The room was full before Rai entered it.
Reporters packed the long benches notebooks open, pens ready, the restless energy of people who had been waiting long enough to become impatient.
A few officials from the court sat along the left wall, watching without the pretense of neutrality.
Rai walked to the front without hurrying.
He stood behind the narrow table and looked at the room once.
Filing what he saw.
The noise settled on its own.
“The bodies found near the Miraan road,” the first reporter said, not quite waiting for permission.
“Throats marked.
No signs of struggle.
Twenty-eight of them.
Is this Thuggee work?”
“No.”
No pause before it.
No qualification after it.
The room stirred.
Someone near the back said something under their breath.
Pens moved.
A court official shifted in his chair and glanced at the man beside him with the particular look of people recalculating.
“You’re saying definitively,” another reporter pressed, leaning forward, “that the Thuggee were not responsible.
Then who was?”
“That’s what we’re finding out.”
“And in the meantime—” the reporter didn’t sit back, “—how many more roads should people avoid?”
The room liked that question.
Rai could see it the collective lean forward, the sense of a wound being pressed.
“All of them,” Rai said.
“Until we say otherwise.”
The lean disappeared.
Something colder replaced it.
Then a chair scraped.
A young man stood near the middle of the room.
Barely old enough to be there.
Standing very straight to compensate.
“Sir.” Steady voice.
Deliberate.
“Is it true the Nirakh’s failure to act sooner left twenty-eight people dead on that road?”
The room held its breath.
Rai looked at him.
Not the cold pull of suppressed anger simply still.
Patient in a way that had nothing gentle in it.
“If the Nirakh had failed,” he said, same volume as before, not a degree warmer, “none of you would be in a position to ask us questions.”
The young man sat down slowly.
The room rearranged itself around Rai without anyone moving.
He let the silence sit exactly as long as he wanted it to.
Then picked up the single document on the table in front of him.
Looked at it briefly.
Set it back down.
“You should be asking,” he said, almost as an afterthought, his eyes moving across the room, “why not one of those twenty-eight people tried to run.”
Nobody wrote that down immediately.
They were still processing it.
Rai straightened his coat.
“Next question.”
The body lay apart from the others.
Not arranged.
Just separate.
Davan saw it first.
He stopped mid-step and looked.
“Is that him?”
No one answered.
No one knew what he meant yet.
Seran came beside him.
Looked at the build, the posture, the way the clothing sat not merchant fabric.
Something more structured underneath the attempt to make it look otherwise.
She crouched.
“Look at the stitching,” she said.
Davan crouched beside her.
The collar.
The pocket placement.
The lining against the inner seam.
“Someone altered this,” Seran said.
“Tried to make it civilian.” Her fingers moved to the edge of the left pocket.
“Not well enough.”
Vani appeared behind them.
She looked at the neck.
“His marks are different from the others,” she said.
“The others were controlled.
Practiced.” A pause.
“This one was rushed.”
Seran looked up.
“Rushed how?”
“Emotional.” Vani’s eyes didn’t move.
“Someone wanted the others arranged.
This one they just wanted finished.”
The clearing went a degree quieter.
Davan’s eyes had moved to the left pocket.
Something there the edge of something small, flat.
He looked at Vani.
She nodded once.
He reached forward and drew it out.
A small identification badge.
Standard Nirakh issue.
The edges worn from handling the specific wear of something taken out and put back, taken out and put back, by someone still getting used to carrying it.
He turned it over.
Read the name.
His hand went still.
“Seran.”
His voice caught.
He didn’t fix it.
Seran took the badge from his hand.
Read it.
She didn’t react not in any way the other examiners could have named.
But something moved behind her eyes.
There and gone.
“Rusi,” she said.
Almost no sound.
Just the shape of the name.
Davan stood.
He looked at the face.
At the badge.
At the face again.
One of the junior examiners looked between them and decided not to speak.
“Did you know him?” someone asked.
Quietly.
From behind Davan.
Davan’s mouth opened.
Closed.
Opened again.
“He was—” The words came out broken at the edges.
“He was my friend.”
Nobody spoke.
All morning the clearing had been manageable method, evidence, documentation, distance.
The professional language that makes the unbearable bearable.
But this was a name.
This was Davan’s voice breaking on three words in front of everyone.
That was different.
Vani looked at the badge.
Then at the body.
Then she picked up her pen.
For the first time that day, she didn’t know what to write.
The rain had come and gone before noon.
It left everything darker soil turned, grass flattened, the ground giving up things it had been holding since the bodies were found.
Fio almost missed it.
A corner of something pale, half-buried where the ground had shifted near the rope line.
Just a flash between one step and the next light catching an edge, there and gone.
