Chapter 16: Bloodlines and Broken Codes

The floor was still faintly warm beneath his palms. The spiral had gone dark, but the air in Arjun's flat still felt charged, like the aftermath of a lightning strike no one could see. His heart hammered unevenly, and the blood on his face had dried into itchy streaks.

For a long minute, Arjun just sat there, back against the wall, breathing through his mouth because his nose was half-clogged with dried blood. His mind raced—not with panic, but with questions too large for one brain to hold.

He had touched something no human was supposed to touch. Learned a story that had been buried under three civilizations' worth of lies. The Witness wasn't just history—it was the lock, the key, and the warning label all at once.

And now that lock was open.

The silence stretched, thick enough to choke on. Then—

"Why do you always poke things that should stay buried, little brother?"

Arjun's head jerked up so fast his neck cracked. "What the—"

The voice wasn't supernatural. It wasn't ancient or cosmic.

It was familiar.

The wall opposite him flickered to life, Bete's projector kicking in with a grainy video feed patched into his flat's comm system.

Priya Shah.

She sat cross-legged on a lab table in some makeshift bunker, a mug of coffee in one hand and a diagnostic scanner in the other. The camera angle was bad, making her forehead look huge, and there was a smear of turmeric-colored something on her collar. Her hair was tied back, but messy, like she hadn't seen a hairbrush in days.

She looked exactly the way Arjun remembered her from med school days—except now there was something harder in her eyes, like too many bad truths had settled behind them.

"What the hell?" Arjun coughed. "How are you even on this line?"

Priya sipped her coffee, utterly unfazed. "You're still using Ma's old spiral encryption cipher as your firewall base, right? The one she taught us for 'secret' sibling notes?"

Arjun scowled. "That was supposed to be private."

"You seriously thought I wouldn't remember?" Priya shook her head. "You were always terrible at hiding your toys."

"Yeah, well, you're not my babysitter anymore." Arjun's fingers curled into fists. "Where the hell have you been, Priya?"

Priya's smirk faded. "Working. And watching."

"Watching what?"

"You."

Across the street, the Arclight surveillance van was dead silent.

The younger agent blinked hard at the new feed suddenly showing up on their taps. "Sir, we didn't authorize a second stream."

The senior agent didn't even look surprised. "That's not our stream."

"Then who—?"

"Priya Shah," the senior said quietly. "And I think we just learned who the real threat in that family is."

Arjun pushed himself to his feet, knees shaky but holding. "Okay, start talking. Where have you been? Why now?"

Priya's face softened. "I didn't vanish because I stopped caring, Arjun."

"Sure felt like it."

"I left because Ma was dying," Priya said softly. "And because she made me promise to finish her work before it was too late."

Arjun froze. "What work?"

"The Asha Protocol Archive." Priya set down her coffee, face grim. "You ever wonder why Ma left medicine? Why she went from being a rising neurosurgeon to running some temple clinic and studying ancient spirals?"

Arjun had. Many times. But no one ever gave him a straight answer—not Ma, not Priya, not the neighbors who whispered about family curses whenever Ma got too sick to work.

"She was trying to decode the bloodline curse," Priya said. "Except it's not a curse."

Arjun's chest tightened. "Then what is it?"

"It's a key."

Bete's speakers clicked softly. "I don't like where this is going."

"Neither do I," Arjun muttered. "Explain, Priya."

"Ma's research started with folklore," Priya said. "Old oral traditions about our family line being 'chosen by the earth itself.' But when she cross-checked that with ley resonance scans—and later, with my neural interface work—she found a pattern."

"What pattern?"

"Soulprint encoding."

Arjun rubbed his face hard, still half-dizzy. "Priya, you're gonna have to dumb this down for me. I'm one concussion away from becoming a potato."

Priya's smile was faint, but real. "Okay. You know how every person's Qi field is slightly different? Like a fingerprint made of energy?"

"Yeah."

"Well, our family's Qi field isn't natural. It's…stitched. Parts of it don't match human baseline at all."

