was freaked, I didn’t want to play the part of a damsel in distress. ‘I’m a little out of my element today,’ I told him with a small smile.

Neel smiled and then started to take off his shirt. Once he’d scrunched it into a ball, he used it to wipe the blood off my forehead. As he rubbed the cloth on my right eye, I realized it had blurred because of the blood pooling in it.

The throbbing in my head had become worse but it didn’t bother me much. There were much bigger concerns on my mind at that time. ‘You think an animal attacked Hari and . . . carried him away?’

‘Umm . . . I can’t say for sure but that’s the most likely explanation. Maybe a predatory animal of some sort. What exactly happened back there?’

‘I . . . I was just taking some photos when I heard something. It was creepy. Like a rustling sound but then . . . when I looked up, Hari . . . he just . . . disappeared. What kind of animal is capable of coming through the fence? It was just so quick.’

I didn’t talk about the next part. The part where my cowardice came into play. When I had picked up my metaphorical skirts and run away instead of trying to investigate or look for Hari. Remorse grew its fangs and gnawed at my conscience but I couldn’t do anything else now except help in Hari’s rescue. ‘You’re sure they’ll be able to find him? Maybe I can go with them and help.’

‘Trust me Mira, its best you leave it to them. Now let’s go, we really need to put a med patch on this.’ Then before I could come around to what was happening, he was already cradling me in his arms and walking towards the house.

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‘Really! You don’t have to carry me. I can walk!’ I protested loudly and tried to wriggle my way out.

Neel’s hold tightened. ‘I’d rather you don’t. At your speed, we’ll probably reach the house by the evening and time is kinda crucial right now.’

I shut up after that, my mind immediately snapping back to Hari and the animal that must have attacked him. I shuddered involuntarily at the thought of the strange rustling sound. Neel looked down at me and shook his head, acting as if he could read my mind. ‘Don’t worry. They’ll find him.’

A few minutes later he stopped abruptly and I looked around to realize we had already reached the house. Now I could be considered puny compared to Neel, but 140 pounds wasn’t exactly a lightweight to carry across a mile. Especially on a sweltering afternoon in the tropics. Would Neel’s physical strength and agility never cease to surprise me?

Typically, Neel wasn’t even panting as he placed me on the big couch. In a loud unwavering voice he then called out for Maria. She came hurriedly out of the kitchen, stopping right in her tracks as soon as she saw me.

‘Que foi!’Neel replied to her in Portuguese, speaking in a

calm and reassuring tone. Whatever he said seemed to pacify her.

I hadn’t followed much of what he’d told her but I did wonder why he hadn’t mentioned Hari’s name anywhere.

Cutting through my thoughts, he looked at me and instructed, ‘Don’t move. I’ll get something for your cut.’ Then he strode out of the room.

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I was still sipping the water Maria had gotten for me when he came back holding a small box. From this, he dug out a spray and started applying it on my wound.

Considering the events of the day, it felt weird that I was so content sitting there next to him. It felt wrong and selfish.

He was putting on the med patch when he finally gave his prognosis. ‘It’s not that deep but it will sting for a few days. The painkilling patch will numb it. You’ll be good as new.’

I nodded and opened my mouth to express my gratitude but my voice failed me at the last second.

That was because even though Neel had finished applying first-aid, he didn’t pull away his hand from my forehead. Instead he did something that froze each and every cell in my body. Dropping it lower, he traced a soft line with his fingertips over my eyebrows and down my cheekbones. The warmth from his fingertips seeped in and warmed me all over. When he caressed my cheek, the thrill of his touch rushed past the pulse on my neck, to the throb in my chest, right to the nerve endings in my belly.

Either he was sitting really close or my body heat had just shot up a few notches. A bead of sweat trickled down my neck and I had to draw in a deep ragged breath just to settle the frantic pounding of my heart.

Smiling gently, presumably at my overreaction, he pulled away. ‘I think I should let you rest, Myrah.’

I sighed. Just to be called that I could bump my head a couple of times. I halted my thoughts. What was wrong with me? I had just met this boy a few days back. All I knew about him was that he liked to read books, could quote Santayana and knew killer self-defence moves.

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What if he turned out to be one of those? Those boys who tell you that they really get you, who hold you like they like you and then they just end up disappointing you.

I wasn’t going to set myself up for one of those clichés. Not again. What I needed was some space to collect my thoughts and to figure out what was happening between us.

‘Umm . . . yes, I think I’ll go to my room.’We heard a car approaching on the gravel outside

and Neel got up to check up on our visitor. Tires screeched to a halt and a door was banged shut.

‘It’s your mother.’Mom ran in looking fraught with panic. She saw

Neel standing by the door and all but assailed him. ‘Where’s Mira? What happened to her?’

‘She’s okay, Ma’am. She’s right here.’ He waved his hand towards where I was sitting and my Mom finally saw me.

‘M, what happened?! Why the patch? Is that blood on your shirt?! How badly hurt are you?’

‘I’m okay, Mom. It’s just a little cut.’‘Little cut?’ She looked at Neel for affirmation as

if his opinion somehow held more weight than mine.‘Don’t worry, Ma’am. It’s just a nick. I’ve cleaned it

up and put a patch. She’ll be okay. And . . . I think I should go join the search party. They might need me.’

‘Of course, Neel. Thank you so much for your help. Really.’

He shrugged. ‘Didn’t do much,’ he said before giving me a chin raise. ‘Take care, Mira.’

Before I could reply, he was gone. Mom hugged me tightly. ‘Oh! M, I’m sorry you had to go through this.’

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‘Mom, Hari . . .’‘I know. Mr Jain told me. Firdaus called him up and

told him everything.’‘Is Mr Jain in the search party too?’‘Yes. In case Hari needs some . . . urgent care.’ Her words made me cringe. But it was entirely my

fault. I shouldn’t have taken Hari on that trail in the first place, or at least I should have tried jumping over the fence or done something when he disappeared. Anything that happened to him now would be because of my actions.

I felt my stomach churn. Maybe I should have gone with the search party but then I hardly knew the jungle and with my head feeling like it had been tazered, I would have been a deadweight in their search efforts. ‘Mom, I think I’ll go to my room. Don’t worry about me. You can go back to the institute and help them out.’

‘Are you sure, M?’‘Really, Mom. I’m okay. I’ll just go lie down for a

while. You go to the institute. They might need you when they find Hari.’

‘Oh, okay.’ She looked doubtful but didn’t push me on it. ‘I’ll come back and change your patch, so don’t take it off before that. Okay . . . go now, get some rest.’

Back in my room, I lay down on the bed and went over everything that had happened that day. Hari’s disappearance. The creepy rustling noise. Running into Neel. Neel. What was this pull that I felt towards him? With a continuous replay in my head, I dissected everything, every word that he had spoken to me, his expressions and the way his fingers had lingered

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over my face till I realized that I was just trying to avoid thinking about the real issue. The surging guilt of having run away, of not having faced my fears to save Hari’s life. After twisting and turning for hours, exhaustion finally trumped my futile mental deliberations and I slept.

VI

THE JUMP

Archived News Excerpt 31/03/2012: Futuristic guns designed to attack the central nervous system of their victims have been given the go-ahead by Mr Tupin. The country’s scientists say that these psychotronic guns will usher in the development of high-tech weapons based on new physics principles – geophysical weapons, wave-energy weapons, genetic weapons and more. The nerve guns will use electromagnetic radiation and people who absorb a non-lethal hit might suffer permanent neurological damage.

Area IV, 26 December 2173I opened my eyes and saw a strange fierce light

seeping into the room through the slits of the shutters. After staring at it in a disoriented manner for a few seconds, I realized that it was just sunlight. Had I had slept through the evening and the night?

I got up from the bed and started as I saw a girl looking back at me. She was trapped inside the mirror on the wall. Apart from a severe case of bedhead, bleary eyes and a burgeoning bluish lump on her forehead, she looked . . . healthy, alive and very, very guilty.

I bathed and got dressed hurriedly, anxious to know about Hari’s rescue and cursing myself to have slept through it all. I had to see Mom so I could pelt her

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with my questions. I opened the door of my room and rushed out, colliding into someone already waiting at the doorstep. Neel. Had he really been waiting there? For me?

‘Sorry . . . didn’t see you,’ I mumbled my apology as I looked up at him. His face looked drawn.

‘No harm done. How’s the head?’ He asked knocking on his forehead.

‘Still sensible. Hey, have you seen my Mom?’ I turned towards her room but Neel put his hand on my shoulder and that stopped me right in my tracks. It should have been all too familiar to me by now. After all, he had carried me across half a mile yesterday but evidently I was still not immune to his touch.

He sensed my stiffness and immediately dropped his hand. ‘Umm . . . Mira, your mother is not in her room. She had to go to the institute. Mr Jain had an issue he needed help with.’

‘What issue? Is it Hari?’‘Yes . . . but I don’t really know all the details. Your

mother told me to change your med patch and that’s why I’m here.’

I stared at him for a few seconds trying to comprehend this sudden brusqueness. ‘My Mom came to your room to tell you to change my med patch?’

He put his hands up in mock surrender. ‘Alright! I was already waiting here when she told me about it. So now she’s designated me as your bodyguard and less dazzlingly, as your doctor. So enough talk, now let’s get that patch changed,’ he said as he clutched my elbow and all but dragged me across to his room.

‘Hey! You don’t have to be so pushy. I’ll cooperate if you just ask nicely!’

We entered his room and he finally let go of my elbow only to reach for the small first-aid box he had used yesterday.

‘Mira, would you please sit while I change the patch struggling to cover the growing blue blob on your forehead?’ he asked as he gave me a bright cheery grin, the potency of which didn’t allow for any further argument.

I shrugged and sat down with an exaggerated sigh, trying really hard not to grin back.

‘Thank you. Now close your eyes.’ I did his bidding and felt his fingers rub an ointment

on my forehead. Then a few seconds later when he took off the patch, it didn’t hurt one bit.

‘Was that an anaesthetic?’ I asked. ‘Yes.’ I peeked when he went to the table again. I saw him

take out a spray can before shutting my eyes again as he turned around.

The can had looked different from the standard antiseptic, but I still asked, ‘Antiseptic?’

‘No.’I waited for him to tell me what it was but I guess he

wasn’t given to conversing while providing medical aid.‘Top-secret drug with supernatural healing powers?’

I asked.‘Spot on.’ I had my eyes shut so I couldn’t see his

face, but I heard the smile in his voice. A moment later when I opened my eyes, I caught him looking at me. And just for a second, I got a glimpse of something pure and bare in his eyes. It was undisguised happiness, laughter and contentment. Everything all at once. But just as our eyes met, his face closed in again.

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‘So what do I get for my services rendered here?’ he asked, wearing his usual smirk.

‘Hmm . . . I could treat you to some awesome breakfast. I had it at this place nearby. In fact what do you know? It’s just downstairs!’

Neel shook his head and then grinned. ‘What a find! So shall we?’

‘Sure. And then you can tell me about Hari. You were in the search party yesterday, weren’t you?’ I knew he was trying to keep something from me and my sense of foreboding was increasing with his evasive manoeuvres.

‘Yes, I was.’‘So . . . did you find him?’‘We did.’I clapped my hands and almost jumped with joy.

‘Really? That’s great!’Neel shrugged. ‘Uh-huh.’I waited for him to elaborate but he didn’t. I folded

my hands across my chest in a show of obstinacy. ‘We can be here till noon if you wish to drag this out,’

I told him as I stared him down with dogged persistence. A few seconds later, my perseverance won as I heard

him exhale deeply. ‘Right. I had forgotten about your . . . tenacity. I was hoping you rather heard this from your Mom.’

‘Heard what? What happened to Hari? Is he . . . okay?’ I didn’t want to say it. I didn’t want to use that word. Alive. Maybe that was the reason Neel was being so evasive?

‘Mr Jain and your Mom are with him right now. They are taking Hari to a hospital in Sector 24.’

‘Is he badly hurt?’‘No, not physically hurt. He’s just in shock.’

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‘In shock? Did an animal attack him?’‘We don’t know yet, Mira. He’s . . . unresponsive. It

seems that he has turned catatonic.’‘But yesterday . . . he just . . . disappeared.’ I

couldn’t wrap my head around it. If Hari had seen a new breed of animal, then why would he climb the fence and willingly follow it into the jungle? That seemed to be the only explanation as the animal couldn’t clearly come inside. It also didn’t seem like him to leave me stranded there with a dangerous animal nearby. He had always been so protective and careful during our hikes.

But then if an animal had dragged him off into the jungle, he should have suffered some form of physical injury? It just didn’t fit.

‘Where did you find him?’‘Three miles away from the waterfall. He was

unconscious but he looked unharmed . . . at least physically.’

After a few seconds of silence, he added, ‘I know. It is confusing . . . I guess we’ll just have to be patient till he recovers.’

I mulled it over in my head. There were many unanswered questions but in spite of those nagging doubts, it felt as though a big weight had been lifted off my chest. Hari was unharmed. He was probably just in shock right now.

I looked at Neel. He was stroking his chin and was lost in his own thoughts. I realized I owed Neel for saving Hari’s life as well as my own. If it had been left to me I would have been sprawled out on the trail as meat for the wildlife, while Hari would have been struggling for his life all day.

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‘Hey, I never came around to it yesterday. Thanks . . . for saving Hari’s life and for carrying me all that way. Really . . . thanks.’

Neel smiled softly. ‘Anytime. Just don’t venture out on the trails for a few days.’ Then he arched up an eyebrow. ‘Umm . . . about that breakfast?’

I grinned up at him. ‘Sure. Let’s go.’As we entered the kitchen we found it devoid of its

usual occupant. However, the table was already laid out with the usual spread.

We didn’t talk much while we ate, but I often felt Neel’s eyes on me. Whenever I looked up, I caught him looking away or diverting all his attention to the food on his plate.

I was pretty busy with my own plate as well as I had missed dinner. I wolfed down three stuffed buns followed by a huge glass of juice while Neel had an apple, two bananas, three sausages and a bowl of sliced avocados. Maybe he was following one of those special muscle-building diets? Not like he needed any more ‘building’ in that department. And not like I was ogling at the musculature in question.

‘Don’t you like bread?’ I finally asked while finishing the last dregs of my juice.

‘Not really. But it seems life-threatening incidents have really helped build your appetite for them.’

I scowled at him. ‘I happened to have missed dinner last night and I’m not a nitwit who nibbles through her food just because she’s sitting with someone.’

His smile widened. He was clearly enjoying this. ‘Well, thank the fates for ravenous alpha girls.’

I got up from the table and picked up another bun just to spite him. Stomping out through the back door,

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I had almost reached the garden before he caught up with me.

‘Hey, remember the personal bodyguard thing? Your Mom wasn’t kidding about that and . . . neither am I.’

I hazarded a peek at him. His eyes had a look which turned my intestines to mush. A fierce joy surged through me but I immediately reined it in. It would be sheer stupidity to find any sort of deeper meaning in this arrangement.

I sat down on the stone love seat in the garden and scoffed at him. ‘So does that mean you will be following me everywhere until my Mom comes back?’ I had been aiming at a bitingly sarcastic retort, but it came out sounding more like a childish gripe.

‘Actually I plan to continue even after she’s back,’ he said as he sat down and turned towards me. He was so close I could feel his cool breath on my cheeks.

‘Would you have a problem with that?’ he asked softly and I was dumbstruck for a few seconds. All I could manage was to gaze back at him probably looking like a complete idiot. ‘Huh?’ Great. Now I even sounded like one.

‘I asked if you would mind having me around even after your Mom came back?’ he repeated gently.

‘You mean like a friend?’ Better to sound daft than to contemplate the tempting alternatives. It was flattering to imagine that he had fallen for me but the fact was that he hardly knew me and I knew next to nothing about him. Was it so easy to fall in love? Was this even love? I had missed him when he had been away but was that enough?

Neel shook his head. ‘Being friends would’ve done

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it for me if we were still in the first grade.’ he said as he placed his hand over mine.

‘No Myrah, I was hoping for something much more.’My heart stuttered and stopped at that moment.

The intensity of his look, his words, his touch, burned right through me. Myrah. His name for me felt like a warm loving embrace. Heat rushed to my cheeks and my heart pounded with joy.

‘Why?’ I whispered, searching for some kind of validation in his eyes but they sent out cryptic messages and looked stormier than usual.

‘Why? Because of you, Myrah,’ he said simply. This was no cliché. This was truth staring at me

without any games, any pretences. ‘Ever since I first saw you . . . every day I used to

watch you, the way you used to place your palm on the tree, the way you used to look up at it in wonder, how you stopped and took the time to . . . care, for nature, for old books, for friends and people around you . . . and then when I saw you on the hammock that day, I couldn’t believe my eyes.’

‘Watch me every day? Wait . . . hammock? I first saw you in your room. When did you . . .?’ My voice trailed off remembering the afternoon I had slept off in the hammock. It was the day that I had had that strange dream and felt the heat seep through my skin and course through my veins. I sucked in a breath at the realization that froze my entire body.

Neel’s proximity had saturated the air around us with a familiar scent. And just like before it smelled of the wild, of wood smoke and a little spice.

I wondered why I hadn’t realized this earlier. I had sensed him that day as well. Before I had even seen

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him, I had sensed him and felt him kissing me. For however much I tried to deny it, it had been a kiss that I had felt that afternoon. And it had been him.

‘Oh!’ My fingers instinctively reached up to touch my lips.

His face lighted up. ‘Seems like I need to refresh your memory a bit.’

He leaned in and paused, waiting for me.Myrah. How could a simple thing like him saying

my name make me feel so special? Myrah. Out of all the images that it conjured up in my mind, the most distinct one was of my tree. The one I had christened the ‘Hope Tree’ when I’d been about six-years-old. The Hope Tree was around a hundred years old and everybody in my sector said it could wither any day. But laughing in the face of all its naysayers, the Hope Tree had stood, year after year, with its roots tangled but resolute, some exposed, others hidden. Every spring these roots would soak in the darkness of the earth and turn it into bright pink puffs of trailing clouds. Clouds that smelled of cherries and hope.

Perhaps spring had arrived for me as well.All my doubts melted away in that moment of clarity

and I looked fearlessly into Neel’s eyes. ‘Maybe . . .’ I cocked my head to one side and smiled at him,

‘. . . maybe just a little bit.’I felt him smile as his lips moved above mine, leaning

and lingering. Touching but not really. Not yet. His lips were barely teasing mine but still the feathery possibility of that touch made me quiver to my toes. What sweet painful languor.

Then he exerted the gentlest of pressures and my lips, pliable and willing, started moving along with his

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in a diabolically slow rhythm. It was sweet and soft. We kissed like that for a long time. The unquenchable fire that had ignited inside me completely overpowered me. I couldn’t get enough of him and I had never felt like this before. All the clumsy fumbling attempts by the boys back in Sector 51 were a thing of distant memory. Here was the real thing. Stoked by his tenderness, I shifted till I was sitting on his lap with my legs wrapped around his midriff. Clutching the hair at the nape of his neck, I bent my head down and crushed my lips to his. He let me lead at first but then as the flames licked away all reasoning, his lips grew more urgent. His hands clutched my waist tighter and each and every fibre in my body roared to that touch. I opened my mouth to breathe in a lungful of air, but then his tongue grazed mine and somehow, oxygen didn’t seem so crucial anymore.

