Vedha's blood made a thin, bright line down the cockpit window, almost beautiful against the pale morning sky.
For a second, he simply watched it drift, weightless, as the plane shuddered around him. The engines howled, the cabin alarms shrieked, and somewhere behind the closed door, fifty stolen girls were crying in a dozen languages. His left shoulder burned like a coal where the bullet had gone in and not come out. With every breath, the pain lanced through his chest, sharp and electric, but the old training forced his hands to stay steady on the controls.
Fifty years of life, and this was how it would end: in a stolen jet above the Arabian Sea, caught between sky and ocean.
"Vedha, focus," he whispered in Hindi, talking to himself the way his instructors in Delhi used to do. "Inhale. Exhale. Fly the plane."
His fingertips were slick with sweat as they gripped the yoke. He had never meant to be here, in this cockpit, with the world narrowing into a tunnel of blinking lights and urgent warnings. He was an Indian orphan who grew up with nothing but the red crystal at his throat and the smell of the railway tracks in his nose. He was an old spy who should have died quietly in some hospital bed, not at thirty thousand feet above a foreign coast. Yet fate had a way of circling back.
The red crystal lay warm against his skin under the cheap cotton shirt and security guard's jacket. The thread that held it—faded, frayed in places—dug into the back of his neck as if reminding him: You are not finished yet.
He blinked onto the small display to his right. They had just crossed the invisible line of Indian airspace heading west, toward another country, another life the girls had never asked for. The traffickers had been so sure. They had laughed in half a dozen accents as they forced the girls up the steps, as if they were cargo. To them, India was a source, not a home.
Not to Vedha.
Behind his ribs, something hot and old twisted. He saw, in a flash, a boy of eight sitting on the cracked floor of a government orphanage, knees pulled to his chest, watching a worker peel a red crystal off a dead woman's neck. The woman lay on a stretcher, covered in dust from the train accident. No one knew her name, only that she had clutched the small crystal until her fingers turned blue. They had pried her hands open and given the stone to the boy because he was the quiet one. Because he never cried.
"Keep it, Vedha," the matron had said in Telugu, pressing the necklace into his palm. "Maybe it will remember you when nobody else does."
He had never taken it off.
Now, fifty years later, that same crystal rested against his heartbeat while the plane screamed around him.
"Sir?" a small voice said behind him, trembling.
He half-turned, wincing as white pain shot through his shoulder. The cockpit door stood half open; he had forgotten to shut it after dragging the last trafficker's body out of the aisle. A girl of maybe sixteen hovered just inside, bare feet blackened with dust, mascara streaks cutting through the grime on her cheeks.
Her eyes were wide but strange: not just afraid, but hard, as if the fear had hit something solid and turned into anger.
"Sir, the… the plane is…" She gestured helplessly, shoulders shaking.
"Still flying," Vedha said, and managed a thin, crooked smile. "For the moment."
Her gaze flicked to the blood soaking through his shirt. "You are shot."
"I am old," he said. "We break easily."
The joke came out weaker than he meant, words hitching on the pain. Still, the corner of her mouth twitched, and he felt a tiny victory. Fear was an enemy; you broke it with anything you could—humor, orders, even lies.
"What is your name?" he asked.
"Aarohi," she whispered. "From Pune."
"Good. Aarohi from Pune, listen to me." His voice sharpened, sliding into the tone the intelligence trainers had drilled into him. The tone that had once made raw recruits stand straighter in dusty yards outside Hyderabad. "Go back and tell the others: Nobody moves unless I say. Seat belts on. Heads down when I shout. Understood?"
She swallowed, nodding fast. "Who are you, sir?"
He thought of all the names he had used: courier, sound technician, driver, stunt coordinator at a Hollywood studio. Ghost, one handler had called him once. You move like a ghost, Vedha. No one sees you until it's too late.
"I'm someone who refuses to let you disappear," he said quietly. "Now go."
She hesitated. "Will we live?"
He met her eyes. There was no room for doubt. Not for them.
"Yes," he said. "You will. Now close the door."
When it clicked shut, the cockpit felt even smaller. The air smelled of metal, sweat, and gunpowder, with a faint, sickly trace of perfume from the traffickers—cheap cologne that clung to their dead bodies.
