Aanya woke with a gasp.
Her hands were smaller. Softer. The ceiling above was not her lab's steel-gray paneling but a cheap plaster roof with peeling paint.
A mirror beside the bed showed the face of a teenage girl—big brown eyes, messy school-braided hair, and a uniform shirt hanging loosely.
She clutched her head as flashes of memory flooded in—her own death, her research, and now… the life of Aria Sharma, an 11th-grade student from Delhi.
Outside the door, a woman's voice called, "Aria! Jaldi karo, school ke liye late ho raha hai.
Ananya—no, Aria—took a deep breath.
If anyone found out who she really was, she wouldn't just be expelled from school.
She'd be killed—again.
And this time, there might not be a second rebirth.
The sunlight felt sharper than she remembered.
Ananya—now living as Aria—adjusted the heavy schoolbag on her shoulder, feeling the unfamiliar weight of notebooks instead of lab files.
The street smelled of frying samosas and petrol. She scanned every passerby out of habit, her scientist's mind running security checks. No suspicious faces. Yet.
At the school gate, hundreds of students in the same navy-blue uniform streamed inside. Their chatter felt like static in her ears—until she realized something strange.
Snippets of conversations slipped into her brain and stayed there perfectly, as if she had a built-in recorder. Her enhanced memory from the experiment was still working.
In the classroom, the name "Aria Sharma" was called, and she raised her hand automatically. A boy sitting next to her smirked.
"Arre, aaj toh time pe aayi ho. Kya baat hai?"
She forced a polite smile, unsure who he was—but his tone told her they had history.
During Chemistry period, the teacher wrote a complex organic reaction on the board. While the rest of the class groaned, Ananya's mind instantly solved it, adding two more advanced steps on her notebook.
The teacher froze, staring at her.
"Aria… yeh tumne kaise kiya?"
She shrugged. "Bas… guess kar liya."
At lunch, she wandered the corridor, scanning bulletin boards for clues about this school's connections. That's when she saw it:
A faded newspaper clipping about a science fair sponsored by Genex Labs—her old employer, the same people who'd tried to shut down her project.
Her pulse quickened.
If Genex had ties to the school… the people who killed her might be watching already.
From the corner of her eye, she spotted a man in plain clothes leaning against the wall outside, pretending to check his phone but staring directly at her.
It wasn't paranoia this time.
She knew that stance.
That was surveillance.