The air inside Kaalkutt Barricades was damp with the salty sting of the sea, its narrow metal corridors humming faintly with the electric breath of machinery. Within the fortified iron shell of Trinetra Command, search operations had intensified. The news of the convoy ambush near Navachra Docks had shaken the entire command structure. Soldiers in muted grey combat suits moved with clinical urgency; reports were flying in from Meghna Sector's intelligence stations, and reconnaissance drones were launched from behind Uraash Vault.
Inside his quarters — minimalist and severe like everything in Trinetra's inner bastion — Agniveesh sat hunched at his narrow desk beneath a single tungsten bulb. His room was function over comfort. A steel-framed cot, a two-door cabinet, a reinforced desk, a data terminal. The air was thick with the scent of paper, ink, and damp metal.
His fingers flicked over the brittle pages of an old technical manual — Radioactive Isotopes: Principles and Decay Pathways — but his mind was restless. He had already devoured the text front to back, annotations lining its margins in his sharp, angular handwriting. He stood up, bare feet on cold tile, and reached for another book from the corner metal shelf that sagged under the weight of knowledge.
And that's when he saw it — a worn-out volume, reddish-brown leather fraying at the edges, placed horizontally under a stack of journals. A symbol was pressed onto its spine: a trident, subtly embossed, with faint radiation sigils behind it. He knew instantly — this was the book Professor Iyer had given him.
As his fingers brushed the cover, dust spiraled upward like whispers of the past.
Flashback: Three Days After the Applauding Ceremony
The warm mid-monsoon sun bathed the PINE campus in amber light as students milled across the central courtyard. The applauding ceremony still echoed in memory — Dean Gautam had clapped his hand on Agniveesh's shoulder and joked in front of hundreds, "Genius minds are always found alone, aren't they?"
Laughter. Recognition. Yet something inside Agniveesh remained unsettled. A thirst. A need to understand deeper.
On the third day, curiosity led his feet to the northern academic wing, where the Department of Nuclear Energy was housed in a building shaped like a semi-coil. Professor Iyer's office was on the third floor, behind a heavy wooden door cluttered with laminated quotes from Niels Bohr, Homi Bhabha, and Oppenheimer.
Agniveesh knocked.
"Come in," came the voice — smooth, aged, but still brimming with intent.
Iyer was adjusting a diffraction array on a table strewn with sensor shards and uranium decay diagrams. Without turning, he spoke, "Back so soon?"
"I wanted to ask something," Agniveesh said quietly.
"You already asked something," the professor said, still facing away. "You asked the world a question and answered it during that exam. That's why you're here."
Iyer finally turned, his intense eyes narrowing behind gold-rimmed glasses. "But let's see if you can answer something far older."
From the cluttered drawer beneath his workstation, he took out a folded piece of paper, the edges yellowing. He unfolded it with reverence.
"This problem," he said, "was left behind by my professor at IISc. He worked on fast breeder reactor optimization, particularly neutron economy in dense environments — a problem tied directly to harvesting energy from thorium-rich ores. But he never solved it. It's a mathematical model embedded in layered feedback loops. Took him six years. Failed till his last breath."
Agniveesh took the paper. Equations written in faded ink sprawled across the sheet, interspersed with hand-drawn graphs. It was an optimization challenge, yes — but multi-variable, recursive, nonlinear, and sensitive to minute perturbations.
The kind of problem where solving it wasn't about intellect, but vision.
"Do I have a time limit?" Agniveesh asked.
Iyer raised a brow, "You're welcome to give up now."
Agniveesh smiled, sat down on the bench across the professor's desk, and began to work. Time melted away. Minutes flowed like mercury.
Forty-five minutes later, he placed the paper down gently. His handwriting extended beyond the margins, equations tucked and extended with arrows. He had restructured the original model and introduced a concept Iyer hadn't considered: temporal neutron flux variation — time-based deviation in flux cycles.
Iyer picked up the paper, read it silently, then reread it twice.
When he finally looked up, his eyes were damp. "You… how the hell did you see that?"
"I didn't see," Agniveesh said calmly. "I just stepped into the equation and listened."
Professor Iyer walked to the cabinet and unlocked a steel drawer, taking out the reddish book. "This belonged to the man who wrote that problem. It's a chronicle of atomic energies, natural isotope decay systems, latent radiation in deep oceanic basins... things not taught anymore."
He handed it to Agniveesh with both hands, like passing on a torch.
"Understand what's inside this," he said. "Because someday, the world may not."
As Agniveesh stepped out of the department building, the warm Dehradun air brushed against his face, and the heavy book still rested in his hands like a secret passed down. Just as he reached the foot of the stairs, he heard two familiar voices.
"Bhai! Look what the wind dragged out of Iyer's bunker!" Veer called out, grinning as he approached with Aadesh beside him.
Agniveesh chuckled. "He gave me this book. Said it belonged to his own professor."
Veer raised an eyebrow and leaned closer to inspect it. "Damn, this looks ancient. Smells like nuclear fossils."
Aadesh smirked. "Why would he give you something like that? What, are you now his successor or something?"
"I don't know," Agniveesh shrugged, still unsure how to explain what had just happened inside.
But Aadesh wasn't interested in physics anymore. "Forget the book, bro. Tell me something more pressing."
Veer joined in, mock-serious. "The real mystery—the girl from the canteen. The one who turned up with a handkerchief when your face was gushing blood like a tap."
Agniveesh rolled his eyes. "I don't even know her name."
"Exactly!" Aadesh exclaimed. "That's what makes it poetic."
"She came like a breeze, vanished like vapor," Veer added dramatically, earning a half-hearted punch from Agniveesh.
They walked back toward the central campus, voices fading into the dusk. The book in Agniveesh's hand remained closed, but something in him had cracked open.
Something had started.