I never knew this feeling could be so consuming . . . so . . . addictive. We swayed in a rhythm of our own, leading and following until I heard someone exclaim sharply. I immediately jerked away and hopped off his lap only to see Maria standing a few feet away, holding a tub of washed clothes. She was gaping at us in shock. I flushed self-consciously at her reaction though Neel seemed to be completely unaffected and even wished her a pleasant morning. Maria smiled back and returned his greeting, but her face remained wary. Without completing whatever she’d come to do, she hurried back towards the house.

Neel turned to me and his smile melted away all my self-consciousness into a slushy mush. For the next two hours, we walked around the house, in the fields, in the garden. We didn’t kiss again, but it was as if our bodies had developed a compulsive need to be linked

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to each other. Sometimes our fingers were entwined and shoulders rubbed each other, sometimes our palms grazed and our lips would irresistibility find the other’s ear, cheek and even hair. Sometimes it was just soft smiles, crinkled eyes and a sense of peace that I had never ever known before.

Neel asked me about my friends, my sector, my father. I told him about my best friend Asha, described the street we used to live on, the bridge I’d never seen, my solitary walks on early winter mornings, my tree in the college backyard. Then I told him about my father. That I had never known him. That I had lost him to an accident when I’d been just four-months-old. That it was a part of my life I didn’t like to talk about. I had always hated the look of sympathy people gave me when I told them about my single parentage. I detested the ‘aww’ that came with it and loathed the morbid curiosity that followed.

Neel didn’t give me any of that. He just clasped my hand tighter and moved on.

We talked endlessly. My seemingly trivial and common thoughts felt special when reflected in his eyes and I revelled in the attention he gave me. The wonder he expressed at my commonplace life made me feel as if I was a mystery he was slowly unravelling. I felt it too. Even the most insignificant detail about him felt so crucial. I asked him about his favourite books, music, colour. Really sappy questions.

Brave New World, rock, black, he answered patiently in monosyllables. He would rather be questioning me, he insisted.

When I had finished describing the flowers of my tree back home and was getting ready to quiz him, Neel

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mentioned he had to go visit the waterfall. He wanted to survey the area again to find any clues that might have been missed yesterday. After twenty minutes of incessant whining, I managed to convince him into taking me along as well.

We set off around noon, following the trail at an easy pace. We crossed the midway mark of the boulder and looking at it I realized that even with everything that had happened yesterday, I felt safe. Whether it was because of Neel or the imposing nerve gun he carried, I couldn’t say.

About twenty minutes later, we reached the waterfall. It looked undisturbed and unaffected in spite of all that it had witnessed. I, on the other hand, felt all my calmness from a minute ago evaporate. Standing there transfixed, I couldn’t do much except watch Neel as he looked around, surveying the whole area. Then something caught my eye startling me out of my inertia.

It was a small wisp of red cloth stuck to a bush near the fence. Neel was walking right around that spot and yet he didn’t reach out to inspect it. Maybe he thought it wasn’t important. I walked closer to take a look and decide for myself.

It was a small piece of red fabric caught in a bush at the base of the fence. I sucked in a breath. It was from his shirt. From Hari’s shirt! I inspected the area underneath the fence. The earth around the base was of a richer colour as if a burrow had been dug there and then covered up recently. I reached to pull the fabric out but a hand clasped my wrist, stopping me.

‘What are you doing?!’ Neel shouted at me. ‘It’s an electric fence!’

‘Hey! Calm down. Cotton is not a conductor, you know.’

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Neel grew very still. ‘Cotton?’ he asked quietly. I felt unnerved by his reaction and by the expression on his face. His face had changed becoming cold and aloof.

‘Did you see the patch stuck on the fence?’ I asked hesitantly, pointing my finger towards it.

He looked in the direction and then stretched out his hand. I noticed how his fingers reached out tentatively as if he was trying to feel something that wasn’t really there. His fingers brushed over the dry crackled leaves snagged on the fence and when they finally moved on the fabric, I saw his hands pause and feel for its texture. A flash of surprise crossed his face as he pulled the fabric free. I was about to point out the freshly covered burrow as well, when I heard something.

It was the same rustling sound . . . coming from somewhere beyond the fence.

My whole body froze. My breath stuck in my throat, I watched as Neel’s back stiffened and his head snapped to a spot on our right. I followed his gaze. There was a tall tree just beyond the fence. The leaves there moved ever so slightly and my breath stopped.

Something that had taken Hari was right behind that tree. Something that was so terrifying, it had turned him catatonic.

Neel held up his morphe close to his mouth and whispered something into it. Then he turned to me and said softly, ‘Myrah, you need to head straight back to the house. I’ll be climbing over the fence as soon as they’ve turned off the circuit. Okay?’

Circuit? Head back to the house? What? No! ‘Neel, I’m coming with you. I can . . .’‘Mira . . . please,’ he whispered urgently, losing

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patience. ‘There is no time. Just do as I say, okay? Go back home.’

‘But . . .’ His morphe gave one short beep. He had been waiting for that signal because as soon as he heard it, he climbed up the fence in one smooth motion and landed on his feet on the other side. He righted his nerve gun and after sparing me a quick glance, walked quickly towards the tree.

As Neel disappeared behind the dense thicket, I pictured myself back at the house, waiting for him to come back. Waiting and wondering like yesterday on the various terrible things that could have happened to him. Arggh! No way was I going through that torture again.

I launched my butt in the air and tried to scramble up the fence. Neel had made it look easy, but it took a lot to actually do it right.

Once at the top, I swung my leg over and considered jumping even though it was quite a height. However, if I ever intended to catch up with Neel, I needed to make up for all the lost time and so jump I must.

I jumped and landed on my feet but then immediately toppled over trying to find my balance. My arms skinned over the ground breaking my fall, but thanks to all the mulch on the jungle floor it didn’t hurt much.

I quickly scrabbled up on my feet and ran as fast as I could. Seconds, minutes passed and I had just begun to lose hope when I saw a glimpse of Neel’s white shirt. I ran faster, trying to cover up the distance between us. And that’s when it happened.

If only I had known what turmoil a little misstep would bring in my life.

If only. If only. If only. I would have been so so careful. I would have never followed him. I would have

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gone back to the house and life would have gone on as usual. Maybe we could’ve even been together living our lives blissfully ignorant of everything that happened. But. None of that was ever going to happen now.

I was stuck here in a death trap.The infection was searing through my body and my

brain, destroying my sanity. No rescue was coming for me. I was completely on my own.

Life had a way of deciding things for you and it seems mine had thought that dangling in a trap in the middle of a jungle would do me some good.

But I was done with this self pity. I am not going to die this slow, dry, painful death. I

call out again, louder this time.‘Come out, come out, wherever you are.’

VI I

THE RESCUE

Archived News Excerpt 17/10/2043: The planting of hybrid plants to counter global warming has led to a dramatic rise in oxygen levels over the last few decades. While scientists are trying to cope with the speed at which these invasive hybrids are spreading, the rise in atmospheric oxygen has had a significant effect on land species. Jad Brow, renowned biologist, has published a study detailing the adaptive evolutionary changes found in two species in the Amazonia – Panthera onca and Crotalus horridus. These two species have been discovered to have developed folds in their nostrils. With the added smell receptors, their sense of smell has become the best amongst any of the land animals making them better trackers and hunters.

Area IV, 27 December 2173I wait and bide my time, tracking shadows on the

mulch below, catching the glimmers escaping through the green web above. They look like sparkles from a disco orb moving in slow motion. Eventually, the sparkles start dimming and the air around me turns grey. The darkness sucks up all the moisture like a ravenous virus. I look down at the blood that has already crusted on my wounded wrist. Scratching the

dark rust flecks away, I poke and itch at the gash till it becomes a gaping wound again. A part of me does that to spill more of my blood to draw in the new breeds like sharks scenting a crimson tide. The other part just wants to feel the pain. It helps to keep the darkness away, to keep me sane.

The pitch black deepens. The jungle thrums and my body trembles with its every beat. Eyes wide, I stare into the darkness, tracking shapes made out of air and shadows, every shift, every rustle, shooting the fear deep in my marrow.

Throughout the long night, I am on the edge but as the mist lightens, my eyes start wavering and I can’t help but drift away into the nudging waves. My body is weary from having lurched through them all night. Transcending a threshold, it finally gives up.

When I wake up, I am covered in sweat and my body feels horribly stiff. I look around through my bleary eyes. It is that time of the day when the evening hasn’t yet set in and the noon still lingers, reluctant to leave like an overprotective mother fussing over her child. And that’s when it finally decides to come back.

I’m not surprised to see it. The new breeds are a tenacious lot. They never give up on their prey. But I am surprised at its ability to sneak up on me again.

It stands on the same branch from which it had attacked me yesterday. Its shimmering black hide and its ferocious, flaming eyes are completely focused on mine.

The feral insanity behind them makes me shudder. I shouldn’t feel this scared. After all, I am the one who has lured it here. But, I am afraid. In fact, I am terrified.

Biting down on the back of my hand is the only thing

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that keeps me from screaming. No. No. No. I want to rethink this whole thing. I am not so sure of doing this anymore. Then. It lunges for me. And there is no turning back.

This time it doesn’t miss reaching its target. Its talons clamp onto the net and it latches on, its long canines unlocking and snapping inches away from my face. The net sways wildly and the world around me spins like a xeppel on a downward spiral. I scramble inside the net, which is both useless and agonizing. My ankle is scalded by rope burns and my leg throbs.

And then just as suddenly, I am falling.My body jolts as it hits the ground. The bindings of

the net burrow painfully into my back. But I know that I don’t have time to acknowledge the pain. I sit up and flail my arms wildly, trying to find the opening in the net. A sharp slice of agony stings my arm and I realize the beast has already marked me.

Desperate, I thrash inside the net floundering for an escape. Suddenly, I am thrown back on the ground. It feels like a tree has just been rammed into me. Then all the air is sucked out of my lungs as an oppressive weight crushes my chest. It is on top of me now and I know I am finished.

I think it wants to savour this moment because it doesn’t bite immediately. Its muzzle touches my face staking out its meal. Then it opens its jaw and rears its head back. And at that moment, I succumb to it. My body relaxes, tired of fighting off the inevitable.

Then it comes. The first deafening explosion followed by another. Maybe it is the roar of madness in my head. I gasp for air because the weight on my chest has increased to such an extent, it has become unbearable.

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Then all conscious thought leaves me as a calming black cloak shrouds my mind.

***

A harsh light seeped in through the cracks. I panicked and tried to push it away. But then I realized my hands were trapped and my fear suddenly surged into terror. My eyes snapped open and I screamed. All the agony of the last three days festering inside came out in that scream. My voice dried up, but my chest still felt like it was in a tight grip.

My breaths came in long ragged pulls and each drag was an effort I was too drained to make. Then I felt something on my lips. Water. Oh, dear fates. Water. I clutched the hand offering it and gulped it down.

I drank for a long time. Eyes squeezed tight, I relished the fullness it brought to my parched insides and greedily sucked on every last drop.

The hand tried to pull away but I clutched it tighter. ‘More.’ My voice sounded scratchy and alien to my ears.

‘After some time,’ the voice said. A human voice. A gentle voice.

I opened my eyes. Maybe I was not done with life after all. Or maybe, life was not done with me.

A girl knelt beside me. She looked very young and for a second, I thought she was just a mirage. There was something so . . . ethereal about her. Her raven black hair was piled on top of her head, a spike driven through it to keep it in place. Her alabaster skin looked bronzed like it had seen too much sun. She reminded me of pixies from the retro fairy tales. But then the pixies I had read about didn’t dress in leather. I noticed

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the distinctly unhealthy sheen on the leather of the waistcoat she wore. Dirt or overuse? Probably both. Tattered half pants patched up with different scraps of cloth made up the rest of her outfit.

Pixies also didn’t carry nerve guns, one of which was casually slung over her shoulder. She held it in place with a broad leather strap but I could tell it was an unfamiliar burden because of the way she kept adjusting it. Her fingers fidgeted as she kept shifting the bite of the strap on her small narrow shoulders.

‘Who are you?’ This voice was not gentle. I turned towards it. A boy stood far away on my left. Tall and thin, his face was covered in a shaggy beard although he couldn’t be more than eighteen years old. His long matted hair had been pulled back from his face and tied behind his neck. He was dressed to match the girl.

A worn-out leather waistcoat and a pair of patched- up pants covered his frame but even from this distance I could make out his much sturdier build. He had broad shoulders and robust muscles which looked tense as they held the weight of a vintage rifle. And there was nothing even remotely uncertain about the way he carried his weapon. Poised and ready, his fingers seemed to be twitching to use it.

My mind was alert now and suspicions rushed to crowd it. Who were these people? Did they live in this sector? Their accent was somewhat similar to mine although their English was broken and mixed up. But the way they were armed and the clothes they were wearing made me feel wary.

‘Not gonna ask you again. Who-are-you?’ His voice got strained and edgy.

‘Mira,’ I told him quickly.

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He gave an exasperated sigh. ‘Who are you . . . Mira?’‘I live in the house . . . Casa . . . Casa Amarela? We

just moved here . . . I was running . . . then I got stuck and the new breed . . .’ I paused as the violence of the past few minutes assaulted my mind.

The girl spoke up, ‘Jaggi, bas kar. For God’s sake, she’s just been attacked.’

I stole a look at the remains of the net beside me. My eyes travelled across to the prostrate form of the beast next to it. It lay there motionless, but then something on its body moved. Riveted, I followed the trail of liquid slithering down its hide. A yellow viscous fluid poured out from its eye and snaked through the black matted hide. When it reached its wet leathery snout, it dripped. I saw the glutinous drop plop on the ground and the contact released me from my trance. I scrambled to make space between me and the ferocious beast. Dragging myself away with my palms scraping the ground, I moved as far as I could go, till my back hit a tree.

‘God! It’s okay. Everything’s okay,’ the girl reassured me as she came towards me with her hands in the air. The rifle thudded on her back with each cautious step. ‘It is dead. Finished. Kaput. Corpsed out.’ She knelt in front of me again and repeated her assurance in a softer voice. ‘Don’t worry. You’re safe.’

I looked into her eyes and was undone by the kindness in them. Hot tears spilled out and heaving sobs wracked my body. A beat later, I felt the warmth of slender arms wrapping around me. Relieved, I melted into the support being offered.

When my grief was finally spent, I pulled myself away and tried to wipe the snot off my face. The girl spoke again. ‘How’bout some grub?’

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My stomach gnawed at the idea and I nodded my head.

She took out a black strip from a ragged satchel tied to her waist and gave it to me. Without so much as giving it a second look, I put it in my mouth. It was stiff and hard to work on. Salted meat.

I felt the insides of my cheeks pucker and fill with saliva at the forgotten taste of salt. It was strange what just a few days without food and water could do to your body. It was even more incomprehensible what those days could do to your mind.

‘Slow down, Mita. Don’t need to get her stomach worked up all quick,’ the boy named Jaggi said.

Mita rolled her eyes at him. The normalcy of her gesture calmed me, but the meat didn’t sit well in my stomach. Already I could feel a wave of nausea rising up my throat. The vomit followed before I could move, or warn the girl.

‘Hey!’ she jerked away but I think I still managed to splatter her pants. I clutched my stomach to stop the vicious twisting of my intestines but the retches kept convulsing my body till there was nothing left inside of me. A cool hand brushed my forehead. Even through the grime and sweat I could feel the roughness of those calluses as they grazed my skin. The boy was kneeling beside me with his palm on my forehead.

‘She’s burnin’ up,’ he announced.I watched as he tore a strip from the bottom of his

pants. Then he poured out some water on it from a leather pouch and cleaned my face with that wet rag. I closed my eyes as my insides slowly uncoiled and relaxed.

‘Drink a little bit.’

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He was holding out the bag for me. I took a few cautious sips, wary of another bout of nausea.

‘Need to lug her to the site,’ I heard Mita say to Jaggi.‘Nahin, Mita,’ he told her in a language I couldn’t

really make out. But even I could detect the warning in his voice.

Mita said something in a defiant tone and I figured Jaggi was not very keen to take me to this site she had in mind.

Mita suddenly threw her hands in the air. ‘Can’t you see she’s one of us. Look at her mop!’

Jaggi turned towards me and looked at my head. I decided to interrupt this strange conversation.

‘If you could just take me back to Casa Amarela?’ I asked softly. I saw them exchange a wary look but I kept going. ‘The people there . . . they will help me.’

Jaggi scowled. ‘Haan! They will help you.’ I caught the mocking inflection in his tone but didn’t understand the meaning behind it. Then he asked, ‘Do you know the native speech?’

‘What? English?’ ‘Nahin. Hindi?’ I shook my head in the negative. My answer seemed to appease the boy because he

immediately started arguing with Mita in ‘native’. Was this Hindi they were speaking? How had they managed to learn Hindi so well? My teachers had told me people across all sectors were required to learn English. Rebyt had enforced that diktat to ensure better monitoring by the security. These two must have really gone through a lot of tutorials on their morphes to be able to speak a second language so well . . . But then I noticed that neither of them were wearing their morphes. I started

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concentrating on what they were saying but they were talking so fast that even if I had learnt Hindi I wouldn’t have been able to decipher a single word.

In between the conversation, I saw Mita gesture once towards my ankle and then towards the net. After staring at them for a few minutes, I gave up on trying to figure out the nuances of their argument. My mind wandered. To my Mom. Then Neel. Then it dwelt on why none of them had come to rescue me. Was Mom still in Sector 24? And Neel? Had he been hurt as well? What were these strangers doing in the middle of the jungle and why were they arguing about where to take me?

The sudden silence stopped the trail of questions in my mind. I realized with rising alarm that Mita and Jaggi had both walked off to a nearby tree and were busy pulling down its enormous glossy leaves. I watched as they cut down about twenty of them. Then Jaggi pulled out a small knife from his pocket and started cutting the leaves into long strips. I wondered what they planned to do, but then I noticed Mita working through two strips and weaving them together like a braid.

Ahh, I got it. They were making a rope.I contemplated my options. These two strangers had

saved me from the beast. They gave me water, cleaned up my face and now they were making a rope. They could be escaped criminals or just plain psychotic, but with the condition I was in, I couldn’t run away from them. And running was probably a far shot, I might not even be able to stand up.

I sat there helpless with my back against the tree and watched my saviours create flawless bindings from the jungle foliage. After some time, Jaggi straightened up and started walking towards me. My heart hammered

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in my chest as he got closer and almost sprinted away from my body as he knelt down beside me. I waited with baited breath as he took off his water bag and handed it to me. ‘Be easy with that,’ he said before returning to his task.

The air in my lungs left with a big whoosh and my shoulders slumped with relief. I raised the bag to my mouth and sipped the water while watching the two of them as they started binding the ropes together, weaving a loosely held blanket of sorts.

The ropes were not for binding me then. They planned to carry me. It looked like Mita had won the argument after all.

