Sleep was not an option. Sleep required the ability to close your eyes, and closing your eyes required the ability to stop imagining a camera pointed at the back of your head, clicking silently in the dark.
Isha sat on her bed, laptop open, every light in her one-bedroom Malviya Nagar apartment blazing, and did what journalists do when they're terrified: they work.
She pulled every post from @TheWatchersList. Thirty-five subjects. She screenshotted each one, archived the metadata, and built a timeline. The account had been posting for six weeks. The first three weeks: low-rated subjects only, all below 7. The entertainment phase — the period when the account built its following by being amusing, provocative, shareable. The ratings were a game. A meme. Content.
Then, in week four, the first high rating: 8.7. Arjun Malhotra. The MBA student. He'd disappeared three days after the post.
Week five: two high ratings. Tanya Ahuja (9.1) and a man named Vikram Singh (8.9), a fitness trainer from Dwarka. Both gone within five days of their posts.
Week six: Priyanka Reddy (9.3). Gone within five days.
And now: Isha. 9.5. Posted tonight.
If the pattern held, she had three to five days.
Three to five days to find the Watcher, identify them, and stop them — or three to five days until she became the next missing person in a case that the police hadn't even officially connected.
She called her editor, Sahil Kapoor. He answered on the fifth ring, his voice carrying the particular thickness of a man who'd been asleep for approximately forty minutes before being jerked awake by a journalist with a problem.
"Sahil, I need to talk. Now."
"Isha, it's 1 AM."
"The Watcher's List account just posted my photo. Rated me 9.5. Every person rated above 8.5 has disappeared."
Silence. Then, fully awake: "Come to the office. Now."
She didn't go directly. She took a route that involved three auto-rickshaw changes, a walk through a crowded late-night market in GK-1, and a final stretch on foot through lanes she knew well enough to notice if someone was following. Old-school anti-surveillance — learned not from spy movies but from covering stories about domestic violence survivors and political dissidents who'd taught her that paranoia wasn't pathology when someone was actually watching.
The Signal's office was a converted flat above a chai shop in Shahpur Jat. Sahil was waiting, unshaven, in a kurta that he'd clearly thrown on over pyjama bottoms. He'd already set up the conference room — projector screen, whiteboard, the whole investigation apparatus that they usually reserved for election coverage or corporate exposés.
