"Walls speak when silence grows,
Colors bloom where no wind blows.
Ask the child with crimson hands—
She paints the truth no one understands."
The next morning, the group awoke to find the village oddly quiet—too quiet. Even the chickens, the carts, the gossipy women they'd seen before seemed to have disappeared overnight.
Kabir rubbed his eyes. "Where is everyone?"
"Maybe it's a market day in the next town?" Radhika guessed, though even she didn't sound convinced.
But then they saw her.
A little girl, no more than ten, crouched against the wall of an abandoned house. Her fingers were dipped in red paint—except it didn't look like paint. She was sketching shapes on the cracked plaster: crooked houses, faceless people, and long black lines that looked like shadows.
The desperate mother's voice from the day before echoed in Kabir's memory:
"Ask the girl who paints. She sees things."
Kabir approached first.
"Hey… what are you drawing?"
The girl tilted her head. Her hair fell over one eye, and she smiled without looking at him.
"Not drawing. Telling."
"Telling what?"
"The story of who was here. The story of who will not be."
Radhika frowned. "What do you mean?"
The girl dragged her hand down the wall, leaving a crimson streak.
"They all go. One by one. No one listens. Except me."
Aman bent down beside her. "Do you know about Chhavi? The missing girl?"
The painter-girl giggled. "Chhavi isn't missing. She's hiding."
That word hiding clung to the air like smoke.
"Hiding from who?" Kabir pressed.
The girl leaned in close, whispering. "From the one who came back."
No one knew what to say.
A Strange Hint
Abhay, who had been silent most of the time, finally spoke:
"Who came back?"
The girl's gaze flicked toward him for the first time, and suddenly she smeared both her red-stained palms across the wall, making two eye-like circles.
"He watches through these. Always watching."
And then, without another word, she stood and skipped away, leaving them frozen by the wall marked with two crude red eyes.
Uneasy Conversations
That night, around the firepit, no one laughed. Not even Kabir, who usually cracked jokes to hide tension.
Zoya stirred the pot of lentils with shaking hands. "She was just a child. Maybe she's disturbed. Maybe she was playing."
"Children don't lie like that," Aman muttered.
Kabir stared into the fire, jaw clenched. "I don't care what she meant. I want answers. Tomorrow, we're splitting again. Half search the temple road. Half find this girl's family. Someone has to know what's going on."
The silence that followed was heavier than any argument.
Above them, the sky was unnervingly clear, with too many stars. And just for a second, Abhay thought he saw two faint red dots blinking from the tree line.
When he blinked, they were gone.
"Some truths are drawn in color,
Others bleed in silence.
When walls remember,
Humans forget."