The weaving took them quite some time and when it was finally done Jaggi finished it off by tying the strips on the edge of the blanket. Mita knelt next to me and put a hand on my shoulder.

‘We gonna lug you, Mira. Okay?’I nodded before hazarding a question, ‘Are you

taking me back to Casa Amarela?’Closing her eyes, she sighed deeply and shook her

head. ‘No, too . . . dangerous.’She pointed to my ankle which was now swollen to

twice its size and had smelly pus oozing out of it. ‘We gotta get some green on that, okay?’

‘Okay,’ I said, feeling relieved. These people couldn’t be that dangerous. Not if they were talking about putting something green on my wound. Psychotic people definitely didn’t bother about stuff like that.

A cacophony of screeches broke through my thoughts and I looked around. The jungle was coming alive for another night and just the thought of the darkness made me shiver. As I sipped more water, I became aware of

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something else. A building pressure in my abdomen. I hadn’t passed anything from my bowels for the past three days. Not surprising. With no food or water, my body had nothing to process. But now with all the water I’d been drinking . . . the urge became too hard to ignore. Maybe things were really looking up for me, considering my body had decided to reclaim its normal functions.

Mita and Jaggi brought over the blanket close to where I sat.

‘I’ve got to pee,’ I blurted out when they were near me.Momentarily stunned, they looked at each other and

then back at me.Jaggi shrugged. ‘So go.’ Mita slapped his shoulder. ‘Bewakoof, she cannot

move. Her foot!’‘Oh!’ Jaggi’s cheeks turned ruddy making me

wonder how old he really was. He ran a hand through his shaggy beard and then scratched his head.

Mita squared her shoulders. ‘We’ll help her.’ Jaggi immediately started to step back but Mita

fixed him with a single look. Her thin hands landed on her hips and her eyes gave out a death glare. I watched the obstinate bend of her chin and it didn’t surprise me when I heard a dejected voice proclaiming surrender. That settled, she turned to me. ‘You ever peed standin?’

‘Sorry?’‘You-ever-peed-standin?’ she repeated, dragging

her words out for me.‘Err . . . no.’‘We’ll try today coz bending that swollen leg of yours

will be a lot less cheery.’ She waved at Jaggi. ‘You crank her up, I’ll yank down her pants.’

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Before I could process anything, I found myself being held up like a rag doll by a pair of strong hands. Mita started tugging on my pants.

‘Close your eyes,’ she said with her head bent and I didn’t have any strength left in me to argue. I closed my eyes.

Then I heard her irritated voice, ‘Hey bhagwan. Not you. Jaggi, bewakoof, you close your eyes!’

I opened my eyes and saw her pulling down my underclothes. Then clutching my clothes in her hands she walked away and turned her head. I took that as my cue but even though my bladder was bursting, I was suddenly gripped with anxiety. I just couldn’t let go. I tried my best to shut down my mind while they waited patiently. For a few seconds. Then a minute.

Jaggi spoke up from behind me. ‘Finished?’‘I haven’t started,’ I replied quietly.‘Hey bhagwan,’ I heard Mita muttering under

her breath.Then I heard a humming. It was coming from

behind me. It was Jaggi. He was humming a tune. The melody

started slow and then picked up. It was when he started whistling to it that I felt the release.

‘I’m done,’ I said quietly after a while, not wanting to interrupt his whistling which would have been a lot more enjoyable at a very different time, in a completely different place.

Jaggi dragged me to a spot a few feet away and placed me back on the jungle floor. Then he walked away and stood with his back turned. Mita helped me rearrange my clothes, when Jaggi spoke up, ‘Hurry up. The night is coming.’

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I looked up and found he was right. The sunlight had gone and the mist was deepening. I felt my shoulders being pulled up again. Jaggi was dragging me backwards. I cleared my throat to ask the reason when my body registered the change. The softness of the jungle floor gave way to a sturdier matted surface. I was on top of the blanket now.

‘We’ll scramble now, okay? Night in the jungle ain’t much to gnat about,’ Mita informed me.

I didn’t want to tell her that I knew exactly what nights in the jungle could be like. Each sound, each timber, each second, would forever be seared in my mind.

They lifted me, Mita in the front and Jaggi at the back. I hung between them on my makeshift hammock, trying not to do more than just wince as each movement caused agonizing tremors to shoot up from my ankle. They started moving and on the first step, I heard a soft grunt. Guilt surged through me.

A girl as young as Mita having to lift my weight? She might act ballsy but she was clearly still an adolescent. The thought prodded at my conscience, but in spite of my weight they both moved surprisingly fast. So fast that staring at the whirling mosaic of trees above made me dizzy.

My body became accustomed to the rocking motion and to the painful quivers that came along with it. As my body settled and adapted, I finally let it sink in.

I had been saved. Three nights of hell. Three nights of living, rotting, festering hell and I had been saved. I closed my eyes.

A man’s deep voice boomed in my head. ‘You realize how risky this is?’

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Another male voice whispered, ‘She was trapped there for three days, they don’t come for her. Seems like she ain’t that important for them.’

‘I told both of you to just let her be but you don’t listen,’ the first man replied.

A girl’s voice cut in, ‘She was attacked. We couldn’t just plonk her there and let her get ripped in front o’us.’ I recognized the voice. It was Mita.

‘Jeezus. Of. In front of us. Prepositions, Mita . . . and please stop using ‘plonks’ and ‘skanks’ in place of real words,’ the deeper voice chided.

I opened my eyes and shifted my head to look around. Four pairs of eyes turned to look at me. Besides Mita and Jaggi, there were two older men. They were tall, with their heads shaved, well-muscled and well-inked. I recognized the ink markings on their chest. I had read about them. Tattoos, they’d called them.

One had an elongated plus sign on his chest and the other had an evil looking eye. These men were dressed differently. Whole fabric and not patches made up their half pants. And apart from that they didn’t have anything else on. They were both bare-chested.

As I observed them, they stared right back at me. The man with the mathematical tattoo did a head-to-toe scan of my prostate form and then sneered. ‘No muscle on her. I give her a week.’

The others immediately shifted their eyes to him. The man with the evil eye tattoo squared his shoulders and turned to face the other man.

Jaggi spoke up from behind him, ‘Are you doubting our skills?’

They got a shrug in response which seemed to further incense the situation.

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Mita interrupted, wagging her thin finger at the men. ‘Come on. No fightin y’all.’ Then she turned to the man with the evil eye tattoo. ‘She’ll be okay?’

He nodded but didn’t speak. Then he started gesticulating with his right hand, making designs and patterns in the air. The man with the plus tattoo interpreted, ‘Deepak says he’ll give her one med patch for the infection but that’s it. For the rest we have to use the greens.’ He looked again at the man named Deepak, who had started moving his hand again. ‘He’s asking you to mash up the salve for her wound and he’ll fix the potion for her fever.’

Then Deepak took a deep breath and pointed to the ceiling. The other man explained, ‘I guess it’s up to the man upstairs after that.’ Deepak nodded his agreement and then cradling his left hand, he left the room.

Mita nodded and scurried away as well. Everybody except Jaggi dispersed. I looked up at him but he just turned his back to me and got busy with some work.

I pursed my lips and gazed up at the ceiling wondering about the man above who seemed to have my life in his hands.

Then I started inspecting my surroundings. The room I was lying in was small and congested. The walls were jagged and seemed to slant inwards. When I peered at them closely, I realized they were made of stone.

There was nothing else inside the room except for the mattress on which I lay, a table lined up against the wall and a strange-looking floor lamp. I shifted my head and looked at the spot from where everyone else had exited the room. That section of the wall was covered by a large overhanging piece of fluffy black cloth. I

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followed the length of the cloth down to the ground but as I reached its edge, my whole body jerked.

Eyes wide with shock, I stared at the large monstrous head attached to the base of the cloth. It looked exactly like the new breed that had attacked me.

But then as I continued to stare, the differences become more apparent. The jaw was slack, the fire in its eyes sanded upon making them look glassy and . . . dead.

‘It zips the light.’ I turned my head towards Jaggi. He nodded towards

the dead beast. ‘Jagger skin. It stops the light from escaping the cave.’

A cave. So that’s where we were. ‘Killed this jagger not fifteen moons ago. Got another

notch on my roll today.’ I looked at Jaggi standing there stroking his beard absent-mindedly. He was staring at the dead beast, probably reminiscing about his kill. I was having flashbacks of my own. I traced the slit on my wrist thinking about the things that had happened to me. In just three days my life had been turned upside down.

Then I noticed that my wrist felt unusually bare. ‘Where’s my morphe?!’

Jaggi’s eyes swung back to me and narrowed as they settled on my upheld wrist.

‘What?’ he asked quietly.‘My morphe? My waistband . . . where is it?’‘Shh. Lower your voice,’ he snapped before turning

around again. He got busy with his work leaving me to dread the worst. Maybe I’d lost my morphe in the jungle while I was trying to scramble away from the new breed. Which meant it was lost forever. I thought about all my books including some of those rare editions that my Nani had passed down to me. Their

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only backup was at home in Sector 51. And right now Sector 51 seemed like an entire galaxy away.

I stared at Jaggi’s back. He probably thought it shallow of me to be fretting about losing some gadget when my very existence had been on the line. Especially since, it was because of his shot that I was still sitting here, breathing. ‘I want to thank you . . . for saving my life today,’ I managed to stutter out.

He didn’t turn around but after a moment muttered, ‘Mita stoned your morf thing in the jungle when we were comin’ back.’

‘What? Stoned my morphe? Why?’‘So the Erons can’t track us.’‘What can’t track us?’Before I could get an answer, Mita charged in.

Balancing a small clay bowl in her hands, she came and sat cross-legged on the floor, right next to my ankle. ‘Now this won’t hurt but it will sting a zit bit.’ With that warning, she scooped out some green goop from inside the bowl and slathered it on my wound. I waited for a fresh stab of pain to hit me but all I felt was a mild burn. A few seconds later, a nasty itching started and I felt like tearing out that patch of my skin.

‘Is the itching normal?’ I asked through gritted teeth.‘Just means it’s slogging to get the fever out of your

bulk,’ Mita replied and then shifted her attention to the wound on my wrist. ‘What were you tryin’ to do when you hacked your wrist? Slay yourself?’

‘Umm . . . not exactly. More like trying to get the beast to attack me.’

‘So you were tryin’ to slay yourself.’‘No, I was actually hoping the beast would claw

through the net, so I could escape.’

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Mita’s hand stilled and she just looked at me. Then she scraped her hand on the edge of the bowl and got up without saying a word. Before leaving I heard her mumble to Jaggi, ‘You were right. Shoulda left the mutt and brought home the jagger.’

I closed my eyes and tried not to think about the fact that Jaggi had wanted to leave me behind in the jungle. And he must have known . . . wounded and broken, I would not have survived the night. Maybe he’d killed the beast just to get another notch in his tally? And now, even Mita regretted her decision.

How could I explain to them the desperation I had felt when I was trapped in that net? How could I describe the mental and physical torture I went through? How could I explain that I had indeed wanted to die but now felt too ashamed to admit it?

Something flickered near my eyes. I snapped them open and realized it was just Jaggi. He was kneeling beside me, his finger raised above my cheek.

‘Easy, I just . . .’ He lowered his finger and finished wiping off the tears that had unknowingly spilled out of my eyes. Then he looked at me and I was surprised at the change I saw in his face. He looked younger and . . . so defenceless. ‘Mita doesn’t keep anything in her heart. Life’s been tough for her. She had to be tough for it too. She doesn’t really mean anything by it.’

I nodded and stared at the ceiling trying my best to hold back a fresh deluge at this unexpected gesture. Jaggi got up and walked away but before leaving, he instructed, ‘Eat slow but finish it. It will fill you up for the night.’

I lifted myself on my elbows and found a big bowl of

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something that looked like a tropical fruit right beside me. With the nausea long gone, my body was raging with hunger. And fruit seemed perfect. I put a small piece in my mouth and a sigh escaped me. It had a thick stringy texture, but it still felt like a mouthful of bliss. I chewed on each piece thoroughly, enjoying the sensation of real food in my mouth. I looked at the table on which its strange hairy peels lay and wondered about the person who’d been bent over them a few minutes ago. Out in the jungle, he had seemed older and harsher but then, when he had spoken about Mita, his face had looked so vulnerable.

As I swallowed the last morsel, the two older men walked into the cave. The one called Deepak stopped at a distance while the other one knelt next to me.

‘What’s your name?’ he asked. I met his gaze. ‘Mira.’He nodded and pulled out a med patch from his

pocket. Once he had stuck that on my arm, he pointed to my forehead. ‘What’s that for?’

I raised my fingers and felt the frayed edges of the patch Neel had stuck earlier. Was it just three days ago? It seemed like ages had passed since then.

‘It’s an old wound. I fell down . . . before.’He snorted. ‘Aren’t you the lucky one?’I fixed my eyes on the bowl between my hands.

‘What’s yours?’ I asked him.‘What?’I looked up at his puzzled face and elaborated.

‘What’s your name?’The furrows between his eyes cleared. ‘Kamal . . .

and that there is Deepak.’

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I glanced at Deepak. He was still standing at a distance hearing our conversation and cradling his hand. A med patch similar to mine was stuck on it. As I looked at him, I realized that he looked a lot younger than Kamal.

‘Your son?’Kamal looked at me and I watched with alarm as

his cheeks went blotchy. ‘Why? Just because I’m bald, you think I’m his father?’

I was taken back by his anger. ‘I . . . I didn’t mean anything by it. I . . . I just . . .’

‘Yeah save it. So, here’s the thing. The meat you ate in the jungle and the fruit right now was all from Jaggi’s ration. Food doesn’t come easy around here. Your ankle is not broken, just sprained and your fever will come down tomorrow, so don’t expect to be pampered. Sick or not, you’ll work for your own food.’

Then he got up and they both left the room. When I was alone, I let out the breath I had been holding and sat back against the wall. How long did they expect me to stay if they wanted me to work? And why did they want me to stay if they hated me so much? My eyes started getting heavy and my thoughts blended into each other. I realized that the med patch was starting to work just as I slid into a dreamless drugged sleep.

VI I I

THE REVELAT ION

Archived News Excerpt 13/07/2030: Dr Thi Luiz, head of the new sciences department at Rebyt Inc has published a study indicating the emergence of a set of children more highly evolved than the average human. He calls them Erons, short for Altero Hominis, meaning the next generation of man. With an expanded consciousness, heightened sensory awareness and stronger intuitive powers, the Erons are often diagnosed as having extreme and chronic ADD/ADHD. Dr Luiz says the Erons appear hyper-wired because of their need to continually challenge themselves. He warns that if these children are not given the stimuli suitable to their level they may have problems with rage, violence and even psychosis.

The Amazonia, 28 January 2173An incessant nudging shook me out of my slumber. I

opened my eyes in alarm only to find Mita sitting right next to me, reapplying the salve on my wrist. When I asked her for the time, she simply said, ‘Sun’s up,’ and then moved over to my ankle.

When she was done, she cleaned her hands on a scrap of cloth and brought over a steaming bowl from the table. ‘Got some broth for you.’

‘Oh, thank you!’ I sat up as fast as I could, feeling

really grateful for the much needed breakfast. Thick with chunks of meat and chopped veggies, the broth was wholesome and filling. Mita sat cross-legged in front of me and watched me eat, her chin resting on her hands.

Usually I would have been embarrassed by such a close examination, but I was much too involved in lapping up the broth. It was the first cooked meal I had had in the past four days.

When I had scraped off the last drop from bowl with my fingers, Mita spoke up, ‘Best you go out and put up some show of work. Kamal is buzzed at you. Did you bicker with him last night?’

‘Bicker? No. I just asked him about Deepak and he got really angry.’

She stilled. ‘Asked him about Deepak? What’xactly did you say?’

‘Well, I just questioned if Deepak was his son and he got . . .’ I broke off as I saw Mita doubling up on the floor. Startled, I propped myself up on my hands and tried to reach her but then I caught a glimpse of her face. Her lips were clamped shut and her eyes were closed but her shoulders . . . they were shaking. Not being able to contain it any more, she burst out laughing. I sat back in relief, not feeling amused at the scare she gave me.

‘You . . . you asked him . . . God!’ She laughed for long irritating minutes. I decided to ignore her and braved myself into standing up instead.

I raised myself up on my hands again and bending my left knee, I hoisted the rest of my body on that foot. It stung a little bit, but at least it made Mita sober down.

She held my elbow and tried to help me up. When I was standing on my feet, I was actually surprised the

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pain wasn’t worse. Whatever greens and meds they had given me, it seemed to have worked wonders. Mita held one of my hands and as we walked out of the cave, she whispered in my ear, ‘Kamal and Deepak? They’re brothers.’

I raised my eyebrows at this bit of information as I ducked under the hide and stepped outside; only it was not as much outside as another cave. This one was a lot bigger than the one I had slept in, with a much higher roof. It had daylight streaming in from a narrow opening further down. There were two mattresses lined up next to one wall and another two on the adjacent side. The rest of the space was occupied by rough wooden shelves. I walked across to them, looking at the assortment of tools kept in one of the shelves. Another one had bowls, pots, pans and spoons. A lean strip of dry meat hung in one shelf along with two of the hairy fruits I had eaten yesterday. The stock of food seemed meagre for feeding five people. No wonder Kamal was so upset about me eating from their share yesterday.

I turned around and it was then that I saw it! There was a big hook stuck in the roof of the cave and a long beam of wood suspended from it. And tied to that beam was a male human body. My eyes parted wider as they moved down the spread-eagled arms to the head slouched low over a bloody chest. His whole body was limp and lifeless.

My whole world stopped and I stood there paralyzed, unable to breathe, move, or even blink. Even though I couldn’t see the face, there wasn’t a single doubt in my mind. It was him!

‘Neel!’ My body ran to him before my mind could even follow. Darkness shrouded him but I could still

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see what had become of him. His chest was crusted with a coat of grime and blood. A cry escaped my lips as I got closer and saw his fingers. His long beautiful fingers stuck out at odd angles. They looked completely broken.

My hands quivered over his ruined, broken body, trying somehow to undo the pain, the suffering.

‘Neel Neel Neel!’ He didn’t even stir at the sound of my voice, but at least I could feel him breathing. I heard the raspy sound straining out from his chest and I cringed at the pain it inflicted on me. My hands fumbled with the ropes which constrained him, but then strong arms snaked across my chest and pulled me back. I fought, clawing my nails into the arms which dared to take me away from Neel.

I screamed in rage, my fury aching to burn whoever did this to him. I wanted so desperately to reach him, undo his binds, but I was cornered. The steely arms enclosed me and it felt like I was back in the trap. Stuck, confined and imprisoned. Again. I felt my body shaking, a strange keening sound started ringing in my ears and for the second time in my life, my mind slipped away into a black hole.

When I came around again, I was back on my mattress and Jaggi was there with me. He was sitting on the floor and busy cleaning his nerve gun. He hadn’t realized I was awake and I didn’t want him to know just as yet. I needed time to think about Neel and what these people had done to him. The thought of Neel’s tortured body broke my heart and boiled my blood with fury. What was wrong with these people? Why would they do such a thing? Then I remembered something I had overheard the first time, in this very cave.

