I did not sleep.
Not because I was afraid—though I was—and not because the bed was uncomfortable—though it was, with its thin mattress and pillow that smelled too strongly of lavender. I did not sleep because the silence in that room was wrong. It was not the silence of a house asleep, the familiar quiet of my mother's breathing and the refrigerator's hum and the distant bark of the neighbourhood dogs. It was the silence of a place that had been designed to absorb sound, to swallow it whole, to leave nothing behind but the beating of my own heart and the soft whisper of my own breath.
I lay on my back with my eyes open, watching the painted stars on the ceiling, and I listened.
Meera, the small one with the teddy bear, slept in the bed to my left. She did not move. She did not turn. She lay on her side with her knees drawn up to her chest, her thumb in her mouth, her bear clutched so tightly that its glass eyes pressed into her cheek. Every few minutes, she made a small sound—not a word, not a cry, just a soft exhale, like someone testing whether the air was still there.
Kavita, the sharp-eyed one, slept in the bed to my right. She slept on her back, her arms crossed over her chest, her short hair fanned out on the pillow. She looked like a soldier resting between battles, her face relaxed but somehow still alert, as if even in sleep she was waiting for something to happen.
And Aanya, the girl with the honey-coloured eyes, slept in the bed across from mine. She had pulled the curtains around her bed closed—each bed had its own set of curtains, heavy and dark, the kind you might find in a hospital or an old hostel—so I could not see her at all. Only the shape of her behind the fabric, the rise and fall of her breathing, the occasional rustle of sheets.
I watched the curtains for a long time.
I thought about my mother.
She would have woken up by now, found my note, read the three lines I had written. Went for a walk. Back before school. She would have set the note down, poured herself a cup of tea, sat at the kitchen table, and waited. My mother was good at waiting. She had been waiting for something her whole life, I realized now—waiting for me to ask about my father, waiting for me to notice the cracks, waiting for the day when the silence between us would finally break.
I wondered if she knew where I was.
I wondered if she had always known.
The door unlocked at exactly five-thirty in the morning.
I heard the click from across the room—a sharp, metallic sound that cut through the silence like a knife. Then the door opened, and a woman I had not seen before stepped inside. She was young, perhaps twenty-five or twenty-six, with dark skin and darker hair pulled into a tight ponytail. She wore a white cotton salwar kameez, plain and unadorned, and her feet were bare.
"Wake up," she said. Her voice was not loud, but it carried. "Meditation begins in thirty minutes. You have time to wash and dress. Do not be late."
Meera sat up immediately, her teddy bear still in her arms, her eyes still half-closed. Kavita was already on her feet, smoothing her grey salwar kameez, her expression as sharp as it had been the night before. The curtains around Aanya's bed parted, and she emerged already dressed—white kurta, white pyjamas, her dark hair braided down her back.
Only I remained on the bed.
The woman looked at me. "You are the new one."
"Yes."
"Your uniform is in the wardrobe. White kurta, white pyjamas. You will wear nothing else while you are inside these walls. No jewellery. No colours. No personal belongings except those we approve."
I opened my mouth to argue—I had never worn a uniform outside of school, and even there, the navy blue skirt and white shirt had felt like a cage—but something in her expression stopped me. She was not cruel. She was not kind. She was simply doing a job, and the job required her to tell me what to wear, and I could either comply or face the consequences.
I did not know what the consequences were. I did not want to find out.
I stood up, walked to the wardrobe, and opened it.
Inside hung three white kurtas, three white pyjamas, and a single white dupatta. The fabric was soft, almost silky, and it smelled of the same lavender that had filled my pillow. I pulled out one of each and held them against my chest.
"Bathroom is down the hall, third door on the left," the woman said. "You have fifteen minutes."
She left. The door did not lock behind her.
The bathroom was a long, narrow room with six stalls, each one containing a bucket, a mug, and a tap of cold water. No showers. No hot water. Just the cold, hard reality of a place that did not believe in comfort. I washed as quickly as I could, scrubbing my skin with a bar of soap that smelled of nothing at all, and dressed in the white clothes that felt too large and too small at the same time.
I looked at myself in the small mirror above the sink.
The girl who looked back at me was not the girl who had left Suryanagar yesterday morning. That girl had worn a navy blue skirt and a white shirt and a navy blue sweater. That girl had lived in a house with a faded blue gate and a mother who ground spices at dawn. That girl had never cracked a window by looking at it.
This girl wore white. This girl had dark circles under her eyes. This girl had a crow's feather in her pocket, still warm, still waiting.
