BOOK OF DEVENDRA: 2048

Chapter 1: The Start
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A SUBURBAN HOUSE - SOMEWHERE ON  EARTH

𝑇ℎ𝑖𝑠 𝑖𝑠 𝑎 𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑟𝑖𝑏𝑙𝑒 𝑠𝑡𝑜𝑟𝑦. 𝐼𝑓 𝑦𝑜𝑢 𝑎𝑟𝑒 𝑜𝑓 𝑤𝑒𝑎𝑘 𝑚𝑖𝑛𝑑, 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑤𝑒𝑎𝑘𝑒𝑟 𝑏𝑜𝑑𝑦, 𝐼 𝑖𝑚𝑝𝑙𝑜𝑟𝑒 𝑦𝑜𝑢, 𝑡𝑢𝑟𝑛 𝑎𝑤𝑎𝑦, 𝑔𝑜 𝑛𝑜 𝑓𝑢𝑟𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑟, 𝑓𝑜𝑟 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑡𝑎𝑙𝑒 𝐼 𝑎𝑚 𝑎𝑏𝑜𝑢𝑡 𝑡𝑜 𝑟𝑒𝑙𝑎𝑦 𝑖𝑠 𝑜𝑛𝑒 𝑚𝑜𝑠𝑡 ℎ𝑜𝑟𝑟𝑖𝑓𝑖𝑐 𝑎𝑛𝑑 ℎ𝑜𝑟𝑟𝑖𝑓𝑦𝑖𝑛𝑔. 𝐼𝑡 𝑖𝑠 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑒𝑛𝑑 𝑜𝑓 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑤𝑜𝑟𝑙𝑑 𝑎𝑠 𝑤𝑒 𝑘𝑛𝑜𝑤 𝑖𝑡. 𝐸𝑛𝑑 𝑜𝑓 𝑎𝑙𝑙 𝑙𝑖𝑓𝑒. 𝑃𝑟𝑜𝑏𝑎𝑏𝑙𝑦. 𝑀𝑜𝑠𝑡 𝑙𝑖𝑘𝑒𝑙𝑦.

𝐹𝑜𝑟 𝑒𝑜𝑛𝑠, 𝑚𝑎𝑛𝑘𝑖𝑛𝑑 ℎ𝑎𝑠 𝑏𝑒𝑒𝑛 𝑟𝑢𝑠ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑖𝑔𝑛𝑜𝑟𝑎𝑛𝑡𝑙𝑦 𝑡𝑜𝑤𝑎𝑟𝑑𝑠 𝑖𝑡𝑠 𝑒𝑛𝑑 𝑤𝑖𝑡ℎ 𝑤𝑖𝑑𝑒-𝑜𝑝𝑒𝑛 𝑎𝑟𝑚𝑠, 𝑠𝑢𝑟𝑒𝑙𝑦 𝑡𝑜 𝑚𝑒𝑒𝑡 𝑎 𝑠𝑝𝑒𝑐𝑡𝑎𝑐𝑢𝑙𝑎𝑟 𝑒𝑛𝑑. 𝐺𝑜 𝑜𝑢𝑡 𝑖𝑛 𝑎 𝑏𝑙𝑎𝑧𝑒 𝑜𝑓 ℎ𝑒𝑙𝑙𝑓𝑖𝑟𝑒 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑠𝑡𝑎𝑟𝑑𝑢𝑠𝑡.

𝑇ℎ𝑜𝑢𝑔ℎ 𝑏𝑟𝑖𝑙𝑙𝑖𝑎𝑛𝑡 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑝𝑟𝑜𝑔𝑟𝑒𝑠𝑠𝑖𝑣𝑒 𝑤𝑒 ℎ𝑎𝑣𝑒 𝑏𝑒𝑒𝑛, 𝑤𝑒 ℎ𝑎𝑣𝑒 𝑎𝑙𝑠𝑜 𝑠𝑝𝑢𝑛 𝑜𝑢𝑟 𝑒𝑛𝑑 𝑤𝑖𝑡ℎ 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑠𝑒 𝑣𝑒𝑟𝑦 ℎ𝑎𝑛𝑑𝑠 𝑤𝑒 𝑢𝑠𝑒𝑑 𝑡𝑜 𝑙𝑜𝑣𝑒 𝑖𝑓 𝑠𝑢𝑐ℎ 𝑎 𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑖𝑠 𝑒𝑣𝑒𝑛 𝑐ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑖𝑠ℎ𝑒𝑑 𝑎𝑛𝑦𝑚𝑜𝑟𝑒.