"What does it match?"

"The spiral's pulse frequency."

Arjun's stomach dropped. "You're saying our ancestors were—what? Modified?"

"More than that." Priya's expression darkened. "They were engineered to act as living encryption keys."

Arclight HQ.

Thorn stood behind his tech team, arms crossed. "They know."

The lead analyst paled. "Know what, sir?"

"That the First Council didn't just build the grid," Thorn said. "They built the bloodline to match."

Arjun started pacing. "Okay, okay. Let's say you're right. Why didn't Ma ever tell me?"

"She tried." Priya's voice softened. "Every ritual. Every temple trip. Every weird midnight story about the spirals and the earth remembering us? That wasn't superstition. It was training."

"Training me for what?" Arjun asked, though part of him already knew.

"To be the next Keeper."

Arjun slammed a hand down on his desk, shaking the ancient laptop. "And you thought keeping me in the dark was smart?"

"I thought I could handle it alone," Priya admitted. "I thought if I cracked the code before you got dragged in, you could…be normal."

Arjun laughed bitterly. "Yeah, great job. Look how that turned out."

Priya's jaw clenched. "I didn't know you'd trigger the grid this soon. I thought we had years."

"Well, we don't."

"No," Priya agreed. "We have hours."

The floor beneath Arjun's feet pulsed softly, like the earth itself had a heartbeat.

"What happens now?" Arjun asked quietly.

"Now," Priya said, "we build the Keeper Key."

The schematic she sent appeared on the wall, overlaid onto Arjun's jury-rigged HelioCore. It wasn't just a machine anymore.

It was him—his blood, his soulprint, his entire inherited purpose—fused into tech.

"Congratulations," Priya said. "You're not just a historian, Arjun."

"You're the only one left who can either seal the spirals forever or reopen them—and invite back whatever answered first."

Arjun stared at the spiral, heart thudding in his chest.

"Fantastic," he muttered. "No pressure."

The schematic hovered in mid-air, projected onto the stained wall of Arjun's flat, flickering faintly as Bete adjusted the feed. It looked like a hybrid creature—part ancient Vedic diagram, part military engineering schematic, part Priya's frantic scribbling in digital ink.

"This thing looks like you designed it during a seizure," Arjun muttered, squinting at the overlapping layers of spiritual geometry, hardware specs, and biological resonance markers.

"Shut up and follow the diagram," Priya snapped from her end. "We don't have time for your stand-up set."

Bete snickered. "Technically, if we all die in 29 hours, you should be allowed at least one farewell roast."

Arjun shot the speaker a glare, but his fingers were already moving, sorting through the pile of scavenged parts covering his desk. The tools were a mess—some from proper repair kits, others hacked together from kitchen knives, broken earbuds, and a soldering iron held together with electrical tape.

Priya's voice softened slightly. "You need to wire the pulse stabilizer directly into your biofeedback monitor."

"That's…medical equipment," Arjun said. "Not ley-tech."

"It is now," Priya replied. "The Keeper Key only works if it can track your soulprint in real time. No automated system can handle that—it needs a human nervous system in the loop."

"Great," Arjun muttered. "I've always wanted to be hardware."

Across the street, Arclight's surveillance team was losing their collective minds.

"Sir," the younger agent whispered, "they're turning him into a…a biological control node."

Thorn said nothing, eyes locked on the feed, expression unreadable.

"Should we intervene?" the agent pressed.

"Not yet," Thorn said softly. "He's doing something we could never force him to do."

Arjun's hands worked faster than his brain, following instinct and habit from years of repairing second-hand tech no one else wanted. He'd done it so often—wiring salvaged drones, fixing junked radios, patching his own ancient laptop—that building the Keeper Key felt disturbingly natural.

Priya watched him work, her expression shifting between pride and guilt.

"You're good at this," she said quietly.

"Yeah," Arjun said without looking up. "Imagine if you'd told me what I was really training for."

