The lab smelled of burnt copper and old paper. Light from the oil lamps had a tired quality, as if the room itself had been holding its breath and was finally letting out a long, thin sigh. Ketaki leaned with both palms on the cold railing that circled the Shatterer, and for a moment she let herself be nothing but the shape of that lean. The machinery did not look like much from the outside: coils, glass cylinders, a set of alignment lenses that were more art than instrument. Inside, however, the air was still singing.
That sound was the problem. It made memory feel like a physical thing, an ache behind the teeth. For days Ketaki had been pushing at an idea until the idea pushed back. Belief had weight. Belief could be measured. Belief could be turned into energy. All of those sentences had been theory and mathematics at first. Now they felt like wounds.
Leela was at her side, steady-handed in the only way Leela knew how: by refusing to look away. Haria hovered by the workbench, his jaw tight as if he wanted to say something aggressive because he did not know how to say something kind. Nobody in the room was calm. Calm would have suggested safety. Safety had fled hours earlier.
Ketaki closed her eyes. The darkness behind her lids was not empty. Faces, small and abrupt, shoved through: a village green soaked in smoke; a line of men with proud, ruined chests; the memory of a child who kept asking for a name she did not know she had given. She could feel Yoddha in the spaces those images left. Yoddha waited in those spaces like a thought that had learned to breathe.
She tasted iron and it was not in her mouth.
Leela reached for her wrist without asking and found a pulse that wanted to gallop and could not. "You did well," Leela said. Her voice was too small against the machinery. "You stopped him."
Ketaki let out a breath that might have been a laugh if anyone had given it a chance to be anything but noise. "I held him for a second," she said. "That is different from stopping him."
Haria cut in, impatient and brittle. "We cannot keep pretending this is a private problem. The Council will hear about an anomaly like this and they will do what they do best. They will contain, categorize, and then weaponize if they see fit."
Ketaki turned away from him. She did not mean to be rude, but when people spoke in inevitabilities it felt like being boxed into a destiny that was not hers. "If the Council steps in," she said, "they will not understand what they are looking at. They will see nuisance, not scale. They will see a broken woman, not a principle."
Leela's hand tightened. "We are not broken just because something happened to you. We are careful. We can document safely. We can control the variables. We can keep it small."
That word small made Ketaki flinch. She had always wanted something grand, which was the arrogance of youth and the crime of a person who believed in systems too much. The Shatterer had been supposed to be an instrument for curing grief by converting it into regulated motion. Instead it had opened a door. She had told herself as they built it that if a door opened, they would study the threshold. Now the threshold was looking back and it was not kindly.
A tremor went through her, a reflex born out of fear and muscle memory. Yoddha did not need to speak to be present. He occupied the rough places in her sentences, the places she left unfinished. Sometimes when she moved a hand he moved it with her. When she tried to recall a face he supplied the name. He was not only memory made violent. He was entitlement given a ghost.
"Why the Council?" Leela asked. It was not a question so much as a demand for explanation.
Ketaki answered because she had to answer, and because Yoddha's patience was not infinite. "Because they keep the keys. They file our essays and our prototypes in rooms that smell like cedar and cold light. They will understand containment. They will not treat us with the smallness we deserve. They will try to make him less than he is in order to make him usable."
Haria's face flushed. "That is cynical."
"Then call it what you like," Ketaki said. "It is realistic."
The room shivered. A sound like glass sighing broke somewhere on the far bench. A lens cracked, a hairline fracture at the edge of something that had been pristine minutes before. Shadows thickened in the corners where lanterns did not reach. The light seemed to pull away from Ketaki and favor the shape behind her.
She felt the shape like wind through leaves. Yoddha had taken a preference. He favored the outline of her shoulders and the bend of her fingers. He liked to stand where her shadow fell and pretend he was a person in his own right. It was one thing to have memory as companion; it was another to have it stand up and refuse to be merely retold.
