Avinash knew how to clean blood from concrete.

Cold water first. Never hot. Heat denatured the proteins and could set the stain into the surface. People always got that wrong.

Wood was different. It needed immediate blotting before the liquid seeped into the grain. Upholstery was a nightmare. Tile looked forgiving until the iron settled into the grout, leaving those dull, telltale rust-colored stains. Clothing depended entirely on the weave.

There were methods. Hydrogen peroxide for certain organic stains. Salt to draw out moisture. Patience. Steady pressure. Experience.

Far more experience than any nineteen-year-old should reasonably possess.

Shane had taught him most of it. Or rather, Shane had accumulated an alarming amount of practical medical knowledge to make sure they both survived the life-altering decisions they seemed to make with alarming frequency.

The pressure dressing wrapped around Nicholas's ribs was a direct application of one of those lessons. Firm enough to support the wound. Loose enough to allow his lungs to expand. Check peripheral circulation. Monitor skin temperature. Never trust a wound simply because it has stopped actively bleeding.

The cut at Nicholas's temple was another matter. Avi had cleaned the blood from his face and secured a dressing over the wound, but he couldn't tell how much damage lay beneath it. The bleeding had been frighteningly heavy. The fact that it had finally stopped didn't reassure him nearly as much as he wanted it to.

Nicholas had been unconscious for almost three hours.

Avi had spent most of them watching his chest rise and fall.

The sight should have reassured him.

It didn't.

Avi's foot tapped out a restless, frantic rhythm against the scuffed floorboards. The mesh desk chair creaked beneath him as he shifted, chewing feverishly at a ragged thumbnail. The small bedroom smelled faintly of rubbing alcohol, copper, and pine-scented floor cleaner.

Wonderful. Exactly how every normal, well-adjusted university student spent their Monday morning.

Avi glanced at the digital clock on his desk. Then at Nicholas. Then back at the clock.

Still unconscious. Still bleeding through the central layer of gauze. Still very much a liability.

"You know," Avi muttered, leaning forward in his chair, "most people don't casually break into other people's rooms bleeding and half-dead."

Nicholas didn't move.

"I'm serious. There's a door. It has a handle. You could've tried using it like a civilized person."

Nothing.

Avi's gaze drifted to the dressing at Nicholas's temple. His jaw tightened.

"Three hours, man. Three whole hours. Do you have any idea how inconvenient you're being?"

The words came out sharper than he'd intended. He waited anyway, watching for the slightest twitch, the smallest indication that Nicholas might be listening.

There was none.

"Unbelievable."

Avi leaned back and stared at the ceiling.

Nicholas Damine.

Twenty-six. Business student. Trainee accountant in the business development department of a private security firm. No criminal record. No outstanding warrants. No glaring financial irregularities. No digital footprints screaming serial killer, cult member, or government assassin.

Just a painfully ordinary man with an aggressively boring credit history.

He'd already searched Nicholas. Thoroughly.

On the very first day he'd arrived—the same day Avi had quietly memorized his full legal name from a stray piece of mail on the kitchen counter. He would've been an absolute idiot not to.

Avi had dismissed him after twenty minutes of digging.

In hindsight, that was rapidly becoming one of the dumbest decisions of his life.

Because ordinary, boring accountants didn't usually carry loaded firearms.

Avi dragged a hand down his face.

This wasn't supposed to happen. None of this had been part of the plan.

Apartment 4B had been chosen through a rigorous process of elimination. Not because he particularly enjoyed the peeling green paint or because the rent was dirt cheap, but because it was forgettable. Invisible. Nobody from his past would think to look for him here.

He'd made a mistake investigating the anomalies surrounding Shane's fatal crash. He'd found an encrypted data trail, followed a routing node he should never have touched, and left a digital fingerprint somewhere it didn't belong. Ever since, the dark corners of the internet had been quietly broadcasting his existence to people far higher up the food chain than he'd ever intended to attract.

He'd been on the run ever since.

