None of it was extraordinary.
That was more or less the point.
They met up when their shifts lined up, which wasn’t always often — Sarthok’s retail hours ran late most weekdays, and Joy’s accounting internship had him buried until eight some nights.
When they could, they got food from the cart near the flyover, the one that overcharged everybody except them because the owner had known Sayan’s family for years.
Sometimes they just sat on the workbenches in Sarthok’s garage until it got too late to justify staying, talking about nothing that would matter tomorrow.
Goutam came when he could, his laptop bag still on his shoulder from whatever he’d been debugging that day.
He’d usually complain, briefly, about a deployment or a client, and then stop talking about work entirely for the rest of the night.
Priya started showing up around the time she and Joy got serious — quiet at first, then less so, once she figured out that half of Sayan’s stories were exaggerated and the other half weren’t, and that neither version was really meant to be believed.
Sarthok brought Mili around a few months later.
The first time she joined them for dinner, she sat back and watched him get into it with Sayan over the bill.
“You said you’d cover the tandoori,” Sarthok said.
“I said I’d help with it.”
“You ate most of it yourself.”
“So?”
Mili glanced at Joy across the table.
“Is this normal?”
“Pretty much,” Joy said, not looking up from his plate.
She let out a short breath, something between amusement and resignation, and went back to her dal.
Sarthok caught it anyway.
“What was that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing.”
He looked at her for a second too long.
She didn’t give him anything else, and eventually he let it go.
Over the next few months, the group began doing things none of the four friends would have picked on their own.
.
Priya was the one who dragged everyone out to a hill on the edge of the city one evening for the sunset, and Sayan complained about the climb the entire way up.
“Nobody told me there’d be an incline,” he said, for maybe the fourth time.
“You knew we were going to a hill, Sayan.”
“I thought that was a name.
Like a neighborhood.”
“You thought we’d teleport up,” Joy said.
“I was hoping.”
Even Goutam laughed at that one, easy and unguarded, and for a while that was more or less what their lives were — work, small debts to each other over food, this kind of low-stakes bickering, and no particular reason to think about anything past the next weekend.
Then, on a Friday, that changed, in a way none of them would talk about afterward.
Goutam wasn’t there.
A server deployment had run long and he’d texted the group that he’d catch them next time.
The other five had stopped for tea after dinner at a place near the main road, plastic chairs, a TV bolted above the counter that nobody paid attention to unless the volume spiked.
It spiked.
“…authorities have confirmed that five individuals connected to the bank robbery case escaped custody during a transit shift earlier today.
One was found dead at the scene during the initial pursuit.
Police have launched a search across the sector for the remaining four…”
Joy set his glass down more carefully than the moment required.
Sayan’s eyes went to the screen and stayed there.
Nobody said anything right away.
It wasn’t a dramatic kind of quiet — more like three people had all, separately, decided this wasn’t a conversation to have out loud.
Mili noticed first.
“What is it?” She looked at Joy.
“What’s wrong?”
He didn’t answer.
On the screen, the anchor kept talking over looping footage of the transit van.
“Police are asking the public not to approach the individuals and to report any activity near the abandoned warehouse district to sector authorities immediately…”
Sayan’s glass clicked against his ring where his hand had tightened around it.
“They actually got out.”
“Sounds like it,” Sarthok said, not moving his eyes from the screen.
“Four of them,” Joy said.
Not really a question.
“Yeah.”
Priya looked between them, her food forgotten.
“Do you guys know them?
From the news?”
“No,” Joy said.
Too fast, and he seemed to know it as soon as it left him.
Sarthok watched the photos flash across the screen — grainy ID shots, the kind that always look worse than the person probably did in life — and then looked away, his jaw tight.
“Let’s head out,” he said, already up.
Sayan didn’t argue.
He grabbed his jacket off the back of the chair.
Mili frowned at her half-full cup.
“We just got here.”
“I know.” Sarthok’s voice had dropped, quieter than his usual.
“We should go.
Now.”
The three of them stood together, and the girls followed, more confused than anything, out onto the street.
Outside, nothing had changed.
Traffic moved the way it always did.
Someone laughed near the pan stall.
A couple argued lightly over a fare with an auto driver.
The traffic kept moving.
People kept talking.
Nothing in the street suggested that anything had changed.
The three of them stood near the curb anyway, not talking, not quite looking at each other.
“Don’t say anything to Goutam,” Joy said eventually, eyes on the road.
“Wasn’t going to,” Sarthok said.
Sayan swallowed.
“You think they’ll—” He didn’t finish it.
“I don’t know, Sayan.”
After a moment they started walking, the girls falling in beside them with questions that weren’t going to get answered tonight.
Behind them, through the café’s front glass, the television kept running the story on a loop nobody inside was watching anymore.
“Shweta…”
The word barely made it past his lips — a dry scrape of sound that didn’t even stir the air inside the plexiglass.
The lab was lit by harsh fluorescent tubes that hummed faintly overhead.
Inside the biopod, Goutam’s body lay still, a dozen thin tubes running from the ports along its sides into the equipment racks behind it.
A monitor on the status rack broke into an uneven string of beeps.
One of the researchers straightened on his stool, eyes going wide behind his glasses.
“Director.”
The older man at the central console turned his head.
“What.”
“Baseline’s shifting again.”
The director crossed to the console, his boots loud against the tile.
“How much.”
“Climbing faster than the stabilizer can handle.” The researcher’s hands were already moving over the keys.
The director looked past the screen to the pod itself.
Inside, Goutam’s fingers twitched once against the lining.
“Increase the sedation,” the director said.
“We already raised it last cycle.”
“Double it.”
The researcher’s hand hovered over the slider.
“We’re within five percent of the toxic threshold.
Push it further and his lungs could give out.”
“Do it anyway.”
He pushed the slider forward.
An amber light started flashing on the display, paired with a low warning chime.
“Damn it,” he muttered.
“What now.”
“Suppression field’s not holding.
Dampeners are pulling full current and it’s still not catching the waves.”
The director stepped closer to the glass, close enough that his breath fogged it slightly.
Inside, Goutam’s chest had started to rise and fall with more weight to it than before.
“He’s coming around,” the director said, mostly to himself.
“We could try the spinal port — might buy us enough to put him back under cleanly.”
“You said that during the last spike.” The director didn’t turn his head.
“Stop talking about it and do it.”
The other two moved around the berth — one adjusting the coolant valves at the base, the other checking the optical lines running to the crown of the pod, his hands not quite steady.
The director stayed where he was, his reflection layered over the pale, half-submerged face behind the glass.
Goutam’s lips parted again.
A small bubble slipped into the fluid.
“Shweta…”