Shweta stood right in front of him, bent slightly at the waist as she tried to catch her breath.
Her chest heaved under her neat school uniform, her shoulders trembling slightly with a mixture of physical exhaustion and sheer, raw anxiety.
To steady herself, she rested her hand on Ram’s shoulder, her fingers tightening with an anxious, desperate grip.
“Ram…” she breathed, looking up at him.
There was no cartoonish anger in her eyes—only a profound, quiet panic.
“Why didn’t you stop?
I’ve been calling your name since the corner.”
Ram stared at her.
His heart gave a heavy, guilty thud.
His brain felt like it was trapped in thick, freezing fog.
The throbbing behind his temples—the cruel remnant of the fractured skies and bleeding stars that had torn through his mind just hours ago—made it hard to focus on her face.
“I…
I’m sorry, Shweta,” Ram stammered, offering a weak, defensive gesture.
“I honestly didn’t hear you over the morning traffic.
My head…
it’s been killing me all morning.
What’s wrong?
Why are you so stressed?”
Shweta’s eyes narrowed, a flicker of deep hurt crossing her face.
“What’s wrong?
Ram, please tell me you’re joking.
Did you completely forget what today is?”
Inside Ram’s chest, a sudden spike of dread pierced the headache.
The parent-teacher meeting.
The second period today.
“Who…
who is coming as your guardian today?” Ram asked, his voice quiet.
“Is your mom back?”
In his words, the fragile composure Shweta was holding onto seemed to shatter.
Her lower lip trembled, her knuckles turning white as she clenched her fists at her sides.
“You forgot,” she whispered, her voice cracking.
“You actually forgot.”
“Shweta, wait—”
“I spent an hour pleading with you yesterday, Ram!” she cried, her voice echoing down the street.
“I told you both of my parents are stuck out of town on that business trip!
My grandmother’s fever spiked—she can’t even sit up in bed, let alone walk to the school!
I begged you to ask your parents to stand in for me, just so the principal wouldn’t suspend me for empty seats.
And you just…
you just nodded.”
Ram stared at her, his throat going completely dry.
He searched his mind for the conversation she was describing.
He reached for yesterday, but there was nothing there.
Just a gray, disjointed blur of exhaustion, phantom sirens, and red skies.
With a sudden, chilling dread, he realized the truth.
Yesterday, while she was talking to him, he had been so profoundly sleep-deprived, so completely consumed by the quiet horror of his recurring nightmares, that he had been operating on pure autopilot.
He had nodded just to keep his knees from buckling in the street.
His brain had literally failed to record a single word she said.
He wasn’t just tired anymore.
His mind was actively slipping away from him.
“I…
I’m sorry,” Ram whispered.
The words felt utterly pathetic.
How could he explain to her that he was losing chunks of his life to a dream?
“Shweta, I swear I didn’t mean to, I just…
I don’t remember yesterday.
At all.”
“I don’t need your excuses!” Shweta shouted, tears finally spilling over her eyelashes.
She raised a trembling fist, taking a step toward him.
“You always do this, Ram!
You never listen!
You’re always somewhere else!”
The raw hurt in her voice, combined with the sudden, terrifying realization of his own failing mind, triggered a pure, panicked flight response.
He couldn’t face the shame of what he’d done, and he couldn’t explain the madness happening inside his head.
Desperate to escape the crushing weight of her tears and his own fear, Ram spun on his heel and bolted down the street toward the school gates.
“Don’t you dare run away from me, you bastard!” Shweta’s voice screamed behind him, followed immediately by the rapid, furious slap of her shoes on the concrete.
“Get back here right now!”
Inside the dark, cramped Ford E-Series van, the air grew incredibly heavy.
One of the masked men sitting in the back broke the silence with a loud, gravelly laugh.
“Today is the day we will make history, Boss!
Hahaha!
Nobody can even guess where we’ll rob today in their wildest dreams…
Hahaha!”
“Stop it, Number 5,” the leader snapped coldly from the front passenger seat.
“Don’t try to make this situation funny.
I think this gamble of mine can either make us filthy rich for the rest of our lives, or we end up as cold corpses, just like our fellow brothers became.”
“No, Boss, Number 5 is actually right,” Number 3 chimed in from the corner, his grip tightening around the cold steel stock of his weapon.
“We will create a new history today, something our predecessors could not do.
We will make it happen today, Boss, even if it costs my life.”
Number 4 joined the conversation, laughing loudly.
“Well said, Number 3 and 5!
Only this kind of resolve can shape this world-shaking history!
Don’t worry, brothers.
Our Plan is absolutely full proof.Today no matter what, we are going to rob the Reserve Bank of India!
Hahaha!”
“And the transit schedules?” Number 3 asked, leaning his head against the reinforced window.
“The shipping routes for the vault cash?”
“Already taken care of,” Number 1 replied, his voice a low, cold hum beneath his rubber mask.
“Number 4 managed to extract the weekly transit logs from the local municipal transit office.
Those lazy, orphaned night-shift workers didn’t suspect a thing when we cloned the hard drives.
The transport paths are perfectly mapped out.”
Suddenly, strange muffled sounds started coming from the very back of the van.
Number 5 spun around, his grotesque rubber mask twisting in the shadows.
He glared down at a tied-up man wriggling frantically on the floorboards.
“You bastard!” Number 5 hissed viciously.
“Just stop your squeaking sound right now, or else it will be the last sound you ever make before you become a corpse, just like this other bastard over here!
Hahaha!”
Hearing the brutal threat, the captive man immediately stopped moving.
He began sobbing as quietly as possible, tears soaking through the cloth wrapped around his mouth.
How did I even get caught up in this shit?
The man thought frantically, his mind spinning in absolute terror.
I was just jogging as usual.
I don’t even know how I ended up here in the first place!
A few moments back,
The man had been out for his routine early morning jog.
At that particular time, the secondary road he chose was completely vacant.
Not a single soul was around.
The city was completely quiet until a series of strange sounds and hushed arguments started coming from a parked van.
Getting curious, the jogger slowed his pace and stepped closer to look at what was happening inside.
Bang!
A loud, brutal metallic sound echoed as a heavy weapon connected with the back of the jogger’s head.
Pain flared for a split second before his vision went completely black, and he collapsed onto the asphalt, unconscious.
Right next to him lay the lifeless body of a security guard—a “hero-minded retard” who had tried to stop the criminals earlier.
“Boss, what should we do now?” Number 3 had asked, kicking the unconscious jogger to check if he was alive.
“This man also saw what we were doing.
We can’t just leave him here.
Should we just kill him like this guard?”
Number 1 had looked down from the van’s side door, his eyes cold and calculated.
“No.
Just tie him down in the van.
He will go with us.
If our plan goes south, he will be our sacrificial lamb!”
Number 3 had grinned cunningly beneath his mask.
“Sharp!”