Chapter 7: The Blood Twin

Tejas Ranade had always been the easy twin.

That was the narrative, anyway—the one Devgad had constructed for them since birth. Tanvi was the serious one, the responsible one, the girl who built an oyster farm from nothing and stared at the sea like it owed her money. Tejas was the light one. The charmer. The boy who could talk his way out of a traffic fine in Malvan and into a free meal at any restaurant between Devgad and Goa.

The narrative was, like most narratives about twins, exactly fifty percent wrong.

Tejas was charming because charm was armour. He smiled because smiling made people look at his teeth instead of his eyes, and his eyes—if you looked too long—contained something that didn't match the grin. Something watchful. Something that had been calculating escape routes since he was old enough to understand that the power in his blood made him dangerous.

Rakta siddhi. Blood mastery.

Of all the gifts the Aadya's residual power could have given a mortal body, his was the most visceral. The most feared. Tanvi's starlight was beautiful—ethereal, romantic, the kind of power that made people gasp in wonder. Tejas's power made people step back. Made them check that the exits were clear. Made them look at him with the particular wariness reserved for things that could kill you before you finished your sentence.

He could feel every drop of blood in every body within a fifty-metre radius. Not abstractly—specifically. He knew the rhythm of every heartbeat, the pressure in every artery, the exact chemical composition of every red blood cell. He could accelerate a pulse. Slow it. Stop it. He could make blood reverse direction in its vessels, pool in the brain, drain from the extremities. He could, if he chose, kill every person in a room by simply thinking about it.

He chose not to. Every day. Every hour. The choosing-not-to was the most exhausting part of being Tejas Ranade.

Chiranjeev's domain was the opposite of Naraka in every way. Where Veer's realm was dark, muted, organic, Chiranjeev's was bright, angular, precise. White stone walls at exact ninety-degree angles. Corridors that intersected in mathematically perfect grids. Training rooms designed with the clinical efficiency of a military installation, because that's what Chiranjeev was—not a god of war (that was Rana Devi's domain) but a god of strategy. The mind behind the army. The brain that moved the pieces while others swung the swords.

He was also, Tejas had decided within approximately four hours, the most insufferable person—divine or mortal—that he had ever met.

"Your control is adequate," Chiranjeev said, watching Tejas manipulate a practice dummy's blood supply. The dummy was a divine construct—a facsimile of a living body, complete with circulatory system, designed for exactly this purpose. "But adequate isn't sufficient. You hesitate."

"I hesitate because I'm manipulating blood. Inside a body. Even a fake one."

"Hesitation in the trials will kill you."

"Recklessness in the trials will make me a monster."

Chiranjeev regarded him. Indradeva's son was—handsome, Tejas supposed, in the way that a well-designed weapon is handsome. Clean lines. Sharp features. Eyes the colour of polished brass, bright and assessing. He moved with the contained precision of someone who had never made an unconsidered gesture in his life.

"You're afraid of your own power," Chiranjeev said. Not unkindly. Clinically. The diagnosis of a strategist identifying a structural weakness.

"I'm aware of my own power. There's a difference."

"Is there?"

Tejas dropped his hands. The practice dummy's blood supply normalised. He turned to face Chiranjeev directly—because Tejas Ranade might be scared, but he'd learned long ago that scared people who face forward are braver than confident people who look away.

"I can feel your blood," he said. "Right now. Your heartbeat is sixty-four beats per minute—slow for a humanoid, which means divine cardiovascular systems are more efficient. Your blood pressure is slightly elevated in your left arm, which means you're tense. Your cortisol levels—yeah, I can read those too—suggest you're more worried about something than you're showing. And there's something else." He tilted his head. "A secondary pulse. Faint. Like an echo. Is that—"

"Stop." Chiranjeev's composure cracked. Hairline fracture, quickly repaired, but Tejas saw it. "That secondary pulse is—it's a divine resonance. Not blood. You shouldn't be able to detect it."

"But I can."