He'd abandoned computer science despite having spent his entire childhood breathing digital infrastructure like oxygen, trading it for social sciences instead. He'd changed states, changed his routines, changed his future—everything.

The whole point was to become unremarkable.

The bleeding man on his mattress was spectacularly failing to cooperate.

Avi pushed himself out of the chair and crossed the room, stopping beside Nicholas. Up close, the dressing looked worse. The dark stain had spread further across the gauze.

He bent to check Nicholas's pulse again.

Steady beneath his fingertips.

It did little to loosen the knot in his stomach.

Avi withdrew his hand and straightened.

"You're in my room. You're bleeding on my mattress. And whatever trouble followed you here is now, very inconveniently, my problem."

A beat passed. He folded his arms and stared down at him.

"But here's the deal. I'm done sitting here waiting for you to tell me what's going on."

He leaned closer, his expression hardening.

"So I'm handling it my way." He pointed at Nicholas. "You can complain about them later. Assuming you wake up, which would be great, by the way. If you could manage that."

The declaration sounded considerably more confident than he felt.

Avi exhaled through his nose and reached for the medical supplies he'd arranged on the desk. He checked the dressing again, careful not to disturb the wound more than necessary.

"Don't make me regret helping you."

+++

Of all the useless, chaotic skills Shane had violently beaten into him over nearly two decades of friendship, Avinash had always considered lockpicking the single most practical.

People tended to wildly overestimate locks. Most standard commercial locks weren't actual security; they were merely polite suggestions of privacy. Five pins. A tension wrench. A delicate touch. Feel, don't force. Listen, don't rush. The fundamental secret of the trade was understanding that mechanisms inherently wanted to move. You simply had to convince them they were being turned by a key.

Shane had once successfully broken into their principal's office at age fifteen just to retrieve Avi's confiscated graphic calculator.

"One of these days, Shane, we are definitely going to get arrested."

"Well, then I'll just have to teach you how to pick handcuffs before that happens."

"See? This is exactly why I can't take you to nice places."

"And yet, you keep taking me places."

Back then, Avinash had laughed, dismissing the bravado. Now, kneeling on the cold floorboards outside Nicholas's locked bedroom door he found himself deeply appreciating the educational value of juvenile delinquency.

Honestly, if Nicholas had planned on coming home partially dead the absolute least he could have done was leave his bedroom door unlocked. Common courtesy wasn't dead, though the man currently bleeding through a temporary bandage on his bed almost was.

Click.

The cylinder yielded with a soft, metallic surrender.

"Thank you," Avi muttered under his breath, carefully withdrawing his makeshift tools.

He pushed the door open, stepped into the dark room, and blinked.

The space was immaculate. Unnaturally, terrifyingly immaculate.

The mattress had military-grade hospital corners, the sheets pulled so taut you could probably bounce a coin off them. A precise, uniform stack of textbooks occupied the corner of the desk: Business Management, Advanced Accounting Principles, Macroeconomics, Financial Statistics.

Pens sat in a matching mesh holder—black, blue, red, perfectly segregated. Even the pencils appeared to be strictly organized by their physical height. The desk lamp stood mathematically centered on the wood, flanked by sticky notes aligned in flawless geometric squares. The entire room radiated the distinct, oppressive energy of a man who ironed his socks recreationally.

Avinash sighed.

His eyes landed on a small, silver picture frame resting on a desk against the far wall. A man and a woman smiled warmly at the camera, a young boy and a little girl standing in front of them with full, toothy beams. A family vacation, probably. It was normal. Painfully, aggressively normal. Nothing about the clean-cut people in that photograph screamed 'climbs buildings for a living' or 'carries suspicious firearms'.

He set the frame back down carefully. Then, after a beat of deliberate thought, he nudged it exactly two inches to the left, completely ruining the alignment. Petty acts of terrorism were vital for personal growth.

Right beside the frame, sitting with dignified seriousness on the corner of the desk, was a rabbit plushie. It wore a faded navy-blue Victorian tailcoat with polished brass buttons, a matching top hat perched proudly between its oversized ears, tiny round spectacles balanced on the bridge of its stitched nose, and a crooked wooden walking cane tucked beneath one arm. One glass eye reflected the glow of the desk lamp, completely unbothered by the fact that its left whiskers had been permanently bent out of shape.

