VEILED FILES

Vasai Safe House — 7:12 a.m.

The old laptop clicked as the pen drive locked into place. A pale-blue folder bloomed onto the desktop, its name plain and cold: Anna_Sebastian_FINAL.

Inside — chaos disguised as structure.

Dozens of audio files. Scanned diary fragments. Photographs. One document titled simply: MWF_Complete.pdf.

Arjun Roy exhaled slowly as he double-clicked the first audio file. Natasha stood beside him, arms folded across her chest, her lips pressed into a line. The room felt smaller with Anna’s voice inside it.

It came through the speakers soft and trembling, like a match struck in darkness.

“If you’re listening to this, I’m likely dead. But my words are not. This is my story. This is his.”

There was no music. No dramatics. Just breath and fire stitched together. Anna’s tone hardened with each passing second — from wounded to resolute.

Natasha turned her head. She didn’t want Arjun to see the tears.

He clicked into the PDF. Forty-two pages. Handcrafted fury. Every line footnoted, cross-referenced — news clippings, award announcements, printouts of plagiarized stanzas. It wasn’t just a manuscript. It was a reckoning.

He rose on the backs of broken pens. Each critic silenced, each poet erased. I called him the Man Without a Face, but I knew his name.
Christopher Lobo.

Mukesh read over Arjun’s shoulder, his brow furrowed, voice low.

“His edits were red not from ink, but from what bled between syllables. When I saw Lena’s poem rewritten under his name, I understood: he kills in couplets.”

Outside, the Vasai wind rustled the leaves. Inside, the truth settled like ash.

10:50 a.m. — Crime Branch HQ, Mumbai

Arjun handed over the pen drive to the forensics team like it was a sacred object.

“Extract everything. Audio, metadata, image timestamps. I want to know where and when each recording was made. Verify background noise — window acoustics, fan speeds, the works.”

The lead technician nodded. “We’ll get the fingerprints off the silence, sir.”

3:15 p.m. — The Leak

Ravi Sharma, a veteran journalist known for burning bridges with style, opened the encrypted file that had arrived in his inbox without fanfare.

He read the name Anna Sebastian, then the title: The Man Without a Face.

Three pages in, he picked up the phone.

By dusk, the internet had caught fire.

Hashtags bloomed across feeds: #MWFRevealed. #JusticeForAnna.
Poets, publishers, politicians — all either reeling or rushing for cover.

Lobo’s office released a sterile press statement, denying everything.

But words couldn’t outpace the ones Anna had left behind.

6:00 p.m. — Natasha’s Safe House

They sat on the floor, laptops open, cables snaking across the carpet like nervous veins.

Natasha clicked on the final audio file.

Anna’s voice was thinner now, but unbroken.

“They think erasing the writer erases the truth. But I left fingerprints in every stanza. The em dashes, the double spacing, the inverted ellipses… those are mine. But he left them too. Because he never thought I’d die before publishing.”

Arjun closed his eyes, committing every word to memory.

“The forensic signature,” he said.

Mukesh nodded. “A poet’s fingerprint. The arrogance of art.”

8:48 p.m. — Forensic Lab

The report was conclusive.

Anna’s Mont Blanc pen had been tampered with — the nib hollowed out to hold a near-invisible needle. Traces of Cerbera odollam residue were found in the channel.

Enough to stop a heart.

“Prints?” Arjun asked.

The technician didn’t look up. “Daniel D’Souza.”

9:21 p.m. — Interrogation Room

Daniel sat with his hands clenched, knuckles white, the air conditioning making him shiver.

“He came to me,” he whispered. “Lobo. He knew everything — my debts, my affairs, the advance I never returned. He said it was just to scare her. A trace dose. Non-lethal.”

“And you believed him?” Arjun asked.

“I didn’t want to. But he… he made it seem like poetry. Said we were giving her material, a reason to write again.”

Arjun leaned forward. “What did he give you?”

“A cartridge. Sealed. Told me to place it in her pen. Said she’d never notice. I handed it back like a gift.”

He began to cry. “She was dead a week later.”

11:35 p.m. — Arjun’s Office

The wall of verse was full now. Names. Red strings. Photos. Poems with blood beneath their rhyme.

Everything pointed to one man.

Anna’s manuscript.

Audio files recorded in her apartment.

Typographic quirks unique to both her and Lobo.

Toxicology reports.

Daniel’s confession.

And still, Christopher Lobo walked free.

“Layers,” Mukesh said. “Lawyers. Loyalists. Silence.”

Arjun stood. “We don’t go through him.”

He turned toward Natasha.

“We go through the crowd.”

Midnight — Literary Festival, Gateway of India

It had been promoted for weeks as A Celebration of New Indian Voices. Lights. Posters. Live streams.

But none of the organizers expected the storm.

Natasha stepped onto the stage.

Dressed in black. Trembling slightly. But her voice? Steel and static.

She held up a piece of paper. The final poem Anna ever wrote. Then she played Anna’s voice from the pen drive, broadcasting it to the entire festival.

“They think I’m gone. But I left fire in the margins.”

Then she began to read. Not her work. Anna’s.

Pages from The Man Without a Face.

Paragraph by paragraph, stanza by stanza, she named names. Anna’s words became her own.

The crowd grew silent.

Phones recorded. Reporters tweeted. Justice was livestreamed.

And in the back, a tall man in a crisp suit turned his collar up and slipped away before the cameras caught him.

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