The charity ward at three in the morning was a landscape of purgatory. The air was a stagnant cocktail of industrial-grade bleach, the metallic tang of unwashed blood, and the heavy, humid scent of communal suffering. Fluorescent lights flickered overhead with a rhythmic, buzzing groan, casting a sickly, strobing pallor over the rows of rusted gurneys. It was the hour of the wolf—the time when the body's will to live is at its lowest and the shadows in the corners seem to lean closer to the beds.

Ananya had been moved from the chaotic hallway to a cramped, four-bed bay. Her world had narrowed to the dimensions of a stained mattress and the rhythmic, wheezing hiss of the ventilator. The seafoam silk gown had been stripped away by an indifferent nurse, replaced by a coarse, oversized hospital tunic of rough cotton that did nothing to hide the skeletal protrusion of her collarbones. Her skin was a translucent, waxy parchment, stretched so thin over her cheekbones that she looked less like a living girl and more like a marble effigy of a martyr.