Those bodies lay in the aisle outside, where he had left them. Men who thought girls were commodities, numbers that turned into money. He remembered flashes of the fight: the first man's surprise when the "old Indian security guard" blurred forward and drove an elbow into his throat; the second man's pistol flashing; the burning punch of the bullet into Vedha's shoulder; the scream of a girl as a stray shot shattered a luggage bin. The training had taken over, turning his body into a machine: close distance, disarm, disable, no wasted movement. Every strike answered years of reports he had read about missing girls, lists of names that never came home.
His heart thudded in his ears. Sweat trickled into his eyes.
"Altitude," he muttered, scanning the instrument panel. Numbers blurred, then sharpened as he forced his vision to focus. He had flown enough simulators at the government training center to understand the basics, but this was no simulation. There was no instructor to grab the controls if he failed.
He dug his phone out of his pocket with his good hand. The screen was spiderwebbed with cracks from where a trafficker had kicked it during the struggle, but it still came to life. No signal. They were too far out. For a heartbeat, panic clawed at him—not for himself, but for the fifty girls trapped behind him in metal and sky.
He closed his eyes, forcing his thoughts to slow. Inhale. Exhale. His instructors had taught him to breathe through pain, through fear, through gunfire. Government men in plain shirts, with kind eyes and voices that never rose; they had come to the orphanage when he was sixteen.
"You are good at watching," one of them had said, crouching so they were eye level. "You see everything and speak little. That is useful."
Useful. It was the first time anyone had called him that.
They had taken him away from the stink of urine and cheap rice, from the thin mattresses and the bruises left by older boys. To a compound outside the city where the air smelled of dust and gun oil, where he learned to run until his lungs burned and to shoot until his arms ached, where books were placed in his hands that talked about history, politics, networks, codes.
"You have no family," the trainer had said one night as they sat under a harsh white light, cleaning their pistols. "That is a wound. We cannot heal it. But we can give you a purpose. A man with a purpose can walk through hell and keep walking."
At sixteen, Vedha had believed him. At fifty, bleeding in a stolen plane, he still did.
He opened his eyes. The purpose was screaming in the cabin behind him.
"Okay, old man," he murmured. "Let's land this thing."
He leaned forward, fingers adjusting the autopilot settings. The plane's nose trembled as it began a shallow turn. The altimeter numbers started to sink, slowly, like a tired heart rate.
He knew he was losing blood fast. Every beat felt weaker than the last, as if someone had turned down the volume on his body. His left hand had already gone numb, so he pressed it hard against the wound, feeling sticky warmth seep between his fingers.
He thought of the years in Hollywood, moving like a shadow between make-believe explosions and fake blood. The studio had been the perfect cover: a brown-skinned man with salt-and-pepper hair and quick hands, known for making stunts look real. No one had questioned the Indian technician who vanished between sound stages and back lots. They had never known that while actors practiced their lines, he had listened in on phone calls, copied hard drives, traced the invisible wires that connected film money to flesh trafficking.
He remembered standing in the dark of a sound stage while a director shouted through a megaphone, watching a choreographed fight between two stars who would go home to warm beds and safe lives. Outside those walls, real girls disappeared off real streets—Hyderabad, Mumbai, Delhi—pulled into vans and never seen again. The reports had crossed his desk back in those first years as an analyst. Bollywood hopefuls, waitresses, runaways. Numbers in spreadsheets.
He had stared at those numbers until they blurred, his chest tight with a helpless, wordless rage.
"This will be your last assignment," his handler had said, sliding the file across a café table in Burbank. Traffic growled outside; a TV behind the counter played a song from an Indian film, slightly out of tune. "A ring using private flights, US and Europe. Girls from India, Nepal, Bangladesh. They vanish at the source. We need someone inside to map the route."
"You say that every time," Vedha had replied dryly, but his hand had closed around the file as if it were the only solid thing in the world.
"Because every time, you survive." The handler had smiled sadly. "Maybe this time you will not need to."
He hadn't told the handler about the ache in his chest when he climbed stairs, the way his hands shook sometimes when he threaded a needle. Fifty was not old, but his body carried more than years. It carried fractures from falls, scars from knives and bullets, the ghost of infections and untreated fevers from childhood. He knew he was running on borrowed time.
Now the debt was coming due.
The intercom crackled under his hand. He pressed the button.
"This is Vedha," he said, voice resonating through the cabin. "Listen carefully, all of you."
The babble of panic quieted into ragged breaths and muffled sobs.
"You have been taken from your homes," he said, choosing each word. "From Mumbai, from Chennai, from villages I have never seen. They lied to you. They promised jobs, visas, films. They meant to sell you. That will not happen."
A sob turned into a choked laugh, disbelieving.
