The week that followed was the strangest period in the history of the household.
Clara and Alice spent seven days trying to figure out what Silas had done to turn the Prime Minister of India into a permanent house guest.
An armed perimeter isolated their modest Sonipat neighborhood.
Soldiers in full combat gear guarded the street corners day and night, while inside Clara’s living room, the most powerful man in the country slept on a folding cot.
At first, Clara and Alice tried rationalizing the absurdity.
Perhaps Silas had designed some revolutionary software.
The boy had always been terrifyingly bright; by age six, he had been helping neighborhood high schoolers work through advanced calculus and physics textbooks.
Yet the longer they tried to find a logical explanation, the more ridiculous their ideas became, until every theory fell apart.
The Prime Minister was living under their roof, not for an afternoon briefing, but for seven days straight.
Even stranger, Vijay treated Silas with a brand of polite deference that looked suspiciously like terror.
Whenever Clara or Alice tried pulling Silas aside for a private talk, Vijay shadowed him closely.
Neither woman had the nerve to openly admit to the Prime Minister that they had no clue what Silas had supposedly accomplished.
Admitting that felt far too embarrassing.
Fortunately, there was one magnificent distraction that kept their confusion at bay: the catering.
Every meal brought to the home was prepared by luxury hotel culinary squads.
The rich gravies, the roast meats, the delicate sweets, and the gleaming silver cutlery were completely foreign to their small kitchen.
Silas, for his part, ignored the presentation entirely.
He ate just as he always did.
He possessed the fine motor coordination to handle every specialized fork and spoon with robotic precision, but doing so would have looked bizarre to his mother.
Instead, he picked up whatever bowl sat closest, eating with casual, unpretentious ease while leaving the polished silver knives untouched.
Clara and Alice could not bring themselves to follow his lead.
They were sharing a dinner table with a man who commanded an army of millions.
How could they eat like peasants in front of him?
Unfortunately, desiring refined table manners and actually knowing which fork went where were entirely different matters.
Silas watched them from across the table, finding it difficult to keep a straight face.
Alice reached toward a slender fish fork, second-guessed herself, glanced sideways at Vijay’s plate, and slowly set the utensil down.
Clara stared at her butter knife as though waiting for the metal to offer instructions.
Every dropped spoon and awkward pause brought a fresh wave of crimson to their cheeks.
Silas lowered his head, his lips twitching.
He had to channel a faint thread of Will Fog into his jaw to keep his face straight.
Without that internal clamp, he would have laughed out loud.
Vijay caught the silent exchange from his seat.
A flicker of amusement softened the Prime Minister’s eyes, but the feeling evaporated the moment memory kicked in.
He remembered his first night at this table.
He had let slip a small, condescending chuckle during their first dinner, only for his chest to lock up so hard he had nearly blacked out.
The smile had been wiped away by an invisible, crushing weight.
Vijay knew the rules now.
Even an annoyed glance from Silas carried lethal weight.
If Silas glared at him across the table, Clara and Alice would notice the hostility, and Vijay had no desire to trigger another supernatural incident in a crowded kitchen.
He kept his face carefully blank and stared at his rice.
Over the preceding days, Vijay had exhausted every asset available to decipher the child.
He had placed encrypted satellite calls and ordered the intelligence bureau to run exhaustive background checks.
Every dossier returned the exact same story.
Silas was a normal boy.
His medical records were ordinary, his family history was clean, and his neighborhood life was completely devoid of suspicious ties.
He was just a ten-year-old adopted child living in Haryana.
At first, Vijay had wondered if the boy was some ancient spirit ripped from Vedic folklore.
But after watching Silas spend a week eating lentil soup, teasing his sister, and letting his adoptive mother wipe sauce off his cheek, mythological explanations began to sound absurd.
Monsters from the dark ages did not sit politely at dining tables, listening to a mortal woman complain about the price of tomatoes.
Vijay watched the boy scrape the bottom of his bowl.
For the first time, he wondered whether the terrifying being holding a knife to his political career was genuinely capable of enjoying a simple mortal life.
The seventh day arrived.
Across the globe, government jets began touching down on Indian runways.
None of the arriving leaders understood the true reason behind the summons, but one factor had been impossible to overlook: the raw panic audible in Vijay’s recorded transmission.
Foreign intelligence agencies suspected that India had suffered a critical meltdown at one of its nuclear weapons depots.
What else could compel the leader of an atomic superpower to broadcast an emergency summons to every major government on Earth?
Yet a glaring contradiction nagged at their security councils.
If the crisis was that urgent, why had Vijay given them a full week to travel?
Why had he flatly refused to brief ambassadors through standard diplomatic channels?
The pieces refused to line up.
Whatever was happening, it was grave enough to draw the heads of state of every superpower to a single region.
Unscheduled summits carried massive geopolitical liabilities; there had to be an earth-shaking justification.
Aboard his presidential transport, Roan, the President of the Russian Federation, stared through the double-paned cabin window.
The brown expanse of northern India spread out below.
The military flight corridors were clear, and the airport below was secured, yet something was missing.
There was no red carpet.
No honor guard.
No receiving line of ministers.
Roan’s eyes narrowed.
The exact same realization struck the other world leaders as their private aircraft started landing on the airport.
This broke every rule of statecraft.
For a brief moment, several security advisors wondered if India had staged a trap to wipe out the world’s executive leadership in one blow.
The theory was discarded almost immediately.
India had ambitions, but initiating a decapitation strike against the entire planet simultaneously was sheer suicide.
It would trigger an apocalyptic war of annihilation from which no nation could emerge intact.
Still, their expressions grew grim.
They had prepared for a security catastrophe, but this dead silence was far more unnerving.
It contradicted Vijay’s entire public persona.
Vijay was a classic populist who lived for media coverage and grand state ceremonies.
How could a politician like that pass up the greatest diplomatic photo opportunity of the century?
The rulers of the modern world were walking onto his soil at his personal request.
The political prestige alone would have secured his domestic dominance for a decade.
Yet there were no cameras, no press vans, and not a single cabinet minister on the runway.
Most unsettling of all, the man who had called them was nowhere to be found.
A chill ran through the arriving delegations.
Whatever was unfolding in this country had slipped completely beyond the realm of standard governance.
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