Siddharth sat behind his desk, the soft hum of the AC barely cutting through the silence in his office. His arm throbbed dully beneath the fresh bandage Tejas had wrapped the night before, but his mind was sharper than ever—calculating, connecting dots, and preparing for the next move.

The pendrive, the corrupted CCTV, Ghost’s warnings—it was all starting to form the skeleton of a larger design. And Siddharth didn’t like being kept in the dark. He sat upright, his back military straight despite the leather chair that begged for a slouch. The laptop screen in front of him displayed graphs, pie charts, and projections—ordinary numbers that masked the extraordinary weight pressing at the edges of his mind.