That evening felt wrong from the start.
Shiva returned from school just after sunset, his footsteps echoing through the narrow corridor leading to their apartment. The door was open. The lights were on.
But the room was too quiet.
Mahi should have been there already—sitting cross-legged on the floor, complaining about homework, humming some tune she'd heard at school. She was never late. Never.
He dropped his bag.
"...Onee-chan?"
No answer.
His mother stood near the stove, her movements slow, distracted. His father hadn't returned yet.
"Where's Mahi?" Shiva asked.
His mother frowned. "She should be home. She left school on time."
A thin, uncomfortable silence stretched between them.
Shiva checked the clock.
An hour passed.
Then another.
Phones were borrowed. Calls were made. Her friends said she'd left the school gate like usual. No one had seen her after that.
Night deepened.
By the time the police arrived, Shiva's hands were shaking—not with fear, but with something colder. Something calculating.
A missing person report was filed.
Posters went up the next morning. Neighbors whispered. Teachers avoided eye contact. The police asked routine questions, wrote routine notes, and promised routine effort.
Shiva watched everything.
He didn't cry.
He didn't panic.
At night, he opened his laptop.
For the first time, he didn't hack to learn.
He hacked to search.
Traffic cameras. Public transport logs. Mobile tower pings. Incomplete data, corrupted files, access-restricted systems—none of it stopped him. He stitched fragments together, following a trail only he could see.
And then—
Nothing.
A gap.
A dead zone where data simply… ended.
Three days later, they found her.
Mahi's body was discovered near a construction site on the edge of the city, partially hidden by debris. The police called it an accident. A fall. Poor lighting. No witnesses.
"Unfortunate," they said.
"Nothing suspicious," they said.
"Case closed," they said.
Shiva stood at a distance as they covered her body.
The world felt muted, as if someone had turned the volume down on reality.
At the funeral, his mother wailed until her voice broke. His father stood like stone, staring at the fire as if daring it to give his daughter back.
Shiva didn't move.
Didn't cry.
Didn't scream.
That night, he locked the door.
He pulled out the laptop.
And for the first time in his life, he crossed a line.
He went deeper than ever before—into sealed databases, restricted archives, forgotten backups. He rewrote access permissions. Silenced alarms. Dug through deleted logs.
And he found it.
Not proof.
Not enough for the law.
But enough for him.
A shadow in the data.
A discrepancy.
A human decision buried under the word accident.
Shiva leaned back, his face empty.
"They didn't look," he whispered.
"They didn't care."
The system had failed her.