At 8:57 AM, Aditya's phone vibrated just as he stepped off the lift onto the engineering floor.

A Teams notification slid quietly across the lock screen.

Rocky Sharma

War Room A. 09:00. RCA – JIRA-RCE-4471.

He glanced at the time, slipped the phone back into his pocket and looked down the corridor.

War Room A's frosted glass doors were still closed.

Through the translucent panel, silhouettes moved around the conference table. Somebody was pointing at the projector. Somebody else appeared to be arguing with a laptop dock.

The meeting before theirs clearly hadn't ended.

Aditya wasn't surprised; meetings at Solstice obeyed the calendar with the same casual relationship Mumbai traffic had with Google Maps.

They acknowledged schedules, but they rarely respected them. Behind him, Priya walked up carrying a paper cup of coffee large enough to qualify as emotional support.

"Nine sharp?" she asked.

He held up his phone. She looked through the glass at the occupied room. "...Corporate sharp."

He smiled.

"Fifteen minutes either side?"

"On a good day."

The pantry sat opposite War Room A, separated only by a short stretch of corridor. The coffee machine hissed loudly before dispensing another paper cup while three engineers from Infrastructure debated whether Kubernetes had made deployments easier or simply changed the vocabulary of failure.

The smell of burnt coffee beans drifted into the hallway, mixing with fresh printer paper, overworked air-conditioning and the faint scent of rain that clung stubbornly to clothes during Mumbai's monsoon.

Someone opened the pantry refrigerator. Someone else groaned.

"They're out of milk again."

"No," another voice replied.

"They've switched to oat."

A collective silence followed.

"...That's worse."

Rahul Mehta stood outside War Room A with a laptop tucked beneath one arm and a printed CAB checklist folded neatly inside a transparent folder.

Aditya noticed the folder before the man; Rahul never attended an RCA without paperwork, as some habits became professional reflexes.

He looked up as they approached.

"Morning."

"Morning."

Priya nodded towards the folder.

"Evidence?"

"CAB minutes."

"You printed them?"

"I trust paper."

"You work in Release Management."

"I've learned caution."

She laughed.

"Already had emails?"

Rahul gave her a tired look.

"Three."

"It's not even nine."

"The first asked whether yesterday's deployment followed the approved release plan."

"It did."

"It did."

"The second?"

"Whether CAB approval was documented."

"It was."

"It was."

Priya folded her arms.

"The third?"

Rahul sighed.

"What changes are we making to prevent another P1?"

She smiled sympathetically.

"And?"

"I haven't attended the RCA yet."

"That never stops anyone."

"It apparently doesn't."

The glass door finally opened, and a group from Finance emerged, discussing quarterly forecasts with the drained expressions of people who had accidentally scheduled a meeting before coffee.

Rocky stood inside holding the door open.

"Perfect timing."

Priya glanced at her watch.

"Nine-twelve."

Rocky looked genuinely surprised.

"Already?"

Nobody answered.

Some questions solved themselves.

War Room A felt cooler than the corridor outside.

The air-conditioning had clearly won its long-running battle against Mumbai humidity, though only just.

A long oval conference table dominated the room, already scattered with charging cables, notebooks, laser pointers, coffee cups and the inevitable collection of adapters that nobody admitted belonged to them. Yesterday's architecture sketches had been erased from the whiteboard, but faint blue ghosts of boxes and arrows still shimmered beneath the fluorescent lights.

Software architecture, Aditya often thought, behaved remarkably like whiteboard marker.

It never disappeared completely. Rocky stood beside the projector, arranging a stack of printed handouts into perfect alignment.

Meher noticed immediately.

"You printed the deck?"

Rocky looked up.

"I always print the deck."

She took the top copy and weighed it theatrically in one hand.

"Forty-two slides?"

"Forty-one."

He smiled.

"I removed one."

"What changed?"

"A duplicate conclusion."

Priya leaned towards Aditya.

"There were two conclusions?"

He whispered back,

"There still are."