Avi stared back at the stuffed animal, a soft, baffled laugh escaping him. "Who raised you?" he muttered to the bunny.

Shaking his head, he turned his attention to the desk drawers, which proved to be equally disappointing. Books, lecture notes, highlighters, folders with meticulous color tabs, and more books. Why on earth would a man who looked like a walking brick wall own this many textbooks?

Avi searched beneath the bedframe. Nothing. He checked inside the few shoe boxes stacked in the closet. Nothing but perfectly preserved leather boots. One lone, empty cardboard box under the bed yielded only a light coating of dust. Apparently, Nicholas's hidden life did not involve secret compartments or aluminum briefcases full of diamonds.

Frustrated, Avinash slid open a deeper drawer in the dresser—Nicholas's underwear compartment.

Avi paused, his jaw dropping slightly. "This is completely nuts."

Blue. Gray. Black. White. Everything was meticulously folded into tight, identical squares. Everything was sorted. Everything was strictly color-coded. His eyes widened in sheer disbelief. "Jesus Christ."

He picked up a perfectly folded gray pair, then a black one, staring at the sheer discipline required to maintain such a ridiculous system. With the solemn, quiet dignity of a priest performing a sacred ritual, Avi began swapping several pairs around. Blue forcefully invaded the white section. Gray actively betrayed the black. Order descended into chaotic asymmetry. Balance was officially restored to the universe.

His gaze drifted toward the smaller divider drawer right next to it. He pulled it open, paused, and slowly raised one eyebrow. Then the other.

Condoms. Large size. Very large size.

"...Okay," Avi murmured.

He slowly, quietly closed the drawer, his cheeks warming slightly despite the empty room. "Good for you, big guy."

He wasn't entirely sure why he suddenly felt awkward; the man wasn't even conscious to witness the invasion of privacy. Turning back to the primary search, however, Avi began to discover something far more alarming than Nicholas's excessive organization.

Nothing.

There was no spare wallet. No old IDs. No expired passports. No secondary phones, no bank cards, no crumpled receipts, and absolutely no personal photographs beyond the single family picture. Normal people left a paper trail. Even the most careful criminals left digital or physical friction behind them.

Nicholas's room felt entirely strange. It was occupied and clearly used, yet somehow completely empty. Temporary. It looked like the quarters of a man who had moved in fully expecting to pack everything into a single duffel bag and vanish by tomorrow morning.

Avi frowned, pulling the door shut behind him and ensuring the lock clicked back into its secure position. He was significantly more perplexed now than he had been before he broke in.

He walked back out into the dim light of his room, where Nicholas was still passed out on the bed, breathing with a slow, heavy regularity.

Avi stared down at him, crossing his arms. "What the hell are you?"

Nicholas continued to breathe peacefully, offering absolutely no answers to the room. Very helpful.

Avi's gaze drifted to his desk, where Nicholas's heavy, black semi-automatic pistol rested directly beside Avi's open laptop. And suddenly, that visual equation looked completely backwards.

Normal citizens carried wallets. Fugitives carried fake identification. Normal people carried smartphones and credit cards.

People generally did not carry military-grade firearms and absolutely nothing else.

+++

The problem with having a very particular set of skills was that sometimes they just sat there, staring at you. Judging. Waiting. Eventually, they became entirely impossible to ignore.

Avi stared at his waiting interface, his fingers hovering directly over the mechanical keyboard. Old habits died incredibly hard. He had promised himself and Shane that he wouldn't get back into this cave. But the hesitation vanished the exact millisecond his fingertips struck the keys. Because unfortunately, this part was easy. Disgustingly easy. Like riding a bicycle. Or breathing.

A few commands. A spoofed protocol. A clean firewall bypass. He borrowed active credentials from people who didn't even know they'd lent them, quickly linking disparate databases into one massive, aggregate search grid.

