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The engineering server room was on the third floor of the CS block, at the end of a corridor that had no reason to be visited after eight unless you had a specific purpose or a convincing lie. Kunal had both.
Preeti had swiped them in at 11:43. She hadn't said much on the walk over, which Kunal had come to understand was not silence but preparation, the way some people go quiet before something they've already decided to do. At the door she'd held the card against the reader and pushed it open and said, "I'll be at the end of the corridor. Water bottle in hand, looking lost. Maintenance comes through around midnight but not always. If I knock twice, you stop whatever you're doing and wait."
"Understood."
"If I knock three times, you close everything and we leave immediately."
"Understood."
She'd looked at him for a half second longer than necessary. Not checking if he was ready. More like filing something away.
Then she'd gone to stand at the end of the corridor, and Kunal had gone in.
The room was cold in the way of spaces that exist entirely for machines. Racks of servers ran floor to ceiling on three walls, their status lights blinking in slow unsynced rhythms. A single fluorescent strip ran the length of the ceiling.
The security archive terminal was in the far left corner behind a secondary rack that had been partially disconnected, its cables bundled and tagged with labels from two years ago. Kunal sat down, entered the credentials his source had given him, and navigated to the footage archive.
The files were enormous. Full eight-hour feeds, each one, no trimming possible from this terminal. He had two drives. He did the arithmetic quickly and it didn't work out the way he needed it to.
He had to choose.
He opened the folder structure and read it fast. Exam block cameras, four of them. Perimeter cameras, six. Hostel wing, three. He couldn't take everything. He pulled up the file sizes, sorted by date, filtered to the day of the attack.
Exam block, Camera 1 and 2. Perimeter, North-East and South-West. Those four. He started the transfers running in the background.
Then, because the files were large and the drives were slow and he had maybe twenty minutes before maintenance, he opened the remaining feeds directly on the terminal and started watching.
He set the playback to 4x and leaned in.
Hostel wing, 13:40.
Corridor. Empty at first. Then two figures moving with purpose from the stairwell end, not running, walking fast in the particular way of people who have calculated that running draws more attention than it saves. Dark gear. The same matte helmets as the exam hall crew. They knew which door.
They were inside for four minutes and thirty seconds.
When they came back out they were carrying two girls, one each, already unconscious, over their shoulders. They moved back toward the stairwell without hurrying.
Kunal watched their faces. The girls had no hoods yet. He didn't know them. He looked at the hairstyles, the build, the clothes, filed it all without yet having anywhere to file it to.
He scrubbed forward. The hostel corridor stayed empty. Nobody came to check on the room. Nobody came out of the adjacent rooms. Whatever the crew had used, it had been quiet enough.
He moved to the next feed.
Exam block, internal corridor, 14:07.
He'd seen enough reconstructions of this online to know the broad shape of it, but watching the footage directly was different. Seven of them through the windows. Disciplined but not military. No hand signals. When they needed to coordinate they talked, faces close, brief. He watched them spread through the hall with clear intent, moving toward specific rows, specific desks.
The invigilator first. Then a student who moved toward the door.
Then the specific desks.
He watched Advik go down. Watched Ved. He kept his face still and kept watching.
Then Shri's desk.
Empty.
He watched the crew stop. The one they oriented toward when something went wrong stood with his helmet turned toward the empty desk for a long moment. Then he spoke. The others responded. This exchange lasted three minutes and four seconds while they were standing in an active exam hall with students on the floor and glass on the ground. Three minutes of talking in a circle like a group of people who hadn't prepared for this exact contingency and were now working it out in real time.
Kunal wrote in his notebook: no hand signals. Talked openly when plan deviated. Not military.
He watched them split. Two out through the windows with Advik and Ved. Three toward the corridor. Two held position in the hall, which made no immediate sense.
He moved to the corridor feed and watched Shri run. Watched the whole sequence. Watched Shri do what Shri had done, and had to look at the desk for a moment after.
He moved back to the hall feed. The two who'd held position emerged when Shri was found. Reserve numbers for when the search took longer than expected. He wrote that down.
He checked the transfer progress. Sixty-one percent on the first drive. He moved to the perimeter feed he hadn't started transferring yet and opened it directly.
Perimeter, South-West, 14:19.
The main group with Advik, Ved, Shri. All hooded, all limp. Moving toward the eastern fence line.
Then at 14:21:03, the two from the hostel appeared from the south-west, still carrying the two girls. And here, briefly, clearly, the faces were visible before someone from the main group moved toward them with the cloth.
Kunal paused it.
He looked at the faces.
The girl on the left. The hair falling across her face. Something in the back of his mind moved without arriving anywhere.
He wrote: two-location operation. Coordinated timing. Hostel grab ran parallel to exam hall. This was planned that way.