Dev had already taken a seat near the middle of the table. Unlike everyone else, he hadn't gone near the coffee machine.

His laptop sat open to the deployment timeline from the previous night. He wasn't reading it; he was simply staring at it.

Aditya recognised that look.

Every engineer who had ever accidentally broken production spent the following morning convinced the logs contained an answer they had somehow missed.

He pulled out the chair beside him.

"Morning."

Dev looked up.

"Morning."

"Sleep?"

"Three hours."

"You?"

"About the same."

A faint smile appeared.

"I kept replaying the migration."

"I know."

"I still think I should've caught it."

"We'll talk."

Aditya placed his laptop on the table.

"After the RCA."

Not before.

Dev nodded.

That was enough.

The conference room door opened again.

Meher Anand entered, balancing a laptop under one arm, a notebook against her hip and a coffee cup between two fingers with the effortless coordination of someone who had long ago accepted that mornings in software engineering required at least three things to be carried at once.

She dressed a touch more sharply than most of the engineering floor—not because anyone expected it, but because she enjoyed it. Today it was a navy blazer over an off-white kurta, silver earrings catching the ceiling lights whenever she turned her head. Her hair framed her face neatly despite the humidity outside, and she wore the easy confidence of someone who could walk into any meeting and immediately make it less serious.

She dropped into the empty chair beside Aditya.

"Please tell me this isn't going to become a two-hour meeting."

Priya looked at Rocky's neatly stacked handouts.

"I admire your optimism."

Meher picked one up.

"Forty-one slides."

She flipped through the pages.

"We're definitely missing lunch."

Without looking up, Rocky replied,

"I've scheduled only an hour."

Meher smiled.

"So had the Finance team."

Even Rocky laughed.

A soft knock interrupted the conversation.

Farah stepped inside; standing beside her was Kavya. The visitor badge from the previous night was gone. In its place hung a fresh Solstice access card clipped to a navy lanyard that still curled slightly from its packaging. She carried a slim notebook instead of a laptop, her charcoal backpack resting comfortably over one shoulder.

Farah smiled around the room.

"I know most of you met Kavya under... memorable circumstances last night."

A few people chuckled.

"Officially, this is Kavya Deshmukh."

She gestured warmly.

"Kavya joins us as Principal Architect and will be working closely with Returns, Risk and the Commerce Platform over the coming months."

She looked towards Aditya.

"I'm handing her over to Engineering."

"Happy to have you," Aditya said.

"So are we," Priya added.

Rahul nodded.

"Nice meeting you outside a P1 bridge."

Kavya smiled politely.

"I was hoping our next conversation would involve less adrenaline."

"It already does," Meher said.

She held up the printed RCA.

"Now it's paperwork."

The room laughed.

Even Dev.

Farah looked relieved.

"Perfect."

She stepped backwards towards the door.

"I'll leave you all to discuss things HR pretends to understand."

"Kubernetes?" Priya offered.

"Acronyms in general."

With a final smile, Farah closed the glass door behind her.

For a moment the room settled into the quiet rhythm that always preceded important meetings.

Laptop lids opened, Teams connected automatically.

Outlook downloaded another dozen emails nobody intended to read immediately. Someone plugged an HDMI cable into the projector.

Nothing happened; Rocky frowned.

"It was working a minute ago."

Rahul walked over.

"Wrong input."

With two button presses, the screen came alive.

Priya took a slow sip of coffee.

"I think we've completed the first root cause analysis of the day."

The room chuckled. Rocky picked up the presentation remote, glanced once around the table to make sure everyone had settled, and smiled.

"Right," he said.

"Let's talk about JIRA-RCE-4471."

The first slide illuminated the room.

ROOT CAUSE ANALYSIS
Incident: JIRA-RCE-4471
Priority: P1
Returns Platform – EU Production Outage

Outside, another ordinary Wednesday carried on across Solstice Systems.

Inside War Room A, the room prepared to explain how one missing null check had somehow required forty-one slides, three departments, a CAB review, and an entire morning's worth of meetings