“Dr. Nithya Vasudevan, please come to Gate 7. Your… your chaos has arrived.”

And in the quiet of the fifteenth evening, as he held her hand without running, without planning, without a single stolen diamond in sight, Kabilan felt a new kind of rush. It was slow. It was warm. It was terrifying.

The world went grey. For the first time, Kabilan experienced a withdrawal worse than any lack of adrenaline: heartbreak. He stopped his pranks. He designed buildings so boringly safe that his partners worried he had lost his mind. Kutty found him one day staring at a blank wall.

He realized then that he couldn’t save her by being calm. He had to be what he was. He had to be the storm.