Chapter 1 — When the Truth Glitched
The police left after midnight, but the apartment still felt crowded with questions.
Ravika Chauhan stood in the living room of her best friend's flat, arms wrapped around herself, staring at the space where Palak had been found. The room was quiet now, yet everything inside it felt wrong—too neat, too arranged, too careful for someone who had just… given up.
Palak wasn't the kind of girl who left without fighting.
Ravika wiped her face with the back of her hand, angry at the tears that kept coming. She wasn't someone who cried easily, but this—this was different. Palak had been her only real companion in this city. The only one who made every boring lecture and lonely evening feel a little less sharp.
An auntie from the next floor placed a shaky hand on her shoulder.
"Police said she was under stress, beta… some children hide everything. Maybe she didn't tell you."
Ravika didn't respond. She couldn't.
People said things because silence scared them.
A little later, Palak's parents arrived—her mother collapsing on the threshold, wailing as if her heart had been pulled out. Her father tried to hold her, but his own legs shook too much. And in the middle of their grief, Palak's mom reached out and hugged Ravika.
"You were… like my second daughter," she whispered, voice breaking. "Why didn't she tell you anything…? Why didn't she tell me…?"
Ravika hugged her back with all the strength she had left.
"I don't know, Aunty… I wish I knew."
But deep inside, a small, cold thought whispered:
This doesn't feel like suicide.
She kept that thought to herself.
---
After the crowd left
The police sealed the bedroom and took the main laptop. But Palak—being dramatic as always—had a habit of keeping her old phone hidden behind her bed frame "because memories deserve a backup."
Ravika found it easily.
She started scrolling because she didn't know what else to do. Her mind was numb, running on instinct.
The messages were normal:
memes, class gossip, job applications, silly rants…
But something felt off.
Three days before her "suicide," there were no messages.
Palak texted constantly—she never stayed silent this long.
And then there was the video file.
A short clip saved in the gallery with a glitchy thumbnail. The moment Ravika tapped it open, the screen tore into static. The video was corrupted—half the frames missing, the sound broken, like someone had forced it into silence.
Ravika frowned.
Palak didn't know how to corrupt a video.
And this wasn't accidental.
It felt… deliberate.
She replayed it several times, and in one half-second where the distortion eased, something flashed in the background:
a shadowy figure standing near the window.
Her blood ran cold.
Palak had lived on the 7th floor.
No one could stand at her window.
Not without climbing equipment… or breaking in.
Ravika's throat tightened. A tear escaped, but this time not from grief alone—there was fear, confusion, disbelief mixing in.
Then something else caught her eye.
The file info showed it had been synced automatically to a backup cloud account—exactly one minute before the time of death the police wrote in their report.
Why would a dying girl upload a corrupted video?
Ravika's stomach dropped.
No, something was wrong.
Very wrong.
---
She stepped back into the living room
Palak's parents were gone now—taken downstairs by neighbors. The corridor was quiet, but her own apartment door just opposite seemed so far away.
She looked once more at the taped-off bedroom door and whispered,
"I'll find out what happened, okay? I promise I won't let them write your story like this."
Her voice cracked at the end.
She left the apartment, locked it carefully, and went to her own flat across the hall.
---
Inside her own room
She placed the phone on the bed, opened her laptop, and started checking details from the backup account. She didn't know what she expected—some clue, some mistake… something.
Instead, she found a strange log entry.
A device had accessed Palak's cloud backup at the same time the video corrupted. Not a phone. Not a laptop.
Something else.
Something… industrial.
Her brows knitted.
No hacker used that type of gateway.
No ordinary user did either.
That kind of access only came from big systems, big companies, big servers.
When she clicked the device details, the name popped up:
rajputind-maint-node
Rajput Industries Maintenance Server
The breath left her body in one sharp exhale.
Rajput Industries was huge. Too huge. A place where interns walked in with dreams, and billionaires walked out with power.
What were their systems doing inside Palak's files?
Her mind began stitching possibilities, but none of them felt peaceful.
Then her phone buzzed.
A single message from an unknown number.
"Don't look deeper."
Her heart stopped.
Another message followed before she could react.
"What happened wasn't your fault.
But it will become your problem."
She stared at the screen, cold creeping into her chest.
And then—
a third message:
"Stay away from Rajput Industries."
Ravika locked her phone with shaking hands.
She was sad—so unbearably sad—but sadness had a way of sharpening into anger. And anger had a way of turning into determination.
She wiped her face, breathed deeply, and whispered into the empty room:
"You messed with the wrong girl."
---
Two days later
Palak's funeral took place in her hometown. Ravika couldn't afford to travel, and Palak's mother cried to her over the phone afterward.
"She cared about you more than herself, beta," the woman sobbed. "She would never leave without telling you…"
The words stabbed deep.
When the call ended, Ravika sat silently on the floor of her small apartment, fingers digging into the tiles.
She didn't have answers.
But she knew where the questions pointed.
Rajput Industries.
If someone inside that empire touched Palak's last moments,
Ravika needed to be inside that empire too.
Not as a victim.
Not as a bystander.
As someone smart enough to see the truth.
She opened her laptop, pulled up her resume, removed anything that could look suspicious, and whispered to herself:
"Wait and watch. I'm coming for you."
She didn't know that the man who owned the company had already seen her once.
Had remembered her for years.
And would recognize her instantly the moment she walked through his doors.
For now, she only knew one thing:
She would join Rajput Industries.
And she would find out who killed her friend.
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