Murders in the Phoenix City

The damp feeling under her palms and feet was deeply uncomfortable.

Combined with the moist, mossy smell surrounding her, it was unpleasant enough to make Neha conscious of herself.

Why on earth am I crawling? she thought.

But she didn't stop.

Or perhaps she couldn't stop.

Her hands and feet continued moving almost mechanically as she crawled upward. Beneath her palms was a strange texture. It wasn't rock. It wasn't soil. It wasn't velvet, fabric, or any other material she could identify.

It was coarse.

Moist.

And warm.

The darkness around her made it impossible to see.

She could only understand one thing: she was crawling upward, over something.

Every now and then, the movements of her fingers and feet made the surface feel strangely familiar. The way her hands searched for something to grip, the uneven ridges beneath her palms, the way her feet pressed against protrusions in the darkness—

It felt like she was crawling along the branches of a tree.

But she couldn't be sure.

Then, suddenly, a greenish light flickered somewhere ahead.

For an instance, the darkness became a silhouette.

And Neha saw them.

Branches.

Thick and thin, intertwined with one another and spreading endlessly in front of her.

So it was a tree.

But what kind?

She had no idea.

Neha kept crawling.

Aimlessly.

Or perhaps not entirely aimlessly.

She was moving toward the greenish light.

As she approached it, the branches became brighter and more visible. Some were so thick that they looked like entire trees themselves. Others were thinner, winding around the larger ones as though they had grown there deliberately, embracing them.

The branches seemed to have no end.

They spread forward.

Upward.

Sideways.

Everywhere.

Neha continued crawling.

The smell grew stronger.

The stench was almost unbearable now—a mixture of dead algae, rotten moss and something else she couldn't identify.

Yet she kept going.

The greenish light was getting closer.

The darkness around the canopy slowly began to brighten. The shapes of the branches became clearer. She could almost see the source of the light now.

Almost.

She reached forward.

Just a little more.

Her fingers stretched toward it.

She was almost about to touch the light when—

Everything went dark.

Again.

The branches disappeared.

The green light vanished.

The smell remained.

But now the dampness felt different.

Not mossy.

Not earthy.

Wet.

Neha tried to move.

Her hands moved.

She wasn't crawling anymore.

She slowly lifted one hand and touched the back of her neck.

Her palm came away wet.

She was sweating.

Profusely.

For a few seconds, Neha simply lay there, breathing heavily in the darkness.

Then, slowly, she opened her eyes.

And at that moment, Neha Sengupta realized that she had been dreaming.

Her room was still dark.

The ambient glass windows remained opaque, keeping the early morning light outside. There was no sound—not even the faint hum of the city's transportation systems.

The silence made Neha realize that she had, once again, failed to complete her sleep goal.

This had been happening for some time now.

But this dream was different.

This absurd, disturbing dream was a first.

Neha made a fist with her left hand, facing downward. She opened and closed it twice, then turned her open palm toward herself.

The centre of her palm lit up.

A translucent display appeared above her skin.

05:42 AM.

Neha stared at it.

She was supposed to sleep until 06:30.

Forty-eight more minutes.

That was what she needed to meet her sleep goal.

She sighed.

Then flicked her index finger once.

The display changed.

Her mailbox opened.

13 unread messages.

Neha began going through them one by one.

At 6:30 AM, Neha was still looking at her palm interface, going through the last of her unread mails, when her bed gave a gentle vibration.

She closed her palm.

The vibration stopped.

Then she opened it again.

The ambient glass of her bedroom window slowly turned transparent.

Morning entered the room.

Beyond the glass stood a forest of towers.

Tall, slender structures rose into the pale morning sky, their surfaces catching the first sunlight. Some seemed to disappear into the clouds. Others were connected by elevated walkways and transit lines, creating layers of movement far above the ground.

And between the towers, not very far away, was water.

A vast stretch of it.

Neha stared at the view for a while.