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Jaggi had said something about nobody coming for me for three days. How had he known that I had been stuck in the trap for three days? I had never mentioned it to them! Had they been watching me rot there the whole time? A voice broke through the turmoil in my head.

‘You want to know about him, or you be dozing some more?’

The lazy drawl in his voice snapped something inside me. I flipped my eyes open and sat up. Directing all the rage bubbling inside me, I looked straight at him. ‘You don’t scare me. You disgust me. Go ahead and kill me with that gun, or torture me like you did him. You guys are nothing but a bunch of sadist creeps.’

He didn’t respond. Not the slightest change in his expression. Instead he just turned his eyes back to his gun and continued cleaning it. I sat there spewing venom and thinking about escape. Running to the house and getting help seemed to be the best option I had. I might get lost in the jungle and I might encounter new breeds but those were the risks I’d have to take.

‘It is a maze out there. You’d never make it,’ Jaggi said without looking up and I was startled at his intuition. After a few seconds, he put his gun down and nodded his head towards the cave outside. ‘What do you know about him?’

I pursed my lips and squared my shoulders, ‘Enough.’He shook his head. ‘Not enough. It’s never enough.

There’s always something they hide. Like this one did. Do you know he’s crippled Deepak? Can’t use his right hand any more. We tried everything. Greens, patches but nothing works. That one,’ he said pointing outside. ‘He has something in his fingers. We didn’t even realize what he’d done till Deepak tried to lift his hand. He just

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touched his wrist like that.’ He pinches his fingers in the air and then took in a deep shuddering sigh.

I know he was trying to check his temper then because his cheeks went ruddy and his ears visibly heated up. ‘You know nothing about him. About them. They are the Erons. They are the sadists. They did this to us,’ he waved around at the cave, the nerve gun, his tattered pants. ‘They took everything away from us. Our families, our homes, our lives. They disgust me and you, with your whiny weak mind . . . You disgust me.’ His face twisted into a horrible sneer as he said that last line. I pushed myself back against the stone wall behind me and turned my head down, but nothing gave me shelter from the impact of the loathing directed at me. It pierced straight through me.

When he got up and left, I broke down. Nobody had ever looked at me with such pure hate and that along with the image of Neel’s broken body and the ordeal of the last four days was all just too much for me to handle. I sobbed uncontrollably for a long time till I felt a small hand clasping my shoulder. Mita. Her strength centred me.

After a few minutes, I wiped my tears and drank water from the leather bag she offered. Idle tears wouldn’t get me anything except make me feel helpless.

We sat in silence for a few minutes till I had to ask her. ‘What has Neel . . . the boy outside . . . why did they beat him up so badly, what harm has he done to you all?’

Mita squirmed uncomfortably, but then answered with a shrug, ‘He crippled Deepak.’

I was surprised at her nonchalance, but then I looked at her and thought about all that she had done for me.

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Mita was the one who convinced Jaggi to bring me here rather than abandon me in the jungle. Mita was the one who defended me and rubbed salve on my wounds. Mita, I felt, would understand.

I held her hands and spoke to her earnestly. ‘But that must have been to protect himself, Mita. He knows this self-defence technique . . . one of his friends told me about it. Neel would never use it unless he was threatened. If you only knew him, you’d realize . . . he’s not violent at all. He’s just . . . a boy.’

She looked at me with a strange mix of anger and pity in her eyes. Then she snatched her hands away from me. ‘He’s not just a boy, Mira. He’s an Eron. You don’t know a blip about him . . . or them.’

‘What Eron? What them? What do you mean for fate’s sake?’

Mita looked deep in my eyes, ‘You really don’t know, do you?’

I looked at her with rising anger and frustration. Mita stretched out her fingers to graze my hand and started stroking my skin as if she were petting an animal.

‘The first time I spotted you, I knew you weren’t from the jungle. Your skin was light, untouched by the sun, your dress was different, your hair so prim, so long. Just one look at your hair and I knew. I told Jaggi when we watched you that first day. You looked jolted and I wanted to help you, but Jaggi being Jaggi, he don’t listen much to what others say. He said he couldn’t be sure, so we came back, told Kamal and Deepak, but then they told us that they’d caught a little something of their own.’ Mita nodded towards the cave outside. ‘Him. It’s the first time we’ve caught one of them. So you faded out. Then the Eron crippled Deepak and

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Kamal lost his mind. But I never forgot about you. I kept yapping at them about going back. On the third day, Jaggi nodded and it was God’s will you see, because just as we were close, we heard the blasted jagger roaring. If there’s anybody that Jaggi hates more than the Erons, it’s the new breeds.’

Mita looked up at me for a response and I asked her the only question I had in my mind.

‘What . . . who are the Erons?’‘Before I tell you that, you gotta tell me all about you.’I looked at her and she said, ‘Start from the day you

were born.’I told her everything. About my childhood, my life

back in Sector 51, my Mom, my best friend, my college, then about Mom’s transfer, David Jain, the institute. Then I told her about Neel, Hari and his disappearance and going on the jungle trail trying to find his attacker.

Surprisingly, my life story didn’t take long and yet when I finished, I felt my throat parch up. I reached for the water bag and took a big gulp from it. ‘Your turn,’ I told her, wiping my face with the back of my palm.

She fiddled with a ring on her finger, loosening it so she could turn it around and started her story in her strange mixed-up English.

‘Jaggi and I, we were born in a sector, but we had no institute like yours, we just got machines in ours. Lots and lots of grubby warehouses crammed up with those clanky, ugly machines. We got no college like you or any best friends for playin’. We got rationed food, lived in blip shacks next to the warehouses and slept in the dark but . . . we were together, Papa, Mama, Jaggi and I.

Jaggi keeps the time’round here so I reckon it

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was six years before. Six festering years before they snatched ’em from us. See, my Papa and his friend go out for a piss in the dark one night and that’s when they spotted’em gone. All of’em blue plastic men, guarding the warehouses, the boundaries, everybody, just whoosh! Disappeared! All at once.

They figured somethin’ dirty was up. They hollered at everyone and asked ’em to pack up. Some came, some ignored him and zonked off again. We mounted the walls and dashed into the jungle. We were a bummed lot, but that night . . . we never stopped. Ran through the night, all of us did and it was near dawn when we heard the booms. Even from so far, it made my ears sting. My Mama, she covered my eyes so I don’t see the fire, but my nose was ranked up with the smell. It was sharp and bitter. Burning meat and old machine oil. As long as I live, I’ll never forget that smell. Then we kept movin’ deeper into the jungle, for days, weeks, who knows. Families lagged behind with festering infections, hankering babies, battered oldies. One day, we got our first look at a new breed. My Papa and other men from our pack finished it, but then, another gang of new breeds latched onto our scent. They are a cunnin’ lot, those new breeds. They followed and hunted us down. Then people started runnin’ away from the pack, thinking they could outsmart the critters, make’em lose their scent. Don’t know if they made it, but with fewer men, grub became harder to find. Jaggi and I went to hunt down some squirrels one day. When we came back to the camp, everybody was gone. We didn’t find any bodies but there was blood splattered everywhere. We never knew if it was ’em new breeds or the Erons. Jaggi and I, we snagged the tools, some clothes and

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then ran. We slept on trees, fed off rats and beasties. One day, Kamal and Deepak spotted one of our traps. They waited for us by it and when they looked at our scraggly lot, they brought us to their home. We’ve been livin’ here ever since.’

She stopped and adjusted the ring back on her finger. I looked at it. It was just a simple unassuming metal ring and yet there was nothing simple, nothing artless about the struggle behind it. I reached out and brushed the cool metal with my fingertip.

‘It’s beautiful . . . it’s strong,’ I told her and by the look she gave me, I know she realized I was talking about just the ring. We heard someone walk in and immediately snapped our heads around to see Kamal. He stood uncertainly at the opening staring at our clasped hands. Mita got up with a jerk and left without saying another word.

I looked at Kamal who now had his eyes fixed on the roof of the cave. I was beginning to understand their hatred of me. In the face of all they had gone through, my three days of being trapped, crying over Neel, who they thought was somehow related to the security people or the Erons, all this would seem so insubstantial to them. So whiny, so weak.

Jaggi’s words stung me, but I knew I had to somehow get across to these people. I had to tell them that Neel was not like those security people who had destroyed their lives. I pictured his broken body hanging outside, rasping with every breath.

I had to help him.‘I’m sorry,’ I said to Kamal and his eyes turned to me.‘For what? For hugging the enemy, or for lashing

out at Jaggi?’

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‘I . . . I didn’t mean those things. I’m sorry, I was just upset.’

He kept looking at me as if he wanted something more, but I had nothing else to say. What else could I say to make this better?

Finally he spoke, ‘It is not your fault. You didn’t know any better. He tricked you like he tricked us. You didn’t know he was an Eron?’

‘Why do you all keep calling him Eron? His name is Neel!’

Kamal shook his head. ‘Mita still hasn’t told you?’‘She told me about how they escaped and survived.

She thinks Neel is related to the security people in some way, but really, he’s not! He’s just completing a research study here with his friends. He’s not who you think he is!’

Kamal took a step towards me and shouted, ‘He is exactly who we think he is!’

I was taken aback by his intensity, but Kamal wasn’t finished, ‘He’s one of them! Them . . . who put us in sectors, in cages, making us flip out about the Radres. Who slogged us like slaves, studied us like guinea pigs and then zapped us like vermin. People called them the new breed of humans, smarter and stronger, but when they finally got to know the truth it was too late. They were the Erons and they were going to be the end of all of us!’

I was stunned into silence. A new breed of humans? What in the world was he

talking about? ‘What do you mean new breed? Like the beasts

out there?’‘Yes, but the Erons . . . they’re the worst of the

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lot. They snuck up on us gradually. They are taller, stronger, live longer, but apart from being almost hairless, there is no other apparent physical difference between them and us. No one had any way of knowing how dangerous they were.’

Almost hairless? How is that not an apparent difference? Then I remembered the faces of Firdaus, Soni, Anil and even Neel. They all had sparse eyebrows, shaved heads and an obsession with skullcaps. They were not obviously divergent, not even suspicious unless someone had their attention drawn to it. But wait . . . a new breed of humans? Surely Kamal was mistaken. How was that even possible?

‘But how did they suddenly evolve? Doesn’t something like this take, like a million centuries?’

‘They evolved because of the same thing that created the new breed animals and plants. We are responsible for their rapid evolution. Over centuries, we changed the way our planet worked. We built the mines which invaded the Earth, we planted the farms that ate up the natural forests, machines that scraped the ocean floors and dams that altered river flows. Then, in the last century we woke up and started doing good, using solar, wind, nuclear energies, reforesting the barren land by planting hybrid super trees. All this brought about a sudden monumental increase in oxygen levels.’

I vaguely remembered reading about the hybrid trees in the archived news articles. Super trees which produced hundred times more oxygen than normal.

‘But that should’ve been good?’ I said, still confused by all this information.

‘It was, but the rules by which the ecosystem worked had not changed. In the history of the planet, changes

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in the amount of energy available in the biosphere have always resulted in evolutionary leaps. Think back.’

Now all I’d ever learnt in the History classes at school was about what had happened during the viral outbreaks, the nuclear attacks and the details of the mayhem that had ensued after. And the only information I had about the world before had either been gathered from those superficial study trips through 12hk or by my own initiative of digging through retro movies and archives.

So, forget the planet, I didn’t even know much about the people that had lived on it before the outbreak. But not wanting to cramp Kamal’s speech, I went along with it. I pinched my nose and narrowed my eyes, my mind in a tizzy with all that it was taking in. Evolved humans? Neel?

Kamal didn’t appear to care much about what I was thinking and continued in an unstoppable flow of his own.

‘The last two jumps in the atmospheric oxygen had resulted in the advent of complex cells and later, in the creation of large animals. This third jump, brought about by humans themselves, hastened their own evolutionary cycle. The only problem was that this leap wasn’t taken by humans alone, we also got those monstrous new breeds as part of the package. You see, the Darwinian train ran its course again, only this time . . . it was an express.’ Kamal’s eyes had an insane glow in them as he brought his face close to mine and whispered, ‘Hunters became predators, feeders became scavengers and the jungle turned into the wild unknown.’

‘But how did we end up in sectors? Were these new breeds responsible for the viral attacks, the Radres?’

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His face registered disappointment at the practicality of my question. He gazed at me for a few seconds, searching my face. Probably looking for some sign of awe at the scientific theory he just elaborated. After a few seconds, he gave up.

‘Erons have existed since the last century but they were not really aware of their differentiation from us. The gene pool is not a dormant entity. Every generation is smarter because of the evolving nature of the genes they inherit. That’s what the scientists and psychologists thought initially. But then they started noticing the widening disparities, the abnormally high IQ’s, the eidetic memory, the superior physical strength, the higher life expectancy. In every aspect, they were better than us. The scientist who first published the finding called them the Altero Hominis – the Next Generation of Man.’

I gawked at the possibilities that Kamal was bringing up, the prospect of them being all around us.

‘The star of his research group was a seven-year-old boy named Lek Singh. They called him the smartest boy in the world. But after the study got published, people didn’t see him as a star. What we humans don’t understand, we desecrate. So, people squashed him, labelled him a freak and the Altero Hominis became the aberrations, the Erons. The government captured most of the Erons, subjecting them to endless experiments, many of them cruel and harsh. With the help of the scientist, Lek along with some of the other kids went off the radar but he never stilled. He decided to beat the humans at their own game. As he grew up, he started bringing his kind together. He founded a technology company when he was just 17. With their superior mental and physical abilities, the Erons had no problems getting into top

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positions in companies, judiciaries and governments. They helped each other out, passing laws, gathering funds for pushing Lek’s company, which diversified and became a mammoth body. In the beginning, the superior technology that his company brought into various industries silenced the dissenting voices and later, the viral outbreaks he engineered, wiped out any stronghold that we humans ever had. His company was called . . .’

‘. . . Rebyt.’ I was too stunned by his story to say much else.

Kamal gave me a wry smile. ‘Spot on. From then on, it was easy for them. Rebyt took control over the world through its miraculous vaccine and Lek did to us what years ago we had done to him, caging us in sectors with the threat of Radres, using some of us as guinea pigs. Each of these sectors had different objectives. There were sectors for manufacturing, for technology, for farming and people were segregated across them based on their skills. The resources given to a sector and the treatment meted out to its inhabitants differed according to how important that skill was to Rebyt. The scientists, the technology specialists, were all kept in a carefully maintained cocoon of luxury while the worker bees were often left to fend for themselves. Even the security people Rebyt had put up as guards were all Erons, all of them intent on slogging their slaves until they didn’t need them anymore.’

Guinea pigs? Slaves? I had never heard anything about any of this. But then all the books, articles, even the movies I’d watched, had always been approved and probably doctored by Rebyt. Fact or fiction, I had no way of discerning the truth. Everything he was saying sounded plausible, but to believe in it would be to slot

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Neel as the enemy and . . . I was not ready for that. I held on to my figments of doubt. ‘How do you know all this?’

‘The scientist who published the study? He was my father. We lived in Sector 24 which was one of the last sectors to be destroyed.’ I sucked in a breath at this news. What about Mom? Kamal didn’t notice and carried on, ‘Our sector had the Rebyt Technology Institute. Software developers, research scientists, network architects, they exploited everything they could from all of us till they didn’t need us anymore. My father was the head there. Lek walked into his office one day and told him he was there to repay his debt. All those years ago, my father had helped him go underground and now he was setting him and his family free.’ Kamal thumped his fist into the hard ground, not even wincing at the impact.

‘Free? Left in the middle of the jungle like abandoned domesticated pets! Fresh meat for the new breeds! At least I managed to warn Deepak before they escorted us off into the jungle.’

I couldn’t process his anger or much of what he had just said because I was still stuck on something he had said earlier. ‘Have all the sectors been destroyed? When did it happen?’

Kamal looked at me and his eyes were filled with a sorrow so stark that I already knew the answer to my question. ‘Why were you sent here?’ he asked.

‘My Mom . . . she . . . she got an offer from Mr Jain. She’s working on a project . . .’ I trailed off as all the links suddenly connect in my mind. David Jain suddenly inviting my Mom for a job at the institute, our travel papers getting processed without a hitch, Neel telling me about the criticality of my Mom’s research.

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The unforgettable citric sweetness of the berries. The proclaimed givers of immortality, those berries

had certainly lengthened our lives in a way, preventing us from being destroyed along with my sector . . . my friends.

I didn’t say anything to Kamal. I was not sure about who to trust anymore.

Kamal narrowed his eyes at me. ‘That must be one important project your mother’s working on.’ I didn’t reply and he didn’t push it. My mind was swamped by the thoughts of my tree, my classmates, teachers and . . . Asha. Were they all gone forever? Images of raging walls of fire and searing waves of heat singed my mind.

Asha, with her jokes and idiosyncrasies, so unaware of the cunning world that lay right behind the perimeters. It sickened me to think about her, about the others. So many lives destroyed. Were we the only humans left in the world or were there others like us? Pockets of last-minute escapees and unworthy survivors? Because that’s exactly what I felt like, unworthy and undeserving of this chance that life had given me.

I knew I was there only because of my Mom. A sudden terror seized me. What of my Mom? Would they discard her as well when she finished her research?

I realized I already knew the answer. I steeled my mind and stiffened my spine.

Knowing what I had to do settled me in a way.Kamal noticed the change in my body language.

‘What is it?’ he asked. Even though I didn’t know how I was going to do

it, the conviction I felt was stronger than any other emotion I had ever felt.

‘I have to rescue my Mom.’

I X

THE ERONS

Archived News Excerpt 11/02/2031: Palaeontologists say that at one time, modern humans may have shared the Earth with as many as three other closely related species, Neanderthals, Homo Erectus and the Dwarf Hominids. Will the evolutionary theory create conditions in the future where spin-off species might develop again? Dr Paz, the author of the bestseller Them and Us, spoke to us about the possibility of Homo Sapiens turning into an endangered species in the near future and the genetic modifications that could arise because of that.

The Amazonia, 28 December 2173I worked outside all morning and found that my leg

did a lot better with the exercise. For the first hour, I watched Mita as she skinned a small mutated rodent. Its teeth were spiked and it had talons instead of claws. Mita informed me that even though a lot of the old wildlife had mutated, most were still not clever enough to evade traps.

I tried not heave up my breakfast as I watched her slice its skin and scoop out all its innards in a bowl. When she asked me chop them into small pieces, I resolved to swallow down my distaste. They couldn’t exactly afford to have a lab here which cultured their

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meat. This was as good as it got for them. And now, also for me.

Around noon I saw Jaggi, Kamal and Deepak head off on different paths into the jungle armed with axes and guns. I questioned Mita about it.

‘They’re gonna check all the traps and bring in the kill. Noon is the quietest time in the jungle, too hot for the critters to do much else,’ she said.

‘They don’t have any morphes. How will they call each other if they need help?’

