Chapter 7: Echoes of the Fallen

Fifty-two hours left.

The countdown ticked in the corner of Arjun's phone screen, a custom widget Bete had installed specifically to nag him into sanity. It wasn't working. Every time Arjun glanced at the shrinking numbers, his heart felt a little heavier. Less than two days to either impress Arclight or officially get branded as a lunatic conspiracy theorist with a talent for illegal excavation.

And still—no working prototype.

"Focus, idiot," Arjun muttered to himself, slapping his own cheek as he stumbled into his flat, dropping his bag in a heap. His clothes were soaked with stepwell moisture, his shoes caked with mud that smelled too metallic to be normal earth. His hands still trembled slightly from whatever he had seen—or half-seen—down there.

Kapoor's ghost-memory-thing pointing at him like a bad omen.The burned handprint.The cracked disk.The hum.

It was all blending into one messy truth, but Arjun still didn't have the full picture. What was Kapoor trying to warn him about? What exactly had pulled Kapoor through the veil? And why had the ancient planners, the British, and now Arclight, all worked so hard to bury this technology?

Bete's voice crackled from the speaker. "Before you dive down the next existential rabbit hole, can I remind you that your 'save my broke historian ass' presentation is in just over two days?"

"Yeah, I know."

"No, you don't." Bete's tone sharpened. "Because in the last twelve hours, instead of finishing your demo, you've broken into a sealed archaeological site, had what I can only describe as a paranormal staring contest, and brought home dirt older than your civilization."

"Worth it."

"No, Arjun. You know what's worth it? Rent money. Unless you plan to power this flat with spiritual radiation, focus."

Arjun groaned, head thudding back against the wall. Bete had a point. He couldn't just solve ancient cosmic mysteries and hope Arclight would be impressed by sheer enthusiasm. They wanted proof—a functioning, scalable power system, not a ghost story.

"Alright," Arjun said, shaking off the fog. "Two tracks. Track one—get HelioCore stable enough to fake a working demo. Track two—figure out what the hell happened to Kapoor, because if we don't, I have a feeling the prototype's gonna get a mind of its own."

"Multitasking: the leading cause of death in broke scientists."

"Noted."

Arjun dragged out his whiteboard—a relic from his tutoring days—and drew a messy timeline. 72 hours when Thorn first called. Now down to 52. That left him roughly 24 hours for actual work, assuming he could go without sleep and survive entirely on chai and misplaced confidence.

Bete chimed in again. "So, about Kapoor. You're not going to find much in the official records. What you need is…" Bete hesitated.

"What?"

"The unofficial records."

Arjun's stomach sank. He knew exactly what Bete meant.

There was only one person in Mumbai who ran a black archive—a personal collection of banned books, forgotten files, and supernatural gossip so wild, half of it could qualify as comedy.

His name was Shinde Baba, and the last time Arjun visited him, it ended with Arjun accidentally setting a cursed rosary on fire. Shinde Baba hadn't forgiven him.

Which made the next hour thoroughly unpleasant.

"You've got some nerve, Varma," Shinde Baba spat, waving a beedi in Arjun's face. "Last time you came here, you said you needed harmless folklore records—and you ended up waking my Rakshasa jar."

"Ancient history," Arjun said quickly. "Speaking of history…"

"No."

"Come on, Baba."

"No."

"It's about Devashish Kapoor."

That stopped Shinde cold.

The old man sat back, eyes narrowing. "Why?"

Arjun hesitated. "Because I think I'm walking the same path he did. And I don't want to vanish like him."

For a moment, Shinde said nothing. Then he sighed, pulled out a battered tin trunk, and set it between them.

"Kapoor was a fool," Shinde said. "Brilliant, but blind. You're the same breed."

"Flattery will get you everywhere."

Shinde snorted, opened the trunk, and pulled out a stack of papers wrapped in old cloth. They were older than any of Kapoor's official files—these were personal notes, collected by temple priests who had tried to warn Kapoor before he vanished.

The handwriting was desperate, messy, covering every scrap of paper available—temple donation receipts, torn calendar pages, even the back of a train ticket from 1938.

