The first cries hit the air at 4:03 p.m.
Aryan Sharma had been standing on the terrace of an unfinished high-rise in Lower Parel, threads open, trying to track the minute fluctuations in stability since his confrontation with the Wardens. The view was all steel bones and jagged cranes, Mumbai's glass towers gleaming beyond in that deceptive afternoon calm. He hadn't eaten since morning. The Shard Within had been restless—pulsing like a muscle bracing for impact—but there'd been no visible anomaly.
Then, without warning, he felt the shift.
It was not a ripple in the loop or a tidy probability fracture. This one had no finesse.
It was blunt, ugly—designed to shove hard.
Through the thread-view, Aryan saw it bloom: a dense black sphere of interference about two kilometers south, spreading like ink in water. The moment it touched surrounding reality, thousands of thread-lines snapped in unison.
And then came the screams.
He was there in under five minutes.
The black sphere wasn't visible to anyone without layered sight, but its effects were everywhere.
A street market had been half rewritten—fruit stalls overlapping with rusted cars that should have been scrap decades ago, bodies flickering between outfits from different years. People knelt, clutching their heads, muttering in voices scrambled with multiple memories.
Through the noise, Aryan caught fragments:
"My mother's still alive—no wait—"
"The wedding was in—what year was it?"
"Risha! Where's—she was—Risha!"
"I never learned to—yes I did—I—"
A.I.D.A.'s voice snapped into his ear:
"Cascade alert: uncontrolled merge-points. Someone's forcing multiple erased loops into singular minds. Probability engine confirms: artificial trigger. This isn't natural destabilization."
Aryan's jaw set. "Wardens."
"Affirmative."
It was almost elegant in its cruelty—simply restore too much. Memory bandwidth snaps; minds seize trying to reconcile contradictions. People break. The public sees chaos, blames the man who made remembering possible.
And sure enough… he spotted them.
Three figures, deliberately unremarkable—jeans, untucked shirts, backpacks. Perfectly local.
But their threads carried no origin signatures inside this loop.
Warden operatives in human masks.
They weren't helping. They weren't comforting. They were whispering into ears, pointing fingers—always in Aryan's direction.
He felt the weight of stares begin to gather.
Murmurs rose fast—fear moves quicker than fact.
That's him.
The one changing everything.
He did this.
Time to get ahead of the spin.
Without hesitation, Aryan triggered a silent call through the Shard's link.
Anchors answered within seconds.
In a Byculla tailor shop, the old shopkeeper closed his eyes and let his two-loop memory stabilize into a ground-calm field.
In Kurla, the teenage medic touched three patients at once, pushing balancing scripts through fevered synapses.
In Dadar, the ex-driver broadcast a steady emotional beat from his rooftop, a slow pulse that told panicking minds: you are here, now, whole.
In thread-view, Aryan saw tendrils of stable light begin pushing back the black sphere's edge.
But the problem was at the center.
He moved.
At the heart of the collapse, a girl of maybe twenty lay on her side, trembling violently. Her threads burned with overload—five distinct life histories crammed into one frame. She mouthed words from different loops:
Names, train routes, favorite foods that changed mid-sentence.
Aryan knelt, letting the Shard extend into her thread-core. The overload fought back immediately, spitting timelines at him like debris—him holding her hand at a funeral, him never meeting her at all, him as a stranger she'd once ignored on a bus.
"Hey," he said softly, pouring anchor tone into his voice, "you don't have to hold them all right now."
The Shard wrapped her in a field of selective quiet—not erasing, not deleting, but placing each memory gently on a shelf inside her mind until they stopped clawing at dominance.
Her breathing steadied. She blinked up at him as her overload cooled.
"Who are you?" she whispered.
"Just someone who remembers," Aryan said.
When she could sit up, he left her in the care of a nearby Anchor team and pushed deeper toward the three planted Wardens.
They saw him coming.
One of them—leaner than the others—grinned like a man who'd just baited the perfect trap. "Here to fix your mess, Sage?"
Aryan didn't bother with a reply. He reached through his own thread-field and slammed their human-masked timelines open.
In an instant, the street around them shimmered—not for the public, but for the operatives—showing six of their past loop assignments:
Standing over erased villages. Pressing rods into people's spines. Wiping names from wedding books. One taking a coffee break as an entire city's history vanished.
"You want collapse? I can give you collapse," Aryan said evenly.
The lean operative laughed. "We are collapse. You're just a recruit who doesn't realize he's playing our game."
The other two moved first—rods flashing out from their backpacks.
Aryan didn't retreat. He dropped probability anchors at their feet—tiny slips in cause-and-effect that made them misjudge each step by fractions of a second. Their strikes missed high, again and again, until he closed the distance.
Memory meets memory:
He pressed his palm to one's neck and injected the sound of a child's laughter from an erased village into their neural core.
The man went rigid, face slackening as if he'd been unplugged.
The lean Warden didn't hesitate—he dropped his rod and lunged barehanded for Aryan's chest.
And that was his mistake.
The moment fingers touched his hoodie, Aryan let the Shard flood backward—not with grief this time, but with coherence.
The lean Warden was forced to remember every erased junction of his orders, every tiny kindness he'd erased and never asked why. His body trembled.
"This," Aryan said softly, "is what stability feels like. And it's the one thing you can't weaponize."
The man gasped, staggered, and collapsed to his knees.
By the time Aryan looked up, the crowd had quieted—the black sphere shrinking as the Anchors' field overpowered it completely.
The manufactured collapse was ending.
A.I.D.A.'s voice was sharp in his head:
"Probability readjustment confirms: the media threads will frame you as the cause anyway. The Wardens seeded enough bystanders with planted versions before you arrived."
Aryan exhaled slowly. "Then we show them what really happened."
He pulled from the Shard—broadcasting the truth-memory of the event directly into those affected: the sight of the agents seeding panic, the sound of their orders, the black sphere's birth.
It wasn't a permanent fix—memories could be contested, suppressed again.
But for now, those in this market would not forget who had saved them.
An hour later, Aryan sat in the cramped backroom of the Anchors' hidden hub, a half-abandoned courier office. Twelve Anchors sat or leaned against battered desks, still buzzing from the fieldwork.
"This," Aryan told them, "was only the first public strike. They'll aim bigger next time—maybe whole districts at once. They want to scare people into thinking remembering is poison."
"They nearly succeeded," one Anchor admitted. "If you hadn't gotten there—"
"We'd be on the news," another finished grimly. "The villain story writes itself."
Aryan nodded. "So we write a better one."
The Shard Within thrummed, pleased.
A.I.D.A. translated:
"Network expansion required. Memory defense must go omnidirectional. Prepare for multi-node vigilance."
Aryan set his jaw.
The Manufactured Collapse had failed—but it showed him exactly where the next war would be fought.
Not in secrecy.
But in the public's belief.