Chapter 1

Tue, 25 Nov 2025 17:15:56 +0000

The Metro Line 6 is nearly empty at 9:47 PM on a Thursday. I sit by the window, watching my reflection ghost across the darkened glass—pale, tired, my carefully applied makeup from this morning now smudged at the corners of my eyes. The tunnel walls blur past in rhythmic streaks of light and shadow.My feet ache. They've been aching since around 3 PM, when I'd been running between the marketing department and that endless client meeting, my heels clicking against polished floors in that irritating rhythm that defines my life. 9 AM to 6 PM without pause. Every single day the same.I'm exhausted. The kind of exhausted that settles deep in your bones, the kind that makes even breathing feel like a task.My phone buzzes. Another message from my mother in Delhi. I don't need to read it to know what it says"Have u seen the photos ? Did u meet the guy? When will u get married"The same questions. Always the same questions. I've learned not to respond. Responding only encourages more messages, more concern, more of my mother's voice in my head telling me I should be married by now, should be thinking about children, should be doing literally anything except what I'm actually doing.I drop my phone back into my oversized work bag—the same brown leather tote I've been carrying since my first job five years ago—and close my eyes.The fluorescent lights above hum their monotonous song. The train lurches slightly as it picks up speed between stations.I've been living in Mumbai for seven years now, and somewhere along the way, the city stopped thrilling me. I remember arriving at twenty-three, fresh from my degree in marketing, absolutely convinced I'd conquer the world. I was going to be different from all the other girls who played it safe and got married by twenty-five. I was going to build a career. I was going to travel. I was going to have adventures.At twenty-nine, I have a cubicle in a building that smells like stale coffee and desperation. I have a two-bedroom flat in Andheri that I share with a roommate I barely speak to.I have student loans from my MBA that I'd convinced myself would change everything, and it changed nothing. Same responsibilities. Same routine. Same crushing sense that life is happening to someone else while I simply exist in it, watching from the sidelines.The train slows as it approaches Dadar Station. I open my eyes.That's when I see it.On the seat beside me—the seat that was definitely, absolutely empty just moments ago—sits something that shouldn't be there. It's roughly the size of a deck of cards but thicker, made of brushed silver metal with a faint blue-green patina running through it like veins. There are symbols etched into its surface, symbols that make no sense to me. Not Sanskrit, not English, not anything from any language I've ever studied or seen. They look almost... alive somehow. Like they're moving beneath the metal surface, though when I focus on them directly, they stay perfectly still.I frown. My eyes dart around the nearly empty car. An old man sleeps three seats down, his head tilted back, mouth slightly open, snoring softly. A young couple sits at the far end, too absorbed in each other to notice anything else—his hand on her thigh, her head on his shoulder. The woman with the shopping bags who'd been standing near the doors got off at the last station.No one is watching me. No one is standing nearby. The device has simply... appeared.I shift in my seat, turning away slightly. It's not my problem. It could be someone's lost phone charger or some tech gadget I don't understand. Some new startup product or prototype. It could be anything. I'll just ignore it. Five more minutes and I'll be at Mahim Junction. Another five minutes walking, and I'll be home. I can order dosa from the place downstairs, shower off the day, and collapse into bed by 11 PM.The train accelerates slightly, and then—Ding.A sound. Not loud, but distinct. Musical, almost. Like a small bell or a chime.My eyes snap open. I look at the device again. The symbols on its surface are glowing now, a soft turquoise light that pulses gently, like a heartbeat. Like it's alive.Ding. Ding.My practical mind tries to categorize it. Some kind of alarm? A phone notification? A timer? But it sounds wrong for any modern technology. It sounds old and new at the same time, like something from a science fiction film, like something that shouldn't exist in a 2026 Metro in Mumbai.Ding. Ding. Ding.The pulses are getting faster. More insistent.My heart rate picks up. Despite every logical thought screaming at me to leave it alone, despite every survival instinct that tells me this is weird and wrong and I should just move to a different seat, I find myself leaning forward. I've always been this way—curious to a fault. My mother used to say it would get me into trouble. And it has, in small ways. Trying things I shouldn't, pushing boundaries, asking questions no one else was asking.I reach out slowly, my hand suspended above the device. The glow is brighter now, almost hypnotic in its rhythm. The symbols seem to swim beneath the metal surface, rearranging themselves into patterns that almost form words, almost make sense, almost—The train screeches.It's sudden and violent. An emergency stop. My body lurches forward violently, my hand shooting down involuntarily to catch myself on something—anything—and my palm connects directly with the smooth metal surface of the device.The sensation is instantaneous and overwhelming.It feels like touching a live wire. Electricity erupts up my arm in a blinding shock, burning through my nerve endings, igniting every cell in my body. I try to scream, but the sound catches in my throat. My vision explodes into white light, searing and absolute. The fluorescent bulbs above seem to expand infinitely, consuming everything.I feel myself falling. Or rising. Or both. The sensation of gravity goes haywire. My stomach lurches violently as though I'm plummeting from an impossible height, and