THE SKIN OF TIME

The engines’ voices exhaled combustion sighs, blending with the early scents of Kashmir’s cold wind, which slammed violently against the hangar doors.

Satya, engaged in his morning ritual, groomed his thick mustache as he walked, counting each step along a gleaming trail of salt, memories of his golden sea in Andhra Pradesh. The steps were always the same. They had to be: four hundred and ninety seven.

Feigning indifference, he greeted fellow officers and cadets with a smile as they passed, raising his eyebrows with pride at his commodore’s uniform, spotless, pressed with unreal precision, and of a blue tone stolen from the sky’s own fabric.

“Three hundred fifty seven... How chaotic everything looked when the uniforms were khaki... Three hundred fifty eight...”

It was remarkable how a shift from the color of earth to that of the heavens had brought such a sense of order, structure, and identity to the Air Force. For Satya, that change marked the true passage into a new decade; the eighties fading into the nineties, the first step into modernity.

As he approached the building, a strange sound nearly disrupted his count. It sounded like air escaping through pipes, ending in dry thuds.

Upon entering, his eyes, trained to trace the invisible lines of cleanliness and order into even the most timid corners, were not prepared for the slightest sign of chaos.

He ascended to the second floor and paused by a window. He scanned its four corners with his gaze, then wiped them again with a white handkerchief. When he saw the cloth had darkened, he pressed his lips together.

Suddenly, a figure passed by on the other side of the glass. He turned, no one there. When he looked back at the window, his reflection was gone. At the center of the glass, a fingerprint remained. He rubbed it away until it vanished.

In the courtyard below, cadets were marching backwards, as if someone were rewinding a tape “What strange exercise are they testing now?” The sound of the pipes seemed to coincide with the motion of the drill.

He felt the strong impulse to check that his shirt remained perfectly pressed, but without his reflection, he couldn’t be sure. Instead, he examined his palm in detail, confirmed it was dry, then flattened it against his chest and slid it up and down as if ironing himself.

He turned to continue walking, but didn’t move. He stared at the tip of his shoe, thoughtful “Something’s wrong.” The shoe was fine, gleaming.

Something beyond.

Beside the window, a crack had opened from ceiling to floor, absorbing the light and turning it reddish. The usual commotion, the shouted orders, the reversed drills, the boots on pavement, all of it dissolved into a heavy, atonal haze, as though he were being pulled underwater.

He turned around with great effort and found a faceless figure holding out a long envelope. The figure saluted, then vanished into a swirl of nameless colors. His legs trembled. He leaned against the wall, trying to confirm the world was still solid. He counted the buttons on his shirt, attempting to steady his breath.

“One, two, three, four, five, six, seven.”

All there. He counted them again in reverse. Whenever anxiety struck, his abdomen tightened. He looked down at the envelope marked “Confidential” and remembered his uncle’s words:

“If you ever feel alone, don’t worry, bad things always come looking for company.”

To the attention of Commodore Satya Sudarshan:

Your immediate presence is required to serve as a consultant in a joint secret operation coordinated by R&AW.

Report urgently to Room H in the East Wing.

Avoid any contact until further instructions are received.

Satya, drenched in sweat, carefully folded the note and slipped it back into the envelope, trying not to wet it. A mission coordinated by the Research and Analysis Wing was the last thing he needed.

Intelligence services do not recognize peace. Calm is nothing but appearance. If no one is willing to dig through the filth buried beneath the layers of the underworld, it accumulates until reality begins to crack.

Satya glanced again at the fissure. He clutched his right hand, which already itched to fidget with the buttons, pressed his lips, and exhaled forcefully, trying to banish his demons.

He crossed the West Wing with an intentionally firm stride, arriving at the central complex adjacent to the family quarters. Lakshmi, his wife, clad in dazzling gold and crimson fabric, knelt down holding their son Anantha, who was struggling to stay upright.

Anantha had inherited the soft, light skin of his mother and the sparkling eyes of his father. Though he’d been born premature and the doctor had warned of possible hypotonia during his early years, there he was, battling gravity like a little warrior.

Lakshmi pointed at Satya with a smile. The boy recognized his father, let out a joyful squeal, and took his first steps. Satya noticed, but held his breath and kept walking, clutching his right hand, saying nothing, eyes fixed ahead, as his orders demanded. He passed them by. Behind him came Lakshmi’s shout, followed by Anantha’s painful cry. He’d fallen face first into the ground.

In the East Wing, sunlight pierced the tall windows at a blinding angle. As he opened the door to Room H, a pungent scent of tobacco wrinkled his mustache. Several beams of light, slipping through the holes in the lowered blinds, cut through the darkness, revealing the hypnotic dance of smoke. His eyes took a moment to adjust before he could make out the arrangement of those present and spot the only empty chair.

It was never good to be the last one in.

“Thank you for coming, Commodore Sudarshan,” croaked the voice of a man at the center of the room, as if attendance had been optional. “I assume everyone here understands that the information to be discussed is highly confidential and extremely sensitive. Therefore, you and your families will be placed under strict surveillance for an undetermined period.”

Satya didn’t like the idea of being under surveillance. Not because he had anything to hide, but because he didn’t know how or by whom he was being watched. Maybe someone was watching the watcher, and someone else was watching that one, and so on in an endless spiral of distrust.

He looked around, trying to recognize the other attendees, but could only make out silhouettes and shadows without defined faces.

“As your ‘invitations’ made clear,” said a voice from the front, “I’m the coordinator of this operation under the Research and Analysis Wing. You may call me... Call me Vinay. But let’s skip the introductions. I won’t take up much of your time, and frankly, it feels as if I already know each of you... intimately.”

Satya felt a chill down his spine. He was certain he didn’t know any Vinay from the RAW.