‘It’s something Deepak taught us. Apart from sign language, he knows another kind of communication made up of dots and dashes. They chop on the trees in different beats to make up words and communicate important information if required. It’s freaky but very safe. No one else can make out the difference unless they know the code.’

‘Is it the Morse code?’Mita went very still and her eyes turned hard. ‘How

do you know about it?’‘My grandmother taught me. I saw it in a retro movie

once and insisted on learning it,’ I told her truthfully.The answer confused her and I couldn’t understand

why until I realized Mita didn’t know anything about movies. So for the next few minutes, I tried to describe it to her and I think I was quite successful because my explanation seemed to satisfy her.

Mita lowered her head and continued her work. And I thought that was the end of it but then a few minutes later, she snapped her head up again. ‘You best stay put inside the line of those trees there,’ she pointed to the four thick-trunked trees surrounding the mouth of the cave. ‘Beyond it, we rigged the whole

place with traps. So if you wander off too far, you might get stabbed by spears, or fall in pits full of spiked wood, or get caught in the rope traps of the kind in which you nearly died.’

My face paled at the memory. I also managed to perceive the veiled warning in her tone and realized she still didn’t trust me. I knew too much now and Mita thought I’d make a run for it, putting them all in danger.

Just as I finished chopping the meat, Jaggi dumped four more rodents near our board. I heard Kamal shuffling through the pots and pans inside the cave. Lunch preparations were underway. Mita skinned. I chopped. And we kept at it for a long time. Being busy not only prevented my leg from stiffening but also kept my thoughts in check. These were awful thoughts of those I had lost and those I stood to lose. I told myself this didn’t include the body hanging limp and unconscious inside. He was the enemy. The enemy. Enemy. I kept repeating it till it was the only word reverberating in my head.

When we were done with the meat and Mita had handed it over to Kamal inside, I asked her about taking a bath. The grime on my body had started to feel like a second skin and I was eager to peel it off.

Mita plucked a leafy stem from a bush close by and then motioned me to follow her. As we followed a zigzag path through the jungle, Mita kept throwing bits of the shaggy stem along the way, marking our trail.

A few seconds later, we came across a small clearing in the jungle. There was a tiny trickle of water streaming through the clearing. Mita pointed to a small patch on the side covered up with dry leaves.

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‘There’s a hole under there in which you can do yer bit. Don’t worry about the critters. This place is sealed like a jagger’s den. Jaggi didn’t leave an inch without a trap of some kind. He likes to do his bizzness in peace.’

I nodded my head, troubled by the excessive information Mita had just shared about Jaggi’s shy bowels. I walked closer to the patch feeling confounded by the idea of squatting over a hole. When I looked up, I was startled to find Mita gone. But then my eyes followed the trail of leaves she’d left behind and I felt reassured of being able to find my way back to the cave.

I quickly took off my clothes and after I had washed them next to the stream, I spread them out on a low-lying branch to dry. Then I uncovered the hole and plugged my nose to stop the festering smell from invading my nostrils. By the time I had done my business and washed up, my clothes had already dried up.

I put them back on and followed the trail but as I reached the mouth of the cave, I hesitated. I chanted the words in my mind. Enemy. Enemy. ENEMY and then squaring my shoulders, I entered the cave. I avoided looking in that corner. Instead, I kept my eyes fixed on Kamal, who was pouring out a steaming broth into a row of bowls. All of them were gathered around the stone stove. I took my place next to Mita and picked up my bowl. The broth looked filling but I suddenly seemed to have lost my appetite.

After watching the others eat for a while, I made myself take a spoonful and chewed down the necessary sustenance. Suddenly, a loud groan echoed through the cave. I stiffened my back, trying real hard to stop myself from getting up and running to him.

Feeling everyone’s eyes on me, I made myself take

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a deep breath and relaxed. I lifted another spoonful of the broth and gulped it down without bothering to chew it. Then I heard him groan again and I knew I couldn’t just sit there. He might be an enemy, but he was without a doubt, the only means of bringing my Mom back.

It was a justification I had to keep telling myself as well as the others. And I did.

I told them that I needed Neel conscious and sane so he could tell me where my Mom was. Kamal looked unconvinced throughout my talk, but when I finished, he nodded his agreement.

After everyone had their meal, I took Mita’s help in making the salve she had applied on me. Then armed with some rags, water and the salve I walked towards Neel.

One look at his broken body and I could feel all my justifications, all my resolve crumbling. With trembling hands I untied his arms. Freed of all restraints, his body slouched on mine. Unable to bear his bulk, I almost toppled back on the ground, but then all of a sudden, the weight was lifted away from me. I looked up to find Jaggi holding Neel by his armpits. He put him down on the floor and there was no love lost in the way he went about it. But before he left, he looked at me and said, ‘Better wrap up his hands after you put the green. It’ll help them heal faster.’

I started cleaning Neel’s hands and even though he groaned softly, he didn’t open his eyes.

Mita put down a small glass bottle beside me. ‘Kamal’s feelin’ guilty. Took ’vantage of it. Pour it on his fingers before putting the greens. It’ll numb the pain and zap the pus from starting.’

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I listened to Mita’s advice and meticulously cleaned Neel’s hands with the thick syrupy liquid. After that was done, I applied the green salve and then finally bandaged his hands with strips of cloth. After that I poured some water in his mouth and raised his head to make him swallow it. Five mouthfuls of water and I knew I had done the best I could.

As the daylight dwindled, I helped Jaggi and Mita in some more chopping work for dinner. Once the meal was prepared, I ate quickly and then tried to make Neel have at least half of his. Even though he didn’t open his eyes, he was conscious enough to swallow the spoonfuls I put in his mouth.

Everybody started settling in for the night but I was unable to sleep. I kept fidgeting on my lumpy mattress till I just gave in and came out to sit by Neel’s prostrate form. Inspecting my earlier handiwork, I realized his bandages were already soaked through with blood and pus.

So for the next few hours, I removed all of them, re-applied some of the leftover salve and then bandaged his hands again. I kept telling myself that I was doing all this only to get to my Mom. But I knew I was just fooling myself.

Closing my eyes, I tried to imbibe some of the cold strength of the rock digging into my back. But then I heard him moan in his sleep and it was my undoing. Tears came silently, steadily and with them came flashes from my past. Asha compulsively flipping her hair behind her ear, Mom tucking me in for the night, Neel grazing my cheek with his knuckles and kissing me like he was consuming my mind, body and soul. The images whirled in my mind edging each other out

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till there was nothing but a lead weight left behind in my heart. I felt crushed under its enormous burden and panic surged through me. Terrified, I tore open my eyes and found myself drenched in sweat.

I steadied myself for a few moments till my mind awoke to the sound of Mita’s chopping knife. Daytime and she was already outside, getting on with breakfast preparations. I got up and looked around the cave. It was empty and Neel . . . Neel was conscious and looking at me. I sucked in a breath. He was sitting up, leaning against the stone wall, one bandaged hand resting on a raised knee and the other cradled in his lap. Suddenly, he leaned forward towards me. I jerked back in response. Neel frowned at my reaction but then his face cleared. Moving back, he leaned his head against the stone wall.

I looked away, working on building up my defences, but then he asked, ‘You know?’

I nodded, feeling my defences crumble and my throat close up.

‘Everything?’ I nodded again and he sighed. After a few seconds,

he leaned towards me again and this time I had to remind myself not to move back. He whispered urgently, ‘Don’t worry. We will get out of here. My father will be here soon.’

I looked at him in alarm wondering what he meant. Either he had a tracker on him or he had been able to signal our location to the . . . Erons . . . somehow.

Neel answered my unasked questions. ‘The chip in your nose. They can track me through you so . . .’ I didn’t wait for him to finish. I was already up and scrambling away from him when I felt his bandaged

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hand clasp my elbow. He whirled me around to face him and I could see from the agony on his face that the sudden movement had taken its toll on his hands.

‘What are you doing?’ he hissed at me.I was suddenly very angry, not just at him but at

myself for not being able to enjoy his pain. Had I not lost enough at their hands to be worrying about him?

‘I’m going to warn them. They saved my life.’‘I know that. But they also turned my hands into putty.’I gave him that, but I was not ready to back down.

My eyes blazed with the fire burning inside me, for Asha, for Mita’s childhood and for the countless terrorized children from the archived videos Rebyt had pushed down my throat.

‘They’re my people and you’re one of them. The . . . the Erons.’

Neel looked at me with an expression I couldn’t quite ascertain. Disappointment? Suspicion?

‘That’s what they call us? The Erons?’‘What had you expected? They’d be happy to let you

steal their . . . our lives, our world?’‘Not me, Myrah. Don’t blame me for my race’s

doings. Like I don’t blame you for what they did to me. It’s not you against me, Myrah. It’s them against us.’

I looked at his face, at the earnestness in his eyes and all I could see were the faces of the people I’d lost. But I knew I needed him. I needed him to bring back my Mom.

I made myself calm down and thought it through. ‘So what happens when your father gets here?’

Neel looked at me for a few moments, studying my face before replying, ‘You and me, we leave with him.’

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I nodded my head towards the mouth of the cave. ‘And what about them?’

‘They stay here. Even though they’ve disbanded from their sectors, I’ll ask my father to grant forgiveness.’

‘Disbanded? That’s what you think they did? They ran away because their sectors were bombed and destroyed. Their families, their lives everything destroyed with it.’

Neel’s face paled and he looked at me with disbelief. ‘That’s not true. My father would never do that!’

‘For fate’s sake, what’s your father got to do with it?’ I asked him, almost shouting it in his face. Before he could reply, he was flung away from my face and thrown against the wall. I screamed in horror as I watched him crumple to the floor. I started to run towards him, but then I saw Jaggi standing there watching me. I held myself back even as Neel got up on his feet again. My mind was in a quandary. Should I tell Jaggi about the chip in my nose? But then if I told him he might hurt Neel again, or do much worse before everyone could make a run for it. And then what? Even if I was able to remove the chip, who knew how far we would all be able to run before the Erons caught us.

On the other hand, if I didn’t tell Jaggi anything it might just pan out as Neel had described. Me on my way to finding my Mom and them staying here. Safe.

‘What was he telling you?’ Jaggi asked me, softly and slowly. I had a feeling that soft and slow with Jaggi was a combination that didn’t bode well. I blurted out the first thing that came to my mind.

‘He was telling me about his father.’Jaggi quirked up an eyebrow. ‘His father? Who is . . .?’

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A scream interrupted him. It was coming from outside and it was Mita’s voice. We both ran outside, but my feet skidded to a grinding halt at the mouth of the cave. A small black xeppel stood at the place where Mita’s chopping board used to be.

It was unlike any of the xeppels I had ever seen before. Its wings were diaphanous and fluttered noiselessly. Perched on multiple steel legs that were bent at an unnatural angle, the xeppel looked more like a human-sized mantis.

I was so shocked at seeing the xeppel that I failed to immediately notice Mita who was struggling in the vice-like grip of a man. A man who was dressed in strange black armour. Mita’s presence fully registered in my mind only when the man slapped her across the face.

Before I could react, I saw Jaggi dashing forward towards them, but then another armour-clad man cut his way and drew him short by pointing a long metal rod at him. The rod made a sharp ‘zing’ sound and Jaggi crumpled to the floor.

All I could do was stand there through it all, transfixed to the spot. My eyes assessed the man standing over Jaggi. Bulky and tall, he handled the metal rod like a prized possession, cradling it like a gun. I would have never ever mistaken it for a gun if I hadn’t seen it in action. The body of the gun was slender and sharp like a sword designed for mutilation. The only thing it had in common with a bulky nerve gun was its tip. It was fashioned like a muzzle.

One look at that gun and I knew this was not going to pan out as smoothly as Neel had said. I felt Neel’s presence behind me now, but before I could confront

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him, the bulky man stepped forward and pointed his gun at me. He motioned me to move and I knew better than to resist. I followed his order.

He led me to Kamal and Deepak, who were already kneeling on the ground. I knelt next to Kamal and mimicked his pose by putting my hands behind my neck. The bulky man stood close and kept his gun trained on us. After a few minutes, Mita and Jaggi were made to join our line-up as well. Of course, Neel was left alone. He stood at the mouth of the cave, looking at me, but I found it hard to meet his eyes. There was just too much anger in me. In a way, he was the reason for all of this. For us being treated this way, for me not telling Jaggi and allowing the rest of them to run when they still had the chance.

The pebbles on the ground dug into my knees, but it didn’t bother me. Something far worse was eating me up from the inside. Guilt at having betrayed my own kind.

I heard Kamal draw in a sharp breath. I turned to look at him and found him staring in the direction of the xeppel. I followed his gaze and saw a man standing next to the xeppel’s hatch. He was tall and lean, his shaved head extending into a broad and prominent forehead, deep-seated eyes and a proud chin. The rest of him was covered in the same black armour as the other two men.

Strangely, the more I looked at his face the more it disturbed me. I didn’t realize why until I saw Neel walking towards him.

At first my mind refused to believe it but the similarity was too much to ignore. The same striking eyes, high cheekbones, the same proud stance.

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‘Lek,’ Kamal breathed out. It was much too soft for the guard to hear, but my ears caught the name and the truth jolted me. The Eron who had started it all, the Eron responsible for the obliteration of our kind, that Eron . . . was Neel’s father?

I watched as Neel got closer to his father and stopped when he was standing within an arm’s length of him. They didn’t share any hugs or even a handshake, instead they talked or at least Neel did, while his father stood there motionless with an unnervingly calm expression on his face. I was still watching him when he suddenly turned and fixed his eyes on me. The coldness of his glare made me cringe and I quickly cast my eyes downwards as a horrible feeling grew inside me. A sharp prickle of fear rose up my spine making me look up once more. And just as I did, the glint of the guard’s gun blinded my eyes. A gun which he had raised in the air above me.

‘No!’ I heard Neel’s voice cry out from somewhere far away as the world around me came to a standstill. Then it was just me and the shining edge of mortality waiting to slice through me. I sucked in a breath and a wracking shudder travelled throughout my body. It’s too soon. It’s much too soon. I wasn’t ready to die yet.

I watched with paralyzing horror as the blade rushed to meet me and then whooshed past me, missing me by just an inch. I looked up and found the guard’s eyes fixed on Lek.

A fresh wave of terror wracked through me as I saw Lek give him a nod. But the guard didn’t raise the blade over me again. Instead, he unhooked a baton from his waist and brought it down on Kamal. Kamal cried out in pain and his body thunked down right next to me.

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The brutality of the gesture wrecked me and I felt my senses leaving me.

My body slumped to the ground and the last thing I saw before my eyes closed was a girl’s face. Somehow even that close to unconsciousness my mind registered her presence because strangely the girl looked a lot like Soni. But then maybe I was hallucinating because her lips suddenly contorted. And it almost looked like she was smiling.

X

THE CUBE

Stinger dated 29/12/2173: This is to notify all residents that a batch of stray humans have been caught and are being ferried to Panopticon IX. Please keep Airway 24 free, from 1300 to 1315. Thankful for your cooperation, Neink, CC.

Panopticon IX, 29 December 2173I pried my eyes open and a sharp blast of light

pierced through my skull. As I raised my arm to block it out, I realized the intense orange blaze was actually coming from me. I looked down in shock and found my whole body glowing like a manic neon sign.

I squeezed my eyes shut, covering them with my palms. Minutes passed and I tried hard to bolster my courage. This time I braced myself before peeking down.

Oh, thank the fates. My body hadn’t been converted into a radioactive bulb. The unearthly glow was actually coming from the garish orange jumpsuit I was clothed in. I grazed the fabric with my fingers. It was a strange luminous material. I had never seen the likes of it before. My shoulders slumped with relief but then I looked around and a fresh dread seized me. Surrounding me in close proximity were metal walls. Even the roof above was just about my height. It was a small metal cube of some sort. I was trapped. Boxed-

in. I hugged myself as a big sob escaped my lips. Not again. Not again. Not again.

As I tried to rein in my rising panic, a glint caught my eye. It was coming from the wall behind me, the one I had been resting my back against. I turned around and dragged myself towards it and when I was closer to the edge, I realized to my immense relief that that particular side of the cube was open. There was no wall there and it opened up into a large space. I looked out, hoping this would be my escape route, but the enormity of the scene was so sudden and so strange that I immediately scampered back a little.

The room outside was impossibly huge. It couldn’t even be called a room. It was more like a huge hall. Even bigger than the cavern of Baby Blue. But that’s where the similarity ended. There was nothing rough or natural about this enormous, almost fantastical, man-made cylindrical hall. The roof at an impossible height above me, glinted with a metallic sheen and so did the walls. There seemed to be no perceptible doors or entrances into this space. It looked like a massive and completely sealed metal cylinder.

The glint which had caught my eye earlier flashed again and I realized where it was coming from. There was a tall, glass-topped pillar in the centre of the hall. It looked like an observatory of some kind.

I wondered if there were guards inside looking at me right now. They could be wearing those sinister body suits and carrying those menacing guns. The memory dredged up bitter remorse and bile rose up my throat. I immediately banished the dark thoughts away and focused my attention on inspecting the pillar instead.

Staring at it now, I realized the cube I was squatting

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in had to be carved into the walls of this hall. And since the observatory was almost at my eye-level, the cube had to be located at some significant height from the ground.

I scooted closer to the edge to hazard a look down below and realized that I was right. I was at the height of about two tall skyscrapers away from the ground and the drop was so steep that just looking down made my head spin. I scooted up and jerked back, but just as I did that, a sharp pain sliced through my forehead. I slumped back on the floor and I had to grab my head in my hands. It felt like it would split in two if I didn’t.

As the pain slowly dimmed, I realized what had just happened. The opening of my cube was sealed with some sort of an electric field. The throbbing dulled but the thought of being confined like this . . . like an animal in a laboratory set me off again. Frantic, I looked around the walls of my cube, searching for some chink, some gap, but it was just seamless metal. I collapsed back on the floor and stared dejectedly out into the hall. And that’s when I saw them.

All around, dotted across the cavernous room outside, were identical cubes just like mine, suspended in the air. There were no ropes or cables holding them in the space and it seemed like they were all held together by some kind of a powerful force field. Horrified, I stared at the hazy glowing silhouettes inside each of those cubes.

Floating around like tiny building blocks, there had to be thousands of those tiny cubes stuck in this metallic giant cylinder. The whole structure could have been a fascinating marvel of modern technology had

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it not been filled with thousands of people imprisoned inside them.

I sucked in a breath as I realized the magnitude of where I was. I was an inmate in a ginormous prison. Of course, that’s what this was . . . a prison designed by the Erons . . . to hold . . . humans!

Suddenly an ear-piercing buzzer went off outside, snapping me right out of my thoughts. It went on for what seemed like an eternity, the sound jarring my already frayed nerves. And just when I thought I couldn’t take it anymore, it switched off abruptly. A hush fell over the entire hall and the numb stillness was unnerving. I waited with bated breath wondering what it all meant. Then my spine almost snapped with shock as a loud metallic clang rang through my ears. Terrified, I saw a row of elevators starting to emerge from the roof above.

Slow and steady, they inched down the length of the large prison. There was one elevator for each column of suspended smaller cubes. I watched as each of the elevators paused in front of a cube, before proceeding to the one below it.