Then, for the briefest moment, she saw the tree.

Those enormous branches.

The greenish light.

The impossible darkness between them.

She blinked.

The image disappeared.

Neha shook her head.

Just a dream.

She stepped out of her bedroom.

Her father was standing in the hall, supported by his mobility device.

He gave her a blank smile.

Neha smiled back.

She felt bad for this man.

He had lost both his legs entirely in an accident four years ago.

They had been visiting some relatives on the mainland that night. The road had been dark. Her father had been driving.

And then, suddenly, a woman appeared directly in front of their car.

Her father had steered sharply to the right to avoid hitting her.

They struck a tree.

The car lost control.

And then they fell into an eighty-foot-deep trench.

Her mother and Sameer—her elder sister's husband—died instantly.

Her father survived, but the accident had scarred him for the rest of his life.

And theirs.

Neha still remembered fragments of that night.

The headlights.

The sudden turn.

The sound of metal.

The darkness below.

She was trying to remember Sameer's face when a voice came from behind her.

"Good morning."

Neha turned.

Sneha was standing there with three cups of coffee arranged on a glass coaster.

"Good morning, Di."

The Senguptas had always been particular about coffee.

They brewed their coffee themselves.

It was a small, unnecessary act of tradition.

Perhaps even an irrational one.

But they liked it that way.

Sneha handed Neha a cup.

"You guys are going today?"

"Yes, Di. Finally a breakthrough."

"Almost six months, isn't it?"

"Yeah, Di. The last island we visited was in November last year."

Sneha nodded.

"Okay. Don't forget to carry anything useful. And take care."

"Take care," came another voice.

The voice was flat.

Emotionless.

Artificial.

Neha glanced toward her father.

For a moment, the accident came back to her again.

It hadn't only taken his legs.

His vocal chords had been critically damaged as well.

The voice she heard now was produced through an artificial vocal system—functional, intelligible, almost human, but never quite capable of carrying the warmth of a real voice.

Neha finished her coffee.

"I'll see you later."

She picked up her bag and left the hall to get ready for work.

Her uniform was a grey, full-sleeved T-shirt with irregular green patterns of different sizes running across it, representing the delta after the Deluge.

She paired it with commando-green trousers and swamp boots.

She hadn't worn the boots in six months.

Six long months had been spent behind screens instead.

The work was called feasibility analysis, but there was very little that felt feasible about it.

Every potential jungle island had to be studied before a single human being could set foot on it for restoration work. Soil composition. Moisture retention. Vegetation density. Root structures. Groundwater patterns. Biodiversity. Terrain stability.

Most of the initial data came from autonomous drones.

The drones flew over the jungle islands, beneath canopies, through wetlands and along waterways, continuously collecting environmental data and sending it back to the restoration teams.

Neha had spent hours looking at that data.

Then days.

Then weeks.

Eventually, six months had passed.

She had stared at three-dimensional maps until the islands seemed to exist more naturally inside her head than on the physical world. She had examined Polychromatic graphs until colours and patterns began to carry meaning without numbers.

As the leader of the feasibility analysis team for the ecological restoration of the city's jungle islands, she was responsible for answering one deceptively simple question:

Which island could be restored next?

Last week, they had finally found a possible answer.

SP18.

Now the screens were no longer enough.

It was time to go there.

Time to collect the samples manually.

Time to see what the drones had seen.

Neha looked at herself once in the mirror, adjusted the sleeve of her uniform and picked up her field bag.

After six months, she was finally going back into the jungle.

Neha preferred cycling to the community hall.

It wasn't particularly far from her home, and she liked the gradual climb toward the centre of H05. There was something reassuring about making the journey under her own effort rather than being carried by another machine.

As she cycled uphill, an old lesson from school suddenly came back to her.

"The community hall is supposed to be the highest point of every man-made island in the city."

Her teacher had said it with the confidence of someone repeating an obvious fact.

The diagram in her textbook had shown it too.

