"Hello, 10." A voice — male, young, processed through a filter that flattened the tone but didn't fully disguise it. Educated. Confident. The voice of someone who was used to pitching.
"Aarav?"
A pause. "You've been doing your homework."
"Where are they? Tanya, Arjun, Priyanka. Where are they?"
"Safe. Comfortable. Being observed. That's the product, Isha — observation. Pure, unmediated, honest observation of human behavior under pressure. You understand this. You're a journalist. You observe people for a living."
"I observe them with their consent. You kidnap them."
"Consent is a spectrum. Every person who posts a selfie on Instagram consents to being observed by strangers. Every person who walks past a CCTV camera consents to surveillance. We've just — extended the spectrum."
"You've extended it into false imprisonment, trafficking, and criminal conspiracy."
"Labels. Legal constructs. What we've built is a platform for the purest form of content in history — real human experience, unscripted, unperformed. The subscribers don't want actors. They want truth. They want to see what happens when a 9 becomes a 3. When confidence becomes desperation. When a person is stripped of everything — identity, routine, comfort — and what's left is just the raw human underneath."
"You're describing torture."
"I'm describing reality television with the honesty dial turned to maximum."
Isha kept him talking. Raghav's team was tracing the call — not the number, which would be a burner, but the signal, the cell tower, the geographic origin.
"Why me?" she asked. "Why rate me 10?"
"Because you're the first subject who watched back. Every other target was passive — they were photographed, rated, and taken without ever knowing they were in the system. You found the system. You studied it. You published articles about it. You made yourself the protagonist of the story rather than the subject."
"And that makes me a 10?"
"It makes you the season finale. The journalist who investigated her own kidnapping. The woman who saw the camera and walked toward it instead of away. The audience wants to see what happens when the observer becomes the observed. That's the content they'll pay double for."
"Your audience is about to watch something different. They're about to watch you get arrested."
"Maybe. But you'll have to find me first. And my subjects."
"I will."
"I know. That's what makes you a 10, Isha. You actually might."
The line went dead. Raghav's team had a cell tower — Mehrauli, south Delhi. A five-kilometre radius. Not precise enough for a raid, but narrow enough to focus the search.
The countdown timer read 22:14:07. Twenty-two hours until the full evidence package auto-published.
Isha looked at the clock. Looked at her phone. Looked at Dev, who was standing by the window, scanning the street below.
"He wants me to find them," she said. "That's the game. He wants the finale to be me, walking into the studio, on camera, becoming the content."
"Then don't walk in."
"I have to. If the subjects are still in the studios, every hour I don't find them is an hour they're in captivity."
"The police —"