What were they doing? What was coming out of the elevator? I sat there, freaking out and thinking about all the scary possibilities, when suddenly, something blocked my view. I sucked in a breath as I realized it was a simple elevator that now blocked the entrance to my cube. And it was filled with people . . . humans, wearing glowing jumpsuits just like mine. I was still staring dumbfounded when a hand wrapped around my wrist and pulled me in with a sharp tug. Then, the elevator began its descent.

I stared at the people around me. They were

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all the same. Girls with shorn hair, hollowed-out cheeks and tired eyes. Was my hair . . .? With a sense of foreboding, I raised my right hand. My fingers weaved through air and my heart skipped a beat. With trembling fingers, I grazed the bristles and the uneven bumps on my scalp.

The hand clasping my wrist tightened its hold and I looked up to find Mita’s eyes staring back into mine. The elevator stopped again and I turned warily towards the door, but it was just another girl getting in.

‘Jaggi . . . Deepak . . . Kamal . . . opposite us,’ Mita whispered in my ear. I nodded. I got what she was telling me. Mita and I were obviously in the same row as we had gotten into the same elevator. And according to her, Jaggi, Deepak and Kamal were being held in the rows of cubes facing us. After a second, she whispered, ‘This whole thing . . . is underground.’

I nodded again, but I was distracted by the girls who kept intermediately walking in. They all wore the same expression of shrivelled-up despair. Like something inside of them had been irreversibly broken. I wondered how much time it would take for Mita and me to start looking like this. A week, a month, a year?

The elevator finally descended into a smaller hall where it stopped and everyone shuffled out only to be prodded into two separate lines for men and women by guards dressed in black uniforms. The uniforms just left their faces uncovered making them look all the more intimidating. I snuck glances at them as the line moved forward. Their features differed, but all of them had some remarkable similarities. The same dusky complexion, shaved heads and almost hairless faces and all of them wore that same kind of armour I had

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seen Neel’s father and his guards wearing. I wondered if they also had the same eye colour as Neel. As I tried to look closer at one of the guards, he happened to catch me staring. The look he gave me then was filled with such disgust that it made me cringe. I immediately cast my eyes downwards and shuffled forward with the line.

As I stepped closer to the front, I saw that the hall had two sections with rows of stalls and the men and women were segregated as they disappeared into the respective bathing areas. The girls in front of me dispersed into a row of stalls at the end of the hall. From the sound emanating from inside these stalls, I assumed they were showers. After a few minutes, the showers all switched off at the same time and seconds later, the girls stepped out dripping and their jumpsuits clinging to their skin.

It was my turn next and as I shuffled into the tiny stall, I was relieved to find a UV pot with a shower right on top of it. I did what I could as quickly as I could, even though the shower had already started pelting a fierce jet of water at me. I looked down at my ankle and found it swollen, but at least it was not filled with that rancid pus any more. Then all too soon, my time was up. I walked out and joined the line of drenched girls. We had to wait till everybody was done. But considering the time allotted, it didn’t take long.

After everyone had gone through this strange bathing ritual, we walked in a file towards another slightly larger hall. The men must have gone through the same treatment as I saw them filing into the larger hall as well, looking wet but clean.

I rubbed my arms to settle the goosebumps and found my jumpsuit was already almost completely

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dry. What Mom wouldn’t have given for this wonder fabric? Thinking about Mom made my nose sting and my eyes water. I wondered where she was right that moment. I wondered if she knew what had happened to me. Then I wondered if she ever would. I shook my head and snapped my mind out of the downward spiral it was threatening to pull me into.

I tried to distract myself by craning my head and seeing what the girls in front were collecting from a chute in one of the walls. When a few of them started moving towards the rows of chairs and tables up ahead, I finally saw what they were carrying. Plates. Plates filled with food.

When it was my turn, I went up to a niche in the wall. It had two buttons which said ‘Man’ and ‘Woman’ respectively. I pressed the ‘Woman’ button and a small flap opened in the wall and a plate came out. I collected my plate and proceeded to one of the chairs as well. It was only when I was seated that I took a good look at the food. Disappointment surged at the sight of different coloured spoonfuls of porridge.

Green, white and red globs of porridge. I didn’t know how long I had been stuck here in this prison, but my stomach felt much like it did after those three days in the net. Starving for food, but going queasy at the sight of it. Especially when the food looked like something I should be painting a canvas with.

I looked around and noticed that no one was talking. The clatter of cutlery was the only sound echoing in the large hall. In fact, most of the other girls and guys had already finished the meagre amount of food on their plates. Even Mita sitting right beside me had her arm placed protectively around her plate and she seemed

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to be completely focused on putting every last bit in her mouth.

Strengthening my resolve, I put a spoonful of the white porridge in my mouth and found it didn’t taste that foul. It actually tasted quite good. But that may also be because my body had recognized these globs as sustenance.

As I swallowed down each bite, I wondered about what would happen to us. How long would we have to stay here? How would we escape? The buzzer went off again and my unaccustomed body jerked at the severity of that shrill sound.

All the orange-suited prisoners got up in unison as if they had been programmed to react to the buzzer. In almost synchronized movements, they picked up their plates and dumped it down a chute on another wall nearby. There was the male-female segregation again and while the men were sent off into some other room, the girls moved to one end of the food hall itself.

Mita and I followed their lead, till we all ended up in a line facing one of the walls. I waited, wondering about the next thing planned for us, when the wall we were facing suddenly started to disappear. It was as if it was being evaporated into thin air!

But I didn’t get a breather to think about it. That’s because I was much too busy assessing the aerodrome that had just been revealed. I knew that it was an aerodrome because right in its centre was a huge xeppel. This one was also shaped like a mantis but it was a lot bigger, big enough to carry the entire lot of us. There was a walkway that appeared from the ground beneath our feet and I presumed this was for us to reach the xeppel.

My guess was proven right as I saw the girls making

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their way down the walkway and starting to board the xeppel. The line moved forward quickly, egged on by the guards standing on either side of the line.

When I finally entered the darkness of the xeppel, Mita clasped my hand. I held on to the crutch offered and we stood there sharing our grief, both of us terrified at what the fates had in store for us.

When the door slid shut, most of the girls started shifting towards the sides. Some sat down on the floor with their backs against the walls, others just collapsed on the floor and lay curled up into themselves. I looked at their tired, exhausted, barely-there bodies and a dread started building up inside me. I thought of talking to them, asking them about where we were going and I even started to move towards one of them when Mita pulled me back. I gave her a questioning look and in reply she placed a finger on the back of my ear lobe. I grazed the spot where she had placed her finger and to my shock found a small lump in my skin there. It was very similar to the one in my nostril where the ismeltz chip was still embedded.

This new chip could be a bug or a tracker, or both that kept a track of our movement and could hear all that we said. I looked at Mita with wide eyes and watched as she shifted her gaze to a corner on the roof. I hazarded a discreet glance in the direction her eyes moved. There was a sealed-in exit door with a big red button beside it. And then I saw it. Right above the button was a small camouflaged surveillance camera which could give a 360-degree view of this entire space. We were being monitored in every way possible. They could hear us, they could see us and they might be doing it around the clock.

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There was nothing we could possibly do so we huddled against the wall and waited for our destination with rising trepidation. The hundreds of haggard faces all around us did nothing to quell our anxiety.

I didn’t feel the descent so when the doors suddenly burst open, the unexpected fierce sunlight blinded me for a few minutes. Mita and I stood up and moved towards the exit. The air that hit us was thick with humidity. As the girls started getting off the xeppel, both Mita and I stood there for a minute taking in the scene before us.

Acres and acres of unharvested corn fields stretched all around us. A transparent dome-shaped roof swept over this vast land, disappearing into the fields somewhere in the horizon.

Out of all the things I had envisioned, I had not expected this.

Forming a line, everyone started moving towards a small outpost surrounded by bristling golden hay. As we got closer, I saw a guard standing on a pedestal beside the outpost. When the first girl reached him he handed out a card to her. I watched the girl as she looked down at her card and then headed off on a path cutting through the hay. The next girl did the same though she headed off in a different direction. When it was my turn, I took the card from his hands without daring to look up.

Later, when I inspected the card, I realized it looked like a digital map of some sort. A timer started at the edge of the screen and I headed off, giving one last glance in Mita’s direction who had just received her map after me. She caught my eye and gave me an almost imperceptible nod. Her destination seemed to be in the

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opposite direction from mine because she immediately headed off to the right, disappearing from my vision.

I started following the direction pointed by the map as well and as I walked, I realized I was not treading on mud but metal. No. This place was not what I had expected at all.

I walked on that path for about five minutes when the map started beeping again. I must have been getting closer to my destination. After a few more steps, the beeping fell silent. When I looked up, I found myself facing a monstrous metallic machine. For a few seconds, I just stood there looking at it wondering what to do. Then I looked at the golden fields beyond. Stretching out invitingly, promising space and freedom, they made me wonder if I could outrun those guards in spite of the tracking chips embedded in my skin. No one seemed to be around and there were certainly no cameras here.

I was still deciding what to do when the card started beeping again. I checked it but instead of flashing the time, it read 2 minutes inactive. Of course. They wouldn’t want their slaves to slack on the job.

Banishing all fanciful thoughts of escape, I shoved the card in my pocket and reached out for the row of buttons on the machine. I was just about to test one of them when the beeping sounded again and a voice cracked down on me.

‘Don’t even think about it.’I turned around to see a girl standing right behind

me. She was tall and was once strongly built but now the skin on her face was stretched so tight, her cheekbones almost looked like they had been sculpted on top. The bristles on her head were bright red in

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stark contrast to her dark ebony complexion. The girl shoved her card inside her shirt front and without sparing me another glance rougly pulled the ears of the corn downward and twisted the whole cob off the stalks that grew all around the machine.

‘Don’t just stand there, moron! Get to work,’ she snapped.

So that is what I had to do. We worked hard, twisting ears, tearing off corn

and stacking plants till our hands were raw and the machine’s tray was full. Then the huge machine automatically reversed and headed off into the field. Another machine took it place and the whole process started again. We worked for hours and hours. The glare of sunlight through the glass dome was merciless and the air was so pungent, it was almost tangible. The girl didn’t speak a word and the work was much too tedious for me to initiate any kind of conversation.

The sun travelled across the sky till it was directly on top of us and beating down on our backs. I was exhausted and knew I was cracking under the work load. But the other girl didn’t take a break, didn’t slack, not even for a second. I’d severely misjudged her before. This one wasn’t lacking in stamina or in will. I, on the other hand, was lagging far, far behind in both. I had never undertaken this kind of physical labour in my life and the humidity, lack of sufficient food or water and my previous injuries were beginning to take a toll. I felt that I could pass out at any moment.

Just as we finished loading up another tray, our maps started beeping again. The girl immediately straightened up and marched off into the fields. Maybe our shift was over?

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I consulted my map and found it was directing me towards the same direction in which the girl had taken off. I headed off on the same path cutting through the field and took the turn indicated. Almost immediately someone pushed me over roughly and I landed on the ground in a heap. Shocked out of my wits, I looked up to find the girl digging her knee into my chest. Even undernourished, she packed enough mass to make my ribs strain.

‘Why are you following me?’ she hissed.Unable to speak, I just handed over my beeping map

to her. With her knee still pressing into my chest, she glanced at the map I was clutching in my hands. Then shifting her eyes to me, she gave me a death glare and snatched the map away.

Only after she had checked the map, and was convinced that I was not without reason in following her, did she lift her weight off of me.

I saw her walking away but I didn’t budge an inch. I kept lying down for a few more minutes, too tired and stunned to get up. The card started beeping again. My first impulse was to fling it away but what good would that have done?

Feeling weary and utterly dejected, I somehow managed to get up and trudge along the route directed by my map. In five minutes I had reached my destination which was a large unintimidating metal shed. When I walked inside, my knees buckled at the sight of the work ahead of me.

Rows and rows of huge rectangular frames rested against the walls of the shed. Stretching in between these frames were thick meshes of metal wires coated in layers of a white crusty substance.

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The other girl had already begun her work. A scrubber in hand, she was busy cleaning the wire mesh on one frame.

Lacking any other option, I got on with the job as well.

Flakes of white crust started falling off as I brushed away, but the wires were so thickly coated with the deposit that it took a good amount of time to complete even one frame.

By the time the next beeping sounded, I was too exhausted to move. I couldn’t do much except to follow the girl as she walked back through the route we had come in. My hands were blistered, my face raw, my lips cracked and the pain in my ankle was back with a vengeance. Surprisingly, the girl looked unaffected by the day’s work. Except for the sweat marks under her arms, there was not a scratch on her. If I ever hoped to survive this, I had to seriously up my game.

When it was time to board the xeppel, I just about managed to enter and collapse on its floor. As soon as everyone was inside, my eyes searched for Mita. Unable to spot her, I got up and walked around, searching among the tired harrowed faces. And I still couldn’t find her!

The doors of the xeppel shut behind me and I panicked. I noticed that there were a lot fewer girls in the xeppel now than there had been in the morning. Fear pushed my body into action and I scrambled through the prostate bodies and reclining forms. I called out Mita’s name and searched for her everywhere till I finally found her huddled in a corner with her head bent down on her knees.

I heaved a sigh of relief and collapsed next to her.

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Leaning back against the wall, I bumped my shoulder against hers. She didn’t raise her head.

‘Mita?’ She still didn’t reply, didn’t even lift a finger in acknowledgment. It was only when the door opened again and everybody started leaving that she finally moved and got up. And that’s when I saw her face.

Dried up tears ran down her cheeks, streaking through the grime and crusted blood. I sat there, reeling in shock until a harsh voice cut through my daze.

I quickly scrambled up on my feet as I saw a guard shouting at the girls who had either passed out or dozed off on the floor of the xeppel.

Once back to our prison home, we were led inside the food hall. There were no men around this time. Mita was somewhere far ahead of me in the line. I pressed the ‘Woman’ button and my tray appeared in the chute and I lost all thought of tracking Mita down. The same three globs adorned the plate this time, along with a much-needed glass of water.

I almost inhaled the food in. It was grossly insufficient for what my hunger demanded and finished much too quickly. I saved the water for the end and drank it in slow sips, cherishing the taste. Both my imprisonments had made sure I never took it for granted ever again.

Dinner over and done with, the elevators took us back to our cubes. I staggered into my cube and my eyes closed before my body even hit the floor.

The sound of the buzzer pounded through my head, jarring me awake. It was too soon. I felt like I had just closed my eyes and my body still ached from the previous day’s exertions. I opened my eyes and my first thought was of Mita. Had yesterday’s hard labour broken her? With the life she’d led in the

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jungle, she should have been better conditioned for this than me. But then she was also younger. Her ashen face from yesterday flashed before my eyes. I had to talk to her.

The elevators started descending from the roof and it was not long before I climbed into mine. Mita was standing in front of the lot, her face bleak and expressionless. I clutched her hands urging her to look at me.

‘Mita what’s the matter? What happened?’She raised her eyes to mine and I cringed at what I

saw in them. Her eyes looked inert and insensible. The fire in them was gone, completely crushed.

I squeezed her hands tighter. ‘Don’t let them break you, Mita!’ I told her trying hard to keep the quiver out of my voice.

The elevator doors opened again and Mita shook her hand off. She walked ahead of me and even in the bathing line she kept her distance. During breakfast, I tried hard to catch her eyes. Not once did she look up from her plate. But I didn’t give up. Once inside the xeppel, I walked up to where she stood but then before I could say anything, she turned around and walked away again.

The constant rebuff didn’t hurt me. The possibilities of why she was acting this way did.

I was paired with the same girl as yesterday. I tried talking to her, asking her name, offering her mine but just like Mita, she also completely ignored me.

Still I kept trying to draw something out of her while we went through the back-breaking work. I was desperate to find some information about this place. Anything that could help me figure out how to help Mita.

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After braving hours of my incessant questioning she finally straightened up and gave me a a stinking look. She raised her hand, pointed to her ear and then in the direction of the xeppel. I understood. She was telling me they were listening.

I picked up a thick stem and tried to scribble in the wet mud. She hissed a breath when she saw me doing that and came over to stomp on the area where I’d just started scribbling. Then she held me by the elbow and pressed hard. She glared in my eyes, searching for something. A beat later, just as abruptly, she let go and moved to a strand of corn nearby. Breaking it in little bits, she started forming words by placing them on the ground. Pressure, she wrote. What did she mean? Seeing the frown on my face, she walked over to the little pathway from which we came and tapped on the exposed underground metal.

I nodded my head, finally understanding.The ground was pressure-sensitive. Maybe it

had been made that way for checking soil density or maintaining water requirements for the crops. Keeping tabs on the human workers might have been an added bonus.

Considering how high the crops around us were, I assumed the only thing they couldn’t do in the open fields was to keep a visual eye on us. Then I watched as the girl crouched beside me and started forming another word. Gema.

I nodded my head and started to write another question when she clutched my hand and waved her card in front of my face. Right. We couldn’t keep sitting for too long, the card would register our inactivity. We

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got on with our work as before but at least, now, the secret camaraderie we shared gave me something to go on.

In the evening, I found Mita in the same corner of the xeppel as yesterday, hunched over with her back against the wall. I sat next to her and opened my mouth many times to say something but somehow words failed me. Then I started humming a song my Nani used to sing to me when I was a kid. It was something about boats and bodies and hope. I never really understood it though the tune always stayed with me.

Midway, I closed my eyes and got lost in the melody. The drone of the xeppel massaged my tired back and the notes soothed my tortured mind. A strange muffled sound interrupted my momentary escape and I opened my eyes to find Mita clutching her hands behind her head, rocking her torso back and forth. Shocked at seeing her so wrought up, I instantly wrapped my arms around her. I drew circles on her back. Petted her feet. Rubbed her arm. Trying all that I could do to soothe her. After a few minutes, she quietened down and then . . . started telling me.

Her words sparked anger inside me, spread its fire through my veins, seared my mind. I clenched my fists into balls and curled my toes to contain the scream of rage bubbling inside me.

‘. . . there’s nowhere to go . . . no hope,’ Mita finished off. I turned to her and held her by the shoulders. ‘There’s always hope Mita. There is always hope.’

‘There is no escape from this hell,’ Mita said with a grim certainty.

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‘What do you mean?’‘They beat me up yesterday because I tried to scram

away into the fields. They caught me before I had taken ten steps away from my post.’

The fact that she ran away without me pricked a little but I could hardly fault her for following her self-preservation instincts. I looked at Mita and pointed to my ears. She nodded slowly and looked away. I squeezed my eyes shut and leaned back against the metal wall, dejected. Mira’s hopelessness deflated my own hopes. Only a miracle could save us now, there was no plausible way out of this prison. I closed my eyes and thumped my head on the wall.

Maybe all the clanging did my brain some good because right then something occurred to me. Without looking at her, I clasped my hand around Mita’s wrist and pressed down on it in calculated gaps and grips. Then I waited, hoping she would understand what I had just asked her in Morse code.

Understand?She threw a glance at me and then quickly looked

away.No, she replied. And for a moment, I just let it sink

in. The success of this small act of defiance did more to heal my spirit than anything else had done in a long time. Judging by the tight grip of her hand, I knew Mita felt the same way. Her body suddenly tensed and I could see she was eager to tell me something.

