The Order's summons arrived in silence.
A single sheet. A single word:
"Cleanse."
Underneath, a name written in red.
Aarav Mishra.
Maya read it once.
Then again.
And again.
Each time, her heartbeat slowed — until she couldn't hear it at all.
She folded the paper.
Placed it in the fire.
Watched it burn.
They had sent her not because she was skilled.They had sent her because she had never failed.
Because she didn't ask questions.
Because they thought she no longer knew how to love.
The last time she saw Aarav, he'd disappeared into the ruins.
A fracture turned storm.
She had warned him in her way — in half-truths and glances. But he'd seen through her even when she tried to disappear behind the mask.
She hated that.
She missed that.
She moved through the halls like a shadow.
Past masked acolytes bowing their heads.
Past whispering walls and dead-eyed Keepers.
Toward the lower archive, where only assassins walked.
Inside: her weapons. Her suit. Her mask.
She stared at it for a long time.
She remembered when they first gave it to her — a ceremony, not unlike Aarav's, except colder. Less personal. There had been no choice offered. Only obedience.
"You are not a person," they had said.
"You are a silence made flesh."
But now…
She hesitated.
She stood before the mirror, mask in one hand, dagger in the other.
"Aarav is a fracture. Fractures become rebellions. Rebellions must be reset."
That's what they'd taught her.
But when she closed her eyes, she didn't see a threat.
She saw a boy who had dared to defy the spiral.
She saw his hands shaking as he held out the card.
She saw herself, reflected in him.
Not the mask.
The girl beneath it.
And for the first time in years, she wanted to save something instead of survive it.
Maya didn't wear the mask that night.
She left it on the table.
Instead, she walked into the city bare-faced, barefoot, silent.
She didn't take the assassin's dagger.
She took a notebook — the one she hadn't opened since before the Order bled her into silence.
Inside: names. Faces. Mistakes.
And a map to where Aarav might be hiding.
She didn't know if she was going to warn him.
Or join him.
Or stop him before he became what the Order feared.
But she knew this:
She was no longer theirs.
And whatever came next, she would face it as herself.