“In our last incursion,” Vinay continued, “we lost three of our best operatives. That may not sound like much, but they were the finest we’ve ever had. They say no one is irreplaceable. I’m afraid that, in this case, they’re wrong.”

He began fumbling with a box, the room filling with clanking, tapping, and sudden thuds, until a yellowish light spread across the wall, followed by the whirring of a small fan. The projector loaded a slide showing an image of a road cutting through a rocky desert.

“Our men had infiltrated a suspicious alliance between a reclusive group of Russian and Chinese scientists,” he paused to take a long drag from his cigarette, exhaling before snuffing it out in the ashtray, “and Pakistan’s intelligence services, who in turn were collaborating with armed Afghan groups. And if that combination doesn’t raise enough red flags, what you see here is an underground facility built beneath the Durand Line, right on the border. Seven levels deep, and covering two square kilometers.”

A murmur of disbelief and tension rippled through the room. Satya took the opportunity to slide his chair slightly, aligning it with the man sitting to his right.

“Please remain calm and silent. I assure you, gentlemen, you haven’t heard anything yet,” said Vinay, his tone was serious enough to hush the crowd. “Brace yourselves.”

He lit another cigarette. The smoke made him squint in pain, and he scratched his beard like a flea ridden mutt.

“Our operatives managed to infiltrate, but not deeply enough to determine exactly what the scientists were working on. The final reports described some kind of experimental weapon, possibly related to gravity manipulation.”

Laughter erupted from somewhere behind Satya, making him shift uncomfortably in his seat. He was trying to grasp the meaning behind what he was hearing, though without much success, and he didn’t want anyone to think it was him laughing. Now his chair was misaligned with the one on his left.

“Does it sound like a joke to you?” Vinay asked, without a hint of anger.

“Forgive me. But this whole story is ridiculous from start to finish. Pakistanis, Afghans, Chinese, Russians... Sci-fi weapons? With all due respect to the deceased operatives, maybe they’d had a bit too much Afghan opium before filing their reports,” the man said, laughing again, this time joined by others in the room.

The slides began to change, showing images of the underground facility’s interior.

“Not deceased,” Vinay corrected. “Missing. Just like everyone else who was inside that complex. Poof. Gone without a trace. There are only two known entry and exit points, one on the Pakistani side, the other on the Afghan side. No one came out. No bodies were found inside.”

The laughter stopped. The only sound was the clicking of the slides. The images showed what appeared to be Chinese and Russian scientists in a lab filled with strange machinery, until the projection froze on an image of what looked like a futuristic cannon.

“This is the experimental weapon. Which, by the way, hasn’t been found either. All evidence suggests the disappearances were caused by its activation.”

He lit another cigarette with the end of the last and advanced the slide to a map.

“As a point of interest, the blue circle here marks the location of the complex. The red circle, here in Kashmir, is the very base we’re in now. And this red line connecting the two marks the exact direction before the event, if you’ll allow the term, that the gravitational cannon was pointing. And it’s not just a straight line on a flat map, it ends precisely here, in three dimensional coordinates, at a perfect angle.”

He ended the sentence with a rising whistle, tracing a long diagonal in the air with his cigarette. He paused, letting the information sink in.

“This all happened nearly a year ago. The day after tomorrow will mark the anniversary, if I’m not mistaken.”

Satya felt a tightness in his chest, his shoulders shrinking as he realized the date matched the day his son was born.

“You may be wondering why you haven’t been informed until now. The answer is simple... at first. And incredibly complex in the end. We’ve been monitoring you all for almost a year, and rest assured, we’ve noticed nothing unusual. But make no mistake, this base was the target. It’s just that the shot, quite literally, backfired. Look, the reason you weren’t given answers is because... we have none. The more experts we bring in, the more questions we have. The more possibilities,” he said, snuffing out the cigarette and spinning it in the overflowing ashtray. The ashes crackled in the projector’s beam like embers. “The more complications. Some experts believe the gravitational cannon might distort space-time in ways we don’t yet understand.”

“Do you think the missing people might have been accidentally... teleported?” asked a high pitched voice.

“It’s not off the table. Maybe they were vaporized, although it’s curious that only organic material disappeared, and the whole thing didn’t blow to pieces. Who knows? Perhaps they accidentally became the first time travelers... We just don’t know. And if that were the case, the ramifications are unimaginable. But let’s not go down that rabbit hole. Before we wrap up this session, I want you to know that over the next few days, we’ll be conducting individual interviews with each of you. Please, try to recall any strange event that caught your attention during this past year. We’re looking for small details, the big ones we already know. Anyway, let’s leave it here for today. I don’t want to overwhelm you.”

Satya left through the dark door of Hall H without looking at anyone. He walked staring at the tips of his shiny black shoes with bewilderment. They didn’t feel like his feet. He was confused. There had been an attack on the base, yet no one had noticed, and nothing had actually happened. It made no sense. He didn’t understand the whole gravity cannon business, the teleportation, or the space-time stuff. It all sounded like one of those American sci-fi movies, which he had never particularly liked. He remembered his son had been born three weeks early. Could that be related? It wasn’t exactly rare. He tried to recall any other event, but nothing came to mind. A shadow clouded his thoughts. The breach. The viscous shadow that seeped from the breach. No one had noticed. Not even he had noticed it until that very morning, though it didn’t seem like something new. Still, he felt ridiculous imagining himself telling a RAW agent that he had found a crack in a wall... or that his son had been born prematurely. His stomach tensed and his hand moved instinctively to the buttons on his shirt.

Suddenly, he heard a woman’s voice shouting his name. He looked up and saw a nurse running toward him. She gestured for him to follow her to the infirmary immediately. His wife had brought in their son after a fall, and he had turned blue.