I splashed water on my face, dried it with a rough cotton towel, and walked back to the room.
Meera was waiting by the door, her teddy bear tucked under her arm. "You have to leave the bear," Kavita said without looking at her. "No personal belongings in meditation."
Meera's face crumpled. "But I always—"
"You know the rules."
Meera looked at me, as if I might offer a different answer. I had no answer to offer. I did not even know where we were going.
Aanya touched Meera's shoulder. "I'll hold it for you. I'll wait outside the meditation hall. No one will take it."
Meera hesitated. Then she handed the bear to Aanya, who took it with a gentleness that surprised me. The bear looked small in Aanya's hands, smaller than it had looked in Meera's, and I wondered how many times Aanya had done this—how many mornings she had stood in this doorway, holding a child's toy, promising to keep it safe.
"Let's go," Kavita said. She walked out of the room without waiting for the rest of us.
The meditation hall was at the center of the building, directly beneath the domed ceiling I had seen the night before. It was a large, circular room with no furniture except for a series of thin cushions arranged in rows on the marble floor. The walls were bare, the windows were shuttered, and the air was thick with the smell of incense and silence.
About thirty children were already sitting on the cushions, their legs crossed, their hands resting on their knees, their eyes closed. They were all dressed in white—white kurtas, white pyjamas, white dupattas draped over their shoulders. They looked like ghosts in the dim light, like shadows that had forgotten they were shadows.
Hargreaves stood at the front of the room, his hands clasped behind his back. He did not look at us as we entered. He looked at the wall, at the bare stone, at something I could not see.
"Sit," he said.
We sat.
I chose a cushion at the back of the room, near the door, where I could see everyone and no one could see me. Kavita sat near the front, her spine straight, her eyes already closed. Meera sat in the middle, her small body folding into itself like a bird tucking its wings. Aanya sat to my left, closer than I expected, her shoulder almost touching mine.
"Close your eyes," Hargreaves said.
I closed them.
"Breathe."
I breathed.
"Listen."
I listened. At first, I heard nothing but the sound of my own breath and the distant whisper of the other children breathing around me. But then, slowly, the silence began to change. It deepened. It widened. It became a space rather than an absence, a room inside my own mind that I had never entered before.
And in that space, I heard something.
Not a voice. Not a word. A feeling. A memory that was not mine. A child crying in a dark room, small and frightened and alone. A door closing. A lock turning. A promise that had been broken so many times that it had become a lie.
I opened my eyes.
Hargreaves was looking at me.
"That is what you are," he said, his voice soft and steady. "You are not just a person who can feel. You are a person who can absorb. Every trauma, every sorrow, every wound that has been left to fester in this place—you will feel it. You will carry it. And if you are not careful, it will destroy you."
The children around me opened their eyes. They looked at me. All of them. Dozens of faces, dozens of pairs of eyes, all looking at the girl who had come from Suryanagar, the girl who cracked windows, the girl who did not know what she was.
I looked down at my hands.
They were shaking.
"Meditation is over," Hargreaves said. "Breakfast is in the dining hall. Nyra, stay."
The children rose. They filed out of the room in silence, their bare feet making no sound on the marble floor. Kavita did not look at me. Meera glanced back once, her eyes wide and worried. Aanya touched my shoulder as she passed, her fingers light as feathers, and then she was gone.
The door closed.
I was alone with Hargreaves.
He walked toward me slowly, his bare feet silent on the floor. When he reached me, he did not sit. He stood above me, looking down, and I felt small in a way I had never felt before—small and young and terribly, terribly alone.
"You felt something just now," he said. "Tell me what it was."
"A child," I said. My voice was barely a whisper. "Crying. In a dark room."
"Whose child?"
"I don't know."
"Yes, you do."
I looked up at him. His face was still unreadable, still carved from that old wood, but his eyes—his eyes were different now. They were not empty. They were full of something I could not name, something that looked almost like grief.
"That was you," he said. "When you were three years old. The night your mother took you from this place."
I shook my head. "I've never been here before."
"You have. You just don't remember." He knelt down in front of me, bringing his face level with mine. "Your mother erased your memories before she left. She erased her own memories too. She wanted to protect you. She wanted to keep you safe. But the past does not disappear, Nyra. It waits. And now it has found you."
I wanted to scream. I wanted to run. I wanted to go back to Suryanagar, back to my mother's kitchen, back to the girl who had never needed answers.
But I could not move.
Because somewhere deep inside me, in the space I had discovered during the meditation, I knew he was telling the truth.
I had been here before.
And I had been running away ever since.