He stopped.
Crouched.
Pulled it free from the mud with careful fingers.
Paper.
Folded.
Soaked through, fragile at the creases.
He held it flat and let the water run off the surface.
Then wiped it slowly with the dry edge of his sleeve.
Official stock.
He could feel the weight of it even waterlogged.
The seal emerged first.
Nirakh.
Ashura central command.
Then the heading.
Appointment order.
Then Fio’s eyes stopped.
He went very still.
Not from shock.
From understanding.
“Fio.” Junei appeared beside him.
“Why is your face that color ?”
Fio didn’t answer.
He read it again.
From the top.
The name.
The rank.
The posting to Ashura effective upon arrival.
A posting never claimed.
Never arrived for.
Carried through a jungle road.
Buried in mud.
He turned it toward Junei without speaking.
Junei leaned in.
Read it.
Straightened slowly.
They looked at each other.
Everything around them continued officers working, boots on wet ground, voices low.
Thirty seconds ago the world had been a different shape.
“Is it his?” Junei said.
Flat.
Because the alternative was something worse.
Fio looked at the name above the Nirakh seal.
“It’s his.”
Not loud.
Not a revelation.
A confirmation of something already cold and certain between them.
Neither of them moved.
Then together, without deciding to —
“Rusi.”
The name came out like something that cost them both.
Nothing carried it back.
Bahadur hadn’t expected to laugh.
But he did.
Kabi clapped him on the shoulder the way he always had too hard, completely unaware of it.
“How are you, my brother?”
“Fine,” Bahadur said.
“Fine.” Kabi made a face.
“That’s what you said when you had fever and still showed up to training.
Fine means nothing from you.”
“It means fine.”
“It means you’re breathing.
That’s all.” Kabi dropped into the chair across from him.
“How’s Fio?
Still arguing with everything that moves?”
“Getting better at it.”
“Davan?”
“Quiet.”
“He’s always quiet.”
“Quieter.”
Kabi laughed the full kind, the kind that didn’t calculate itself.
“And Junei?
Please tell me he’s stopped trying to be Fio.”
“He’s trying to be Fio.”
“Poor boy.” Kabi shook his head.
“Give him time.”
They sat for a moment in the comfortable silence of people who didn’t need to fill it.
Outside, Miraan moved at its usual pace carts, voices, the rhythm of a border city that never fully stopped.
“So,” Kabi said.
“I heard you caught a new case.”
“Yeah.”
“Bad one?”
Bahadur looked at him.
“Yeah.”
Kabi studied his face.
Then- “Do you not get exhausted?”
“I used to.”
“And now?”
“Now I’m used to it.”
Kabi was quiet for a second.
Then “Does it ever feel like him?”
“Like who?”
Kabi smiled.
Wide.
The kind that came from somewhere old and certain.
“Rusi.”
Something shifted in Bahadur’s chest.
He kept his face where it was.
“It’s been almost a year since I’ve seen him,” Kabi said.
His eyes had gone somewhere warm and far away.
“Do you feel it?
That kind of absence that just sits there.”
Bahadur said nothing.
He looked at the window.
“Remember—” Kabi started, already smiling before the memory arrived, “—that hunt outside Janikar.
All of us together.
You, me, Fio, Davan, Junei.
Rusi.
We thought we were so prepared.”
“We were not prepared,” Bahadur said.
“Catastrophically unprepared.” Kabi laughed.
“And then I broke my leg—”
“You twisted it—”
“It was broken, Bahadur, and Rusi carried me on his back — and then he fell, because of course he fell — and then you carried both of us and we all got sick for a week and none of us told anyone why—”
Bahadur laughed.
Short.
Quiet.
Real.
Then it faded.
Kabi was watching him with something that was almost but not quite concern.
“You alright?”
“Yeah.”
“You went somewhere.”
“I’m here.”
Kabi looked at him a moment longer.
Then let it go the way old friends do when they trust the other person will say it when they’re ready.
“It’s good to see you,” he said simply.
Bahadur took a slow breath.
“Kabi,” he said.
“There’s something I need to—”
The door opened.
Darsh Vael walked in.
Smooth.
Unhurried.
His eyes moved across the room once not lingering, but not missing anything either.
“Forgive the interruption,” he said pleasantly.
“I didn’t realize you had company, Kabi.”
He crossed to the desk and lifted a document from the stack at its edge.
The same practiced ease.
The same warmth that sat slightly wrong if you looked at it long enough.
Kabi watched him.
Bahadur watched Kabi watch him.
The conversation moved elsewhere.
And the thing Bahadur had been about to say stayed exactly where it was.
And didn’t leave.