Sunless

The facility existed in a place that maps forgot.

No town sat nearby, no road worth following. Just dust and stone stretching toward horizons that offered nothing back. The structure itself pressed downward rather than rising, a brutalist slab of reinforced concrete swallowed by the earth, its surface unbroken by windows, unnamed by any signage. It did not announce itself. It did not need to.

Only the fences gave it away, layered and electrified, humming with a kind of contained violence that you felt in your back teeth before you saw the wire. And the towers. The towers that never slept.

Below ground, the air was wrong in a way that was hard to name at first. Too cold, too clean, recycled so many times it had lost all taste, all memory of outside. Three levels down, in cells that officially did not exist, three college students were learning what it meant to disappear.

The first day, they were brought in together.

Three chairs bolted to the floor. Lights too bright to look at directly, angled so that every face became a squint and every thought felt slightly more difficult than it should. The same measured voice asked the same question to all of them, patient in the way that only people with institutional support behind them can afford to be.

"ErgolineX. Tell us about the extraction point."

They looked at each other with confusion that came from different places. Advik tried to explain, students, exams, wrong people, the kind of reasonable protest that assumes the person listening has made a reasonable mistake. Ved demanded to know where they were. Shri asked if this was some kind of joke.

The interrogator smiled. He had the smile of a man who had heard all of it before.

"Your friends have already told us everything," he said. "We just need you to confirm the details."

It was a lie and they all knew it, could feel the shape of it in the room. But knowing a thing and being unaffected by it are two different problems entirely, and hearing the words still did something. Put a thin crack in the space between them, hairline and invisible, but there.

That night, the lights never went off.

Sleep deprivation arrived without ceremony or announcement. No shouting, no threats, nothing so blunt as that. Just fluorescent lights snapping on each time their eyes dropped closed, guards drifting in and out at intervals too irregular to predict, doors opening and sealing with pneumatic finality for no apparent reason. By the second day, confusion had settled into them the way cold settles into stone, gradually, then completely.

They were woken before their bodies were ready and marched to a concrete yard ringed by guards, ordered to exercise in the thin gray light. Push-ups. Running in place. Holding positions until muscles shook with the particular exhaustion that has nothing left to push through. It wasn't training. It was calibration. No one explained the rules, and missteps were corrected wordlessly, hands on shoulders, pressure applied until compliance returned.

Interrogations followed. Sometimes together, sometimes separate. Always the same question.

By the third day, pain entered the routine with the same quiet inevitability as everything else. Stress positions were introduced as though they had always been part of the schedule. Standing with arms raised. Kneeling on concrete floors that leeched heat from their joints until the cold felt personal. Silence stretched between questions until thought itself became laborious.

Ved began tracking patterns anyway. Guard shifts. The way one of them favored his right leg after long stretches on his feet. The timing between questions, the particular pauses that preceded a rephrasing. He catalogued it all with the focused calm of someone who understands that observation is its own form of resistance.

Shri still tried to joke during the group sessions. The jokes landed less often now.

Advik stopped explaining and started listening, watching how the interrogators reacted, when they interrupted and when they let silence breathe, trying to understand what ErgolineX actually was, why it mattered enough to build something like this around it.

By the fourth day, they were separated without announcement or explanation. Just different doors and different corridors and different silences.

Isolation sharpened everything it touched. The rooms themselves became instruments: too cold, then too hot, too small in ways that a body registers before the mind catches up. The floors hummed faintly with latent electricity, and they learned fast that disobedience didn't earn punishment so much as trigger it. A missed command, a delayed response, and the ground would bite back with a sharp, incapacitating jolt that left muscles screaming and thoughts scattered like paper in wind.

Food arrived each evening and this, strangely, was the hardest part to absorb. It was warm and familiar: rice, dal, vegetables that tasted fresh. Sometimes even dessert. For twenty minutes they could almost forget where they were, almost pretend this was a hostel mess hall and the day had been ordinary. The regularity of it became an anchor, not a kindness exactly, but the only thing that could be relied upon, which in the absence of anything else becomes its own kind of mercy.

The routine hardened into something fixed and immovable.

0500: Wake-up. 0530: Exercise under guard. 0700: Interrogation. 1400: Stress positions or isolation. 1800: Food. Lights never fully off.

On the fifth night, pills arrived. Small, white, unlabeled. Advik's body rejected them badly, convulsions rippling through him, then vomiting, then a rash spreading across his chest and arms while guards watched without comment. After that the pills stopped, for all of them, though no explanation was offered and none was expected anymore.

Sleep became fragmented and shallow, a surface that wouldn't hold weight.

By the end of the week the interrogators had stopped performing the fiction of investigation. They spoke as if the answers already existed somewhere inside the three of them, as if the only remaining question was duration. How long. How much. Clarity became difficult to hold onto. Thoughts slipped. Memory softened at the edges.

By day seven, nobody was pretending this was about information.

It was about endurance. And none of them knew how much of it they had left.

Day eight began the way every day began: lights, exercise, guards.

Then they came for Advik.