A carefully planned island rising gently from the surrounding water, its streets spreading outward from a central community hall built at the highest point. The design had made perfect sense when the islands were first planned.

It made considerably less sense now.

Neha cycled past buildings that would have dwarfed the community hall even when she was a child.

Towers rose a hundred storeys into the morning sky, their lower levels disappearing behind layers of trees, commercial structures and elevated walkways. The island no longer looked like the neat diagrams in her old schoolbooks. Years of construction, redevelopment and ordinary human life had gradually erased the geometry of its original plan.

Somewhere beneath all of it was the old community hall.

She couldn't see it.

So much for the highest point.

Neha smiled to herself and continued uphill.

She reached the hall at eight.

Her reporting time was eight-thirty, and, as expected, none of her team members had arrived yet.

She parked her bicycle and walked inside.

The community hall was quieter than usual. Neha sat down near one of the large windows, raised her left hand and opened her palm.

The interface appeared.

She began going through the latest news while waiting.

"Again you're early. And on a Monday. What's wrong with you?"

Ratul's sweet voice made her look away from her palm.

He was standing a few steps away, smiling.

"Good morning to you too."

Neha glanced at the time.

"And you're early by fifteen minutes. Not bad, Ratul."

"See? I'm improving."

Souvik and Kaya arrived together, exactly as expected.

Five minutes later, Arpita appeared at the entrance, her apologetic eyes already doing the explaining.

"Sorry."

Neha looked at the clock.

"Five minutes."

"I know."

"Acceptable."

Arpita smiled.

They gathered their equipment and headed outside.

Their mini omnibus was waiting near the entrance.

One by one, they climbed aboard, stowed their field equipment and settled into their seats.

The doors sealed.

Their seats locked into place.

The omnibus gave a barely perceptible vibration beneath them.

As the omnibus hovered through the streets of H05, the river came closer.

At first, it appeared only in fragments between the towers.

Then it grew.

Wider.

Wider still.

Until the streets beneath them began to disappear and the omnibus left the ground altogether, hovering over ripples and waves.

Neha could have felt the breeze playing with her hair if she and her teammates weren't sitting inside a temperature-controlled, humidity-controlled, god-knows-what-else-controlled glass enclosure that could hover over almost any surface—land, water, swamps or wetlands.

It was the obvious transport system for a city like this.

The omnibuses were everywhere.

They were the red blood cells of this archipelagic life, carrying people, supplies and information between the islands, flowing over water where roads could no longer exist and gliding across wetlands where bridges made little sense.

Sophisticated.

Efficient.

Almost completely devoid of inconvenience.

And yet, Neha sometimes wondered what the city had lost along with its old roads.

The Maidan, for example.

The old maps showed it as an enormous green expanse, enclosed by some of the most important streets of the lost city. People had walked there, gathered there, played there, protested there. And, most famously, trams had once passed around it—slow, rattling trams carrying people through winter afternoons.

At its heart stood the Victoria Memorial Hall, a vast white marble monument crowned by an angel, surrounded by carefully maintained gardens.

Neha knew the place, of course.

Everyone did.

She had grown up seeing its reconstructed images, visiting its restored island during school excursions, and learning about the Maidan long before she was old enough to understand how radically the city had changed.

She had never ridden those trams.

She never could.

But she had watched the old recordings.

There was something almost absurdly slow about them by the standards of her time. People actually chose to spend long minutes travelling at a pace at which they could feel the winter air, watch the Maidan pass by and hear the city around them.

Perhaps that was the charm people always talked about.

Neha couldn't know.

She could only imagine it.

The thought lingered as the omnibus moved farther out over the water.

The towers of H05 gradually receded behind them.

Cargo vessels appeared ahead, moving through the enormous river.

And beyond them, the Victoria Memorial stood exactly where it had been restored to stand—on its own small island.

The white marble caught the morning light.

