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The cell door groaned like an old throat clearing. Akhil didn't flinch. Six months of measured cruelty had taught him the meaning of that sound: more pain, another ritual to be endured. His wrists were maps of raw skin; his breaths came as small, precise thefts. Inside him the world had shrunk until only one thing remained: a small, stubborn ember that hissed, I need to see her.
A guard's voice cut the stale silence. "Up."
He stood because his muscles obeyed habit, because habit had replaced choice. They hauled him down the corridor. The lights hummed above, the paint peeled in sickled curls, and somewhere ahead a cane tapped in blind rhythm. John's silhouette waited at the interrogation room like a promise of thunder.
"You've gone quiet, boy," John said when they shoved Akhil into the chair. His blind eyes stared without seeing; his smile was the thin blue of old glass. "No more screams? No more lies?"
Akhil sat. He breathed. He waited. The whisper behind his ribs repeated: I need to see her.
John stepped close, the leather of his cuff rasping. "Tell me where Akira's body is," he said. "Or I will keep peeling at you until there is nothing left but bone."
The words landed and bent the air. For a second the bulb above them seemed to sputter in sympathy.
Then: a guard's tentative voice, muffled at the doorway. "Sir — phone call. Someone named Hinata. She's been trying to reach you."
At the sound of that name something like lightning struck through Akhil's fog. His eyes widened — not with simple memory but with a sudden, terrible clarity. Faces flooded back: sunlight on a street, the way a laugh had broken like glass. He felt the imprint of other lives snap into place. He remembered everything, and nothing felt like before.
He laughed. It started small, a thin wire of sound, and grew until it filled the station. The laugh echoed through concrete and iron until even the guards looked around, unsure what had broken. John's smile tightened; he looked amused at first, then sentenced.
"Look at you," John said, voice flat with disgust. "Your body's a spiderweb — weak, fragile. And those chains. And still you dare to laugh—"
Akhil's laugh split into something sharper. "Some chains," he said, "some cages," — he watched John's face — "can't keep a man."
John reached for a rejoinder, ready to remind the boy of every broken rib, every rod of leather and anger. He didn't finish. Akhil's hands were moving, slight and deliberate, fingering the iron cuffs as if feeling the rhythm of their weakness. He had watched them, counted welds, noted rust. Habit had taught his hands to learn metal by touch.
He bent his head to the bulb above them. The glass was old, the socket loose. With a small, patient movement Akhil aimed his cuff's metal against the lamp's fragile throat. There was a soft clink, a grazing scrape, a whisper of glass.
The bulb shattered like a small dying star.
Darkness swallowed the room.
A dull pause filled the space — the collective intake of breath from men who trusted light more than luck. One guard fumbled for a lighter. A tiny orange blossom flared, fragile and certain. He cupped the flame as if shielding it from the dark.
In that hesitating instant Akhil slid from the chair. He moved like a shadow that had remembered how to breathe. Chains skittered; a guard gasped and reached. Somewhere a boot met a desk. The lighter's flame danced and then guttered — knocked by an elbow, snuffed by a cloth, extinguished. In the sudden black, the sounds multiplied: the metallic clank of falling equipment, a cry of surprise, the ricochet of scuffling boots.
When the emergency floodlights bled back to life, the interrogation room looked like the aftermath of a storm. Chairs were overturned. Hands of men reached out, picking at bruises they did not yet fully feel. The chains that had bound Akhil lay twisted on the floor. The chair he had sat in was splintered.
He was not there.
For a long, shocked second the uniforms stared into emptiness.
John's fingers gripped the pistol at his hip until the knuckles showed white. He could not see the boy who had laughed in his face; he could only feel, in the silence, the gulf where control had been.
Outside in the wet night, Akhil ran. The cold bit through his shaking skin. Every step was a reclamation and a curse, a slow and inevitable return toward the phantom that chased him: her. He did not know her name. He could not have sketched her features. What pulled him was less a memory than a blade lodged in his chest; the single ache translated as purpose.
"They'll hunt you," someone's voice said in John's head, though he could have been listening to his own body. "You let him go."
John let the words hang, and for the first time his practiced righteousness trembled with something like alarm. He pounded a fist against the table as if to steady thought with force. He had built his life on law and duty, on the idea that a man could make justice a clean thing. This was not clean.
Akhil kept moving through alleys that smelled of diesel and rain, through streets with neon scabs and sleeping dogs. He was a body relearning movement, an instrument with a single string tuned to a note of obsession. He stumbled, but he did not stop.
Behind him, John ordered radios, phones, men to flood the streets. His blind eyes were ice, his cane tapping a rhythm now not of ritual but of panic. He could not see Akhil, but like every prey his life had taught him to read, he could hear the space where the boy had been, the absence as telling as any footprint.
Akhil vanished into the city's dark arteries the way a rumor slips between teeth. He left behind overturned chairs, a circle of frightened men, and a message that would not be unwritten: chains could be broken. Men could be unmade. And a thing hollowed out by pain could still become monstrous by desire.
John stood in the interrogation room longer than he thought he would. He felt something foreign press at his ribs — not guilt for what he had done, but a thin, cold fear that he might have freed what he had meant to destroy.
The night swallowed the sound of John's hurried commands. Somewhere, in the rain-slicked streets, Akhil kept running toward a name he could no longer speak and a face he could no longer draw. The world had been narrowed until the only horizon left was the burn in his chest.
I need to see her, he thought, and the city seemed to open a dark road before him.
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