The interrogation room smelled of ozone and damp concrete. They strapped him into the chair, wrists and chest and ankles, and left him there long enough for his shoulders to begin their slow protest, long enough for his mind to cycle through the same questions it had been turning over for days. The restraints were heavy-duty but not improvised. The chair was bolted down with professional precision. Everything about this place spoke of infrastructure, resources, planning that had been done well in advance by people who knew what they were building.

Not Naxalites. Naxalites operated in forests, ran guerrilla campaigns out of necessity and ideology. They didn't have facilities like this, didn't need them.

So who?

The door opened on a man in his late forties, clean-shaven, wearing civilian clothes as though he'd stepped out of an office somewhere reasonable. He pulled up a metal stool and sat across from Advik with the ease of someone who had done this many times and found the proximity deliberate rather than uncomfortable.

"Good morning."

Advik said nothing.

"You're thinking again. I can see it." The man's voice was almost friendly.

Advik kept his face still.

"Let me save you some time," the man continued. "There's no pattern worth finding. No logic that will help you here. We ask questions and you answer them. That's the only system that matters in this room."

"I don't know what you're asking about."

"ErgolineX."

"I don't know what that is."

The man studied him for a moment without any visible feeling about the answer.

"Your heart rate just spiked. Pupils dilated." He stood, brushing invisible dust from his trousers. "You're telling the truth. That's unfortunate."

He nodded to someone behind Advik, outside his sightline.

The chair tilted backward. A tank descended around his head and sealed with a hiss that sounded, in that fraction of a second, entirely final. Advik caught his own reflection in the curved plexiglass: eyes too wide, breath already running ahead of him.

Then the water came.

It was nothing like drowning in open water, nothing so navigable as that. There was no surface to fight toward, no direction that meant air, just liquid filling every available space and forcing its way in, triggering every primal alarm his body had ever learned to hear. His lungs spasmed. His mind went white.

Strategy became impossible. Understanding became impossible. There was only the absolute and animal certainty that he was dying.

When they pulled him back up he vomited immediately, clear fluid mixed with bile splattering onto the floor between his feet. His throat was raw. His lungs were trying to remember their purpose.

The man's voice came from somewhere behind him now.

"ErgolineX. The extraction point."

Advik couldn't speak yet.

"Do you think we're doing this because we enjoy it?" The man let the question sit for a moment. "We're doing this because someone, somewhere, made a mistake. Maybe it was you. Maybe it was someone you know. Maybe it was pure bad luck. But the mistake was made, and now we have to correct it."

"What mistake?" Advik managed.

"That's what we're trying to find out."

The tank descended again.

This time Advik tried to hold his breath, tried to steel himself for what he knew was coming. It made no difference. The panic was chemical and unavoidable, his body thrashing against restraints that gave nothing back.

Three more times.

By the end he had nothing left to vomit. They hauled him back to his cell and deposited him onto the cot, and he lay there shivering with his lungs still burning, staring at a ceiling that told him nothing.

ErgolineX. Extraction point.

He tried to find the thread. If they believed he knew something, that meant someone had told them he did. Faulty intelligence. Mistaken identity. Or something he didn't want to follow to its conclusion.

His mind found Aisha before he could redirect it. He pushed the thought away with more force than he had, pressing it back behind the things he needed to stay functional. She was safe. She had to be safe. That was not a thing he could afford to question.

His hands were shaking. He pressed them flat against his knees and held them there.

He was here. He was alive.

For now, that would have to be enough.

Three levels below ground, Ved was learning to count.

Guard rotations: four on the morning shift, three in the afternoon, the one with the scar cycling posts every two hours, the younger one always stationed furthest from the cells as though proximity made him uncomfortable. Door mechanisms: pneumatic seals, electronic locks with manual override panels, hinges reinforced in the particular way that suggested whoever designed this room had anticipated someone looking for weaknesses. Ceiling height: approximately three meters, too high to reach, though the ventilation grates sat lower, maybe two and a half, maybe less if you measured optimistically.

He catalogued it all because it gave him something to hold onto. Because the alternative was thinking about the hook in the ceiling that his wrists had been cuffed to for the past six hours, and the grinding pressure in his shoulders that had long since stopped being sharp and had become instead a slow, constant weight that made his vision swim and thought feel viscous.

Through the vents, something drifted toward him. Muffled, distant, impossible to identify with certainty. Advik, maybe. Or Shri. Or his own breathing, distorted and echoed back.

The door opened: the scar and the younger one, moving with the impersonal efficiency that had already become their defining characteristic. They unhooked him without speaking and his legs gave out immediately, the floor arriving faster than expected. They caught him, lowered him to the concrete with the same practiced ease they used for everything, and pressed a water bottle to his lips. He drank because his body demanded it, not because he wanted to give them anything resembling cooperation.

"You know what we want," one of them said.

"ErgolineX. Where is it stored?"

"I don't know."

The guard nodded as if this had been the expected response all along. They hauled him upright, hooked him back. The pain flared back to white and Ved's breath hissed through his teeth, controlled and deliberate. He didn't scream.