Sign Deepak? she asked me.It was a good idea but I didn’t want her to put herself

in any more danger. I started to tell her to not do any such thing, but then I stopped. Her eyes were looking alive again. Eager and hopeful.

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Okay careful, I told her instead.From then on, we communicated this way every day,

sharing scraps of information. A week passed before Mita was successful in making

contact with Deepak in the food hall. I don’t know how she managed it as conversation was forbidden. I later found out that she had tapped a quick Morse code on her plate while she was standing behind him and it had worked. More days passed before she could glean any kind of information from him. When she did, she told me Deepak’s work involved feeding endless piles of garbage into machines. She said he had called them garbage lands or islands but she couldn’t be sure.

As time went by, Mira kept up her Morse code interactions with the men and told me that Deepak was sounding more and more dejected. He had told Mita that their food rations were even lesser than ours, their labour was harder and the treatment a lot harsher. He also mentioned that Jaggi and Kamal were not faring very well either. I squeezed my eyes shut in despair. This place was killing us all and no one cared. We were just dispensable human slaves.

It came to me one day as I was cleaning the filters and cursing the obstinate crystalline crusts on the grills. Where did this forsaken crust come from anyways? The question made me stop midway. I stepped back and looked at the huge frame.

Reduce it to one fifth of its size and it was not very different from the air filters my Mom used to clean once a month in our old apartment. Maybe these were air filters as well? Their size was in perfect proportion to the dome they were installed in? If this was a biome or a specialized climate controlled greenhouse that the

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Erons had created for maximizing crop productivity then they would need these air filters to maintain the right humidity and temperature. It all made sense except for the white crust. Dirt, fibres or even calcium deposits were expected, but this white substance looked different. I grazed my finger on it and put it in my mouth. My lips puckered at the salty flavour. Salt deposits. But why salt?

I tried to think like my Mom would. Objectively and dispassionately. Okay. The deposits came from the water being used to humidify the air. Salt deposits implied the water had a high salt content. High salinity in turn meant this dome was built close to the sea. Wait, maybe it was built on the sea. Maybe that was why they were flying in all of us every day directly from the prison into the dome. And that meant that for a certain part of the ride every day, the xeppel flew over water . . . or to be more precise sea water.

A hand landed on my shoulder and I started. Gema was standing behind me and my map was beeping. I checked it. 4 minutes inactive. I had been so engrossed in my thoughts, I hadn’t even heard it till now.

I tucked the map back in my shirt and nodded at Gema. Getting back to work, I wondered if I should share all this with her, but there was no way I could confide in her without the Erons getting to know about it. And the possibility she knew Morse code was almost negligible. Plus I knew next to nothing about her. I decided to let it go. It was far too risky.

On our way back in the xeppel, I shared all my deductions with Mita. Though she didn’t say anything, the sceptical look on her face told me she thought my theory was highly unlikely. Still the next day, as the

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xeppel took off I saw her gluing her ears to the wall. I realized she was trying to figure out whether we were flying over land or water. After a few minutes, she straightened up, disappointment filling her face. Of course, against the drone of the xeppel there was no way to tell the difference. I looked away trying to focus on the count running in my head. When the doors of the xeppel opened up again, I stopped. 1500. That’s how many seconds it had taken for the xeppel to reach the dome. It took twenty minutes every day to ferry us between the prison and the dome. Twenty minutes that would mark for us, the difference between life and death.

I spent the rest of the day thinking about what lay before us and realized the possibilities were bleak. The way the Erons were working us, we would all be dead in a month or two anyway. We had absolutely nothing to lose.

On the way back, I clasped Mita’s hand and told her what I had in mind. Her eyes widened and she turned her head to look at me. I didn’t know what she found in my face but I saw her squaring her shoulders in response. She pressed down on my hand in an affirmative sign.

Before we parted for dinner, I told her to send the message to Deepak as well. Now all we needed was for the fates to be on our side. This would be nothing more than a suicide mission otherwise.

A week later, once Mita had been able to relay the message to Deepak and he’d passed it on to Jaggi and Kamal, we drove our plan into action.

That day Mita and I waited for a few minutes after the xeppel had taken off. When our counting reached

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500, we both got up and started undressing. As we shed our clothes, some of the girls turned to look at us with wide curious eyes; some scampered away in fright, while the others were just too broken to be bothered by our antics.

I was too unnerved by what I was about to undertake to feel even remotely conscious about my nakedness. I quickly tied both the sleeves of my jumpsuit on one hand and its legs, on the other. Mita did the same and then we rushed towards the door. If anyone watching us through the camera had registered our strange actions they didn’t seem to be doing much about it. Of course all of that would change as soon as I pushed the red button beside the door. And it did.

A ear-piercing siren filled the air as Mita and I stood there, holding on tight to the railing, waiting as the door opened unhurriedly and much too slowly. A sudden blast of wind pushed against us and I staggered back, almost losing my footing for a second. If it had not been for Mita gripping my hand, I would have actually flown back into the crowd cowering behind us. I girded my feet into the floor and both of us stood firmly at the edge, clasping each other’s hands, the wind biting into our skin, our jumpsuits billowing riotously behind us.

When I got a peek of the view below us, it brought such joy to my entire being that I couldn’t imagine anything in my life ever surpassing this feeling.

Foaming blue waves yawned at us, blending into azure calmness, stretching further down into a shimmering skin of water. My stupid hunch had actually worked!

I looked at Mita. She was smiling as wide as I was. When she met my gaze, I nodded and then . . . we jumped.

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The jumpsuits broke our fall but only slightly. We plummeted down. We were falling too fast from not too far above. Freedom tasted of salt and iodine, but nearly shattered every bone in my body. For a moment, it felt like I was sinking, but then my survival instinct kicked in and I started thrusting myself to the surface. I came up gasping for breath and after a second, so did Mita.

I looked around, desperately scouting for land but as far as I could see there was only water. I started to panic, thinking we had jumped only to freeze to a certain death when a metallic beam coming from afar caught my eye. I waved at Mira and pointed in that direction and then started undoing the jumpsuit from my hands and legs. Having detached it, I tied the jumpsuit around my neck and started swimming towards the gleam. Considering that the xeppel took about 20 minutes every day to reach the dome, the glimmer was coming from a place too close to be the fields and since we had waited for a few minutes before jumping, it couldn’t be the prison we’d just left behind. Hope bloomed in my heart and made me work harder at getting to it.

It took us a long time to reach it. Partly, because it was excruciating to swim without any protection against the cold waters and also because of the rising doubt I felt as I got closer to the spectacle slowly revealing itself. It was an unearthly sight.

Five gleaming green towers shaped like enormous concave petals stood tall on a giant floating pad. This was definitely not made by humans.

This was Eron territory.My heart sunk but we had nowhere else to go.

We had come too far to turn back now. We kept

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swimming towards the structure which looked even more intimidating close up. The petal-shaped towers were covered by thick glossy plants but I could make out the windows built in at each level. As we reached the edge, I plunged my head underwater to search for a way to climb up the sloping metallic pod.

After dipping in a couple of times, I realized that the pod was ballasted by an underwater tower running deep into the sea. Still searching for a way up the smooth slope of the pod, I came up for a breath when suddenly, something heavy hit my skull. Stunned with shock as well as the force of the impact, I swung my head around wondering where the blow had come from. But there was no one around me. Then I looked up and a net jacketed my face. Desperate, I tried to flail my arms and legs when a familiar sharp pain seared through the back of my head. An overpowering feeling of helplessness dragged me down as dark spots completely clouded my vision.

X I

THE R IDE

Stinger dated 09/06/2104: The design for the first floating self-sufficient aquatic city has been approved by our Commander-in-Chief. Termed Aquapolis and fashioned after the Hibiscus, the city will have a capacity for 100,000 inhabitants. Five different towers will comprise the living facilities and will have the ability to close-in while adapting to extreme weather conditions. The central dome, aptly termed the Stybus, will use seawater to humidify the environs and harvest the crops, thus providing a sustainable food supply for the population in face of the worst natural and chemical disasters.

Aquapolis 001, 26 January 2174I woke up to a strange chill. My cheeks felt numb

from lying on a cold hard floor. I was wearing a blue suit this time. This one was not made of the same fabric and seemed to be more worn around the edges. The room I was in was a broader version of my earlier cell. I also spotted a UV pot fitted in one corner and as I looked around, I realized that was not the only difference. There was no missing wall here, no break, just a seamless expanse of four walls binding me in. This looked and felt like one of those solitary confinement rooms in prisons shown in the retro films. Only here all the walls were cold, hard and metallic.

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I gave up on investigating any further because an overwhelming feeling of despair swept over me. I felt like banging my head against the floor and crushing my skull in. But of course, I did no such thing. I just lay there feeling listless, lost and completely hopeless.

The wait was endless. At one point in the day or night, a food plate arrived through a chute flap that blended right back into the walls as soon as I picked up my plate.

I swallowed down the familiar globules of multi-coloured porridge which was as bland and inadequate as ever. Hours passed or maybe just minutes, I had no way of telling. I only got up to use the pot and once I was done, I lay down on the floor, spreading my arms and legs. It seemed surreal that my body, my life could have changed so drastically in such a few days. My muscles ached, my head hurt and the throb in my ankle had become a part of my existence. A voice startled me out of my brooding.

‘It’s a bit early for a nap, is it not . . . Mira Sharma?’I raised myself up on my feet unsteadily and turned

around for that’s where the voice came from. Shaved scalp, broad forehead, sunken, piercing eyes and a spotless square chin, Lek was not dressed in his heavy armour today. He was wearing a black bodysuit just like the prison guards. He seemed to have materialized from nowhere, or maybe the doors were just like the food chutes, cleverly concealed in the metal walls.

Standing with his hands folded behind his back, he looked at me with a bored expression on his face.

‘Dreaming of wild escapades, perhaps?’ he asked with a sigh, as if talking to me was exhausting him.

His jaded demeanour could have fooled me, if his eyes hadn’t felt so familiar and were not so easily

decipherable. They were the same mixed-up colour as Neel’s and yet they were so very different. Arctic and emotionless, they had a tell-tale glint in them. A keen sharpness which defied the indifferent behaviour he put on. This small knowledge gave me the confidence I needed to confront him. This Eron was the man who had waged war against my whole race.

‘Maybe,’ I answered him with a smirk, ‘You seem to be in serious need of entertainment.’

My bravado was reckless, idiotic even, but what was there left to lose? What could they do to me, now? Torture and beat me like they did to Mita? Whatever the consequences, it felt like if I could show him down for even a second, all my pain would be completely worth it. Maybe this little defiance would lend some meaning to the lives of all my friends which he had destroyed so easily and with such horrible brutality.

His eyes flashed but then he smiled, baring his teeth. It made his face look grotesque and the effect was chilling. ‘Your mother could also do with some of that . . . entertainment.’

His words made me suck in a breath and I had to stop myself from lunging at him. ‘Where is she?’ I asked through gritted teeth.

He smiled. ‘The question you should be asking is – how is she?’

Dread filled me but I didn’t let it show on my face. People like Lek fed off others’ fears and doubts. I treaded with care. ‘Her research . . . you kept our whole sector alive because of my Mom’s research?’

He looked at me with his piercing eyes, ‘Sometimes it surprises me that you quarrelsome, frivolous bunch

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of humoz are capable of such intelligence and such courage.’

I started at his use of the term.He smirked and said, ‘You look surprised at the

name. I think it is only fair. Your kind gave us a name, Erons and we gave you one ourselves. Humoz is much better suited than the lofty human isn’t it?

He sighed deeply and started walking around the room, keeping his eyes fixed on me.

‘Well, I had to sustain all of those humoz. I kept them in sectors. Till we had finished all our psychological and physical experiments. Till we had gleaned all that was there in your tiny little brains. Your sector was the last one. All those humoz had to be maintained, living on our resources, eating off our food. All for your mother. You see, sometimes the spark of genius doesn’t come from having a superior IQ. Sometimes it is just inherent and genetically coded. Thankfully, Mr Jain thought of bringing her to the rainforest.’

‘Our sector . . .?’‘. . . has been purged,’ he completed impassively. I

struggled to keep a calm face because his eyes were still watching, waiting to catch my reaction.

I pressed my lips together. ‘You still need my Mom though. You wouldn’t pass up a chance on immortality, would you?’

He nodded. ‘Unfortunate but true. However the good news is that now, we have you,’ he said, baring his teeth again in a mocking smile. ‘When you went missing, your Mom dropped all her work thinking you had gone Hari’s way.’ I winced at Hari’s name and Lek didn’t miss the reaction.

‘Oh yes, I know everything. Hari uncovered some

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things he shouldn’t have at the institute. Mr Jain had security keep an eye on him, but he made use of those little treks with you in the jungle. He made a run for it and I am told he has not been found yet . . . probably already been snacked upon by the mutant new breeds.’

‘But Neel told me . . .’ His spine stiffened as I uttered Neel’s name and he gave me a glare.

‘Yes, he was probably trying to protect your feeble mind.’ He stared right through me and focused on something far away. ‘That boy was always too soft on you humoz but to actually fall for one of them . . .’ his eyes panned back to my face, focused on my body, looking at it in a way that made me feel uncomfortable, ‘. . . ludicrous.’

I tried hard not to let him get to me but the look he threw my way made me cringe. So that’s what they thought of us? Then why did Neel, like his father had put it, fall for me?

‘Maybe it was because of the surveillance,’ he said, answering my unspoken question. I waited but when he didn’t elaborate, I was forced to ask, ‘Surveillance?’

He smirked at me, ‘He didn’t tell you?’When I didn’t reply, he shook his head and answered,

‘Yes, he and his little team were helping Mr Jain by keeping an eye on your mother’s research. I think Neel got a little carried away while observing you and your mother. He got involved in your lives after he saw you every day and watched your every move.’

Neel had been spying on me and my Mom? My every move! He made it sound so callous, so intrusive and maybe that’s just what it was. A bored young boy’s naive obsession with a girl from another race, whose face he had grown used to seeing on a screen.

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Insecurity started to leech away at the fire in my heart. Whatever mind games Lek was playing were succeeding in achieving their end.

‘Anyway,’ he carried on, ‘we have you now. And it will be a great motivation for your mother to finally put her head into finishing her research. You will be very comfortable here I assure you. We don’t bother with unnecessary cruelty. You’ll be assigned your quarters and you’ll stay there as long as we wish. Oh! And don’t even think about escaping. In case you haven’t figured out already, you’re in the middle of an ocean.’

‘Where are we? What is this place?’ I asked, remembering the intimidating structure I had seen in the sea before being trapped.

‘You are the second humoz to have the privilege of living on Aquapolis I, the first of the aquatic cities to be ever built,’ he said with a proud smile. ‘Designed to resist extreme weather conditions, self-sustaining and with a capacity for 1 million inhabitants . . . it is a marvel of modern science. Sometimes, I can’t believe that 60 of them are now out there on our planet.’ His eyes had that faraway look again and he went quiet, thinking of things that were probably very far removed from my immediate concerns.

‘Where is my Mom?’His eyes came back to me with a start and his face

hardened. ‘Very much here, I promise you, but the less entertaining you make yourself, the safer she will be.’

He turned to leave and the outline of a door emerged as he stepped closer to it. I tried to capture its position in the room, so I could remember it for later. As he was leaving, he turned and caught my stare.

He shook his head and muttered, ‘It is useless, Mira

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Sharma. There’s no escaping this place and soon there will be nowhere else to go to.’

‘What do you mean?’ My question was barely a whisper.

He left, melting into the walls that closed in after him. I ran towards them, feeling their smoothness with my fingers. They’d blended back in place without as much as a crease! I scanned the walls meticulously trying to find a fissure or an opening of some sort but there was no chink anywhere. I turned back disappointed and slumped down on the floor.

I was back to guessing time for hours, days, months. How did one make out time when the walls caved you in, suspended your breaths in echoes ricocheting through your brain, eyeballs bleaching with a fluorescence that seemed to be draining your very existence?

Meals and showers marked the only breaks in continuity. Plates appeared in the chute and disappeared as I woke up from the drug-induced haze. The cleansing shower sprays would sporadically appear from the roof and leave my skin feeling raw and tender. The frequency of these breaks became too crowded, too similar to keep track. I ran my fingers through my hair to stop it from matting, cleaned my mouth with the two mint leaves they generously gave along with the food and kept my bowels functional using the pot in the corner. I did everything it took to hang on to hope. I ceased to worry about Mom, her research, and how long it would sustain us. I ceased to worry about anything. But still the quantum of time was endless and increasingly I spent it slumped in a corner with my eyes shut, waiting for my end.

‘Myrah?’

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‘Myrah?’ the voice asked again. I refused to acknowledge it. Responding would mean crossing that barrier. The one that held my sanity in check.

Something touched my shoulder and I cringed from the contact. Not a hallucination then. Rubbing away the bleariness, I managed to crack my eyes open but the fluorescent lights blinded me. Then a face filled my vision, sheltering me from their harshness. My heart sped up and my breath became all knotted.

‘Myrah,’ he said again and held my face in his hands. His eyes looked pained and right at that moment it didn’t matter if he was an Eron, if he really loved me, or even if he was here to kill me. Right then all that mattered was the suffering that I saw in his eyes. That suffering which I thought had belonged only to me. I clasped him tight to myself and we stayed like that for a long time.

‘You need to come with me, Myrah,’ he finally whispered in my hair.

So he had come as my end. Maybe the agony on his face came from the discomfort of his role. Not a resonance of my feelings.

The betrayal stabbed me deep. How many times would I set myself up for this?

I pulled back and looked at him. He was unchanged. Those eyes. That nose. His lips. Just as gloriously heartbreaking as ever. When he held out his hand, I noticed his fingers had completely healed. The only marks left on them were faint, darkened welts. The Erons must have some fantastic super drugs at their disposal.

We stepped out of the room and entered a long corridor. Endless translucent walls stretched around me on both sides, seamless in their deceptive uniformity.

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Who knew how many stories like mine lay trapped behind them?

We stopped before a section of the wall and as Neel stepped closer, the outline of a door appeared on it. Stepping inside, I found the room to be in complete contrast to the previous one. Filled with strange looking equipment, its centre was occupied by a group of white metallic machines crowding around an elevated, floodlit berth. It reminded me of scary futuristic movies involving aliens and cruel experiments. My skin began to crawl and my teeth started chattering. An arm held me across my shoulders and pressed me against an unyielding chest. I turned my face and burrowed into the safety it offered me. Even through the thick layer of his suit, I could feel the frantic beat inside his chest. Maybe, just maybe, he still cared? Maybe it was just what I needed to believe. Sometimes all one could do was to believe in the lie and hope it turned true someday.

His lips moved against my hair. ‘It’s all going to be okay. I promise.’ His words weakened my knees and I slumped. He lifted me in his arms and carried me towards the berth.

Just as I tried to submit myself to my fate, a masked person entered the room. Shivers wracked my body as I lay down on the berth. It’s too soon. I had to say so many things. Why didn’t Neel take me away? I could die a thousand deaths for him . . . but him? He’d just watch as someone muffled the life out of me?