Priya flinched. "I wanted you to have a normal life."

"Well," Arjun said, "you screwed that up."

"Yeah," Priya whispered. "I know."

The first layer of the Keeper Key came together quickly—a basic pulse modulator that would let Arjun's heart rate and breathing sync directly with the HelioCore's frequency generator.

"Okay," Priya said. "That's the easy part. Now the binding layer."

Arjun froze. "The what?"

"The blood binding," Priya said, like it was obvious. "The Key has to recognize you as the Keeper. You need to imprint your soulprint directly into the core."

Arjun's stomach twisted. "That sounds…medical."

"It's more spiritual," Priya admitted. "But also a little bloody."

"Of course it is."

Bete's speaker crackled. "Should I play some ominous chanting? Maybe light a candle?"

"Shut up, Bete," Arjun and Priya said in perfect unison.

Arjun grabbed the scalpel from his first-aid kit—its blade still slightly stained from the last time he'd sliced his hand trying to open a jammed drone casing.

"This is so unsanitary," Arjun muttered, but he dragged the blade across his palm anyway, hissing through his teeth as blood welled up.

"Good," Priya said softly. "Now place your hand on the core."

Arjun pressed his bleeding palm against the modified HelioCore unit—the centerpiece of his makeshift ley firewall, now merged with Priya's Keeper Key design. The metal shivered under his hand, faint pulses of warmth rising from it like a living thing waking up.

The blood didn't just sit there. It sank into the metal, veins of red spiderwebbing across the surface, tracing ancient patterns Arjun hadn't carved—but the metal remembered.

The spiral under the floor answered.

Arclight's sensors spiked violently.

"Sir, the ley grid's recognizing a Keeper signature."

Thorn leaned back, exhaling slowly. "And now the real game starts."

The air in the flat grew thicker, heavier with meaning, like the very walls were leaning in to listen.

Arjun's vision blurred, his breath shallow, as the spiral and the core synced to his pulse. For a moment, his body wasn't just Arjun Varma—it was a piece of the grid itself.

"You okay?" Priya asked, voice quieter now.

Arjun's laugh was breathless. "You ever…plug yourself into the earth's nervous system? Because that's what this feels like."

Memories flickered at the edges of his mind—not just the Witness' memories, but fragments from other Keepers. Faces he didn't know, voices whispering prayers in languages no one had spoken aloud in thousands of years.

They were all part of the Key now.

Arjun was the last link in a chain stretched across generations.

And for the first time, the weight of it hit him—not just as knowledge, but as grief.

"This is why Ma was always so tired," Arjun said softly. "She carried all of this, didn't she?"

Priya's voice cracked slightly. "Yeah."

He closed his eyes, hand still on the core, breath slowing until it matched the ancient pulse beneath his feet.

The spiral beneath the building glowed faintly, responding to his touch—not with power, but with recognition.

"Okay," Arjun said softly. "We have a Key."

Priya's smile was shaky, but real. "Now comes the hard part."

"Which is?"

"You have to decide what to unlock."

The schematic shifted again, showing two pathways:

One—seal the spirals permanently, cutting off Earth from the ancient grid forever.Two—open them fully, sending a new message into the void.

"This is insane," Arjun whispered. "You realize that, right?"

Priya nodded. "It always was."

The spiral pulsed again.

Once.Twice.Three times.

Arjun took a deep breath. "What would Ma have done?"

Priya didn't answer immediately. When she spoke, her voice was very soft. "Ma would have listened first. Before deciding."

Arjun's throat tightened. "Yeah. That sounds like her."

The final pulse came not from the spiral, but from within the core itself—a rhythmic beat matching his heart exactly.

"You are the Keeper," Bete said, tone unusually serious. "It's your call now."

Arjun wiped his bloodied palm on his jeans, staring at the ancient circuitry lit by his own heartbeat.

"Then we listen," Arjun said quietly. "Before we decide."

Beneath the floor, 333 meters down, the Witness listened back.