Its gardens formed a neat green border around the monument, almost unnaturally precise against the wildness of the surrounding landscape.

There were no streets around it anymore.

No tram tracks.

No continuous expanse of Maidan.

Only water.

The memorial, along with a handful of other surviving and restored heritage structures, stood as isolated fragments of the old city amid the vast new geography.

From the omnibus, they looked almost like a carnival of memories scattered across the Hooghly river.

Neha watched the monument for a while.

She had seen it many times before.

Behind the memorial lay nothing resembling the city shown in the old photographs.

There were forests.

Water channels.

Small islands.

And beyond them, more islands.

The old city had been broken apart so completely that the monuments had become its landmarks in the most literal sense—small pieces of history standing above the water, telling anyone who cared to look where the vanished streets had once been.

Neha turned back toward the direction of travel.

SP18 was still far away.

The omnibus continued southward, carrying her deeper into the archipelago.

They continued southward.

After a while, a thin column of white smoke appeared ahead.

Then another.

It was rising from an island.

As the omnibus drew closer, Neha could see vultures circling above it.

If they hadn't been sitting inside the sealed chamber, they might have smelled it—the unmistakable stench of burning flesh carried by the wind.

Keoratala Cremation Island.

The cremation ground had survived the transformation of the city, though almost everything around it had changed. What had once been part of a crowded urban neighbourhood now stood isolated amid the water.

The smoke drifted upward.

The vultures circled.

Nobody in the omnibus said anything.

A little farther south, another familiar structure appeared.

The crest of the restored Kalighat Temple rose above the trees. The temple stood on its own restored island, surrounded by channels and vegetation where streets and buildings had once existed.

The omnibus curved around the temple island.

And then the Hooghly was behind them.

Ahead lay green. Nothing but green.

The city seemed to end abruptly at the edge of the temple island.

They had entered the jungle-island zone.

"Jungle islands."

Neha had always found the name strange.

Growing up, she had wondered how an entire region that had once been a city could eventually acquire such a name.

But that was what they were called now.

The islands had been catalogued as the SP islands, following the old South Parganas administrative designation, their numbers replacing the names of neighbourhoods that had disappeared beneath the Deluge.

SP12.

SP13.

SP14.

SP15.

The omnibus passed them in quick succession.

From above, each island seemed to be nothing more than a mass of green surrounded by water. Occasionally, a narrow channel or a clearing appeared beneath the canopy.

Then the vegetation became denser.

Mangroves began reaching farther into the waterways.

The omnibus slowed.

Its sensors adjusted automatically, mapping branches and roots ahead.

The journey became quieter.

Twenty minutes later, SP18 appeared.

It was smaller than some of the islands they had passed and almost completely isolated from the others.

Neha checked the coordinates.

SP18.

According to the oldest surviving maps, this place had once been called Dover Terrace.

The omnibus slowed as SP18 emerged through the mist.

Ahead, the dense vegetation opened into a vast stretch of low-lying wetland. There was no proper ground to land on. The island was a mosaic of shallow water, saturated soil and tangled vegetation—thick mangrove growth in some places, sparse salt-tolerant shrubs and grasses in others. Thin roots and pneumatophores rose from the dark water like countless fingers, while larger mangrove trunks stood farther apart, their twisted roots disappearing beneath the surface.

The omnibus lowered itself until its underside was only a few centimetres above the wetland.

Its movement changed almost imperceptibly. It no longer travelled over a solid surface. Instead, it glided through the marsh, maintaining a constant gap above the water and mud. Where the vegetation grew thicker, the omnibus pushed gently through it, bending reeds and young mangrove shoots aside without touching them. Shallow channels opened beneath its path, reflecting fragments of sky and foliage.

Inside the enclosed cabin, the temperature and humidity remained perfectly controlled.

Neha watched the landscape through the glass.

SP18 was nothing like the neat, engineered islands she had grown up on.

There were no broad roads, residential towers or landscaped parks. The wetland simply stretched between the trees, broken here and there by things that did not belong to it.