When he spoke, it was not through her mouth the way it had been once. Now his voice seemed to move across the room as if it had trained itself in acoustics.
"You resist," he said. The words were simple. They were also accusations.
Ketaki swallowed, and the act itself felt like agreement. "I resist," she admitted before she could decide whether speaking was wise. Saying his name gave him solidity. Yoddha was, in part, made of the syllables people used to describe him. The more they named him, the more real he became.
"Then let me," he said. The tone was not malevolent simply for the sake of cruelty. It was a voice convinced of rightness. "I will do what you fear. I will give them a reason to be afraid and they will give me what I need."
Leela, who rarely spoke in theater, answered instead with a practicalized certitude that sometimes passed for bravery. "What does he want?"
"Recognition," Ketaki said. Her hands trembled as she tried to hold that single, searing truth. "Authority. Not just survival. He wants to be the part of me that gets the answers. He wants acknowledgment that the choices he made were real choices and not mistakes."
That admission lay between them and tasted like ash. It explained the cruelty in his memory and the tenderness in its memory. Where Ketaki had thought she was absorbing wrongs to steady herself, Yoddha had been cataloging them as credentials. He had been collecting the permission to act.
Haria paced once, then stopped. "We can shut it down," he said. He looked around the structure of the Shatterer as if the thing had betrayed him personally. "We can disable the conversion lenses and seal the chamber. Make it a lesson for us. Tape the cracks, file the blueprints, and never speak of it again."
Ketaki laughed, a small, hard noise that came from the part of her that still loved risky ideas. "Do you really believe secrets live forever in the dark? Do you think a machine that learns from belief will be content with being locked in a closet?"
"Then what do you want?" Haria asked. There was fear bleeding through his impatience. He wanted a plan. Ketaki wanted something different and she did not know what to ask for.
She wanted Yoddha to be less certain. She wanted him to see that being held did not justify what he had done. She wanted to make the world softer and the world would not consent.
The lamps sputtered. A filament popped in the distance. For a brief, dreadful second the room went half-blind. Ketaki felt the presence behind her move closer, like a man testing which of two doors was unlocked. That proximity was an embarrassment. People who have been made by violence sometimes forget that other people bleed.
"Fine," Ketaki said finally, because a sentence felt like an action. "If he is going to be visible, we document everything. We take witness statements. We log reactions, physiological responses, the sequence of events. We make his emergence an experiment instead of a crisis. If we can create a model, the Council will either have proof or they will not. Either way, it will not be raw rumor."
Leela's face was pale, but she nodded. "Controlled and recorded," she said. "No sudden triggers. No public displays."
Haria shook his head. "You want to perform this in the same building where you nearly tore yourself apart? That is reckless."
Ketaki looked at him and did not answer. Recklessness had been her currency for a long time. She liked to think of it as courage. Sometimes it was just stubbornness and bad timing. That distinction had never been easy to make.
She moved to the console and began to write, hands that wanted to be busy. Her handwriting was a cross between a ledger and an apology. Every line she wrote was an attempt to convert chaos into something that could be measured. It was a human thing to do, and also a cowardly thing. If she reduced the event to numbers, maybe she would feel less like a monster.
The Shatterer responded to documentation as if pleased. A low vibration threaded through the floorboards, subtle enough to be mistaken for settling wood. The crystals in their chambers lent a faint, restless glow. Ketaki recorded breath rates and pupil dilation, wrote down the exact phrases Yoddha used when he had spoken through her, cataloged the moment when the laboratory light had died. In the margins she wrote what she would not say aloud. She noted how her hands had moved without her permission, how anger felt like a lever that wanted to be pulled.
Time passed in measured increments. They took duplicated notes and crosschecked them; Leela read aloud so that there was a voice that could be timed against the machine's hum. Haria argued about controlling variables and made a list of reasons why their plan could go wrong. The list grew long and fat. That was the point. Ketaki wanted every possible mistake filed where it could be looked at, poked, and possibly cured.
