The fixer's name, as far as Shyam could tell from the stall's peeling signage, was Bunty, and Bunty had been perfectly cooperative right up until Shyam slid the photograph of the data card's casing across the counter.
His face didn't do anything dramatic. It just went very still, the particular stillness of a man recalculating every decision that had led him to this exact conversation, and then he was gone — vaulting the counter with a speed that suggested this wasn't his first time needing to leave a conversation quickly.
"Anya—"
"Already moving." She was past him before he'd finished the word, and Shyam swore under his breath and ran after both of them into the crowd.
Sadar Bazar at midday was not built for pursuit. Shyam learned this the hard way, colliding with a spice cart, apologizing in Hindi to a vendor who did not appear to accept the apology, ducking under a shutter half-lowered for lunch, all while trying to keep Anya's braid in sight ahead of him and Bunty's fleeing back beyond that. His lungs burned. His feet knew the rhythm of running through crowded lanes in a way that surprised even him — some old, unexamined instinct waking up and taking over his legs before his brain had fully agreed to the plan.
"Southbound, into the loading yards," he gasped into his comm. "Captain, if you're close—"
"I'm close." Rathore's voice, clipped, already breathing hard herself. "Two minutes out. Don't lose him."
They didn't lose him. What they lost, instead, was the thread of control over where the chase actually ended — Bunty cutting through a gap between two shuttered warehouses that looked, from a distance, like it led somewhere, and turned out, once Shyam and Anya committed to following him through it, to lead precisely nowhere at all.
A dead end. Brick on three sides, crates stacked head-high, a single narrow gap behind them that was rapidly filling with people who had not been invited to this conversation.
Bunty had vanished — through some door or gap Shyam hadn't caught in time — but the men now blocking the alley's mouth clearly weren't there for him. There were eight of them, maybe nine, and even without Dr. Sen's briefings Shyam could have told which ones were ordinary muscle and which ones weren't: two of the men at the front had a faint, wrong shimmer along their forearms that had nothing to do with sweat.
"UMA meat eaters," Anya said, low, already shifting her weight, wings straining faintly at her back beneath the plain kurti. "Black market ones. Untrained, probably, but strong."
"You've been sniffing around our supply chain all week," said the man at the front — broad, unhurried, the kind of calm that came from genuinely not being afraid of the two people in front of him. "Little birdie told us DARF's been asking questions. Didn't expect DARF to send in a woman who forgot her flight suit and a boy who looks like he'd faint at the sight of a kitchen knife."
"You'd be surprised," Shyam said, before he could stop himself, and immediately regretted drawing attention.
Rathore arrived a beat later, breathless, scales already flickering half-formed along one forearm, and the numbers shifted from bad to worse in the specific way numbers do when a third target simply gives the crowd one more reason to commit.
"Captain Ananya Rathore," she said, voice gone hard and flat, "DARF. You are currently obstructing a federal investigation, and I am authorized to—"
"To what?" the broad man said, almost gently, spreading his arms to indicate the eight bodies behind him, the brick walls, the single narrow exit now fully blocked. "Call for backup that won't reach you before we decide what to do with you? Go ahead, Captain. Flash whatever badge you like. Doesn't change how many of us are standing here and how few of you there are."
Shyam watched Rathore's jaw tighten, watched her weigh — visibly, painfully — the choice in front of her: fight and risk real injury against numbers that outmatched even a Mature-Restricted combatant three to one, or reveal the full weight of government backing and burn every ounce of quiet, low-visibility groundwork DARF had built this week, tipping off whoever was actually orchestrating this that they were being hunted.
"Everyone," she said, low, to Shyam and Anya, "on my signal—"
"There's no need for a signal," said a new voice, unhurried, coming from the alley's mouth behind the standing wall of men, and every head in the alley turned at once.
Farah stood there in her burkha, utterly unbothered, as though she'd wandered into a garden party rather than a standoff. The broad man's expression did something complicated and fast — recognition, then something closer to alarm, quickly and badly hidden.
"Bibi," he said, and the honorific came out strange in his mouth, too careful, too respectful for a man who'd just been threatening a government captain a moment earlier. "This — this doesn't concern you."
"It concerns me the moment it happens two streets from where I grew up, Salim." Farah's voice was mild, almost bored, and somehow that made it worse. "Does your Ustad know you're out here threatening federal officers in his territory? Or is that a conversation I should have with him myself, tonight, over tea?"
The name landed on the alley like a dropped stone. Two of the men actually took a step back. The broad man — Salim, apparently — went very pale under his tan.
"There's no need for that, Bibi Sheikh."
Sheikh. Shyam turned the name over in his head, half a second too slow to place why it mattered, and caught Rathore's eyes flicking toward Farah with something that wasn't quite surprise — more like a suspicion finally confirmed.
"Then walk away," Farah said, still mild, still bored, "and tell whoever's paying you that DARF's business in this market is not a coincidence, and it is not going to stop, and the next time your people corner one of my colleagues in a dead end, I will not be nearly this polite about it."
For three full seconds, nobody moved. Then Salim gave a short, sharp gesture, and the men behind him melted backward out of the alley's mouth with the speed of people who had somewhere else to be, entirely, immediately, and forever.
The alley went quiet. Shyam realized he'd been holding his breath for the better part of a minute and let it out all at once, legs suddenly unsteady beneath him.
"You know him," Rathore said, once the last of the men had gone. It wasn't quite a question.
"I know of most people in this market, Captain. It's a small world when your family's been part of it for four generations." Farah adjusted her hijab, unbothered, already turning to head back the way she'd come. "We should move. Bunty's long gone, and standing in a dead-end alley discussing my family tree isn't going to find him again."
"Your family—" Anya started.
"Later," Farah said, not unkindly, already walking. "Ask me properly sometime, when we're not standing in a market that apparently knows my name better than it knows yours."
Shyam fell into step beside Rathore as they filed out of the alley, adrenaline still sour in his throat, and found the Captain watching Farah's retreating back with an expression he couldn't quite name — not suspicion exactly, and not quite respect either, but something caught somewhere between the two, the look of a commander realizing there was an entire dimension to one of her own combatants she'd never once thought to ask about.
"Did you know?" Shyam asked quietly. "About her family?"
"I knew Farah Sheikh grew up in Old Delhi," Rathore said. "I did not know Old Delhi apparently grew up around her." She exhaled, long and slow, some of the command-mode tension finally bleeding out of her shoulders now that the danger had passed. "We lost the lead."
"We got something else instead," Shyam said, before he'd quite decided to say it out loud. "We got confirmation this isn't just some low-level supplier problem. That man was scared of one name, Captain. Scared enough to walk eight armed people away from a fight he thought he was winning."
Rathore glanced at him, something almost approving in her eyes despite the exhaustion. "You're not wrong." She keyed her comm, voice already sharpening back into command cadence. "Command, this is Rathore. Southern lead is gone, but we have a new thread worth pulling. I want everything DARF has on file for the Sheikh family of Old Delhi, quietly, and I want it on my desk before tonight's debrief."
Ahead of them, Farah walked on without looking back, calm as ever, giving absolutely nothing else away.