A piece of concrete lay half-buried beneath the roots of a mangrove. Rusted lengths of TMT protruded from a moss-covered mound. Farther ahead, a weathered pillar stood among the vegetation, its lower half completely swallowed by soil and roots.

Neha had seen enough of these remnants to know what they were.

The old city was still here.

Most of it had disappeared beneath decades of sediment, salt and vegetation. What remained was rarely more than a fragment—a foundation, a wall, a section of pavement—slowly being absorbed into the ecosystem around it.

The omnibus continued forward for several minutes before the landscape began to change.

A small field facility appeared between the trees.

It had been built on one of the few patches of stable ground in the wetland, raised only slightly above the surrounding terrain. A compact modular structure stood beneath a canopy of mangrove and other salt-tolerant vegetation. Solar panels covered part of its roof. Equipment crates, sampling cases and several autonomous survey drones were arranged around the perimeter.

The omnibus moved towards it, slowing further.

For a few seconds, it hovered almost motionlessly above the marsh while its sensors scanned the terrain below.

Then it eased forward onto the firmer patch beside the facility and settled down almost silently.

The doors opened.

Warm, wet air rushed into the cabin.

Neha stepped out first.

Her boots sank slightly into the soft, dark soil.

“Welcome to SP18,” she said.

Ratul stepped out behind her, followed by Souvik, Kaya and Arpita. Within minutes, the team was unloading equipment.

Their first task was not restoration.

It was verification.

Neha opened the environmental survey on her wrist interface while the others began deploying the portable instruments. Soil probes, groundwater sensors and atmospheric monitors were distributed around the edge of the wetland. Two autonomous drones lifted from their charging cases and rose above the canopy, beginning a slow survey of the island.

The data appeared almost instantly.

Temperature.

Humidity.

Soil salinity.

Water depth.

Ground stability.

Vegetation density.

The familiar streams of information began filling Neha's interface.

She studied them without speaking.

The drone-generated three-dimensional map of SP18 looked impressive. From above, the island appeared to have distinct ecological zones, each sharply separated from the next.

But Neha knew better.

She crouched beside a cluster of low mangrove plants and pushed a soil probe into the ground.

The instrument stopped earlier than expected.

She looked at the reading.

“Hard layer?”

Souvik checked his own display.

“About thirty centimetres down.”

Neha shook her head.

“That’s not a hard layer.”

She took another reading from a point less than a metre away.

The depth was different.

Again, she moved.

Different.

She stood up.

“The drones are averaging the surface,” she said.

Ratul looked over. “Meaning?”

“They’re treating the wetland like a continuous terrain.”

She pointed towards the marsh.

“It isn’t.”

The team followed her gaze.

Water channels ran beneath the vegetation, some visible from the surface, others hidden beneath layers of roots, mud and accumulated organic matter. What looked like solid ground from above could become saturated soil a few metres away.

Neha opened the three-dimensional model and enlarged a section.

“The terrain isn’t changing randomly. There’s a pattern.”

She began comparing the drone’s elevation data with the groundwater readings.

The deeper channels appeared to correspond with slightly denser vegetation.

That caught her attention.

She walked farther into the wetland.

Kaya followed with a portable sensor.

The vegetation became thinner here. The ground disappeared almost completely beneath shallow water. Small mangrove shoots rose from the surface in dense clusters, while larger trees stood farther away, their roots exposed above the water.

Neha stopped.

“Take a reading.”

Kaya lowered the sensor.

The result appeared on both their displays.

Freshwater.

Neha frowned.

She took another reading.

Freshwater again.

“That’s strange,” Kaya said.

Neha looked around.

“Very.”

SP18 was a saline wetland. The island’s surface water and soil chemistry were exactly what they expected from a coastal delta environment. Yet beneath the vegetation, the groundwater readings were showing something different.

They moved deeper into the wetland.

Several more readings produced the same result.