Just like old times.

He could almost see Shane sprawled lazily across the corner of his desk, casually eating chips while Avi worked.

"Are you in?"

"No."

"You're smiling."

"I'm not smiling."

"That's your smiling face."

"I hate you."

"Love you too."

Then both of them laughing as though they had all the time across the world. Back when this had actually been fun. Back when they were just two idiots far too clever for their own good.

Back before the funerals. Back before the blood. Back before the promises.

"Promise me something."

"Depends."

"If I die first—"

"Shut up."

"Humor me."

"No."

"If something happens, don't go all Batman. No stupid investigations. No revenge. No disappearing into some cyber-vigilante cave."

"Batman had money."

"Avi."

"Fine."

"Promise me you'll stop all this."

"No. Why should I be the only one to stop shit? What about you? What about the questionable life choices you are actively making?"

"This isn't about me, no? I'm hypothetically dea—"

"No"

"Avi—"

"No."

"Avinash!"

"Fine. Promise."

God. What an absolute joke.

The terminal cursor continued to blink in the dark room. One minute passed. Three. Five.

Search complete.

The query results populated the center monitor. Avi leaned forward, but what he found wasn't a digital trace on Nicholas. Instead, it was the strict registry file for the heavy firearm he'd stripped off the man earlier.

Registered Owner: William C. Dias

Occupation: Head of Systems & Infrastructure, Millennium Co-operations Pvt. Ltd.

Firearm License Status: Active

Avi frowned, his eyes scanning the lines. "Huh."

He cleared the system cache and executed a different search.

Name: William Cornwell Dias

Age: Forty-seven

Status: DECEASED

Date of Death: 13.06.2019

"And there we have it." Avi pinched the bridge of his nose.

The harsh blue light of the monitor reflected off his tired eyes.

Of course. Of course it wasn't going to be that simple.

He cross-referenced a completely different database. Same result. Insurance records, a digital death certificate, tax audits—every single record agreed.

William Cornwell Dias was a ghost. He had been dead for seven years.

The gun wasn't Nicholas's. Somebody had stolen it, sold it, or—

No, he didn't like that train of thought. Not one bit.

Avi leaned back heavily in his desk chair and looked at the bruised creature currently sprawled across his bed. Nicholas remained stubbornly alive, utterly irritating, entirely mysterious, and right now, completely useless.

"Motherfucker."

Silence.

He stood up and wandered slowly toward the window. Pulling back the edge of the curtain, he peered outside. The neighborhood looked disturbingly peaceful beneath the pale, bleeding fingers of dawn. Sleeping houses. Empty streets. Tree branches swaying lazily in the cold morning breeze. It was a stark, mocking contrast to the storm raging beneath his own ribs.

Avi let the curtain fall, cutting off the encroaching daylight, and walked back to his desk.

The pistol waited exactly where he'd left it on the workspace. He removed the magazine and checked the chamber. Twice. Old habits. Shane had drilled that specific brand of paranoia into him from the very beginning.

"What's rule one?"

"Treat every weapon as loaded."

"Rule two?"

"Check it anyway."

"Rule three?"

"Check it again because apparently you have trust issues."

"Good. You do listen to me."

He carefully unloaded the live rounds, setting the brass casings aside in a neat, orderly row on the desk. He wiped the cold weapon down with a microfiber cloth until his fingerprints disappeared one by one. Opening his desk drawer, he placed the heavy metal inside and slid it firmly shut.

The click of the drawer lock echoed loudly through the quiet room.

Avi stared at the wood for several long seconds. Nicholas was still out like a light, bandaged, bruised, and sleeping like he wasn't personally responsible for the slow, agonizing collapse happening around Avi's carefully crafted, invisible life.

He needed leverage. He needed an angle.

Fishing his phone out of his pocket, he opened an encrypted thread stream with an ID he absolutely despised seeing on his screen. His thumbs work a few lines before hitting send. He threw his head back in pure, unadulterated exasperation, as he tossed the phone away.

"Arrrggh. To hell with that."