Bangalore rarely stopped for anything. Not the monsoon. Not the traffic. Not even the nightly power flickers that swallowed entire streets like blinking gods. But on the morning of March 7th, the city paused.
Not because it wanted to — but because it didn't know how to react.
At 6:42 AM, a call came through to HAL police station. Three bodies were hanging upside down from the pillars of the Whitefield Metro overpass. Their arms were stretched outward like broken wings. Their eyes closed, their mouths stitched with black thread. No blood. No bruises. No signs of a struggle.
Just one thing united them — a 'red chalk checkmark' drawn precisely beneath each of their feet on the pillar's concrete base.
Media choppers circled within the hour. Drones were jammed. News anchors were silenced. By 9:00 AM, the bodies were gone. But the internet had already erupted.
People didn't forget that kind of image.
And somewhere deep inside the National Recon Division building, 'Kabir Sharma' stared at it in high-definition clarity. Pixel by pixel. Frame by frame. Alone.
He wasn't supposed to. The operation had been labeled "Null-Level Incident." That meant ignore and delete. But Kabir had seen something before — in 2019, along the Mizoram border, during a silent raid on a weapons camp.
Three guards had gone missing. Their bunkers were untouched. No forced entry. Just a single 'red checkmark' drawn on a bulletproof window. That one had been dismissed too.
But Kabir never forgot patterns. That was why they called him the 'Observer'.
"This isn't a cult prank," he whispered to himself. "This is precision."
He scanned the footage again. Same silence. Same posture. Same eerie symmetry in the way the chalk was drawn — 'left to right', not right to left. Dominant left hand. Consistent pressure.
Then his screen blinked.
An encrypted message, blinking red:
*\[PRIORITY RED – EYES ONLY]*
"Do not engage. Observer status confirmed. You're being watched."
Kabir froze. That wasn't internal protocol.
That was… off-grid.
He turned to the wall behind him — a whiteboard covered in clippings, handwritten notes, old incident reports. And in the centre, circled in red ink, was a name he had hunted for four years.
"THE LEDGER"
Not a person. Not an agency. A whisper. A rumour passed through online forums, corrupt police chatter, and anonymous tips. Always tied to exposure of major scams, always ending in "unexplained deaths".
And always — "marked in red chalk".
He stood up, exhaled slowly, and reached for the marker to draw a line through the newest case…
But paused.
There was "a mark already on the board".
A perfect, fresh red checkmark. Right through the name.
No sound. No door movement.
Nothing had entered his room.
And yet, something had.
Kabir walked to the window. No footprints on the balcony. No climbing wires. The security sensor hadn't tripped. That meant only one thing.
'Whoever left the mark… wanted him to know.'
Elsewhere, on a rooftop east of the city...
A teenage boy with tired eyes sat cross-legged beneath the early sunrise.
A worn schoolbag rested beside him. Inside it: a half-eaten protein bar, a black diary… and three sticks of red chalk.
He traced one between his fingers like a scalpel.
Then he looked up — straight into the sunrise — and whispered to no one:
"Three more tomorrow."
His name… was "Zayen".
And his silence had just begun.