Freshwater traces.

Not enough to form a visible stream.

Not enough to appear on the old survey.

But enough to suggest that something was moving beneath the island.

Neha marked every location on the map.

The points began forming a loose line.

Then another.

Then another.

She zoomed out.

The lines seemed to converge towards the interior of the island.

“Let’s follow it,” she said.

The team spent the next few hours moving slowly through SP18.

They collected soil from different depths, water from shallow channels and samples from the roots of several plant species. Autonomous drones continued mapping the vegetation overhead while Neha and the others worked at ground level, correcting the gaps in the machine-generated model.

By afternoon, the island had begun to reveal itself.

It was not an empty jungle waiting for restoration.

It was already an ecosystem.

A young one, perhaps. Fragile in places. Unstable in others. But functioning.

Neha stood beside the edge of a narrow freshwater pool, staring at the readings.

The water was almost completely hidden beneath overhanging vegetation.

She looked at the surrounding plants.

Some were thriving.

Others were not.

The difference was not random.

It followed the water.

She opened the restoration model and looked at the proposed intervention zones.

Then she deleted them.

Ratul looked at her.

“What are you doing?”

“Nothing.”

She closed the model.

“We don’t restore this yet.”

“But the feasibility report—”

“Is based on incomplete data.”

She looked across the wetland.

“If we alter the vegetation before we understand the groundwater system, we could destroy something that is already working.”

Nobody argued.

They spent another hour collecting samples.

By late afternoon, the light had begun to soften beneath the canopy.

The team packed the equipment back into its cases. The drones returned one by one, folding themselves into their transport housings.

Neha took one last look at SP18.

The wetland stretched away between the trees, its shallow waters catching fragments of the fading sky.

Six months of simulations had reduced the island to numbers.

Standing there, she realized how little those numbers had actually told them.

The omnibus was waiting beside the field facility.

The team loaded the equipment and climbed aboard.

Once everyone was inside, the doors sealed.

The vehicle rose only slightly from the ground and began moving through the wetland, its underside maintaining a few centimetres of clearance above the mud and shallow water.

It passed between the mangroves, through the marsh and back towards the open channels beyond.

Neha watched SP18 disappear behind the vegetation.

They had come looking for an island that needed restoration.

Instead, they had found an island they did not yet understand.

It was almost nine when Neha stepped into her home.

“How was it?” Sneha asked curiously, almost as soon as she entered.

Their father greeted her with a smile.

“Exhausting!” Neha said with a sigh. “But interesting as well. Let me freshen up. I’ll tell you everything.”

After changing, Neha joined them in the living room and began recounting the day. The conversation stretched far beyond SP18. The sisters discussed the strange freshwater readings, the state of the island and the problems they had encountered during the survey. Before long, the conversation drifted towards Neha’s teammates—Ratul’s endless enthusiasm, Souvik’s habit of questioning everything, Kaya’s seriousness and Arpita’s uncanny ability to arrive five minutes late.

Their father listened quietly, occasionally smiling at the sisters' gossip.

Later, the two sisters helped him onto his bed before returning to their own rooms.

It was well past midnight when Sneha finally looked at her sister.

“Get to bed now, or you'll miss another sleep score.”

Neha reluctantly went to her room.

She knew sleep would evade her again.

It always did.

She set the ambient bedroom for sleep and lay down.

To her surprise, she fell asleep within ten minutes.

And as consciousness slowly slipped away, she found herself somewhere else.

Back at the tree.

Crawling.

The branches felt familiar.

In their backdrop, she could see the silhouettes of countless more branches stretching towards the shining green light ahead.

Her crawling was not aimless. Somehow, she knew she had to reach that light.

As she kept moving, she began to feel thirsty.

If only I could reach that light... all my thirst could be quenched.

The thought came to her naturally.

She did not know who had put it there.

It felt as though the thought had always existed inside her—since the beginning of time.

She crawled faster.