Then: Who are they?
The transfer finished. He ejected the drives, closed every window, pushed the chair back.
The knock came two seconds later. Two knocks.
He was already standing.
Neither of them spoke until they were outside.
The campus at midnight had a particular quality, not empty exactly but skeletal, the paths lit at intervals by sodium lamps that made everything look slightly jaundiced. Their footsteps were the main sound.
"You were almost done when I knocked," Preeti said. Not accusatory. Just precise.
"Got lucky with the file structure," Kunal said. "It was more organised than I expected."
She looked at him. He kept his eyes on the path ahead.
"You were maybe twenty minutes in," she said. "I'd been timing."
"Like I said."
A pause.
"Okay," she said. The word carried several things inside it that she chose not to unpack.
They reached the fork where their hostels diverged. She stopped. He stopped.
"You have what you need?" she asked.
"Yes."
"Then I'm going to sleep." She shifted her bag on her shoulder. "Tell me what you find. When you're ready."
She turned and walked away down the left path. Kunal watched her go for a moment, then turned right.
He didn't sleep.
He transferred the downloaded files to his laptop and watched them again at his desk, more carefully this time, pausing where he needed to. The footage confirmed what he'd caught in the server room. He made a proper set of notes. Built a timeline. Cross-referenced the two groups, the exam hall crew and the hostel pair, mapped their movements against each other.
The coordination was too tight to be coincidental. They had left the hostel at the same time the exam hall crew entered the windows. The hostel grab had been allocated exactly enough time to be done and at the perimeter when the main group arrived. Someone had planned both operations as a single job.
He looked at his notes for a long time.
He still didn't know who the two girls were.
He opened a browser.
The Reddit threads had been running since the night of the attack. He'd checked them before and found mostly noise. He started scrolling again, filtering for posts with photos, looking for anything from the hostel wing.
He found the post forty minutes later.
Someone had compiled photos of empty rooms, a grid of them, doors open or photographed through gaps. The ordinary debris of interrupted lives. It had a moderate number of upvotes, not prominent, not buried, sitting in the middle range of things people had half-noticed and moved on from.
He looked at each photo slowly.
Third row, second from the right.
A desk near a window. Several origami figures arranged in a small cluster. Deep burnt orange paper, a specific fold, the wings sitting back at a low resting angle rather than extended.
He had taught Advik that fold. Second year, waiting for a lab session to start, an hour to kill. Kunal had learned origami from a YouTube phase during board exam prep and Advik had asked him to show him something he could make for Aisha. Kunal had shown him the crane variant, the modified one with the wings folded back that way, because he thought it looked more considered than a standard crane. The paper had been from Advik's notebook, burnt orange. Advik had spent an hour getting it right. He'd made four of them before he was satisfied.
Kunal looked at the photo.
He clicked into the comments.
Most were dismissive. One user was pushing back with patient, specific persistence. She said she had lived in the room beside that one. She and her roommates had been relocated, told it was an electricity conservation measure, the entire row locked off, power cut. She'd been given two hours to move her things. She thought it had been done quickly and quietly for reasons that had nothing to do with electricity. She named her neighbours. She posted three photos, corridor shots, overexposed, faces not perfectly clear.
Kunal looked at the third photo.
The girl on the left. The hair.
He opened the paused perimeter footage in another tab.
He sat there looking between the two screens for a moment.
Then he opened his messages.
His last text to Aisha was three and a half weeks old. Hey. I know this is impossibly hard. Don't know if you want to hear from anyone right now. Just wanted you to know I'm here. He'd sent it after two days of debating. He'd told himself he'd give her time. That he'd check in again in a week. After watching Myra he'd decided he wasn't equipped to help anyone else and he'd let the week pass and then another one.
Single grey tick. Undelivered.
He stared at it.
He'd been telling himself her phone was off. That she'd turned it off to get away from notifications. It had been easier than the alternative, which was going to check on her, which he hadn't done.
He looked at the perimeter footage. Aisha, hooded, carried out with the others.
He put his phone down.
He got a piece of paper and drew a simple diagram. Six names, lines radiating from a central point. Advik. Ved. Shri. The two names from the Reddit thread, her roomates. Every line running back through the same person.
"You have got to be kidding me."
Why her?
He sat with it for a while. The desk lamp was the only light. Outside, the campus was quiet.
He thought about Dev. About what it would mean to hand this to him tonight, incomplete, the why still unanswered. He thought about Myra. He thought about the grey tick and what it would do to both of them to understand what it actually meant, that it wasn't grief or silence but absence, that the messages they'd all sent into what they thought was one kind of void had actually been going into another kind entirely.
He put the notebook in his desk drawer. Put the drives next to it.
He needed to understand it more completely first. That was the honest reason. He had another reason too, one he was less willing to sit with, and he didn't sit with it.
