The morning after the escape felt like a city holding its breath. Street vendors swept wet dust into neat piles; autorickshaws threaded through narrow lanes carrying passengers wrapped in plastic against the rain. But inside the walls of Central Jaipur High, the world moved toward something that looked innocent — paper lanterns, a small stage, a folded program announcing the cultural evening. Parents arranged chairs under strings of fairy lights. Children practiced songs in a corner, their voices brittle with excitement.
Lucy walked the campus twice before the function began, the familiar layout of the school oddly comforting and tragically useful. She memorized vantage points — the balcony behind the auditorium, the service gate used for deliveries, the path through the school garden that led to the old drainage culvert. She laid traps in her head: patrol patterns, where to position volunteers, which classrooms to keep locked.
Siya arrived before dusk with a backpack full of things that still felt foreign: a compact radio jammer, spare earpieces, a small first-aid kit, and an extra locket that belonged to Sid. She moved quickly and quietly, her eyes always scanning. To everyone else she was the worried friend who'd come early to help, but inside she was Lucy's shadow — watchful, fierce.
"Two points of entry," Lucy said softly, handing Siya a crudely sketched map. "Main gate, and the service gate. He'll probe the perimeter first — test crowd reaction. That's his pattern. He needs to see how fast we scramble."
Siya nodded, lips pressed thin. "We'll be ready."
They had volunteers — a handful of teachers who were ex-military, a janitor who once served as a night watchman at the telecom building, a few parents who could be trusted to keep calm. Lucy distributed code words, practiced silent signals, and set up a system of mirrors and reflective flash tags to mark exits. It was patchwork and prayer, engineering against an enemy who had spent years breaking them down from the inside.
The auditorium filled. Students filed in, a wash of bright kurtas and school uniforms. Parents chatted, oblivious to the tension coiled in Lucy's muscles. The headmaster gave a short speech; the band struck up a cheery tune. Lucy sat at the back, knees pressed together, the cracked photo of Sid hidden in her palm like an anchor.
Outside, Nick watched from a drizzle-blurred rooftop across the street, his figure a dark punctuation mark against sodium lights. He studied the event through binoculars, mapping the crowd. For him, the function was both stage and testing ground — a place to send small, precise ripples and watch how the Agency responded. He had no interest in slaughter; his intent was exposure. Panic in the right moment would create a tableau the city couldn't ignore.
He tapped a phone twice — once to a burner that sent out a series of seemingly random calls, twice to a shadow line that would later hum with data as Project Helix began its leak. The signal he sent was not loud; it was a tongue of steel — a probe that measured reaction times, a way to calibrate Lucy and Rana and anyone who believed the Agency could still control its narrative.
The first test came at intermission. A messenger — disguised as a delivery boy carrying decorative lanterns — slowed at the service gate. He fumbled with the latch, feigning trouble. A teacher noticed, walked to help, and the messenger smiled apologetically. Someone recorded the exchange on a phone, forwarded it to a group chat; nothing felt out of place.
But Lucy watched the messenger's shoes — too clean, no dust of the route he claimed to have taken. She watched how he shifted his weight when the teacher turned his back. Her earpiece chirped.
"Signal confirmed," Siya whispered. "He's watching the response."
Lucy's jaw tightened. She stood and moved, ostensibly to the restroom, but she slipped into a maintenance corridor that led to the back of the stage. She followed the delivery path the messenger had taken and found, tucked inside a crate of decorative paper, a small device — a compact transmitter blinking blue. A crude RFID reader. A trigger rigged to send a burst to any tagged device within range.
She stifled a curse and wrapped the device in her dupatta, pressing it to her chest as though the cloth could smother the threat. Someone else might simply have removed the device and called it lucky. Lucy had learned to think two steps further: how the removal would look on surveillance, who would see her, which camera would tilt. She wiped her prints on the metal crate, left the crate as she had found it, and walked back into the auditorium — smiling.
Nick watched her from across the street. His eyes narrowed. She had taken the bait — but she had also neutralized the immediate threat without causing alarm. That was an unexpected vector; she was sharper than he'd anticipated.
Backstage, Lucy found Siya waiting with a worry that looked like defeat. "He's probing," Siya said simply.
Lucy nodded. "He wants panic on camera. He wants the Agency to overreact." She set her jaw. "We make sure that when he pushes, he finds order — not chaos."
On a rooftop two blocks away a man in a black coat — a handler — flicked his lighter and watched Nick through a pair of binoculars. His phone buzzed: a single line of text. Nick's fingers hovered, then tapped the reply: Stand by. Observation holds.
A single exchange, innocuous, but it shifted the balance. Nick had lackeys; this wasn't a lone vendetta anymore. He had resources, networks, and a plan that used spectacle as leverage. Lucy realized then that she could no longer confine this to personal retribution; this was becoming a public war.
In the dim hours, the function concluded with applause and practiced smiles. Parents hugged children, and the fairy lights glimmered like false stars. But Lucy and Siya walked the campus in the aftermath, eyes still sharp. The transmitter had been only the first signal. Nick's real play would come later — a deliberate escalation that would force the Agency to show its hand in public.
They locked the gates that night with hands that trembled not from fear but from the charged adrenaline of someone prepared to fight for everything they loved. As they left the campus, Lucy tucked Sid's photo back into her bag and, for the first time in days, allowed herself a single breath.
Somewhere in the rain, on a distant rooftop, Nick lit a cigarette and watched the glow of the school fade. He had watched them move. He had measured them. The confrontation had passed, but the war had just become visible.
---