"We are going back to India," Vedha said. "But I need your help to land. I am injured. I cannot do it alone."
Silence, thick and heavy. Then Aarohi's voice, shaky but stronger than before: "What do we do, sir?"
"Some of you know planes," he guessed aloud. "Your fathers, your brothers, maybe they work in airports? Some of you have seen movies, played games. You are not useless. You will listen to my instructions, and you will not panic. We will do this together."
As he spoke, he felt something shift in the air behind him. Panic folded into a different shape: a tense, fragile hope.
He released the intercom button and sagged back for a moment. The cockpit swayed. His vision tunneled and blurred; the instrument panel seemed to recede down a long black corridor.
The crystal at his throat grew very warm.
He thought of the first time he'd noticed anything strange about it. He had been fourteen, burning with fever in the orphanage infirmary. The room had swayed just like this, walls sliding in and out of focus. He had clutched the crystal in his fist, and for a heartbeat, he had seen — or thought he had seen — a woman's face above him. Dark eyes, tired and gentle, a hand brushing his hair back from his forehead. He had opened his mouth to speak and found he could not. The next morning, the fever had broken.
He had told no one. The crystal was his, and so was the mystery.
Now, as his blood soaked through the security jacket, the stone seemed to pulse in time with his slowing heart.
"Not yet," he muttered. "Let me finish this."
The cockpit door eased open again. Aarohi slipped inside with two other girls behind her. One was maybe thirteen, with a school plait coming undone; the other, older, in her early twenties, wearing a cheap synthetic salwar kameez that still smelled faintly of incense.
"Sir, we…" Aarohi swallowed. "Can we help here?"
The youngest girl's eyes went straight to the blood, then to his face, as if measuring how much time he had left.
"Can you read English?" Vedha asked, forcing his voice to stay even.
All three nodded.
"Good. You—" He pointed his chin at the oldest. "Stand here. If I tell you to read any label, do it out loud. You—" He shifted his gaze to the youngest. "Sit in that seat. Put on the headset. When I say, you will repeat my words to the radio. Someone will answer. You tell them exactly what I say."
The girl's hands shook as she settled into the co-pilot's chair, headset crooked over one ear, but she moved quickly, like someone used to following instructions. Maybe she had parents who shouted orders in a crowded kitchen, or a teacher who barked at her to stand and recite.
"Aarohi," Vedha said. "You watch me. If I pass out, you slap my face and shout my name. You understand? Do not let me sleep."
A flicker of fierce amusement lit the girl's eyes. "Yes, sir."
He smiled despite himself. "Good. Now let us bring you home."
His hands moved across the controls, guided by memory and instinct. He told the youngest girl what to say into the radio, his voice steady, ignoring the wet weakness creeping up his arm.
"Mayday, mayday," she repeated, her voice small but clear. "This is—" She stumbled over the technical designation, and he mouthed it, guiding her. "We have a medical emergency. Pilot and crew are dead. Plane has been taken by traffickers. A passenger has control but is injured. Carrying approximately fifty Indian nationals. Requesting immediate guidance to nearest Indian airfield."
The reply came a moment later, crackling through the headset. The girl's eyes widened.
"They are asking for… for details," she said.
"Give them," Vedha answered. "Tell them my name. Tell them I am Indian Intelligence. Tell them this plane is coming home whether they like it or not."
His vision blurred again, but he heard the rustle of incredulous voices on the other end when his name went through. Somewhere, a radar screen lit up with their position. Somewhere, a controller in a white shirt and tie stared at a blinking dot and made a decision that would be talked about for years.
The descent began. The plane shivered, then settled into a long, careful glide.
Outside the window, clouds parted to show a smudge of land far below, edged in silver where the sea met the shore. He did not know which city it was yet—maybe Mumbai, maybe Goa—but it was India, and that was enough.
"Sir," Aarohi said softly. "Are you… are you scared?"
He considered the question.
"I have been scared many times," he said. "When I was your age, I was scared every night. The orphanage… it was not kind. The city was not kind. But fear is not the enemy. It is a warning. It tells you what matters."
"To live?" the youngest girl whispered.
"To live," he agreed. "And to make sure they do not take from you what they took from me."
He thought of all the things he had never had: a mother's touch, a father's laugh, a home that did not smell of disinfectant and despair. He thought of all the things the traffickers would have taken from these girls if he had failed: their futures, their bodies, their sense of being human.
The crystal against his chest pulsed again, almost in approval.
