“But my father—”

Mrs. D’Souza went quiet. No one in Class 11 had ever answered that way.

The bookshop near the railway station had exactly one copy left. Raghav grabbed it like a lifeline. The cover was a lurid green, showing a dissected frog floating above a DNA helix. Inside, the pages were so thin they whispered when turned.

Raghav ran. Through the dark streets, past the railway station, past the closed bookshop, to the school’s back gate. The neem tree stood black against the sodium-vapor sky. And beneath it, a woman in a white coat—Mrs. D’Souza.