The person approached me with a med patch in his hand and I wondered if everyone could hear the frantic thudding of my heart. Then I felt it. The med patch touching my skin. My body stilled and I closed my eyes with a dreadful finality. A soft nudge on my

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shoulder had me opening my eyes again. The masked person was staring at me. My vision started to blur but I could make out the person snagging a finger on his mask and pulling it down.

Firdaus. It’s Firdaus. His face started to fade as he put his mask back on and picked up a scalpel. A scalpel? Then he did something completely unexpected and absurd. He winked at me.

What? I started to say but my tongue refused to cooperate. It lay heavy and immobile in my mouth. My vision started contorting into a dizzying, spiralling set of tunnels. The only thing piercing the haze was the sharp glint of the scalpel’s blade, till I couldn’t even hang onto that anymore.

A horrible burn rose up my throat and filled my mouth with scalding acid. I was lying on my stomach so I got up coughing and sputtering, trying to spit out the sourness. I was still in the same room, still on the berth, still alive. And I was not alone. I looked back and found Neel standing on the other side of the berth, looking down at me. Brow crinkled with concern, his hand was resting on the berth, stretched out towards mine. I stepped down from the berth and faced him.

‘Why am I still alive?’ The hoarseness of my voice made it unrecognisable even to me own ears.

He sucked in a breath and his face scrunched as if in pain. ’That’s what you think?’ he said. When I didn’t respond he straightened his back, wiping his face clean of all emotions.

‘Feel the chip in your nose,’ he said in a clipped tone.Curious, I raised my hand to my nose and found that

the lump there was gone. I looked up at him in surprise. ‘What? Where did it go?’ That’s when I realized.

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He had brought me here not to kill me but to remove the trackers from my body. I felt the base of my spine through the thin fabric of the jumpsuit. No sign of the bump there too.

‘You can thank Firdaus later,’ Neel told me, his face still expressionless. ‘As we speak, he is doing the same for your mother, then Mita, Jaggi, Kamal and Deepak. All of them are here on the polis. Once the trackers are removed, we will make a craft available for all of you. Using the location we’ll feed into the craft, you can travel to a place where there are other surviving human factions.’

My eyes widened. Maybe I had this all wrong. Maybe what we had was real. Why else would he do all this?

‘Why are you doing this?’ I asked.He remained silent and I stepped closer to him.‘Why?’ I asked him again. He crossed his arms over

his chest but it didn’t deter me. I stepped closer till I was standing right in front of him.

He looked down at me and his mask slipped. His face twisted with grief. ‘Don’t you know?’ he asked in a broken voice.

I do know. My heart throbbed with joy. I reached for his hands, unlocking them from around his chest. He let me. Lacing my fingers through his, I wrapped his arms around me. Then with our clasped hands digging into my back, I planted my face in his chest and breathed in. We stood like that for a long time. Lost in each other. Lost in our familiar togetherness.

‘You’re coming with us?’ I asked even though I already knew the answer.

‘Myrah.’ His voice was gentle as he rubbed his chin against my head.

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‘Please.’ I put all my heart, all my want in that one word.His arms tightened around me in response and I

wished I could freeze this moment forever.‘Neel!’ a voice screamed from outside and we

stepped away from each other. A harried looking Anil ran into the room.

‘They traced down the surveillance hack. We have half an hour before they boot them up again.’

‘Get Firdaus and the other humoz,’ Neel said and swung into action. Grabbing my hand, he hauled me up against him. I staggered along and tried to keep up with his pace but then Neel suddenly stopped, picked me up in his arms and started running down the corridor at break-neck speed. After what I’d just been through, the momentum was nauseating.

‘What . . . about my . . . Mom and . . . the others?’ I asked, my voice breaking in rhythm to his strides.

‘Firdaus and Anil are getting them.’I thought of the directions he had given to Anil.

Humoz, he had called them. That’s what his father had called us. He was doing all this . . . going against his own father. For me?

I felt him come to an abrupt halt and then a second later, he dropped me to my feet. We were standing in a wide hall and facing us was the strangest looking machine I had ever seen. It was shaped like a tall metallic tower resting on thin spidery legs. As we approached it, a hatch opened up on one side and I climbed in with trepidation.

Once inside, I discovered its interiors were very different from a xeppel’s. Loaded with a complex set of buttons and levers, it also had strange-looking pods embedded into the walls. I turned to see Neel tapping

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some information into a hologram. It looked like a complicated chart or maybe a map of some sort.

After he flicked it off, he turned to me. ‘I’ve programmed it to reach the destination. It’s on auto mode so none of you will have to worry.’

‘What will happen to you after we leave?’‘Nothing.’‘Nothing?’‘I have to be here.’ His face was expressionless and

I knew. Nothing I would say could make him change his mind. But I still tried.

‘Your father will never forgive you.’‘This is much more than that. He has to be stopped

and I know how.’‘Stopped?’‘From destroying the planet.’I sucked in a breath. ‘What do you mean?!’‘He plans to release toxic gases across each of the

land masses. He wants to smoke out the remaining humo . . . humans.’

‘Smoke them out?’‘He thinks he doesn’t need the land masses anymore.

The many Aquapolis around the world are all self-sustaining. Any minerals, metals they need to replenish come from the ocean floors. Already all the Aquapolis have been primed to stay away from shores . . . yes they can move as well.’

‘But the gas won’t be selective . . . it will kill everything!’

‘Just collateral damage. It doesn’t seep into the water and that’s all that matters to him.’

My mind boggled at imagining such a scenario. All the land masses converted into barren wastelands

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overnight! Trees, animals, humans. Species that took billions of years to form and link up, all eradicated with one single step. I lean against the wall for support even as Neel continued, ‘I have to stay back. I have to stop him.’ His voice was stiff but when he lifted his head, the hollowness on his face wrung my heart out.

I walked up to him and knelt down so we were face to face. Eyes closed, I touched my forehead to his. My hands found his shoulders, trailed up the sides of his neck and held the back of his head. I memorized everything. The curve of his collarbones, the firmness of his shoulders, the softness of the skin behind his ear lobes, the faint trace of hair trailing his nape.

When he wrapped his arms around me it felt like I had travelled back in time. A forgotten pulse started beating again in my heart. Then our lips touched and the beat ignited. My hands pressed him closer, trying to remove even the smallest measure of distance between us. Our lips met with a gut-wrenching tenderness. Then he abruptly removed his arms and it was like someone had punched me in the stomach. My fingers dragged themselves down his skin, unwilling to relinquish the contact. Unwilling to let go. But it was time.

I watched him disappear through the hatch and squeezed my eyes shut wanting to remember this moment because even though we had said our goodbyes, I knew deep down that what we had was unchanged, untarred and had marked me forever. Falling in love with him had ruined me for life.

‘Mira!’ I opened my eyes and saw Mom rushing towards me. She wrapped me in her arms and we held each other rocking and sobbing till another body hit us both. I lifted my eyes to see Mita’s spiked red head

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buried in my mother’s back. More people filled up the small space inside the craft and the three of us broke up to watch them. Firdaus brought in an unconscious Deepak and belted him in a pod. Anil brought in Kamal and did the same. Before leaving, Firdaus stopped to give me a chin raise and then he was gone. Neel walked in again carrying Jaggi over his shoulder.

My heart flipped painfully in my chest. This was the last time I was going to see him. I steeled myself for what was to come. The last look, the last touch. But then it all happened in less than a second. Neel put Jaggi into the pod and just as he was about to belt him in, Jaggi smacked Neel’s head down on his knee. A crunch and a second later Neel crumpled on the floor. Both Mom and I rushed to Neel’s help. Ignoring us, Jaggi hopped across to the control panel. I looked down at Neel, his head lying limp on my lap. Mom tore a strip from her shirt and pushed it down on the gush of blood flowing from his forehead.

‘Mita! The hatch,’ I heard Jaggi shout. I looked up to see Mita rushing to close the hatch. As the craft came to life, I heard shouts coming from outside. Worried, I looked at Jaggi who seemed quite comfortable in front of the control panel. He had a hologram open and as he flicked an icon on it, the craft started rising in the air. I watched in dread as we neared the roof of the hall but as soon as we approached it the roof disappeared. And just like that we were off, shooting up in the sky.

Neel was still unconscious but at least the blood had stopped flowing. After a few minutes, as his breathing steadied and his wound clotted, I started worrying about how he would react when he came around. And what would he do now? What about his father?!

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The turn of events was too sudden, too drastic for me contemplate.

‘Where are we going?’ I heard Mita asking Jaggi who was busy studying a navigational chart. From this distance, it looked like the one Neel had been feeding our destination into.

‘Camp Riese,’ he replied.‘What?’ Both Mita and I shouted at the same time.Jaggi looks at Mita and then glanced back at me.

His eyes shifted to Neel’s head resting in my lap.‘I’ll be damned,’ Mita muttered and I wondered about

this place that had her so freaked. Jaggi didn’t say anything but just turned back to the panel and shrugged.

After a few minutes as Mom explored the cabinets for some edibles, I saw Mita observing something intently out of the window. I followed her gaze and my breath caught at the view outside.

The sky wasn’t blue anymore, it was pitch black and shining across as far as my eyes could see, were tiny crystalline sparkles. I squeezed my eyes shut and thanked the fates for the way things turned out. When I opened them again, I found Mita looking at me and even after all that we had been through, we looked at each other and smiled. ‘Tell me about Camp Riese?’ I asked her and she started talking.

It seems Camp Riese was actually an old bunker complex. It was in the same continent as the Eiffel Tower and had played a big role in a war. A war that had happened centuries ago.

Mita told me it was called the Second World War and that the camp had been used by the bad guys to store their weapons. These bad guys had thought of themselves as superior to the others and had enslaved

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many of the other races to prove their dominance. It all seemed rather familiar to me. The only difference was in our case, the camp which had harboured evil earlier was now going to be put to good use.

I remembered Neel mentioning earlier that there were other surviving human factions there. I told Mita about that. She told me a lot more about this war and how it had panned out. It was all very fascinating. I asked her how she knew about all this and she told me her father had gotten to know about this camp from a nomad they’d met while living in the jungle. Long after Mita finished, I rested my head against the wall and gazed at the sky outside. Why did everything blur when you moved on the ground, but remained static when flying in air? Maybe because on ground we had fears and hesitations muddling our vision. The constant looking over the shoulder, the perpetual dread of the shadows lurking in the bushes, or just the unending comparisons against other people who marked our lives and changed our destiny forever.

I looked at the myriad twinkling stars stuck on the sky like ancient jewels. I watched them with wonder and swelling relief. Up here, so far away from the muck down below, it almost felt like I was invincible. Here, where there was nothing holding me back, no one pulling me down, it almost felt like I could shape my own destiny. And maybe I would.

EP ILOGUE

Stinger dated 09/2193: Bioscience personnel are advised that Senior Mentor Neel, Mentor Suri and Senior Servicer Froi are scheduled for Renege today at 34:00 galaxy time.

My mind is conscious. The dose has worn off but strangely, I don’t feel disoriented at all. Maybe it’s because I know what to expect. I had come in this room an hour ago, feeling dragged down by the perpetual weight sitting on my chest. My whole body had felt stiff. Weary. Old.

I know what it will feel like when I get up now. Adrenalin coursing through my veins, crackling my new bones, renewing my decaying muscles, charging up every fibre, every cell in my supplanted body. The only thing that’ll remain the same will be my thoughts and a part of my memory. Because that is the one drawback of the Renege – retrograde amnesia.

I lost about thirty per cent of my memories when I underwent my very first procedure. That was when I had turned 30. At that time, they had instructed me to undergo the procedure every ten years.

This has been my second Renege.The craving in my stomach wills me to get up but

when I raise my head, a sudden jolt in my fingertips

stuns me for a second. I look down at my hands in surprise. This has never happened before. Out of nowhere an image of shredded fingers flashes through my mind. Horrified, I raise my hands and flip them around. I stare at my intact, unharmed hands and realize that my fears are completely unfounded.

I lie back and close my eyes, trying hard to centre my mind but then an image flashes through my mind again. This time it’s nothing gruesome. It’s actually a face. A girl’s face.

It drifts in and out, just escaping my reach. I squeeze my eyes tight and try harder to make out its features. Round black eyes, dusky oval face and raven hair. A humoz! What was a humoz doing in my dreams? I hear someone entering the room and I sit up with a start. It’s my attendant. I glare at him but he doesn’t seem to have noticed anything amiss.

He starts telling me all the post-procedure precautions I need to take, but I already know them all by heart. I switch my mind off and think about the next few days. As per the post-procedure rules, everyone gets a week off after they’ve undergone the Renege, but with the upcoming selection for the council, taking leave now might not be the best move for me.

I can’t share any of these worries with my attendant so when he bows, I just nod my head and leave for my room.

I lie down looking forward to a restful sleep but the strange flashes intensify over the night. The dreams are unsettling. They are much too vivid. There is too much emotion. Nothing of this nature has ever been reported post procedure! Myrah. The name suddenly surfaces on my tongue and I put my hand over my mouth, surprised

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at having uttered it out loud. I tear open my eyes and even my breathing. Even the impulsiveness of the act is completely out of character for me. Too spontaneous. Too out of balance. Not something a senior would do.

Dawn breaks but I don’t step out of my room. My brain is much too muddled for any coherent thought or action.

Why are these memories coming back to me now? They were supposed to be deleted from my brain forever. After all it’s a well-known, well-studied side effect of Renege. Then why now? Had something gone wrong in the procedure this time? I flex my hands and feet. They seem fit and springy like they always do post Renege.

I go out for a walk, eat the food slotted for me, but then finally decide on taking a few days off. I need time to process this.

And that’s what I do over the next few days. At night, as the images continue to haunt me, I start linking up the flashes. The girl’s face becomes clearer, bringing other memories along with it. Memories that were buried in a young, fresh heart.

The ache in my chest the first time I saw her, the thrill when my lips touched hers, the fury of seeing her being held by the guards, of finding her broken and forlorn in one of the watch rooms. The last helpless words she shared with me with my head in her lap, right before the other humans started torturing me for information. They’d been trying to find out about our plans. I remember the look of betrayal on her face when I’d told her that years ago my father had secluded batches of humans for his own experiments. He’d put them in sectors and studied their knowledge, habits, building

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the basis for our own people. I remembered how my father had then managed to track my whereabouts and had destroyed most of the underground camp. I remembered the most painful thing. That instead of coming with me, despite all the things I had done for her, the girl had decided to stay back with that other humoz boy, Jaggi.

Myrah. That was my name for her.I try to push the memories away. To be remembering

these moments now means that they must be deeply ingrained in my brain. But how could I have possibly felt any connection with that girl? It seems so frivolous, so trivial. And all for an unsightly humoz? Absurd.

Soni visits me on the fourth day. We talk about the selection due the next day. My scorecard is perfect but that’s not enough according to Soni. She thinks the only thing that will now differentiate the candidates is the final sermon. A sermon that will be watched by every Eron on this planet and beyond. A sermon that I had already prepared before my procedure. Before she leaves, she asks about my well-being. ‘Better than ever before,’ I say and it’s not a lie. Physically, I feel like a 20-year-old even though my mind is in shambles. Of course, I don’t share any of this with her. A human love interest being dredged up from my past would be disastrous at this stage.

Soni seems satisfied with my reply and after she leaves, I spend some time going over my sermon. A lot of it is from my father’s notes. Pity, he couldn’t live to see how our people had flourished. Pity, he couldn’t live till they discovered the procedure. He spent his life driving our scientists for drugs that could provide the ever-elusive immortality. How ironic that they

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discovered it just five years after his death. Five years, after they replaced his position with an elected council. And how ironic was it that the Commander-in Chief of all the Erons, the one who had ensured their racial supremacy was now just a name on the data machines. And here I am his son, Neel Singh, having to prove my worth to be elected to the council.

Father would have been proud of the strategy my sermon illustrates. I will be advocating for the aggressive spreading of our system across the Virgo super-cluster. I have even prepared for the possible counters that the council can pose to test me.

For example, they may question me about the investment in these expeditions. It’s true that the expeditions in the last ten years within the local galactic group have not come up with equivalent returns in resource mining but still, I will press upon the need for an increase in the intensity and hostility of our search efforts. The chief reason being that our current resources garnered from across the local galactic group are not only unsustainable but are of inferior quality.

They may then argue that even though the ocean bases have been utilized, the potential of the land masses, both here and on Earth have remained untapped for decades. But then I’ll point out that whatever minerals are left in the land masses across both the planets are either contaminated by the extermination efforts, or have already been staked upon by the mutants. Especially on Earth. They are just too many of them now, multiplying every minute and becoming an uncontrollable menace.

It might as well make sense to undertake a second more extreme extermination exercise to get rid of them.

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The next day I wake up to a charged air. The alleys outside are buzzing with excitement. The selection happens only once in ten years and is an eagerly anticipated public event.

Inside the public space, I take my place in the sphere of seniors. Along with me are the other two candidates. The council sits behind us and all of us face our audience.

I am the third speaker but I patiently wait for my turn. I am in no hurry. The conviction I have keeps my back straight and my chin high. I wonder if this is how everyone feels when they’re sure of their victory. Can they sense every fibre of their being lit up? Do they see each and every face in the audience? Each and every detail? Do their toes and fingers arch to touch that exultant high? And then I see her.

It is the face from my dreams. The humoz girl! But this is impossible. How could she have ever survived? Her hair has been shaved off so she looks like us, but there is no mistaking those eyes. I could recognize them anywhere. Black, beautiful and hopelessly human.

She hasn’t noticed my attention yet. Her face is twisted with an ugly humoz emotion as she stares at someone standing in the front. My eyes shift to the subject of her wrath. Soni. I hear the first speaker’s heels clacking down to the focal point and I get distracted for a second. When my eyes shift back to the audience, I find the girl has disappeared. Where did she go? My eyes scan the crowd desperately, trying to find her face. The speaker starts talking of new technologies for improving ocean mining and of focusing on researching sustainables among the local galactic. The same old tripe. I tune her out and keep looking for the girl. But she’s gone. Nowhere to be seen.

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Maybe it was just an error. A Renege-fuelled fantasy. I can’t afford to indulge in any fantasies at this moment.

The first speaker finishes to a mild applause. I banish all the plaguing illusions and try to focus on the second sermon which turns out to be on the most differentiated topic ever. The candidate talks about utilizing and domesticating the mutants on Earth. To a stunned audience, he elucidates the benefits of optimizing the resources we have on existing planet groups and then he stresses that it requires involving the other life forms as well.

He talks about conducting partnerships instead of exterminations, even as the audience shuffles on their feet, trying to hide their sly smiles. I feel my blood boiling at his stupidity, his attempts to make a mockery of the sermon, defending the critters who have forever attacked us, killing our kind, stealing our resources. I can barely contain myself as I see him finish and step down. I don’t wait for him to come back. I walk past his shocked ruddy face and stand there facing my people. My voice is strong, every timbre, every tenor daring to be challenged.

‘One people, one system, one cluster . . .’