The radio crackled. "You are cleared to approach," the girl relayed, voice shaky. "They… they are clearing the runway. They say, 'Hold her steady. We see you.'"
Vedha let out a breath he hadn't known he was holding. His shoulder throbbed with each heartbeat, and his fingers felt like they belonged to someone else, but he could see the ground now: the flat ribbon of runway, the scatter of buildings, the tiny ants of emergency vehicles lining up like a silent guard of honor.
"Seat belts on," he said into the intercom. "Heads down when I shout. We may bounce. Do not scream; it does nothing except scare the person next to you."
A nervous titter of laughter came back along the cabin speakers. He swallowed the lump in his throat.
"Sir," Aarohi said, eyes shining with tears. "After this… will you—"
"After this," he said, cutting in gently, "you will go home. You will live a long life. You will tell your children that one day, you landed a plane with your own hands. And you will never again believe anyone who tells you that you are weak."
He did not answer the question she had not finished. He did not need to. The girls were not stupid.
The runway rose to meet them. The plane floated, then dropped. The wheels kissed the tarmac, bounced once, twice, then settled with a roar and a long, shuddering scream of rubber and metal. The cabin erupted in screams that turned into cries of joy.
Vedha held the brakes, teeth gritted, as the aircraft hurtled down the strip, slowing, slowing, until at last it rolled to a groaning crawl.
He let go of the yoke.
It was strangely quiet inside his head now. The alarms had ceased; the engine noise faded to a distant hum. He could hear the girls sobbing behind him, hear someone shouting prayers in Hindi, another in Tamil, another in Bengali. He could hear sirens outside, growing louder as the emergency vehicles raced alongside the plane.
"Sir! We did it!" the youngest girl cried, tearing off the headset. Her eyes sparkled with wild relief. "We landed! We—"
Her voice broke off as she saw his face.
His skin had turned a waxy gray. The blood on his shirt was almost black now, dried in stiff patches. His breathing came in shallow, rattling pulls. He tried to straighten, to give her a reassuring smile, but his body refused.
"Good work," he whispered. His voice scraped like gravel in his throat. "You did well. All of you."
Aarohi grabbed his hand. Her fingers were warm and tight around his.
"You have to come," she said. "You have to tell them. Tell the police, the reporters. You are the hero."
He almost laughed. Hero. The word felt too big for him. He thought of all the operations that had never made headlines, of the faces that had never been found, the girls he had not reached in time. For each success, there had been failures carved into his memory like scars.
"I am tired," he said instead.
The cockpit door burst open, light flooding in as someone outside triggered the emergency stairs. Voices shouted, boots pounded. He could hear orders being barked in crisp Hindi and English, hear the sharp, clean competence of trained responders.
Hands reached for him—paramedics in bright vests, a uniformed officer—but the world was already turning distant, like a film shot through fog.
His fingers slipped from Aarohi's grasp. As he slumped back in the seat, the red crystal at his throat flared with a sudden, fierce heat. He gasped, or thought he did; he could no longer feel his chest moving. For an instant, in the space between one heartbeat and the absence of the next, he felt again that feather-light touch against his hair, smelled dust and jasmine and the faint, remembered warmth of a body that had once held him.
"Amma?" he tried to say, but the word never made it past his lips.
Outside, the cabin doors swung open. Sunlight poured into the plane. The girls began to descend, shepherded by officers with gentle hands and hard eyes. Some of them looked back toward the cockpit, searching for the man who had spoken on the intercom, who had turned fear into instructions and chaos into landing.
None of them noticed the small, red crystal on its faded thread as it lifted silently from Vedha's still chest.
It hung in the air for a moment, catching the sunlight, glowing like a drop of frozen blood. Then, as footsteps thundered up the stairs and paramedics crowded in around the body, it winked out of sight, as if swallowed by the light itself.
Later, reporters would speak of a mysterious Indian agent who had saved fifty girls from a fate they could barely describe. They would show grainy photos, shaky phone videos taken on the tarmac, interviews with sobbing parents. His name would be mentioned, then mispronounced, then slowly forgotten as other stories took its place.
But for now, as the sirens wailed and a hot wind swept across the runway, a quiet absence hovered over the cockpit. The red crystal was gone. The thread that had once cut into the back of his neck lay empty, tucked under his collar like the last secret of a man who had lived his life in shadows.
And in the minds of fifty rescued girls, a new story took root: a story of an old orphan who had refused to let them become invisible, who had trusted them with their own survival, who had died making sure they lived.