BetterIndian
Raina Rathore was twenty, a computer science major, permanently sleep-deprived, and surviving college through caffeine and spite.
Her professors considered her quiet but intelligent.
Her classmates thought she was antisocial.
Her father thought she spent too much time online.
None of them knew the truth.
Because every night, after midnight, Raina stopped being a tired engineering student and became someone else entirely.
Nyx.
A name buried deep inside encrypted forums, darknet servers, and anonymous message boards.
Nyx was careful. Brilliant. Untouchable.
She hacked quietly - slipping through firewalls, scraping hidden files, uncovering conversations powerful people thought had disappeared forever. The internet made sense to her in ways real life never had.
Code was predictable.
People weren't.
Then her father announced they were moving.
"To Kailaspur," he had said proudly over dinner.
Raina nearly laughed.
Kailaspur was a city - loud, crowded, and permanently tangled in politics. Every street seemed to belong to someone important: ministers, party workers, contractors, old political families.
Dusty roads.
Broken buildings.
The Wi-Fi barely worked.
Kailaspuri became her personal hell immediately.
Her father loved it.
"Peaceful," he called it.
Raina called it cursed.
Then she met Neel Thakur.
And Kailaspur stopped feeling boring.