Arjun scanned the first sheet, pulse quickening.

"The whisper grows louder each time the seal breaks. I hear it even when I sleep. It knows my name now."

"The spirals are not decoration. They are locks, glyphic patterns to confuse the thing that lives beneath. If you break the pattern, it finds you faster."

"I dreamed of a door made of stone and stars. The door opened inward."

Arjun's throat tightened. This wasn't just an academic study. This was a man losing his mind in real time—a historian crushed between discovery and something too big for him to understand.

There was one final note, scrawled in the corner of a paan shop receipt, barely legible through smudged ink:

"If anyone reads this after me, do not follow the hum. It is not a call for help. It is a lure."

"Bete," Arjun whispered. "You seeing this?"

"Yeah." Bete's tone was unusually serious. "This guy didn't just get lost. He got pulled in deliberately."

Shinde Baba lit another beedi. "Kapoor didn't vanish because he made a mistake, beta. He vanished because something down there wanted him."

Arjun exhaled slowly. "And now it knows me too."

Shinde shook his head. "You should walk away."

Arjun gave him a crooked smile. "Too late."

He paid Shinde in cash and a promise not to summon anything else, then headed back to his flat, head swimming with everything Kapoor had tried to warn him about. Spirals as locks. The hum as bait. The door that opened inward.

By the time he got home, the countdown read 50 hours.

Two days left to either save his career, solve a mystery older than civilization, or die the exact same way Kapoor did.

Bete's voice broke the silence. "So, what now?"

Arjun stared at the prayer stones, at the half-assembled HelioCore, at the cracked spiral disk from the stepwell.

"We follow the hum," Arjun said softly. "But this time, we make sure it's talking to us—and not the other way around."

The sky had started to lighten, soft gold bleeding into the gray Mumbai dawn by the time Arjun spread out his materials on the floor. The prayer stones, Kapoor's cursed notes, his own scavenged hardware—everything formed a chaotic circle of obsession around him.

The air inside the flat was thick. Not physically—there was no smoke, no heat—but something about the space itself felt…heavy, like every molecule had grown denser after the stepwell. Like the hum hadn't just stayed underground.

It had followed him home.

Arjun knew what Bete would say if he voiced that thought, so he didn't. Instead, he opened his notebook and started sketching a bridge—not physical, not architectural, but something stranger.

"Bete," Arjun said softly. "What's the interface between a myth and a machine?"

There was a pause. Then: "That's either poetry or a nervous breakdown."

"Think about it," Arjun pressed. "Kapoor triggered the grid by accident. But what if you could talk to it? Directly. With something designed to translate intent into frequency?"

"Like a psychic keyboard?"

"Exactly." Arjun's mind raced. "The relic stones act as tuning forks. The grid responds to ancient geometries, right? Mantra patterns, prayer harmonics, things like that."

"Technically, yes."

"So what if we build something that replaces the mantras with input commands? Something that talks in the language the grid understands, but using my voice instead of religious chants."

Bete whistled softly. "You want to write a driver for reality itself."

"Driver, chant, prayer—same thing, different formats." Arjun's grin was all teeth. "I'm not praying to history. I'm coding it."

He sketched rapidly, layering his usual scrawls over Kapoor's spirals, adding his mother's forgotten HelioCore schematics into the mix. His fingers smudged ink across paper as the concept took shape—a device somewhere between a talisman and a synthesizer, designed to speak directly to the frequency grid, bypassing ancient rituals entirely.

"Okay," Bete said after a moment. "Hardware first. What are we building this on?"

Arjun stood, cracking his neck. "Let's raid the junkyard."

By 7 AM, Arjun was ankle-deep in electronic garbage, sorting through discarded modems, broken oscillators, and what might have once been a weather station, now gutted for scrap. The man who ran the junkyard—Suleiman bhai, expert in cheap miracles and creative lies—watched him from a distance, smoking something suspicious.

"You're back," Suleiman said dryly. "What illegal science are you cooking this time?"

"Spiritual Bluetooth."

Suleiman sighed. "You worry me."