𝐹𝑜𝑟 𝑦𝑜𝑢 𝑠𝑒𝑒? 𝑇ℎ𝑖𝑠 𝑖𝑠 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑠𝑡𝑜𝑟𝑦 𝑎𝑏𝑜𝑢𝑡 ℎ𝑜𝑤 𝑖𝑡 𝑎𝑙𝑙 𝑒𝑛𝑑𝑠. 𝐼𝑓 𝑦𝑜𝑢 𝑑𝑜 𝑛𝑜𝑡 𝑤𝑖𝑠ℎ 𝑡𝑜 𝑙𝑒𝑎𝑟𝑛 𝑜𝑓 𝑠𝑢𝑐ℎ 𝑡𝑟𝑎𝑔𝑒𝑑𝑦... 𝑝𝑙𝑒𝑎𝑠𝑒, 𝑛𝑜𝑤 𝑖𝑠 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑡𝑖𝑚𝑒 𝑡𝑜 𝑡𝑢𝑟𝑛, 𝑐𝑙𝑜𝑠𝑒 𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑠 𝑚𝑒𝑠𝑠𝑎𝑔𝑒 𝑤ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑒𝑣𝑒𝑟 𝑦𝑜𝑢 𝑎𝑟𝑒, 𝑠𝑜 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑦𝑜𝑢 𝑐𝑎𝑛 𝑒𝑛𝑗𝑜𝑦 𝑤ℎ𝑎𝑡'𝑠 𝑙𝑒𝑓𝑡 𝑜𝑓 𝑦𝑜𝑢𝑟 𝑚𝑖𝑠𝑒𝑟𝑎𝑏𝑙𝑒 𝑓𝑢𝑐—

"Dev? Did you not hear me call out a thousand times?" His mother's shrill voice reaches upstairs to him. "Dinner is ready. Come down this instant or I will march up there and unplug you!"

The threat makes his fingers twitch above the projected keyboard on his desk, hovering somewhere in the vicinity of typing: 𝑖𝑓 𝑦𝑜𝑢 𝑎𝑟𝑒 𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑑𝑦 𝑡𝑜 𝑙𝑒𝑎𝑟𝑛, ℎ𝑜𝑤𝑒𝑣𝑒𝑟, 𝑐𝑜𝑚𝑒 𝑗𝑜𝑖𝑛 𝑚𝑒.

He eyes the cursor on his wall, blinking at him as if he was about to do the unthinkable: leave it blinking there for the time being. The woman has great timing, he has to admit. It's like she senses when he's just sat down to write.

He saves his progress, however little of it, and rushes down before she carries out that threat. He has lost one too many good starts to her whims to know she would do it. Unplug his system.

"When's Dad coming back?" he asks, popping into the dining room where he spies his annoying sister already seated to Mum's right, like a scary little wingman. Or right-hand man, he thinks, sarcastically. That's what his little sister was most days, Mum's right-hand man. Or woman... or kid.

Billie answers his glare with a poke of her tongue then busily types away at her tiny tablet as he takes his usual seat.

"How come she gets to bring a gadget to the table, but I can't have five minutes to finish what I was doing?" He grumbles, eyeing the bowl of salad already sitting before them. Whoever willingly ate salad was a sad sack, and he was no sad sack. He'd resist. Even if Mum put some on his plate.

Billie throws him one of her smirks, the one that says she's clearly up to something.

Before he knows it, she's projecting the bleary words onto the ceiling, and his cheeks flush like fire. "Starting another doomsday novel, I see. What attempt number is this—"

"Mum!" He gets to his feet, the chair scraping soundlessly behind him on the carpet. He's desperate to snatch that stupid device from her hand and preferably smash it, without Mum seeing it so he can deny culpability. "Can you please tell this freak to stop hacking my things? There's something called privacy and boundaries, and she needs to learn it."

Despite his protest, Billie begins reading aloud, "This is a terrible story." She pauses and quirks her brows at him. "With that kind of start? You don't say."

