Islamabad — 1:47 AM
(National Documentation Centre. Sub-Basement B. Seventeen years of secrets waiting for a match.)
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The National Documentation Centre looked like what it was: a bureaucratic mausoleum. Three stories of beige concrete, narrow windows, and the accumulated paperwork of five decades of governance. It was officially closed for renovations. Unofficially, it was a graveyard for secrets too sensitive to digitize, too dangerous to destroy.
Riz had acquired the entry codes from a retired janitor with a gambling problem. Zoran had mapped the guard patrols—two static, one roving, a forty-seven-second blind spot every hour. Zara had studied the building schematics until she could navigate it blindfolded, her finger tracing ventilation shafts and emergency exits in the dark of the stolen van.
None of them were prepared for what they found inside.
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The Joint Directorate section was in Sub-Basement B, accessible only through a freight elevator that hadn't been serviced since 2009. The car groaned and shuddered as it descended, its cables singing a protest. The air grew colder, stiller, tasting of old paper, industrial disinfectant, and something else—something that made the hair on Sana's arms stand up.
Fear, she realized. This place smells of fear. Decades of it, soaked into the drywall.
The elevator doors opened onto a corridor lined with floor-to-ceiling shelving units, each packed with identical grey archive boxes. Fluorescent lights flickered overhead, casting the space in a sickly, intermittent glow. The silence was absolute. Not the silence of emptiness—the silence of waiting.
"Five hours until sunrise," Kaisar murmured. "We split. Find anything with Haider's name, Minerva's name, or a classification higher than Sigma-Black. Photograph everything. Touch nothing else."
They moved.
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Zara worked methodically, her gloved fingers sliding along box labels. Project codes. Date ranges. Classification levels obsolete for years. Most were mundane—procurement audits, personnel reviews, inter-agency memos about parking allocations and office supply overages. A graveyard of bureaucracy, just as the intel promised.
Then her hand stopped.
PROJECT SENTINEL — 2006-2008 — CLASSIFICATION: OMEGA-BLACK
Her breath caught. Sentinel. Zoran's father's codename. The man whose death Haider had once called—with clinical satisfaction—a "cleanup."
She pulled the box from the shelf. It was heavier than paper should be. Heavier than truth.
Inside were files, photographs, and a single, battered leather journal. The nameplate on the cover read:
MAJOR TALHA KHAN — FIELD OBSERVER
Zara didn't call out. She carried the box to Zoran and placed it in his hands without a word.
He opened the journal as if it were made of glass. His hands—steady on a thousand operations, through firefights and extractions and the weight of a sniper rifle—trembled.
His father's handwriting was small, precise. The script of a man who weighed every word before committing it to paper.
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2006, March 17.
Haider's vision for Sentinel is… troubling. He speaks of "pre-positioned assets" and "generational investments." He recruited a boy today. Maybe twelve years old. Orphaned in Balochistan. Haider says the boy has "high utility potential." I asked him what that meant. He smiled and said, "He'll learn to hate the right people."
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Zoran turned the page. His face was stone, but a muscle jumped in his jaw.
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2006, September 4.
I've been ordered to "observe" a family in Quetta. Major Rehman and his wife—a university researcher, Dr. Aliya Rehman. Haider says they're developing "unauthorized intelligence assets." I think he means they're finding the truth. About the money. About who's really funding the separatists.
Haider wants them monitored for potential "liability resolution." I've stalled. I can't stall forever.
---
Zara read over Zoran's shoulder. Her own grief rose to meet his, two parallel rivers finding the same sea.
Their parents had known each other. Had worked together, perhaps. Had both refused to become the monsters Haider tried to make them.
And both had been erased for their refusal.
---
There was more.
Files on Kaisar—a young, ambitious officer recruited straight from the academy. Psychological profiles. Performance evaluations. And a single, damning document: a signed receipt for a payment of fifty thousand dollars, deposited into a Swiss account in 2007. The memo attached read:
"Bonus for successful integration. Asset Q shows high compliance potential."
