Vikram sat outside the hut, elbows on his knees, watching the narrow lane.
It was mid-morning. Thin smoke curled from a tea stall nearby. The air smelled of ash and boiled milk. Someone was hammering metal in the next alley. A group of boys passed with cloth bundles under their arms, heading for the press building.
He still didn't know how to speak. Not to them. Not yet.
A woman had handed him a half-roti earlier. He nodded in thanks. She called him Vicky again.
He kept it.
He had no money. No answers. No one to ask.
But his mind... something had changed.
He could hear his own thoughts louder than before. Like a second voice just behind the first — calm, distant, observant. It didn't echo. It watched. It felt… sharper.
More than that — he felt others.
Not clearly. Just flickers. Brushstrokes of emotion that weren't his own.
Later, he stood at the street corner, pretending to fold newspapers. A boy next to him, maybe eleven, whistled while rolling the bundles.
Vikram's hand brushed the boy's arm by accident. He started to pull back — but the contact lingered.
Just a few seconds.
He didn't feel anything at first. No visions. No voices.
But something settled in his chest — a quiet shift. A weightless thread, tugging faintly from somewhere deep inside. Like a thread had tied itself between them.
The boy kept whistling, unaware.
But Vikram knew: something had happened.
He tested it again later. A brief touch to an old man's shoulder — nothing. Too quick.
But when he helped a woman pick up a fallen paper roll and their hands met, just for a moment longer — that same feeling returned.
A thread.
Not memory. Not knowledge. But presence.
Each time he held the touch for a few seconds, he felt a subtle pull, like a doorway opening — not enough to see through, but enough to know it existed.
And then came the emotions. Fleeting sensations that passed through him moments after linking: Anger. Regret. Hunger. Fear.
They weren't thoughts. Just feelings. Like echoes carried on wind. He couldn't trace them to exact causes — not yet — but they were real.
None of them looked at him. None noticed.
But they were now… connected.
He could feel them.
And the link didn't vanish after the touch ended. It remained, as if some part of them had stayed with him, even as they walked away.
That night, he sat near the back wall of the printing shed, staring at the palm of his hand, heart thudding.
He didn't know what this was. Not yet.
But it was real. It had come with him. Or awakened in him.
Something ancient. Something powerful.
And it was growing.
The boy from the press, the whistler, had fallen asleep on folded sacks of old paper. Vikram watched him from a distance.
He lay down. Closed his eyes.
And then he tried.
He didn't move his body, but his mind reached — not outward, but inward — toward the thread.
And to his surprise, it responded.
The boy's presence met him in that space. Subtle. Soft. Open.
The link pulsed. Not forceful. But waiting.
And there — for the first time — something began to shift.
Memories did not come as clear images. Not yet.
But the door creaked open.
He could sense impressions: warmth, shame, laughter in the dark, a mother's voice, the cold floor of a shared room. Still vague, still blurry — but closer.
Not knowledge. Not control.
But access.
And it would grow stronger the longer they were connected — and especially when they slept.
He pulled back.
The net was real.
And it wasn't just connection.
It was the beginning of something more.