The crow, I told him, was just a crow.
I said this with my back straight and my voice steady, the same voice I used when I told teachers that I had finished my homework or when I told my mother that I was not hungry. It was a voice designed to end conversations, to close doors, to make people believe that there was nothing underneath worth looking for.
Hargreaves did not believe it.
"Just a crow," he repeated, writing something in his notebook. "With a missing claw. That followed you for three days. That sat on your windowsill at night and tapped three times. That left a feather in your pocket that has not cooled since you picked it up." He looked up at me, his eyes empty and full at the same time. "That is a very specific crow for a very ordinary bird."
I said nothing.
"Tell me what you felt when you looked at it."
"I didn't feel anything."
"Everyone feels something when they look at a crow. Most people feel nothing at all—they see a bird, they look away, they forget. But you did not look away, Nyra. You looked at it the way you might look at a mirror. Tell me what you saw in that mirror."
I remembered the crow's eyes. Too bright. Too aware. Full of something that might have been recognition or might have been warning. I remembered the way it tilted its head, first one side, then the other, as if it was trying to decide whether I was friend or food or something in between.
"I saw myself," I said, and the words came out before I could stop them.
Hargreaves stopped writing.
His pen hovered above the notebook, suspended in the air like a bird that had forgotten how to land. He looked at me for a long moment, his face still unreadable, but something in his posture had changed. He was leaning forward now, just slightly, the way a cat leans forward when it has seen something interesting in the grass.
"Go on," he said.
I shook my head. "I don't know what that means. I saw myself. That's all. It was like looking in a mirror that was also a bird."
"And how did that make you feel?"
"Like I was being watched."
"You are always being watched, Nyra. That is not a feeling. That is a fact." He set his pen down and folded his hands on top of the notebook. "Let me ask you a different question. When you touched the stone wall of the textile mill outside Chikmagalur, what did you feel?"
My blood turned cold.
I had never told anyone about the mill. I had never told anyone about the stone wall, or the whispers of the children who had worked there, or the way I had collapsed afterward, my body shaking, my mind full of voices that were not mine. Kaelen had known because Kaelen had been there. But Kaelen was not here. Kaelen was a secret, a memory, a name I had not spoken since I left him in that rusted skeleton of a building.
"How do you know about the mill?" I asked.
"We know about everything, Nyra. We knew about the window. We knew about the notebook. We knew about the crow. And we knew about the textile mill, and the stone wall, and the children who whispered to you from a hundred years ago." He tilted his head, and for a moment, he looked exactly like the crow. "We have been watching you for a very long time. Longer than you know."
I wanted to stand up. I wanted to walk out of the room, out of the building, out of the garden, back to Suryanagar, back to my mother, back to the girl who had never needed answers. But my legs would not move. They had turned to stone, the same stone as the wall in the mill, the same stone that had held the whispers of a hundred dead children.
"The wall," Hargreaves said again. "What did you feel?"
I closed my eyes.
The memory came back to me in fragments—the rough texture of the stone beneath my palm, the sudden rush of sound like a river breaking through a dam, the voices overlapping and merging until they became a single voice, a single cry, a single word that repeated over and over and over.
Help us. Help us. Help us.
"They were children," I said. My voice was barely a whisper now. "Small children. They worked in the mill. They worked from morning until night, and when they were tired, they were beaten, and when they were sick, they were sent back to work, and when they died, they were buried in unmarked graves behind the building. No one remembered them. No one came to find them. They just... stayed. In the walls. In the stones. In the dust that covered everything."
"And what did you do when you felt them?"
"I took them."
"Took them where?"
"Into myself."
I opened my eyes. Hargreaves was watching me with an expression I could not name—not pity, not approval, not concern. It was something else, something I had never seen on a human face before. Something ancient.
"That is your gift," he said. "And your curse. You are a Null Aegis, Nyra Raizada. One of the rarest of the Awakened. You do not simply feel the imprints of trauma left behind on objects and places. You absorb them. You take them into your own body, your own mind, your own soul. And then you carry them."
"I don't want to carry them."
"No one does. But wanting has nothing to do with it." He picked up his pen again. "The children you absorbed from the mill—are they still inside you?"
I thought about the whispers. I had not heard them since that day. Since I collapsed on the floor of the mill and Kaelen had held me and told me to breathe. Since I woke up two days later with white at my temples and a hollow ache in my chest that had not faded.
"I don't know," I said. "I think so. I think they're sleeping."
"Sleeping," he repeated, writing it down. "That is one way to describe it. Another way would be dormant. Another way would be waiting. Another way would be hungry."
I felt my stomach turn. "What do you mean, hungry?"