Dev grabs an apple from the fruit bowl that always sits in the middle of the dining table and throws it at her, but of course, being the perfect being she is, she catches it midair, to his disdain. Showoff.

"If you're of weak mind, and weaker body—"

"MUM!" Before Dev can help it, he's jumping over the table to smack that stupid thing out of his little sister's hands.

"That's enough, Billie." Mum calmly sets down a gorgeous pot of pasta and his stomach rumbles despite the embarrassment fluttering through him. "Your brother's privacy is important. Stop invading it unless you'd like me to start invading yours."

"Fine." Billie slams her device closed and the ceiling goes back to bland white, the projector in the corner, dead. Though he cannot say the same about his cheeks. "Write horror, Dev. People will eat that shit up."

"Billie? Language."

"Sorry Mum, but it's true. Horror is what gets people's juices moving."

"Billie." Mum's tone is brimming with a warning.

"What?" She spits and Dev cracks a smile. He knows exactly what Mum is about to ask of this heathen.

"Say grace."

"Grace."

"Billie," Mum growls with impatience.

"Fine. Dear God, or whoever you are up there in that dark blue and sometimes light blue sky, we know to be a vast, bewildering space, filled with galaxies and planets, and possibly aliens, though, to them, we too are aliens..."

Dev can't help but laugh. Mum's gone all red despite her tan, and if it was possible, she might have even fumed from her nostrils.

"Billie Quinn Shah!" Mum screams. God, he loves it when she screams and it isn't at him.

This is it. Dev can feel it. The moment Mum knocks the brat down a peg. He can't wait.

Billie stops her hilarious rant and pouts. "You are a scientist. You should be ashamed... believing in some giant celestial being who cares about what little microbes like us do, in our insignificant little planet, living our insignificant little lives, Mum."

Their mum takes a deep breath and places her cutlery back on the table slowly, at the end of her wits. "Yes, I am a scientist, and I love learning about how things work, but I am also not arrogant enough to think all this existed without someone, something's design. Just like the house we live in, the food we eat, the meds we take, the tech we use were all created by us, why can't you just understand that there is something beyond our immediate knowledge that created us?"

"Like a higher-intelligence alien?" Billie's got that spark in her eyes that usually shows when she's enjoying her little moments, getting under someone's skin.

"Enough." Mum clasps her hands together in prayer and eyes Dev, who immediately follows her suit, joining his hands in a prayer. "I choose to believe someone created us, rather than being the result of an accidental set of chemical reactions. Honestly, Billie, you think if you left a chemical lab as it is without intervention, chemicals would talk to each other and 'mate' as it were? Hey there Hydrogen, I'm Chlorine, how about we combine and make hydrochloric acid for stomachs that don't exist yet?"

Dev snorts out a laugh, unable to peel his gaze away from his sister's flushing red face. She knows when she's been told.

"Now, say grace!"

He enjoys seeing Billie roll her eyes and sigh. Giving up.

"Dear Bhagwan, thank you for the food we are about to eat. Yours, three little humans in a tiny little house..." Billie spits through gritted teeth.

Then a phone rings somewhere and he and Billie are both staring around the room, bewildered.

"What is that?" he asks.

"Nothing." He notices Mum's paled a little as she gets to her feet. "Eat."

"Mum?"

"I said eat." She goes to the hallway, opens the shoe cupboard, and disappears inside, and he knows it. She's answering the phone Billie and he had played with as a kid. A virtual relic of the past. A useless antique... or so he'd thought.

"Huh... so it does work." Billie leaves her seat and walks around the table, towards the hallway. "Who do you think it is?"

"What do you mean, 'so it does work'? You knew it worked?" Normally, Dev would hold her back, tell her not to go spying on Mum, not to invade that privacy, but he is just as intrigued. He has heard it once before, that ringing, as a child. The memory of it flooding back now.

"I guessed," Billie whispers in his ear the closer they step to that closet. "It's odd, don't you think, having a museum piece hidden in our shoe cupboard, and it's not even original to the house."

"You looked up the house and when it was built?" He follows her to the cupboard, tiptoeing.

"I don't like puzzles." She throws him a look like he should know this.

"I thought you loved puzzles. You solved enough of them like crazy as a kid."

"Exactly. I solved them because I hate not knowing the answer, the why, what, how."

