He clicked.

Below it, in Dhruv's handwriting: "We are not in the answer key. We are the unsolved problems now."

Page after page of sketchy websites. "Download now!" "Free PDF 2024." He clicked one. Then another. Each link led to a labyrinth of pop-ups: "Your iPhone is infected!" "Spin the wheel to win!" Exhausted, he closed them all.

Then, at the very end of the PDF, a final page. A single sentence:

He looked back at the PDF. The final line had changed. It now read:

Rohan stared at the cracked screen of his phone. The search bar glowed in the dark of his hostel room:

The problem was not mathematics. It was a photograph. A grainy, black-and-white image of a hostel corridor. His hostel corridor. And at the end of the hallway, a figure. A boy in a gray hoodie, facing a wall, scribbling with chalk. The figure was Dhruv.