yet I also feel pressed against something heavy and immovable. The burning sensation intensifies, spreading from my arm through my chest, down my spine, into my bones."This is it," some detached part of my mind observes with surprising clarity. "You're dying. The device was a bomb or something. You're having a heart attack. You're dying on the Metro at 9:47 PM on a Thursday in front of strangers who won't even remember your face."It's almost funny. After twenty-nine years of playing it safe, of following every rule, of living a life so carefully constructed that nothing ever surprises me, this is how it ends. Not from adventure. Not from taking risks. But from a curiosity reflex on public transport.The light intensifies beyond anything I can perceive. My sense of self begins to fragment, dispersing like dust caught in sunlight. I feel like I'm coming apart at the molecular level, like every atom of my being is being torn away from every other atom and scattered into void.And then—Everything goes black.***Silence.Not the comfortable silence of a quiet night, but something absolute. Complete. A silence so profound it has weight to it, has texture. I gasp, my lungs suddenly remembering how to function. My eyes fly open.I'm lying on my back on something soft. Moss. Actual moss. My hands, when I press them down, feel the give of earth and decomposing leaves, ancient and damp and alive. Above me, impossibly high and impossibly distant, is a canopy of leaves so thick and so vast that only scattered fragments of light manage to penetrate it. The filtered light is green, ancient, and nothing like the harsh fluorescent glow of the Metro car.The air smells like nothing I've ever smelled before. Rich and alive and primal. Soil and rain and growing things and something else—something wild that I have no name for. The air is thick enough that I can almost taste it on my tongue. It makes my eyes water. It fills my lungs in a way that feels foreign, like breathing on an alien planet.I push myself up slowly, my hands sinking slightly into the damp earth. My work blouse is soaked through—either from sweat or moisture from the ground, I can't tell. My skirt clings to my legs. My phone is still in my bag, which lies beside me, the leather darkened by water and something else.I'm not on the Metro anymore.That much is immediately, undeniably clear.I scramble backward, my heart suddenly hammering against my ribs so hard I think it might break through my chest. I push myself to my feet, my mind fracturing into a thousand panicked pieces. This isn't possible. This isn't real. I'm hallucinating. I'm in a hospital. I'm dead. I'm having a stroke. I'm—The jungle around me is impossibly dense. Trees twist up from the earth in a tangle of roots thicker than my torso, their trunks rough and scarred with an age I can't fathom. Vines hang like serpents from the canopy above, some as thick as my arm, swaying slightly in air I can't feel. The undergrowth is so thick that I can barely see more than thirty feet in any direction. Everything is moving—leaves shifting, branches creaking, things rustling in the distance that I don't want to think too carefully about.It's still daylight, though filtered and green and somehow older than any daylight I've ever seen. The sun is higher than it should be for this time of evening. The shadows are all wrong. The angle of the light suggests late morning or early afternoon, but my phone—I pull it out with shaking hands—still shows 9:47 PM.The screen flickers and dies.My hands are shaking so badly I can barely hold it.I force myself to breathe. In through my nose. Out through my mouth. The air tastes of earth and water and something acrid that makes my eyes water even more.I'm having a breakdown. That has to be it. Stress. I've been working too hard. The pressure at the office has been mounting. That dick of my team leader has been breathing on my neck to meet the deadline. My mother has been calling more frequently, her concern now tinged with something that sounds almost like reproach. And now my mind has simply... shattered. Created this elaborate hallucination to escape the monotony of my life.Except it feels too real. The ground beneath my feet is too solid. The air is too thick. The sounds around me—the calls of birds I don't recognize, the distant splash of what might be water, the constant rustling of invisible things moving through the undergrowth—are too specific, too varied, too complex for my mind to have invented on the spot.I look down at the device. It's still in my hand—I don't remember picking it up—but it's different now. The metal is completely dark, the symbols gone, the faint glow extinguished. It feels inert, dead, like picking up a stone."Hello?" My voice sounds small and strange in the vast, ancient quiet of the jungle. It sounds like it belongs to someone else. "Hello? Is anyone there?"Only the jungle answers me, with its clicking insects and distant bird calls and the soft, persistent sound of something moving through the undergrowth just out of sight. Something large. Something that sounds heavy.My breath comes faster. My chest is tight with panic.I'm trapped. I'm alone. I'm standing in the middle of a jungle, nothing about this landscape looks like anything from the modern world, nothing about this air or these sounds or this impossible green light—and I have no idea how I've gotten here or how I'll get back.For the first time in years, I feel truly, completely terrified.And somewhere beneath that terror, something else stirs in my chest. Something that, despite my overwhelming fear, feels almost like exhilaration.This is adventure. This is the thing I've always claimed I wanted. This is life happening to me instead of around me.I just wish I weren't so absolutely, utterly unprepared for it.The jungle grows darker as the sun shifts. I can hear sounds getting closer. Multiple sounds. Footsteps, maybe. Heavy, deliberate, moving through the undergrowth with purpose.My hands clench into fists. My body tenses.