Arjun dug out a crystal oscillator array, half a motherboard from a defunct industrial printer, and a working rotary dial from a landline phone so old it might predate the partition. In his mind, the system was already assembling itself.

"The grid works on frequency and intent," Arjun muttered, mostly to himself. "But intent needs a shape—a way to encode thought into geometry."

"Like drawing yantras with your mind," Bete added.

"Exactly."

He grabbed a cracked speaker cone, ran his fingers over it, and saw potential. If he could modulate his voice directly into the ley frequency, the grid wouldn't just hear him—it would understand him as part of the system.

The operator instead of the intruder.

Back at the flat, Bete ran diagnostics while Arjun cannibalized his loot, wiring old circuitry into new purposes. Every few minutes, he glanced at the countdown: 49 hours. Time evaporated faster when you were building something that technically shouldn't exist.

Each piece had a role:

The prayer stones acted as contact points, grounding the system in the ancient geometry Kapoor uncovered.The oscillator array translated his voice into raw frequency pulses.The rotary dial was pure indulgence—Arjun just liked the drama of physically dialing into history.

"Explain this to me," Bete asked, voice half-curious, half-worried. "Why is this better than just triggering the grid normally?"

"Because triggers are one-way," Arjun said, hands busy soldering a wire. "We poke, it reacts. But if we talk—if we can make the system understand we're trying to negotiate, not trespass—that changes everything."

"Or it pisses off whatever's down there."

"That too."

By midday, the interface was ready—a cobbled-together monstrosity that looked like someone had crossbred a harmonium, a ham radio, and a sacrificial altar.

"Beautiful," Arjun said proudly.

"It looks like a robot coughed up a tantrik's toolbox," Bete said. "I love it."

The first test was small. Arjun placed one prayer stone on the floor, connected the interface, and spoke directly into the microphone.

"Grid, this is Arjun Varma. Do you read me?"

Nothing.

"Okay." Arjun adjusted the frequency band, voice dropping into the chanting tone he remembered from temple ceremonies. "Om Shree Arjun Varma bol raha hai, hello."

The prayer stone hummed faintly.

"Got a twitch," Bete reported.

Arjun refined the pitch, switching from his own name to the sigil he found in Kapoor's notes, tracing it with his fingertip as he spoke.

"Calling the guardian of node 3," Arjun said. "This is HelioCore Protocol requesting access."

The stone glowed.

Arjun's pulse spiked.

"It's working."

The hum shifted, forming words—not spoken, but felt directly in his bones.

"State your purpose."

Arjun froze. "Did you hear that?"

"No," Bete said. "Whatever you just triggered—it's only talking to you."

Arjun took a slow breath. "My purpose is to understand why the grid was sealed."

The hum paused. Then:

"Not permitted."

Arjun's jaw tightened. "By whose authority?"

"The First Council."

"Who the hell is the First Council?"

"Not permitted."

The hum intensified, edges sharp, the air itself thickening. Arjun's ears popped from the pressure.

"Okay okay okay," Arjun backpedaled. "Let's not do this the hard way."

He adjusted the dial, softening his tone. "I'm not your enemy. I'm trying to repair the grid."

The hum faltered. Faint hesitation.

Arjun leaned in. "You're broken. I can help."

The prayer stone flickered once—then spat out a burst of static, hurling Arjun backward across the room. His back hit the wall, lungs emptied, ears ringing.

"What the hell was that?" Bete shouted.

Arjun groaned. "That was history calling bullshit."

Once the ringing subsided, Arjun stared at the still-glowing prayer stone. Whatever the grid was, it wasn't just technology. It had memory, personality—a fractured intelligence that had spent centuries enforcing silence.

But silence couldn't hold forever.

Bete's voice cut through the quiet. "48 hours, boss. What's the plan?"

Arjun wiped blood from his nose, grinning despite himself. "We ask better questions."

He dragged Kapoor's notes closer, scanning them for every forbidden name, lost chant, and ritual bypass the old archaeologist had considered. Somewhere in those scribbles was the right phrase—the right handshake—the way to get the grid to stop seeing him as an intruder, and start seeing him as an operator.

Because if Arclight got there first, they wouldn't talk to history.

They'd tear it apart.