The main hall clock tried to strike twelve.
Its gears caught, hesitated, and then surrendered to the damp silence pressing in from every side. The Himalayan Institute for Excellence stood suspended in fog, its stone corridors slick with moisture, its arches breathing out cold. Shimla's mist had crept in during the night, thick and patient, curling through the campus like something that knew where it was going.
Siya stood on the upper veranda, fingers wrapped around the iron railing, her sketchbook held flat against her chest. The metal was icy, unkind. Below her, the courtyard lay erased—trees reduced to shadows, pathways swallowed whole. Somewhere a door creaked. Somewhere far off, a dog barked once and fell quiet.
She did not hear Rohan approach.
She felt him instead—his presence settling beside her, close enough to disturb the air. The warmth of him reached her shoulder before her eyes did. He smelled faintly of rain and old paper, a scent she associated with the library's upper floors, with long afternoons that slipped unnoticed into evening.
"You'll miss the morning bell," she said, still facing forward.
"I won't be here for it."
Something in his voice made her turn.
Rohan stood with his hands in his pockets, shoulders set, his gaze fixed on the fogged courtyard. The mist softened his features but not enough. In the thin light from the lantern behind them, she noticed new lines around his eyes—sharp, etched, nothing like the creases that came from laughter. They looked earned. They looked recent.
"You should be packing," she said more gently. "Your mother hates last-minute chaos."
A small smile crossed his face and vanished just as quickly. "Some things don't fit in a suitcase."
That should have sounded playful. It didn't.
He reached into his bag and drew out a notebook. It was small, wrapped in aged leather, the surface cracked and cold beneath her fingertips when he placed it in her hands. On its cover was an intricate symbol she had seen all her life without ever really seeing it—a fragment of the school crest, deliberately unfinished.
"This is for you," he said.
She turned it over once, uncertain. "One of your logic exercises?"
"No." He shook his head. "This is… a promise."
The fog pressed closer, muting sound, making the world feel narrowed to the space between them. Siya felt her chest tighten, though she could not have said why.
"If there comes a time when things stop making sense," he continued, carefully, "or when you feel lost, this will lead you. But promise me something."
She met his eyes. There was no teasing there now, no warmth to deflect the seriousness of what he was asking.
"Promise me you'll only open it when you have to."
She laughed softly, because the alternative was fear. "You're being dramatic. Are you leaving or staging a mystery?"
He did not answer that.
"I promise," she said instead.
He took her hand then. His fingers were cold, his grip firmer than usual, as if he were memorizing the feel of her. For a moment, she thought he might pull her closer, might say something reckless and human that would break the tension open.
Instead, he let go.
"Find me."
And then he stepped back, swallowed by the mist.
She waited for the sound of his footsteps.
They never came.
The notebook rested on her desk like an accusation.
Siya lay awake long after the lights were out, listening to the Institute settle around her—the groan of beams, the whisper of wind through old windows. Her roommate slept easily, one arm flung across the pillow, untouched by secrets. The notebook waited.
She told herself she wouldn't open it.
She traced the symbol on its cover instead, recognizing now what she had missed before. The crest was incomplete. Art unfinished. Logic interrupted. Truth withheld.
Eventually, she stopped pretending restraint was strength.
She opened it.
The first page was blank except for a small, precise sketch: the front gate of the Institute. Her eye snagged on a detail she had never noticed in years of passing through it—a single weathered stone at the base, half-hidden beneath ivy.
Below it, in Rohan's neat handwriting:
The beginning is in plain sight, if you know where to look.
Her skin prickled.
This was not a goodbye.
This was a map.
By morning, the campus was already murmuring.
"He left," someone whispered near the dining hall.
"No permission."
"His mother isn't answering her phone."
Raghav intercepted her near the doors, inevitable as a conclusion reached too quickly. He stood with his usual stack of books, posture immaculate, expression sharpened by certainty.
"He's an opportunist," he said flatly. "Nothing more."
She stopped walking. "You don't know that."
"He's the top student of Logic. He doesn't disappear for romance." Raghav adjusted his glasses. "Most likely a scholarship interview. Efficient. Minimal fallout."
"It was a promise," she said, sharper than she intended.
Raghav's eyebrow lifted. "Or a distraction. A magician's flourish—draw the eye one way while the real trick happens elsewhere."
He moved past her, already finished with the conversation.
Doubt followed him like a residue. Siya looked down at the notebook tucked against her ribs and wondered, for the first time, whether she was chasing love—or an illusion carefully designed for her.
She reached the gate before sunrise.
The sky over the Himalayas bruised itself purple and grey, the air sharp enough to sting her lungs. Dew soaked the hem of her pajamas as she knelt, pushing aside ivy with numb fingers.
The stone was there.
Loose.
Her heart kicked hard as she worked it free, exhilaration flooding her despite herself. Tucked behind it was a tiny bundle tied with a faded green ribbon.
A paper crane.
The memory struck without warning: the library's dust and hush, Rohan folding paper with impossible precision, his voice low and pleased.
"You think in hard lines," he had said. "You need pleats."
Standing in the cold dawn, the crane felt heavier than it should have. Inside it, another clue waited.
Behind her, footsteps scraped softly against stone.
"Siya."
Divya's voice cut through the mist, sharp with urgency and something like hunger.
Siya closed her fist around the crane.
The game had begun.