Chapter 128: Ch.125: Spyglass & Starlight
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- United States of America -
- May 5, 1939 -
For the next few days, Karna hardly slept. Sleep felt like a luxury when shadows were your kingdom and every secret you stole tonight could save lives tomorrow. He moved like a breeze through the veins of American cities — New York, Chicago, Boston — never staying long enough for a scent trail to form. He’d sit quietly In a greasy spoon diner beside dockworkers, or stand in the smoke-hazed corner of a club where the music was too loud and the deals too quiet. Everywhere he went, he left threads behind — people stitched into place, ordinary on the outside, eyes wide open on the inside.
His subordinates had come with him from Bharat in ships that had no names on any ledger that mattered. Now, they wore other skins: dockhands, cooks, railway porters, janitors sweeping hotel floors where foreign dignitaries whispered behind closed doors. Some slipped into unions where word traveled fast and careless. A few found home in the darker streets — stepping right into the worn boots of American gangs who thought they ruled the night. Karna never liked using his people that way, but he knew the truth — you couldn’t fight rot if you didn’t first live in it.
One by one, they made contact with old rackets, bribed a stool pigeon here, scared a small-time thug straight there. Some went deeper in places like the Hell’s Kitchen — slowly claiming corners of the underworld the American police pretended they didn’t see. It wasn’t about profit. It was about eyes and ears — the kind of eyes that noticed who sold guns to whom, who whispered to foreign spies, who planned to bleed Bharat from across an ocean.
Every night, Karna gathered the pieces. Some nights he stood on a roof above Brooklyn’s rattling train lines, talking quietly through the Hidden Flame’s enchanted seal pressed cold to his palm — Anaya’s voice crackling into his ear even from thousands of miles away.
She’d done more in days than some spies did in years. Disguised as Corbin, she moved through secure bases like a phantom in uniform — filing fake reports, steering real orders, slipping Karna classified chatter about troop movements, secret test sites, whispered suspicions that the government pretended didn’t exist.
Hydra, though — that was still the nest no torch could easily reach. Even Anaya, for all her gift, had to tread carefully. One wrong step and they’d smell the lie on her skin. Karna knew she’d get there — she always did — but he checked in more often than she liked, just to hear her voice and know she was still fighting. He trusted her with the work — but he still carried the fear for her like a blade under his ribs.
When he could, Karna visited Sofia and her family. Just once, a quiet night when the city’s lights glowed soft behind a fogged window and Sofia’s mother fussed over him like he was her own lost boy, even the young Lila, Sofia’s younger sister, treated him like her older brother. They talked about nothing and everything — laughter, new inventions, the things Aryan might do next. When he left, he promised he’d come back soon. They knew he would — and they knew he wouldn’t say when.
He knew Hydra’s eyes were out there. Watching the Rajvanshi engineers, the Kalachakra Group suits who came with polite smiles, lucrative business opportunities in Europe and cutting-edge blueprints that made American tycoons drool. Elias was already too valuable to hide — so Karna did the next best thing: he made himself disappear while never leaving at all.
His P’otoki’esis was more than vanishing — it was rewriting light until truth bent out of shape. The version of him that boarded the Rajvanshi ship home — chatting with engineers, shaking hands at the docks — was perfect down to the stray hair ruffled by the Atlantic wind. An illusion that would fool even the sharpest Hydra rat peering through binoculars from a crumbling warehouse roof. When that ship sailed, it carried his ghost.