The small café tucked behind the old market had become their unofficial meeting spot. It was quiet, dimly lit, and most importantly, no one paid them any attention. The fan above hummed lazily, stirring the faint smell of coffee and fried snacks that clung to the air.
Naina was the first to notice Shivam as he stepped in. She started to greet him with her usual teasing, something about always arriving late, but the words froze on her tongue. Her eyes caught the bruise blooming along his jaw, the split in his lip.
"Whoa," Aman muttered, leaning back in his chair. "You look like you went twelve rounds with a truck."
Shivam tried to wave it off, sliding into the empty seat between Dikshant and Aanchal. "Just a rough night."
Dikshant frowned, studying his brother. The others had started with easy smiles, but now the table had gone quiet, their focus narrowing. Shivam could feel the weight of their stares pressing against his skin. He exhaled, rubbing a hand over his face.
"I need you all to take this seriously," he said, voice lower than usual. "What I'm about to show you… it isn't some paranoid theory."
He pulled out his phone, thumb scrolling until the screen filled with grainy images. He placed it on the table for all to see.
The photos weren't perfect, some blurred, some overexposed, but the details were there. Crates being hauled into trucks. Men in SynerTech jackets. Floodlights cutting through the Ridge's fog. And one frame that froze them all: a faint orange glow seeping from the gap of a container.
Aanchal leaned forward, her brow furrowing. "This is recent?"
"Last night," Shivam confirmed. His voice was steady, but inside, the memory replayed with raw clarity, Veeraj's fists, the taste of blood, Kairav's voice cold and measured. "I wasn't supposed to be there. And they knew it. They knew me."
Naina tilted her head, eyes narrowing. "What do you mean, 'knew you'?"
"They said my name," Shivam replied, scanning their faces one by one. "Called me out like I was on a list. Kairav himself showed up. He told Veeraj to leave me because…" His throat tightened around the word. "…because I was their specimen."
The silence that followed wasn't the kind that came from disbelief. It was heavier, as if each of them was carrying the weight of what that word implied.
Aman broke it with a sharp breath. "Specimen? That's not just surveillance. That's…" He stopped himself, shaking his head. "That's like lab rat territory."
Shivam nodded. "And he said more. He knows where we've been. What we saw. And he knows about you. About all of you. Your families, your routines. He made it clear,"
"that we're being watched," Aanchal finished, her voice soft but clipped. She sat back in her chair, arms folding across her chest. The joking sparkle that usually lit her face was gone now, replaced by something more calculating.
Dikshant spoke up for the first time, his tone sharper than his years. "Then nothing we've done was ever really hidden. We thought we'd buried the Other-world, the Metro, all of it. But someone's been watching from the start."
Naina tapped her finger against the phone screen, lingering on the faint orange light. "And now they're moving things that don't belong in this world."
Shivam didn't say anything to that. His mind was already looping through scenarios: the crates, the workers, the surveillance. How much did they already know? How far had the leak gone? He'd spent half the night imagining cameras in his room, phones tapped, every word they spoke catalogued in some file.
"I'm not telling you this to scare you," he said finally. His voice cracked a little, but he forced it steady. "I'm telling you because if SynerTech's involved, this isn't about gas leaks or cover-ups anymore. They're planning something big. And we're caught in the middle of it."
The group looked at one another, the air heavy with a new tension. Aanchal was the first to break the silence, muttering, "Well… guess that explains why we're not joking anymore."
Her attempt at lightness didn't land. The bruise on Shivam's jaw said more than her words ever could.
The silence around the table stretched longer than usual, like each of them was waiting for someone else to speak first. The low hum of the café's refrigerator and the occasional clink of cups from behind the counter filled the gap, sounding almost intrusive against the heaviness of their thoughts.
Finally, Naina leaned back, exhaling sharply. "Okay. Let's cut through this. If SynerTech knows about us, that means something leaked. Somewhere, somehow. We were careful, at least I thought we were. We never talked about this outside our circle."
Her eyes swept across the group, firm but not accusing. "So how?"
Aman frowned, drumming his fingers on the table. "Phones tapped? Cameras? They're a billion-dollar company; they could have eyes anywhere. Maybe it isn't even about what we said. Maybe it's just… us being there. What if they tracked movement patterns?"
"Maybe," Aanchal said slowly, chewing on the inside of her cheek. Her voice had dropped lower, more thoughtful. "But it doesn't explain everything. If they were watching that closely, we would've known. You can't tail ten teenagers for years without one of us spotting something."
The frustration in her tone echoed what Shivam had been thinking since last night. He rubbed his temples, the memory of Kairav's words burning like a brand: I know what you saw. I know where you went.
Dikshant spoke next, his voice sharp. "Then maybe it wasn't an outsider. Maybe it came from inside. From one of us."
The words landed like stones on the table. No one reacted immediately, but Shivam could feel the discomfort shift through them, like a ripple in still water.
Aanchal broke the silence, but not carefully. "You know what's strange?" she blurted. "Apart from us, the ten from school, we never saw the other Metro or Otherworld survivors again. Not once."
Everyone turned to her.
She sat up straighter, defensive under their eyes. "Think about it. The Metro was full of people. Dozens survived that day, right? But after it happened? Silence. No survivor groups, no reunions, no chance encounters. It's like they just… vanished. Except us. And Rathod's bunch."
Naina frowned, leaning in. "You're saying one of them talked?"
"I'm saying," Aanchal replied, her words clipped now, "that if SynerTech knows everything, then either they got to someone else who was there… or someone handed them the story." She shook her head, almost angrily. "And it doesn't add up. The Metro was intact here. None of that happened in this world. No collapsed tunnels, no dead. Only we remember it. So how the hell could anyone outside know unless someone told them?"
The weight of that thought pulled them all into silence again. Even Aman, usually quick with sarcasm, looked unsettled, his jaw tight.