"Long time no see... Light."
The words came through the receiver like a ghost from a decade ago. Lucian didn't respond immediately. He couldn't. His throat had closed up the way it always did when the past came knocking—unannounced, uninvited, carrying all the weight of things he had spent ten years trying to forget.
For a few seconds, he just sat there. The phone pressed to his ear. The lamp burning low on his desk. His reflection staring back at him from the dark window, looking older than he remembered.
Nagi.
Of all the people Agent 12 could have been, of all the voices that could have answered that encrypted line, it had to be him. The man with the scarred forehead and the metal brace. The man who had once saved Lucian's life and then disappeared into the chaos of his own wounds.
Lucian took a breath. Then another.
Then the conversation began.
---
Nagi listened carefully. That was his way—always had been. He didn't interrupt, didn't rush to conclusions, didn't fill the silence with useless words. He just listened, his brown eyebrows drawn together, the wrinkles on his face deepening with every sentence.
"Hum," he said. Then, after a pause, "Hum."
That was Nagi's language. Small sounds that carried whole worlds of meaning. A single hum could mean I hear you. Two could mean I am paying attention. Three, with a slight lift at the end, meant this is worse than I thought.
Lucian kept talking. He told Nagi about the red eye—how it had started glowing, pulsing like a heartbeat trapped behind his son's iris. He told him about the nightmares. The cliff. The blade. The way Agastya woke up screaming about deaths that weren't his own.
"Children have such things," Nagi said quietly. But there was no conviction in his voice. He was testing the words, seeing if they would hold weight. They didn't.
Lucian told him about the forest trip. How Agastya had gotten lost for two hours. How he had returned without a scratch. How he had said—with that strange, hollow certainty that made Lucian's blood run cold—that the tiger had not attacked him. That a wolf had carried him safely out of the trees.
The line went silent.
Nagi was not humming anymore.
Lucian could hear him breathing—slow, deliberate, the kind of breathing a man does when he is trying very hard not to panic. He imagined Nagi sitting in his room, the metal brace on his left hand resting on the desk, the scar on his forehead catching the light. He imagined the wrinkles around his eyes pulling tighter, the brown eyebrows pressing together until they almost touched.
"Agastya is awakening," Nagi said finally.
Lucian's heart stopped. Then started again, faster than before. "How do you conclude that?"
There was a pause. A long one. When Nagi spoke again, his voice was different—flatter, more careful, like a man choosing his words from a very small supply.
"I will send you a parcel," he said. "Tomorrow. You will get your answer."
Lucian wanted to ask more. He wanted to demand explanations, to pull the truth out of Nagi's scarred hands like a doctor pulling a splinter from a wound. But something in Nagi's voice told him it was useless. The conversation was over.
The line went dead.
---
Nagi placed the receiver down slowly.
His hand—the one without the brace—rested on the black box for a moment longer than necessary. The plastic was warm now from the call. Warm and ordinary, like any other phone after a conversation. But this had not been an ordinary conversation. Not even close.
He leaned back in his chair.
The room was dark except for the laptop screen, which had gone to sleep, its glow reduced to a faint pulse in the corner of his vision. The curtains were still drawn. The door was still closed. Everything was exactly as it had been before the call.
But everything had changed.
Agastya is awakening.
The words circled in his mind like vultures. He had known this day would come—had known it for years, had prepared for it in ways he never spoke about, had built his entire second life around the possibility of this moment. But knowing and facing were two different things. The first was a thought. The second was a weight pressing down on his chest, making it hard to breathe.
No, he thought. No, no, no.
He grabbed his head with both hands—the scarred one and the braced one—and pressed his palms against his temples. His fingers dug into his hair. His elbows rested on the desk, trembling slightly.
No.
The word was useless. It changed nothing. But he couldn't stop thinking it. Couldn't stop feeling the panic rising in his throat like bile.
His heartbeat was too fast. He could hear it in his ears, feel it in his wrists, in his neck, in the scar on his forehead that seemed to throb with its own ancient memory of pain. He was scared. Truly scared. The kind of scared that made his stomach clench and his hands shake and his mind race through scenarios that all ended the same way.
This is not happening.
But it was happening. It had been happening for years, right under his nose, and he had been too busy pretending to be normal to notice.
He sat there for a long time—minutes, maybe hours—just breathing. Just trying to keep the panic from swallowing him whole.
---
The door creaked.
Nagi didn't turn around. He didn't need to. He knew the footsteps, the way the floorboards groaned under a certain weight, the soft rustle of cotton that always preceded her voice.
"Nagi."
Prachi.
She stood in the doorway, her hand still on the handle, her silhouette framed by the dim light from the hallway behind her. She had been sleeping—or trying to sleep. Something had woken her. Maybe the sound of his breathing. Maybe the absence of him beside her. Maybe just the instinct that comes from sharing a life with someone for twenty years.
"What happened?" she asked. "You look like someone has stolen your peace."
He didn't answer immediately. His hands dropped from his head and rested on the desk, fingers splayed, palms flat against the wood. He could feel the grain beneath his skin. Real things. Solid things. Things that belonged to this life, not the one that was calling him back.
"Just business," he said. The words came out rougher than he intended. "Issue. You can go back to sleep. I have to fix this."
Prachi didn't move.
She stood there for a moment longer, her eyes scanning the room—the laptop, the black box, the tension in her husband's shoulders. She knew him. Not everything—he had made sure of that—but enough to recognize when he was lying.
But she also knew when to push and when to let go.
"Okay," she said finally. "Don't stay up too late."
She left. The door closed behind her with a soft click.
Nagi waited until her footsteps faded down the corridor. Then he stood up, walked to the door, and turned the lock. The sound was small but final. A seal. A promise that whatever happened next, he would face it alone.
---
He went to the front wall of his room—the one behind the heavy wooden wardrobe, the one no one ever looked at twice. His hands moved automatically, years of muscle memory guiding his fingers to a spot that looked no different from any other.
He pressed.
Once. Twice. Three times. A pause. Four times.
The wall responded with a soft click.
A compartment slid open—small, square, hidden so carefully that even Prachi, who had shared this room for two decades, had never suspected it existed. Inside, wrapped in cloth and sealed with wax, was a box.
Nagi's hands were shaking as he reached for it.
The box was not large. It fit easily in his palms, the wood smooth and dark, the edges worn from handling. He had prepared this years ago—packed it, sealed it, hidden it away against the day it would be needed. He had hoped that day would never come. He had hoped he would grow old and forget why the box existed and what it contained.
But hope was not the same as belief.
He carried the box to his desk and set it down. His fingers fumbled with the seal, breaking the wax, unfolding the cloth. Inside lay the parcel—the one he had promised to send to Light. The one that would answer questions Lucian didn't even know he was asking.
Nagi stared at it for a long moment.
Then he packed it neatly, wrapped it carefully, and addressed it to a name that was not a name and a place that was not a place.
For Light.
He would send it in the morning. Tonight, he would sit in the dark and try to remember how to breathe.
But Nagarjun knew—with a certainty that sat heavy in his chest like a stone—that this was only the beginning.
The past had found him.
And it was not letting go.
TO BE CONTINUED.....