"No mortal should be able to read a divine being's energy signature through their circulatory system. What you're describing is—" He stopped. Reconsidered. "You're not just manipulating blood. You're reading biological information at a molecular level."

"I prefer to think of it as aggressive empathy."

Something shifted in Chiranjeev's brass-coloured eyes. The assessment was still there, but it had deepened—moved from evaluating a weapon's sharpness to considering its potential applications. "This changes your training protocol. If you can read biological data this precisely, you can do more than control blood flow. You can—"

"I can heal." Tejas said it flat. No pride, no drama. A fact he'd discovered at seventeen, when he'd felt the cancerous cells in old Vasanti-aunty's liver from across the room and had spent three sleepless nights figuring out how to redirect her blood flow to isolate and starve them. She'd gone for her check-up a month later and the doctor had called it spontaneous remission. A miracle.

Tejas hadn't told anyone. Not even Tanvi.

"You can heal," Chiranjeev repeated. "And you can—"

"Kill. Yes. Obviously. That's why I hesitate." He met the god's eyes. "The distance between healing and killing, in my power, is the width of an intention. One thought in the wrong direction and I go from doctor to executioner. So yes, I hesitate. I will always hesitate. And if that makes me inadequate for your trials, then I am happy to be inadequate."

The silence in the training room was crystalline. White walls. White floor. Two beings—one mortal, one divine—staring at each other across an ethical chasm that neither could bridge.

"My father wants you to be a weapon," Chiranjeev said finally.

"I know."

"If you refuse—"

"I won't refuse to compete. I'll refuse to be a weapon." Tejas held up his hand. A single drop of blood rose from the cut on his palm—a perfect crimson sphere, hovering at eye level, catching the white-room light like a ruby in a jeweller's display. "This is mine. My power. My blood. Not your father's. Not yours. Mine. And I will use it the way I choose."

Chiranjeev stared at the floating drop of blood. At the young man holding it aloft with nothing but will and divine inheritance. And something complicated crossed his face—an emotion that his strategic mind probably hadn't budgeted for.

Respect.

"Then we'll train on your terms," he said. "But understand—the trials don't negotiate. What comes in those chambers doesn't care about your ethics. It will try to kill you. And if you hesitate at the wrong moment—"

"Then I'll die as someone I'm not ashamed of. Which is more than most divine beings can say."

The drop of blood hung between them, burning red in the white room, and Tejas Ranade—charmer, boat operator, blood mage, terrified twin—did not look away.

---

That night, lying on a pallet in his assigned quarters (white, sterile, military—Chiranjeev's domain didn't do comfort), Tejas felt Tanvi reach for him through the bond.

Not words. The twin bond didn't work in words; it worked in states—emotional weather patterns that transmitted across whatever invisible frequency connected them. Right now, Tanvi was sending him something warm. Steady. The emotional equivalent of a hand on his shoulder.

I'm okay, he sent back. Not in language. In feeling—a deliberate projection of calm confidence that he didn't entirely feel but that he knew she needed to receive.

Her response was a flicker of amusement. She could always tell when he was performing calm instead of feeling it.

Faker, her mood said.

Always, his mood replied.

He lay in the dark and felt the blood of every being within range—other contestants in nearby quarters, their hearts beating with the particular arrhythmia of fear. Chiranjeev, two floors up, his divine pulse slow and steady. The faint, distant signatures of other Divyas elsewhere in the Mandapa—a constellation of heartbeats, each one different, each one carrying information that Tejas's gift decoded automatically, constantly, whether he wanted it to or not.

Forty-two contestants. The first trial was tomorrow. Not all of them would survive.

He pressed his hand to his chest—the same gesture Tanvi made, the twin reflex, palm over the place where the power lived—and felt his own blood pulse against his fingers.

I will not be a weapon,* he promised himself. *I will be a healer who can fight. There's a difference.

He held onto that difference the way a drowning man holds a rope, and waited for a dawn that wouldn't come in any recognisable form.

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