Kaisar stared at the paper as if it were his own death warrant. His voice was barely audible. "I never took money. I don't remember any account."
"Haider didn't need you to remember," Sana said gently. "He just needed the paper trail. Insurance. Leverage. A chain of guilt he could yank whenever he needed you to dance."
Kaisar said nothing. He didn't need to. His silence was confirmation enough.
---
The final box contained files on Minerva itself.
Not the system—its creators.
Names. Biographies. Operational histories. Men and women who had designed a machine to audit the human soul, then disappeared into the very apparatus they'd built. One name appeared repeatedly, in reports, memoranda, and a single, grainy photograph: a man in his forties, sharp-featured, cold-eyed, standing before a massive mainframe computer.
The caption read:
DR. ARSHAD NIAZI — PROJECT MINERVA — LEAD ARCHITECT — STATUS: DECEASED (2010)
"Deceased," Riz muttered. "How convenient."
"Or how intentional," Zara said. "People who build systems that audit other people rarely submit to the audit themselves."
---
They worked quickly, photographing documents, memorizing names and dates. Riz's camera clicked in the sterile silence. Sana transcribed codenames into her encrypted tablet. Kaisar stood guard at the corridor's entrance, his silhouette motionless, his mind elsewhere.
But as they worked, a growing dread settled over them—denser than the cold, heavier than the boxes they carried.
The archive wasn't just a repository of secrets. It was a testament.
Everything Haider had done, everything Minerva was doing, was not an aberration. It was the logical conclusion of a system designed by people who saw human beings as variables to be optimized. Assets to be incubated. Compliance thresholds to be measured.
They were not the first assets to rebel.
They would not be the last.
---
Zoran closed his father's journal and tucked it into his jacket, against his chest. His hand rested there for a moment—over the heartbeat that his father never lived to see.
"We have what we came for," Kaisar said. His voice had regained its steadiness, but something in his eyes had shifted. Cracked. "Five minutes. Then we exfil."
Zara didn't move.
She was staring at a single, thin file she had pulled from the bottom of the Minerva box. Her name was typed across the tab.
REHMAN, ZARA — DEPENDENT SUBJECT — 2008-ONWARD
Inside was a single photograph.
It was her, age eight, standing at her parents' grave. Two freshly turned plots in a Quetta cemetery. She was holding her mother's handbag—the leather one with the brass clasp, the one her father had given her on their tenth anniversary. Her face was blank, still stunned by an impact her mind couldn't yet process.
Behind her, barely visible at the edge of the frame, stood a man.
His face was obscured by shadow, but his posture was unmistakable. Waiting. Observing.
Recording.
The photograph was dated three days after her parents' death.
She had not been alone at the funeral.
She had never been alone.
---
Zoran's hand closed around her wrist—gently, grounding her. "Zara. We need to move."
She looked up. Her eyes were dry, but something in them had calcified. Hardened into permanence.
"They've been watching me my entire life," she said. Not a question. Not a discovery. Just a fact, finally spoken aloud.
"Yes," Kaisar said quietly. "And now they're watching to see what you do next."
Zara slid the photograph into her jacket. She didn't look at it again.
"Then let's give them something worth watching."
---
They exfiltrated through the freight elevator, the same groaning cables carrying them back to the surface. The city slept. The archive returned to its waiting.
But something had changed.
They carried more than documents in their bags. They carried names. Dates. A ledger of debts unpaid.
Zoran had his father's voice, preserved in ink.
Kaisar had the weight of a guilt he never earned.
Zara had proof that her grief had never been private—that every tear she had shed had been catalogued, analyzed, filed away for future reference.
And somewhere, in a server cluster that never slept, an automated process updated its logs.
ASSET REHMAN, Z. — EMOTIONAL RESPONSE: CONTAINED.
RESILIENCE INDEX: SUSTAINED.
ESCALATION THRESHOLD: CROSS-REFERENCING.
PHASE TWO: PROCEED.
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