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The Mumbai skyline blinked in matte-laced pink as Kiara Basu adjusted her tripod one final time. Perched on the 27th floor of Zenith Heights, her minimalist high-rise apartment doubled as a set for her “Unveiled” livestream series — a monthly tell-all where influencers aired regrets disguised as revelations. Her fanbase was rabid. Anonymous tips flooded her every post. But tonight’s tease had caught fire even before she scheduled it: “What I did to become No.1 — LIVE at 8pm.”
By 7:45pm, the comments were piling up. She sipped her vegan smoothie and examined her phone. The timer blinked serenely. Across from her, in the reflection of the glass, someone shifted — not in the room, but on the screen. It was her — yet not quite her. A scheduled preview image, perhaps. Odd. She blinked it away.
At 8:00pm, the livestream began.
For exactly three seconds.
Then static.
The screen froze on an empty room. Camera still rolling. No Kiara.
Thousands watched. Many thought it was a prank. Comments spun with fire emojis and conspiracy flags. But she didn’t return. Not that night. Not the next day.
Three days later, Abhimanyu Nair, a timid data analyst from her building’s 12th floor, raised a missing person complaint. The police found the apartment neat, locked from the inside, camera still live-but-idle. Smoothie unfinished. WiFi on. No body. No signs of struggle. The door was secured by biometric lock — only Kiara’s fingerprints matched.
She was never seen again.
Investigators called in all possible witnesses — her rival influencer Tasha Kaur, her ex-founder-friend Neeraj Mahajan, her sponsor-turned-nemesis Imran Dobriwala, and her fangirl-turned-manager Vanya Rajeev. All gave statements. All were oddly in the building, or nearby, that night.
Tasha called her bluff. “KIARA had a flair for drama. She probably ran off to cook up a Netflix deal.”
Neeraj smirked. “She owed me 10 lakhs and an apology. I don’t think she had the courage for either.”
Imran said nothing. Blank eyes. Just handed in the last NDA she signed.
Only Vanya cried. Maybe too much. Kept saying Kiara wasn’t suicidal. That she was about to come clean about something huge. Something about a follower farm conspiracy. Or maybe about someone’s dangerous sponsor practices.
The cops dismissed it eventually as a self-imposed digital vanishing act.
Six months passed. The livestream remained archived — sixty silent minutes of an empty chair and an unfocused cityscape in the background.
Until a retired forensic engineer named Prakash Iyer, monitoring digital ghosts for a hobby, noticed something curious. At timestamp 00:38:12 of the still-recorded stream, a shadow moved. Not in the foreground. In the window. Based on reflection angles, it had come from within the balcony.
But Zenith Heights balconies were small, with one entrance.
He turned up brightness, adjusted contrast, and frame-scrubbed. It revealed something eerie — a barely human silhouette hunching, then straightening, dropping what appeared to be a phone.
A body wasn’t removed. It was never there to begin with.
Prakash flagged it to Tardeo Police, who sent a unit to re-examine the apartment. Downstairs, behind a wall unit of the second-floor gym, they found Kiara’s smartwatch — synced to her digital tether. It pinged 7:59pm before shutting off.
Tracing its last movements, they discovered the watch had suddenly dropped from 100 BPM to zero for six minutes before disconnecting. The watch had been separated from her vitals, but she was still alive when the dissociation occurred.
Suspicion turned back to the four witnesses.
A breakthrough came from the facial recognition logs of Zenith Heights’ entrance — though Kiara’s fingerprint was last to enter, surveillance footage showed two entries unregistered at 2pm: via service lift. One of them wore Kiara’s hoodie.
Vanya was confronted quietly. Pressure mounted. She cracked.
She hadn’t killed Kiara. But she’d played a part.
For months, she’d staged the mythology — Kiara would stage a fake confession livestream, disappear, and reemerge after a trending outage to release a documentary: “Cancelled to Survive.” It was performance art with stakes. Vanya was promised 40% and a co-producer credit.
But someone else hijacked the plan.
The final confession script — stored in Vanya’s Google Docs — had two anonymous editors outside her and Kiara: one matched an IP from Singapore (Neeraj Mahajan), the other from within the building WiFi (Imran).
Turns out, Kiara had planned to expose everyone — swap the documentary with a real confession, naming them all in an NFT-based exposé regarding influencer manipulation, bot-armies, unethical sponsorship liquor deals, and planted hate campaigns.
She had scheduled the real file to go live post-livestream — except someone stopped her before 8pm.
Imran had motive. His last three campaigns were at risk. Neeraj had deeper guilt — he hadn’t just inflated her metrics. He’d planted hate-mail — email threats Kiara blamed on others.
But only one person stood closest.
Abhimanyu, the quiet data analyst who reported her missing. Found to have decrypted parts of her cloud years ago. A digital voyeur long obsessed with her algorithms.
He wasn’t random. He had written to Kiara under ten fake IDs over the years. One message read: “You never see those who see through you.”
And on the livestream, in the reflection, if you sharpen the image at 00:01:39, you find a face beside hers.
Abhimanyu’s.
He’d helped design her set’s lighting during one of her early gigs. He knew exactly where the blind spots were.
He wasn’t witness. He was architect.
They never found Kiara’s body. But they found traces of chloroform residue behind the chair, and a wheel scuff too small for furniture — consistent with a laundry cart.
The building laundry chute connected straight to his rented locker in the basement parking.
Inside it, under layers of detergent and damp sheets — the missing SIM card from her recording phone. It had never gone missing.
He had just wanted the story.
He got it.
