No one argued. For the first time since they opened the office, this wasn't about petty cases or broken marriages. This was something else. And as Anchal switched off the desk lamp, the half-lit photo of Ritika seemed to watch them back, a silent reminder of what they'd just promised.
The next morning, the PI team cut through the buzzing chaos of Ritika's college campus. The courtyard hummed with the usual Delhi college noise, vendors shouting about chai, students cramming notes, posters peeling off the notice board. But Anchal wasn't here to blend in.
They found Ritika's closest circle of friends in the canteen, huddled around steel tables. At first, the girls were defensive, whispering, glancing at each other like outsiders weren't welcome, but once they saw the photo of Ritika, the wall cracked.
"She'd been… different last week," one friend admitted, stirring her straw in a watery cold coffee. "Distracted. She kept drawing these weird shapes in her notebook." She slid a page across, rough sketches of crystals, jagged edges repeating over and over.
Mansi's eyes sharpened as she scanned the drawings. "Not random. Structured. Almost geometric." She quietly snapped a photo for later analysis.
Another friend leaned in, nervous. "She said she kept seeing trucks at night. Near the Ridge road. With these orange lights, like construction but… not normal. When we laughed it off, she got serious. Said if anything happened to her, we should 'look at the Ridge.'"
Sumit frowned. "And none of you thought to tell the police that?"
"They already wrote her off as a runaway," the girl muttered bitterly. "Why would they listen to us?"
Anchal's jaw tightened, but her voice stayed calm. "You did right by telling us. If she left any trace, we'll find it."
Later, outside under the neem trees, Mansi's laptop balanced on her knees, keys tapping in quick bursts. "I've pulled her phone metadata. Last GPS ping, inside Ridge, cluster zone. But here's the strange part: her WhatsApp backups are gone. Not deleted, erased. Professionally. Like someone scrubbed her footprint clean."
Pawan shifted uneasily. "So, someone doesn't just want her missing. They want her forgotten."
Suchitra hugged her notebook to her chest, voice low. "She must have known. That's why she warned her friends."
Anchal stared at the screen, the word Ridge circled on Ritika's sketches in her mind. For the first time since taking over her father's office, she felt the weight of a case pulling at more than just truth, it was pulling at memory, history, maybe even the world they thought they'd left behind.
"Tomorrow, we build the board," she said, steady. "If the Ridge is hiding answers, we'll drag them out."
The group nodded, silent agreement hanging heavy in the Delhi heat. The office was cloaked in near silence that evening. Outside in Lajpat Nagar, the city had thinned to its after-hours rhythm, an auto-rickshaw sputtering past, a stray dogs bark cutting the stillness, the faint hiss of a pressure cooker in some distant kitchen.
Inside, Anchal's desk lamp carved a pool of pale-yellow light across the room, leaving the corners swallowed in shadow. Dust motes drifted in the glow, suspended like fragments of thought.
On the corkboard, Ritika's face anchored everything. The girl's smile, open, almost shy, was frozen in the photograph, but it had become something heavier in the office: a reminder that this wasn't just another case file.
Around her, the board had grown dense, almost suffocating. Ritika's notebook sketches, crystalline shapes repeating in obsessive lines, were pinned alongside coordinates circled in red ink, arrows drawn toward Ridge. Mansi's fragments of code logs and neatly scrawled notes about "orange-light trucks" clustered in one corner, like warning signals waiting to be understood.
But it was the same word that stared back at her no matter where her eyes landed: SynerTech. She had written it three times, underlined twice, circled once. And still it looked unfinished, like a whisper daring her to peel another layer back.
Anchal leaned against the desk, arms folded, the marker still smudging faint red against her thumb. The threads all bent toward that name. Erased trails, half-truths, missing footprints. Too many coincidences, too deliberate to ignore.
The ceiling fan groaned above, the slow rotation chopping the silence into uneven beats.
She pushed away from the desk, tugged her satchel strap over her shoulder, and locked the shutters. Pins and markers weren't enough anymore. She needed dirt under her shoes, to stand where Ritika had last stood, to let the forest speak for itself.
The Ridge greeted her like a place split in two. Near the entrance, couples lingered on benches and joggers padded along the outer tracks, their laughter carried on the hot evening air.
But every step deeper bled that sound away until silence pressed in from all sides. The canopy thickened overhead, and the dying sun leaked through in long, golden slants, painting fractured shadows across the path.
Anchal moved cautiously, every sense sharpened. She passed the slope she'd marked before, where a shard of stone jutted from the earth, its surface cut with spirals and jagged etchings. Kneeling, she let her fingers trace the grooves, cold, deliberate lines that matched Ritika's sketches exactly. Not children's play. Not weather's work. Something intentional, and old.
Further on, faint tire tracks bit into the soil, twin grooves pressed into the dust and still holding the glint of fading light. She followed them a few steps before stopping, her body alert to something her ears barely caught. A vibration under her boots, low, irregular, like the pulse of hidden machinery thrumming far beneath the surface. The sound wasn't natural, and it didn't belong here.
Her phone buzzed in her pocket, jolting her upright. The sudden intrusion felt louder than it was. She scanned the tree line before answering.
"Hello?"
"Anchal." Pawan's voice cracked with tension. "You need to come back. Now." Her brow furrowed. "What's going on?"
"It's Naina. She called. Naina, Aman, and the other Aanchal, they're already on their way to the office. She said it's important. Urgent." Pawan's breathing carried uneven through the line, betraying the nerves he tried to bury.
Anchal stood still, staring back at the stone carvings, the tire tracks, the shadows thickening between the trees. Ridge. Orange trucks. Erased data. All of it winding back to the name waiting on her board.
She let out a slow breath, steady but weighted. "So, it all comes back to us going in that world."
"Anchal?" Pawan pressed. "I'm on my way." She ended the call before his worry could stretch further. The Ridge held its silence as she turned back, but the hum under her feet seemed to linger even as she left it behind.