"Walk me through it," he said.
She did. Every data point, every timeline correlation, every disappearance. She projected the spreadsheet on the screen — the list of thirty-five subjects, the ratings, the disposition column that read "SAFE" for everyone below 8.5 and "MISSING" for everyone above.
Sahil looked at the screen for a long time. He was forty-three, a veteran of newsrooms that no longer existed, and he had the particular instinct of a man who'd spent two decades distinguishing between stories that were interesting and stories that were dangerous. This one was both.
"The police know?"
"I sent the data to the Cyber Cell last night. They assigned someone. I don't know who yet."
"We need to accelerate. If the pattern holds, you have days. We need to identify the account holder before the clock runs out."
"The account is anonymous. No name, no bio, no linked accounts. The posts are uploaded from a VPN — I checked with a tech contact. No geolocation data in the photos. Whoever's running this knows how to stay hidden."
"Then we work the other angle. The victims. What connects them?"
Isha had been thinking about this. The three confirmed missing persons — plus Vikram Singh, who she'd added after finding a missing person report filed by his gym partner — had nothing obvious in common. Different ages, different professions, different neighborhoods. The only link was the rating.
But the rating itself was a link. It implied criteria. The Watcher wasn't randomly assigning numbers — they were evaluating based on something. A standard. A measurement. And that measurement, if she could decode it, would tell her what the Watcher was selecting for.
"I need to look at the low-rated subjects," she said. "The 3s and 4s. What makes them different from the 9s?"
She spent the next four hours comparing photographs. The low-rated subjects and the high-rated ones, side by side. She was looking for physical patterns — attractiveness was the obvious hypothesis, because the internet loves to reduce everything to appearance. But the ratings didn't track with conventional beauty. Tanya Ahuja was conventionally attractive, yes. But so was Subject #012 (rated 4.6), a woman in Lajpat Nagar who was, by any standard, stunning.
The correlation wasn't beauty. It was something else.
At 5 AM, bleary-eyed and over-caffeinated, she found it.
Isolation.
Every high-rated subject — every person who'd been rated above 8.5 and subsequently disappeared — was, based on their publicly available information, relatively isolated. Tanya Ahuja: single, lived alone, family in Nagpur. Arjun Malhotra: from Indore, PG accommodation in Gurgaon, no close friends in the area. Priyanka Reddy: new to Noida, roommate was a recent acquaintance. Vikram Singh: divorced, lived alone, estranged from family.
