The Fake Heart

Rohan Verma is one of the country's finest heart surgeons. For eleven years he has worked in secret on one thing: Prototype Nine, an artificial heart that doesn't just pump blood but listens to the body it lives in.

Then his oldest friend, Aryan, a photographer who once took a caning to save him, collapses with a failing heart. No donor can be found in time. On the operating table, with minutes left, Rohan makes the choice that will cost him everything. He implants the untested device, and Aryan lives.

But the heart was never built from science alone. Its rhythm was copied from a dying farmer's chest eleven years ago, from a heart that kept beating long after the man was declared dead. Soon Aryan's food loses its taste, his hands stop feeling cold, and every night at 3:41 a second heartbeat rises beneath his own. People around him begin to die, quietly and without a mark.

As Aryan forgets himself, a black second heart grows in his chest, and something from beyond the world starts to speak through him. Rohan follows the trail to a remote village that has chained the same terror in iron for twelve hundred years, and learns what he truly built. Not a heart, but a door.

A psychological sci-fi horror about friendship, guilt, and the price of saving someone you love. With a countdown to the dark of the moon, Rohan must decide how much he will give to close what he opened.