"Trauma does not disappear, Nyra. It transforms. The children you absorbed—their pain, their fear, their longing to be remembered—that energy is still inside you. And energy, once awakened, wants more. It feeds on what it is given. And if it is not given enough, it will find its own food."
"Are you saying I'm going to hurt people?"
"I am saying that you are going to have to learn to control what is inside you. Otherwise, it will control you." He closed his notebook and set it on the floor beside his chair. "That is what we do here at Astraea Adhyayan. We teach the Awakened to control their gifts. We teach them to live with what they are. And when they cannot learn, we teach them to forget."
"Forget how?"
He did not answer. Instead, he stood up and walked to the windows, his back to me, his hands clasped behind him. The morning light fell on his white kurta, turning it gold, and for a moment, he looked almost holy. Almost kind.
"There is a room beneath this building," he said. "A room where the walls are lined with lead and the air is thick with silence. We call it the Calming Chamber. When a child's power becomes too strong, too wild, too dangerous, we take them there. And we help them let go of what they cannot control."
"You mean you take it from them."
"I mean we help them release it. Some of them emerge weaker but calmer. Some of them emerge... empty." He turned to face me. "And some of them do not emerge at all."
I thought of the ten-year-old girl in the dining hall, her cold fingers on my elbow, her whispered warning. If your stomach is full, it hurts more.
"The first session," I said slowly. "The one after breakfast. That's the Calming Chamber, isn't it?"
"No. The Calming Chamber is for children who have already lost control. The first session is something else." He walked back to his chair and sat down, picking up his notebook again. "The first session is a test. A measurement. We need to know how powerful you are, Nyra. We need to know what you can absorb, how much you can carry, and how long you can hold it before it begins to consume you."
"And if I refuse?"
"You cannot refuse. You are already absorbing. Every moment you sit in this room, you are taking in the imprints of everyone who has sat here before you. The fear, the hope, the despair. It is seeping into your skin, your bones, your blood. The only question is whether you will learn to control it, or whether it will control you."
I looked around the room. The walls, which had seemed so ordinary when I entered, now felt different. They pulsed with something I could not see but could feel—a low, steady thrum, like the heartbeat of a sleeping animal. The chairs, the windows, the floor, the very air—all of it was alive with the residue of everyone who had been here before.
I had not noticed it when I walked in. But now that Hargreaves had named it, I could not stop noticing it.
"Breathe," he said. "Close your eyes. Breathe, and listen, and feel. And when you are ready, reach out and touch something. Anything. The floor, the wall, the arm of your chair. Touch it, and tell me what you feel."
I closed my eyes.
I breathed.
I listened.
The room was full of ghosts.
Not the ghosts of the dead, but the ghosts of the living—the children who had sat in this chair before me, their hearts pounding, their palms sweating, their minds racing with questions they were too afraid to ask. I felt their fear like a second skin, pressing against my own, trying to find a way in.
I opened my eyes.
I reached out and touched the arm of my chair.
The wood was smooth and cool beneath my fingers, worn down by years of hands that had gripped it in terror. And as I touched it, I felt them—all of them. A boy who had wet himself during his first session, too frightened to ask permission to leave. A girl who had laughed when Hargreaves asked his first question, and had been taken to the Calming Chamber that same afternoon. A child so young that she could not speak yet, only cry, only reach out with her small hands and beg for a mother who was not there.
I pulled my hand away.
My fingers were trembling.
"What did you feel?" Hargreaves asked.
"Everything," I whispered. "I felt everything."
He nodded slowly, writing something in his notebook. When he looked up again, his face was exactly the same as it had been before—unreadable, unmovable, carved from old wood.
"You are stronger than I expected," he said. "Stronger than your mother was. Stronger than your father was." He paused. "That is both good and bad. Good, because you may survive what is coming. Bad, because everyone will want to use you."
"Even you?"
He did not answer. He simply closed his notebook, stood up, and walked to the door.
"Session is over," he said. "You may return to your room. Lunch is at noon. This afternoon, you will begin your training with Vidya. She will teach you how to close the door."
"What door?"
He looked at me over his shoulder, his face half in shadow, half in light.
"The door inside you, Nyra. The one that lets everything in. You must learn to close it. Otherwise, you will drown."
He left.
The door closed behind him.
I sat in the wooden chair for a long time, my hand still resting on the arm, my fingers still trembling. The room was empty now, but it was not silent. It was full of whispers, full of ghosts, full of children who had sat where I was sitting and felt what I was feeling.
I did not know how to close the door.
I did not even know where it was.
But somewhere deep inside me, in the space I had discovered during meditation, I could feel it opening wider.
And I was afraid of what would come through.