The light seemed closer now.

Then, in her haste, her left hand missed the branch ahead.

Everything rolled before her eyes.

For a moment she could not tell which way was up.

Then—

A jolt of pain shot through her hips.

Did I fall down? Where did I fall?

Everything was dark again.

She could feel the same branches beneath her.

She moved her palms around, feeling one branch after another.

She was sitting on them.

But how?

Were these branches rooted in the ground?

What kind of tree is this?

And then, in an instant, she understood.

A Banyan tree.

Perhaps larger than any Banyan anyone had ever known.

The moment the thought formed, everything changed.

The world moved.

Faster.

So fast that Neha barely had time to understand what was happening.

She was no longer crawling.

She was running.

But why?

Why am I running? Who am I running from?

She looked behind her.

There was no one.

Still, she could not stop.

She ran deeper into the darkness.

Then she saw someone ahead.

It was difficult to make out in the darkness.

A man.

He was running.

Running for his life.

Every few moments, he looked behind him.

But why are we running?

There was nothing behind them.

What are we running from?

Then another thought came to her.

Am I chasing him? Is he running from me? Why on earth—

She could not finish the thought.

The man struck a low branch.

His body twisted.

He fell heavily onto the ground.

He tried to get up.

Once.

Twice.

But his arms gave way beneath him.

Neha slowed for the first time.

She kept walking towards him.

She did not want to.

At least, she thought she did not.

Yet something inside her was driving her forward—a strange desire to do something she had never imagined herself capable of doing.

She looked down.

A large stone lay beside her.

Her hand reached for it.

She picked it up.

The man was still struggling to rise.

Neha walked towards him.

In the little light that existed, she could see his torn red shirt.

She could not see his face.

Her hands began to rise.

Not by choice.

Not entirely.

As if someone else had taken control of them.

Then, with all the force she had, she brought the stone down.

Everything went dark.

For a moment, there was nothing.

Then Neha became aware of movement.

She was dragging something.

A body.

The man's body.

She did not know why.

She did not know where she was taking him.

But she kept dragging.

The weight pulled against her arms, yet her body moved with strange certainty.

Then the surroundings began to feel familiar.

The marshes.

The wetlands.

The vegetation.

Even the way she moved between them.

She knew this place.

She had been here before.

Then she saw the light.

The bright green light.

Her pace quickened.

She knew where she was taking him.

As she moved closer, the darkness around her slowly dissolved.

The vegetation became clearer.

The water channels.

The low-lying marsh.

The tangled roots.

And then she recognized it.

SP18.

She was dragging the man's body through the very wetlands she had walked through that afternoon.

The green light was coming from one of the freshwater channels they had discovered.

Neha dropped the body beside it.

She knelt in the mud.

For a moment, she simply stared at the water.

Then she did something that was beyond anything she could have imagined herself doing.

She plunged her mouth into the mud and began sucking at the freshwater channel as though it were a straw.

She drank desperately.

Mud entered her mouth.

She could taste the earth.

The water was cold.

Her stomach turned.

She felt nauseous.

Dizzy.

She wanted to throw up.

But she could not stop.

She kept drinking.

The green light grew brighter.

The water trembled.

Then the mud began to vibrate.

The marsh shook beneath her.

The branches around her seemed to move.

Everything began to blur.

The wetlands.

The water.

The body.

The light.

Everything dissolved into one violent vibration.

And then—

The marsh disappeared.

The branches disappeared.

The green light disappeared.

Neha's eyes opened.

She was lying in her bed.

Her forehead was moist with sweat.

She stared at the ceiling, breathing heavily.

For several seconds she could not move.

Then her eyes shifted towards the ambient display.

Her sleep score glowed softly in the darkness.

Sleep Goal Completed.

Neha stared at it.

For the first time in years, she had slept through the night.

She had no idea that somewhere inside that sleep, she had just witnessed a murder.

Or that, in the dream, she had committed it herself.