He turned off the lamp and lay down.
Slept.
The weeks after the attack had a texture to them that Myra couldn't have described precisely but would have recognised anywhere. Days that looked the same from the outside, same route to the mess, same table, same hours. The grief hadn't gone anywhere. It had just become load-bearing, structural, the thing the days were built around rather than interrupted by.
She'd started going outside more. The room had started feeling like something she was trapped in rather than something she'd chosen, and outside was at least different.
It had helped, quietly and without announcement. She'd run into people from her department she hadn't spoken to since before the attack. She'd sat in on a lab session she hadn't been scheduled for because the door was open and the work was familiar and familiar was easier than most things. She'd started doing the readings again, not all of them, but some.
She hadn't named any of this as progress. She'd just been doing it.
The morning after Kunal's server room night, she went to her Networks elective. Sat in her usual spot. The lecture was on routing protocols, dry material that she'd always found easier to absorb than she expected, and she followed it without difficulty, making notes in the margins the way she always had. The student beside her, a girl named Tanvi from a parallel section who had started sitting near her a few weeks ago, leaned over at one point to ask about a notation and Myra explained it and Tanvi nodded and they went back to their respective notes without ceremony.
After class they walked out together in the loose, unplanned way of people heading the same direction. Tanvi was talking about the assignment, then about the exam schedule, then about how she'd finally started coming back to the labs regularly after weeks of barely leaving her room.
"Honestly it was that club thing," Tanvi said. "The welfare collective. They did this session a couple weeks ago, just like, sitting together in the common room and working. No pressure, no talking about feelings, just being in the same room as other people. It sounds stupid but it actually helped."
Myra said something neutral.
"They've got a new thing this week actually." Tanvi pulled out her phone and sent a link. "I don't know if you've seen their stuff. But it's been good for me. Even just the idea that someone organised it."
Myra's phone buzzed in her pocket.
They said goodbye at the junction and Myra walked toward the hostel and opened the link without thinking much about it. A simple page. Upcoming activities. A banner at the top with the collective's tagline.
Return at your own pace. You don't have to do it alone.
She read it.
She thought about the lecture she'd just followed without difficulty. The notes in the margins. Tanvi asking about the notation and Myra answering without having to think about whether she had the energy.
She realised she'd been okay for two hours.
Not happy. Not healed. But okay. Functional. Present in her own life in a way she hadn't been in weeks, and she hadn't even noticed it happening, it had just happened, quietly, while she was paying attention to routing protocols.
The realisation sat in her chest for a moment.
Then it curdled.
She had been okay. She had been sitting in a lecture making margin notes while Shri was somewhere she couldn't reach. She had been explaining notation to a girl she barely knew, calm and competent, while Advik and Ved were gone. She had let herself be okay. She had almost felt good about it, had almost been grateful to a club whose entire premise was that moving forward was the correct direction, and she had been walking right into it, nodding along, nearly sending them a thank you.
She stopped in the middle of the path.
A student walked around her without looking up.
She put her phone in her pocket and walked faster.
She pushed the door open harder than she meant to.
Dhriti was at the desk, turned around at the sound of the door. She started to say something about dinner timings.
"Don't," Myra said.
Dhriti blinked.
"Whatever you're about to say." Myra dropped her bag. "Don't. I don't want to hear it right now."
"I was just saying the mess closes at—"
"I heard you." She sat on her bed. "I don't care. Please just be quiet."
Dhriti's expression moved through several things. She turned back to the desk without speaking.
The room was silent for a while.
Myra sat with her hands in her lap and looked at the wall. The anger that had carried her through the door was already thinning, leaving something worse underneath. She thought about what Dhriti's face had looked like when she'd told her to be quiet. Not hurt exactly. More like someone who had been expecting it and was tired of being right.
She hadn't deserved that.
Myra knew she hadn't deserved it.
She didn't apologise. She sat there with the knowledge of it and let it be one more thing she was carrying, because that was all she could manage right now, just carrying it, not putting it down and not putting it right, just holding it alongside everything else and waiting for the day when she had enough hands.
Outside the window the campus was doing its evening things. Someone was playing music two floors up. A drone hummed past at its regular altitude.
The tagline sat in the back of her mind like something that wouldn't dissolve.
Return at your own pace.
She pressed her palms flat against her knees and held them there.
The room was quiet except for the music two floors up, muffled and shapeless through the ceiling. Dhriti's back was still turned. The silence between them had settled into something neither of them was going to move first.
Myra's jaw ached. She hadn't noticed she'd been clenching it.
She sat there in the thickening dark and held her hands still and waited for the feeling to pass, the way she had been waiting for all the feelings to pass, the way she had been waiting for weeks now.
It did not pass.