Back in India, the air felt heavier, even though no storm had arrived.
Aaradhya sat at her workstation, her fingers frozen on the keyboard. It had been three days since she last felt a ping — not from any system, but from something far rarer: instinct.
Her custom-built tracking script, originally a side project she never intended to finish, had just returned a strange output.
Coordinates. Non-system. No source tag. Just raw geographical trace from a fragment of an old data packet she decrypted from Nishanth's buried presence code.
Location: Rwanda.
She leaned closer.
This wasn't a recycled proxy or a masked VPN. It was physical. Real. A presence node not digital, but organic. Someone had left behind microdata triggers that mimicked the original Feather architecture.
And the only person who ever knew how to do that was gone.
But now?
Maybe not.She closed the screen and whispered:
"You're not in India anymore, are you?"