They were methodical until they were interrupted.
The lab doors opened and the draft that came in carried with it a smell Ketaki had met only in government buildings and at funeral parlors: the scent of too much order. Two men walked in. They wore the same gray jackets that made bureaucrats into a uniform and they had the air of people who were always asking whether a decision would be profitable in inconvenience.
"Ketaki," the first man said. His voice was the kind that attempted to merge politeness and power. "We received an abnormality report. We were told to proceed with caution."
Haria stiffened into a posture of immediate antagonism. Leela's face burned. Ketaki felt something in her chest that was not fear and not courage but an honest, naked exposure. She had wanted to control what happened next. She had not expected a knock at the door.
"You are early," she said. It was an odd reply. Honesty sometimes read as insolence. The man smiled the practiced smile of someone who had never been surprised before.
"We prefer to be prompt," he answered. He glanced at the Shatterer as if it were a wild animal on display in a market. "Please step away from the operational console."
It felt like a command dressed as a request. Ketaki, who had planned everything, had not planned for this kind of inevitability. She realized her own mistake in the same second the realization arrived: trying to keep a dangerous truth to oneself made you selfish by definition. That selfishness then invited authority to fix things in a way only authority knew how: by taking them.
Leela reached for Ketaki's hand and squeezed. The gesture was small and full of apology. Haria opened his mouth and then closed it. The two men advanced with the careful speed of people who had been trained to do no harm until they could assert control.
Ketaki did not feel brave. She felt tired and naked and aware, fiercely and painfully, of her shortcomings. She had wanted to be both creator and curator. She had believed she could stand in the middle and hold contradictory things together. People like her had made inventions before, then watched them become instruments of someone else's will. That was a common plot in any book about ambition. She had read those books and felt both superior and doomed.
The first official put a hand on a switch and turned it. The light in the lab dimmed and then steadied itself at a level that felt like supervision. He took notes on a pad with a pen that clicked. That clicking ticked off a time that would not belong to them anymore.
Ketaki stepped back, not because someone told her to, but because she wanted the men to take responsibility for containment. It was an act of cowardice disguised as relief. She had been wrong to think she could keep the threshold between worlds to herself.
"Document everything," she told them. "Record us. If you are going to intervene, do it with transparency."
The first man inclined his head. "We will proceed with standard protocols."
He said the phrase as if it had sanctity. Ketaki believed him only insofar as a list of rules could be believed. Rules could be followed enough to avoid catastrophe. Rules could also be used to justify all manner of quiet cruelties.
The men walked past the Shatterer, measured the alignment lenses as if they were precious specimens, and set a small device by the main console that blinked blue and red like a patient thing. It monitored. It regulated. It behaved like a lullaby for machines.
Ketaki watched them and felt both foolish and relieved. They were not heroes. They were officials. They were neat. They were the kind of people who buried complex possibilities under paperwork. Perhaps that was a better fate than allowing raw possibility to snap into violence. Or perhaps it was worse. She could not tell which.
Yoddha watched, too, and when he spoke it was almost a whisper, but it wrapped around her throat like the last coil of a noose.
"Let them watch," he said. "Let them be afraid. Then they will give us what we want."
Ketaki closed her eyes and felt the weight of returning control, and then the loss of it. The room settled into a new rhythm. There were cameras now watching their faces. There was a protocol number that someone could quote later. There were people who would later argue about containment thresholds and the ethics of sentiment conversion.
Ketaki made a small promise to herself that was equal parts hope and apology. She would record everything. She would try to make her error legible. She would not pretend she had all the answers. She would accept the imperfections that had made her human and the unintended consequences that came with being inventive in a world that kept score.
Outside, the wind moved through the temple courts and, for the first time since the Shatterer had turned on, the sound of ordinary life seemed like a different language. Ketaki did not know whether what she had done was good or bad. She only knew she had been honest about its risk, and honesty seemed as near to redemption as she could get.