Karachi — 48 Hours Later
(Two days of moving through back channels, sleeping in shifts, never staying long enough for the system to fix a location. Now Karachi swallowed them.)
---
The city didn't know it was a battlefield.
Commuters honked at intersections gridlocked by stray dogs and overambitious buses. Chai wallahs poured steaming cups into clay kulhads, passing them to outstretched hands without breaking rhythm. Children flew kites from rooftops, glass-coated string slicing the sky in silent duels. Karachi performed its daily miracle of chaos and survival, unaware that twelve chemical weapons had recently been scattered across its map like poison seeds waiting for rain.
STAR had no safehouse now.
They moved in a stolen delivery van, its exterior plastered with a fake plumbing company logo—Al-Falah Sanitation Services—its interior a jury-rigged nerve center of encrypted laptops, dead batteries, and anxious silences. The suspension groaned every time they hit a pothole, which was constantly. Karachi's roads were designed by optimists and maintained by no one.
Zoran drove. Kaisar rode shotgun, his posture deceptively relaxed, one hand never far from his weapon. In the back, Sana balanced a laptop on her knees while Riz traced network maps on a tablet that kept losing charge. Zara sat against the side panel, her phone dark in her palm, watching the city blur past a window streaked with dust.
No one had slept more than three hours in the past two days.
No one complained.
---
Sana was studying the chemical data from the recovered canisters when she noticed it. A pattern. A ghost in the molecular structure that shouldn't exist—and yet there it was, as deliberate as a signature.
"This peptide marker," she said, zooming in on a spectral analysis. The blue light of her screen painted hollows under her eyes. "It's not a fingerprint. It's a key."
Riz looked up from his own screen, fingers still hovering over the keyboard. "Key to what?"
"I don't know yet." She traced the diagram with her finger, following the bond structure like a path through unfamiliar terrain. "But look here. And here. It's designed to interact with something. A catalyst. An activator. This isn't just a weapon. It's a system. The VX is the payload, but this marker is the trigger."
The van hit a pothole. Everyone swayed. No one spoke for a moment.
"Haider was never just selling nerve gas," Zoran said slowly, understanding dawning in his voice. His knuckles were white on the steering wheel. "He was selling control. The weapon only works if you have the key. And he kept the master copy."
"Or someone else did," Zara said quietly.
She hadn't spoken much since the file. Her silence was a wall, and they all respected it, even if it worried them. Even if Kaisar caught himself checking on her in the rearview mirror every few minutes, his concern masked by professional stillness.
Riz's screen pinged—a sharp, urgent sound that cut through the van's heavy air.
"I've been cross-referencing the 'Minerva' system ID across every database I can legally—and illegally—access," he said. "It's compartmentalized to hell. Deeper than anything Haider built. But I found a fragment. A single reference in a declassified budget allocation from 2008."
He paused, as if the words themselves required preparation.
He read aloud: "Project Minerva: Long-term strategic asset incubation and evaluation protocol. Oversight: Joint Directorate of Internal Audits."
"Joint Directorate," Kaisar repeated. His voice was flat, but his jaw tightened. "That's not a real agency. That's a ghost label. It means the oversight committee doesn't officially exist. No charter. No public mandate. No accountability. Which means Minerva answers to no one."
"And it's been incubating assets for seventeen years," Sana said. The weight of the number settled into the van like cold water rising. "Including Haider. Including… us."
The van fell silent.
Seventeen years.
Zoran was seven in 2008. He had been learning to climb trees in his village, his father already dead, his mother working double shifts at a textile mill. He had not yet learned what a sniper scope looked like. He had not yet learned that his hands could take life.
Zara was eight. She had still believed her parents would come home. She had still believed that justice and truth were the same thing.
Their futures were already being mapped then. Their traumas pre-selected. Their utility assessed by a cold algorithm that saw human lives as line items in a strategic portfolio. They were not recruited. They were identified. Cultivated. Waited for.
The van's engine droned. Outside, Karachi continued its indifferent existence.
"I need to know what's in the rest of that file," Zara said suddenly.
Her voice was steady. Her hands were not. She pressed them flat against her thighs, but the trembling bled through.
"Alpha Prism. It's incomplete." She was not asking permission. She was stating a fact. "The summary mentions 'financial conduits' but not where they led. It mentions my parents' refusal but not what they refused to stop. It calls me a 'dependent subject psychologically viable' but doesn't explain how long they watched me before they decided I was worth harvesting."
The word hung in the air. Harvesting.
"You want to investigate a seventeen-year-old conspiracy while a machine is actively trying to terminate us?" Zoran asked.
It wasn't a challenge. It was a question. A genuine one. His eyes met hers in the rearview mirror, and she saw no judgment there—only the exhaustion of a man who had spent years surviving and was still being asked to run.
"I want to know what I was made for," Zara replied. "Before I let them use me again."
No one argued.
Because beneath her words was a fear they all shared but none had spoken aloud: that they were not soldiers who had chosen their war. They were experiments who had escaped their lab, and the scientists were coming to reclaim their specimens. The audit cycle had already begun. Minerva was already watching. And the only thing worse than being hunted was not knowing why.
Riz broke the silence. His voice was quieter than usual, stripped of its sardonic edge.
"If we're going to run toward the fire instead of away from it, we need intel. Physical intel." He pulled up a faded satellite image on his tablet—a compound on the outskirts of Islamabad, unremarkable, forgettable. "There's an archive. Old records from the Joint Directorate, stored in a decommissioned facility. No network connection. No digital indexing. It's just… paper. Waiting."
"Paper can't be hacked," Sana said.
"Paper can't be audited," Zara added.
Zoran looked at Kaisar. The older man's face was drawn, the lines around his eyes deeper than they had been a week ago. But his gaze was clear. Steady. The same gaze that had kept them alive through worse odds.
"We need to know what Minerva knows," Kaisar said. "We need to know what Haider was before he became Haider. We need to know why seventeen years ago, someone decided that a network of traumatized children would be a good investment."
He picked up his weapon. The movement was automatic, practiced—the weight familiar in his grip.
"Islamabad. Tomorrow night."
No debate. No hesitation. The decision was made.
The van drove on through Karachi's endless sprawl. Behind them, the city glittered under the setting sun, oblivious and beautiful—minarets catching gold, sea breeze pushing inland, millions of lives continuing their ordinary trajectories. Ahead of them lay a graveyard of paper secrets, waiting to be exhumed.
Zara held her phone in her palm. The file still glowed in its memory, patient predator, unsleeping witness. She did not open it. She did not need to.
Somewhere in Islamabad, in a dusty room full of forgotten truths, her parents were waiting to speak again.
She would listen.
And then she would decide what kind of weapon she wanted to be.
---