The rain had a rhythm to it — not soft, not tender, but persistent like a secret trying to force itself out of someone’s mouth.
Alishba adjusted the camera strap across her shoulder, the leather soaked and heavy against her damp kameez. Her dupatta clung to her back, drenched by the monsoon that had swallowed Lahore’s sky. The old airstrip stretched out ahead of her, cracked, moss-covered, and forgotten by time — but tonight, it felt alive. Like it was waiting for something. Or someone.
The skeleton of an old plane stood near the far end, wings broken like the arms of a once-proud beast. Shadows crawled across the field, lit occasionally by flickering yellow streetlights and the far-off gleam of headlights that should not have been there.
Alishba crouched behind the rusted shell of a cargo truck, raising her camera to her eye.
Click.
Another flash.
Through her lens, she caught a figure standing beside a black SUV — tall, commanding, speaking to two others. She couldn't make out the words, but their urgency cut through the air. One of the men opened the SUV’s trunk.
That’s when she saw it.
Not suitcases. Not weapons.
A body.
Tied. Gagged. Breathing.
Alishba's heartbeat spiked. Her fingers tightened around the camera. She took three more pictures, adjusting for light, angle, exposure. There was no fear — not anymore. Only calculation.
She wasn’t here by accident.
Another flash. Another capture. Then silence.
One of the men looked directly in her direction. She froze.
They couldn’t have seen her.
But instinct screamed otherwise.
She ducked low and backed away, each step carefully placed against wet gravel. The shutter of her camera had always been her weapon — and tonight, she might have just fired the wrong shot.
She reached her car — an old Mehran with chipped paint and a stubborn engine. Sliding in, she wiped her lens and checked her memory card. Twelve photos. All sharp. All damning.
She sat there for a moment, watching her windshield blur with rain. Her reflection looked back at her — wild curls soaked flat, dark eyes rimmed with smudged kajal, skin pale in the faint interior light. There was a calmness in her stare. A dangerous calm.
Alishba had learned how to live with darkness. She didn’t flinch at blood, didn’t blink at screams. That part of her had died long ago — with her brother, with her trust, with every truth the city tried to bury in her family’s name.
Tonight, she’d uncovered something. Something big. And whoever those men were, they would come looking for the girl with the camera. She knew it.
But she also knew how to disappear.
She drove through narrow backstreets, avoiding the main roads, past shuttered shops and sleeping dogs curled under pushcarts. Her flat was on the top floor of an old haveli in Mochi Gate — the kind of place where secrets whispered through brick and lime and time. She entered through the side alley, walking up the crumbling staircase with practiced silence.
Inside, the room was dimly lit with yellow fairy lights that hung from the cracked walls. Books and photographs littered every surface — some framed, others pinned, all carefully chosen. A kettle hissed on the stove. Her cat, Safaid, jumped down from the windowsill and rubbed against her ankle.
Alishba tossed her dupatta on a chair and plugged in her camera. As the photos transferred to her laptop, she poured chai into a chipped cup and leaned against the counter, listening to the hum of the city outside.
One image popped up on the screen.
She zoomed in — face, profile, tattoo on the left wrist.
And then her breath caught.
She recognized the man.
Not from her world.
From his.
Reyan.