Hmm. He supposed that made sense, but he couldn't deny the odd sense of fluttering in his heart as they stared into the dark cupboard through the gap. "I don't like this."

"Why? She'd never know if you don't snitch."

Dev frowns at his sister, catching on. "Not us snooping, B. This." He nods at the cupboard Mum hadn't completely closed behind her. "I'm pretty sure the last time that thing rang, something bad happened."

"What?" Billie says this, perhaps too loud.

"I don't know." Dev slaps a hand over her mouth, shushing her, and leans in, closer to the gap in the doorframe to hear better.

"This is ridiculous." Billie waddles off behind him and returns with her gadget, a small tablet she's made several modifications to over the years, hardware and software, mostly of her own making. Again. Showoff.

"What are you doing?" He asks, eyeing her as she wedges hearing pods in her ears the size of sultanas.

"Listening in. Unless you want to continue hovering there like a ghost." She settles at the bottom of the stairs."

"How are you going to hack an old telecommunication line, genius? It's not linked to any computers or satellites." Dev settles on the stair beside her, and when she throws him an impressed look, he smiles. "Sure, not all of us are child prodigies and pure evil geniuses like you, but it's just wires."

Billie gives him an appreciative nod and he feels a swell of pride in his chest. Damn right, he was good at certain things too, like knowing his history. "So, the question still stands, how are you going to hack a physical line?"

She gives him that smirk of hers again. "The switchboards are all automated these days, by a computer. And where there is a computer—"

"You can do your freaky thing." Dev nods, but Billie's pout isn't very reassuring. "What's wrong?"

"Nothing... I just gotta figure out which of the signals connecting with the phone tower is from that phone... Once I do that, I can try and..." She types rapidly into her gadget, and a few seconds later, says, "Ha. Gotcha."

But her face goes from instant glee to instant confusion. Dev shifts impatiently on the stairs. "What is it?"

"It's Dad."

"Dad?" He takes the pod she holds out to him and wedges it into his ear. A static crackles and then Dad's voice is clear in his ear.

"... don't pack like you're running... just enough to grab and go... Tell the kids whatever you have to... a relative died, you won a holiday, whatever... I don't know why... Just, be ready, in case—" Dad suddenly stops talking, and in the background, they can hear a faint doorbell.

"Why? Is everything okay, Nari?"

Dev's suddenly grabbing Billie's arm and she's not shaking him off like she normally would. They are both on the edge of their seat when Mum asks what's going on over the phone.

They want the answer, too.

There's some more static on the line before Dad says, "Someone's at the door. Hang on..."

The seconds feel like an eternity. The silence, suffocating.

Billie claps her palm to her podded ear as if that'd make the silence of Dad's line fill with his voice. "You said last time that phone rang something bad happened? To Dad?"

Dev shakes his head. He's not sure, but his gut is telling him yes. "I don't know. Maybe..." On the line, a faint crackling makes them both catch their breath. "Dad? Come on... What's going on?"

"Narendra?" Mum's voice sounds edgy on the line. "Nari? What's going on?"

They can hear the muffled voices of two or three more people.

"I don't like this," Billie mumbles, typing something on her coded keyboard, one that is Billie-centric, 'unhackable' was the word his sister had once used. Bewildering, more like. But she wasn't wrong. It felt like they were waiting for something terrible to drop. But what?

Where was Dad and why was he calling on a secret line? Why would a neurosurgeon and a scientist need a secret line in his house unless he was wrapped up in—

"Maybe Dad is working on something he shouldn't be?" Dev leaps to his feet, unable to stay still.

"Narendra?" Mum's voice punctures the silence again.

Dev doesn't want to breathe let alone move a muscle. What's going on, Dad?

"Na—" But Mum's voice cuts off as shots fire in the background.

"Dad?" Billie shoots to her feet.

Dev feels an icy chill curl down his spine.

"Narendra?" Mum's voice is a panicked squeak. "Narendra?"

The moment stretches on. Too long.

For once, neither of them move. They can only listen silently, to Mum, to the noise in the background that is making acid churn in their stomach, to the silence that diffuses through the line afterwards.

Billie's eyes glisten with tears. He feels his throat clamp.

"Narendra?"

Wherever Dad is, they know he is unable to get to that phone right now, that secret phone in their shoe cupboard.

"Narendra?"

Word count: 2242