He wouldn't.

When they left he hung there with his vision graying at the edges and thought, with the methodical patience that the last eight days had sharpened in him, about efficiency. Torture was a documented failure as an intelligence-gathering tool. It produced false confessions, desperation, whatever the victim calculated the torturer wanted to hear. This was not obscure knowledge. It was studied, written about, known by anyone who had looked into the subject for more than an afternoon.

Which meant either these people were incompetent, or they genuinely did not care about the information.

They wanted him broken. That was the actual product they were trying to manufacture.

The thought did not frighten him the way it might have a week ago. It clarified something instead, the way a diagnosis clarifies something, even a bad one: at least now you know what you're dealing with.

He was not going to give them that.

Later, back in his cell, Ved ran a methodical inventory of himself.

Shoulders: damaged, possibly torn, definitely inflamed in the deep way that would take months to fully resolve. Wrists: raw and bruised, the skin broken in places. Ribs: sore in a way he hadn't noticed until he tried to breathe deeply. He lowered his arms slowly, noting each complaint his body filed, and then lay down on the cot and stared at the ceiling.

In the early days, the whole thing had irritated him more than it had frightened him, irritated him the way deliberate inefficiency always did, the obvious psychological manipulation, the sheer waste of effort in asking questions they should have known he couldn't answer. He'd found it almost insulting in its bluntness.

Now the irritation had calcified into something colder and more durable.

Not rage, not yet. Just a promise, kept close and very quiet: I will remember this. I will remember you.

Shri's world was noise.

Sirens tore through his cell in cycles, two hours of sound pitched precisely at the frequency most likely to prevent adaptation, then five minutes of silence that arrived like a pardon, then back again, inexorable and exact. The pattern never varied.

When they came for him on day eight he almost felt something like relief, which was, he understood distantly, probably the intended effect.

They led him through corridors he couldn't map, through doors that sealed behind him with pneumatic finality. The room they brought him to was white in a way that felt aggressive, as though the color itself were a statement about power and the absence of it. A chair sat in the center with restraints built into the arms and legs, and they strapped him in with the quiet efficiency that had replaced all human transaction in this place.

Electrodes were placed along his scalp, carefully, not to shock, he understood instinctively, but to monitor and to guide. A visor lowered toward his face.

"Hey," Shri tried, his voice coming out rougher than he expected. "If you're going to mess with my brain, at least play something decent. Some old Hindi film songs, maybe some classic--"

The visor sealed over his face.

The exam hall materialized around him with a completeness that bypassed skepticism entirely.

Not as an image he was watching from outside. As a place he was inside. He could smell the floor wax, feel the particular density of the air in a room full of people sitting very still. The ambient sounds were right, the scratch of pencils, the distant fan, the creak of someone shifting in their seat two rows over. His body believed it before his mind had finished deciding whether to.

He knew it wasn't real.

His brain had already stopped caring about what he knew.

The glass shattered inward.

He watched the scene play out: himself running toward the door, looking through the narrow window. But this time Myra wasn't hiding. She was standing in the corridor, waiting, her face carrying an expression he didn't recognize on her, something calm and deliberate and entirely unlike fear.

"No," Shri said quietly.

The scene lurched sideways rather than cutting away cleanly, a wrenching tilt that his stomach registered as motion. Now he was in a corridor and his family was there: his mother, his father, his younger sister, being led through doors he recognized. His mother turned to look at him.

Her expression was not fear.

It was disappointment, the specific kind he'd spent a significant portion of his life working to avoid. And the simulation didn't simply show it to him. It fed something directly into whatever part of him processed shame and failure, the particular weight of having let everyone down in ways that couldn't be walked back. He felt it as a physical thing pressing against his chest.

"They're not here," Shri said. His voice sounded like it belonged to someone else. "This isn't real."

A voice answered him, not through his ears but through the bones of his skull, intimate in a way that made his skin crawl. "If your memory of Myra was wrong, why would your memory of their safety be right?"

Then the visor went dark and took everything with it.

He sat in the chair while the electrodes were peeled away, taking strips of skin with them, and stared at his hands in the white light.

"ErgolineX," a voice said from somewhere behind him. "Who supplied it?"

"I don't know," Shri said.

He said it quietly, almost without heat, because he was using what remained of his energy for something else.

"Tomorrow we'll try again."

Back in his cell, the sirens resumed their cycle before he'd even sat down.

He didn't cover his ears. He just settled onto the floor with his knees pulled to his chest and let the sound wash over him and tried not to think about his mother's face. Tried, also, not to think about the fact that he couldn't be entirely certain it had been fabricated.

He pressed both palms flat against the concrete floor. Cold. Solid. Indifferent to everything that was happening, which was, in its own way, a comfort.

In for four. Hold for four. Out for four.

Myra had taught him that during second year exams, sitting cross-legged on a library floor surrounded by notes, laughing at him for being the anxious one when she was the one who should have been panicking.

The memory hurt.

He held onto it anyway.