The order wasn't supposed to leak. Orders like that never were.
By the time Shyam heard about it — secondhand, from Ramesh, over a lunch nobody was actually eating — half of Team 7 already knew Rathore had requested a full background check on Farah Sheikh's family through DARF's own channels, and the other half had opinions about it loud enough to fill the gap.
"It's basic protocol," Birju said, arms crossed, not quite meeting anyone's eyes. "A man in that alley called her Bibi like she owned the street. You don't just let that sit unexamined. Not after everything."
"She saved us," Meher shot back, sharper than Shyam had ever heard her. "She walked into that alley and talked eight armed men into leaving without a single punch thrown, and the thanks she gets is Rathore running her family through a database like she's a suspect."
"Nobody said suspect."
"Nobody had to."
Shyam kept quiet, mostly because he didn't trust his own opinion yet, and partly because he was watching, with growing unease, the way the argument had already sorted itself along lines that felt uncomfortably familiar — the same rough shape as the divide that had opened after Anya's arrival, except this time it wasn't clean at all.
Because Dr. Sen, when Shyam finally found her in the small kitchen off the debrief wing, was firmly, unapologetically on Rathore's side.
"She should have told us," Sen said, stirring her tea with more force than the tea required. "Not the details. I don't care about the details. But something, before we walked three unprepared people into a market where apparently her surname works like a magic word. That's not paranoia, Raj, that's basic operational trust."
"Anya doesn't see it that way."
Sen's mouth tightened. "Anya thinks anyone with a complicated family deserves the benefit of the doubt before anyone starts digging. I understand why she thinks that. I don't happen to agree with her, and we've had this particular argument in one form or another since she was nineteen years old."
That surprised him more than he expected it to. "You disagree with each other. About this."
"Anya and I disagree about a great many things, Raj. We simply don't usually do it in front of the whole team." A ghost of something tired crossed Sen's face. "She thinks I trust institutions too easily, given what one of them nearly cost her. I think she trusts people too easily, for the same reason. We're both probably a little right."
Shyam didn't have an answer for that, so he didn't try to give one, and let the silence sit until Sen waved him off toward whatever was left of his own cold dinner, her mind clearly already somewhere else.
He found Farah near midnight, on the narrow walking path that ran along the DARF compound's outer wall, alone, unhurried, moving the way people move when they're not actually going anywhere in particular.
He told himself he'd approach quietly. He made it perhaps fifteen meters before she spoke without turning around.
"You're loud for a man who thinks he's being careful, Raj."
He stopped, faintly embarrassed. "How long did you know I was there?"
"Since you left the dormitory door. I could hear you deciding whether to come out here for a full two minutes before you actually did it." She finally glanced back at him, something wry in her expression despite the late hour. "I'm a trained combatant who's spent twenty years listening for footsteps that mean trouble. You're not exactly the first person to try sneaking up on me."
"Fair." He fell into step beside her instead, since there didn't seem to be any use pretending otherwise. "I heard about the order."
"Everyone's heard about the order." She said it without heat, which somehow made it land heavier than anger would have. "It's fine, Raj. I expected it, honestly, sooner than this."
"Doesn't sound fine."
"No," she agreed, "it doesn't, does it." They walked in silence for a moment, the compound quiet around them, distant traffic noise from beyond the wall the only sound. "Can I ask you something, since you clearly came out here to ask me something?"
"Go ahead."
"You've gotten close to Sen. And to Anya." Not an accusation — just an observation, laid flat on the table between them. "What does that actually mean to you? Because from where the rest of us are standing, it looks like you found a family faster than anyone else on this team, and I'm curious whether you see it the same way."
The question caught him more off guard than he expected. "I don't know if family is the right word yet. But — " he considered it honestly, because she seemed like someone who'd notice if he didn't, "— they're the first people since I left home who've looked at me like I was worth explaining things to. Not just using. Explaining to."
"That's a very specific way to describe affection."
"It's the only way I've ever really had it described to me."
Something in Farah's expression shifted, subtle, unreadable in the dark. "And Rathore? What do you make of her?"
"Honestly?" He thought about it properly this time. "I think she's the most competent person in this unit and she'd rather eat glass than admit she's scared of losing control of it. I think everything that reads as cold is actually just her trying very hard not to be the reason someone else dies on her watch."
"That's generous."
"It's also true. Both things can be true."
Farah was quiet for a long moment, long enough that Shyam wondered if he'd said something wrong, before she finally asked the question underneath all the others.
"And me, Raj? What do you think of me — of what I did in that alley?"
He didn't answer immediately, because he could tell she genuinely wanted the honest version rather than the comfortable one.
"I think you scared eight armed men without lifting a hand, using nothing but your own name," he said slowly. "I think that means either you're something the rest of us don't fully understand yet, or your family is, or both. And I think—" he hesitated, then decided against pulling the punch, "—I think you're the only person on this team who reminds me even a little of where I come from. People who get respect because of blood, not because of what they've personally done to earn it. I know what that costs a person, carrying a name like that. I don't think anyone else on this team does."
Farah stopped walking entirely.
For a moment she simply looked at him, something unreadable moving behind her eyes — surprise, maybe, or recognition, or the particular wariness of someone who'd just been seen more accurately than they'd planned to allow.
"That's a very specific thing to know," she said quietly, "for a boy who grew up, as far as your file says, in a quiet academic household in East UP."
"Files say a lot of things," Shyam said, and immediately wished he hadn't, because Farah's eyes sharpened at once, and he understood, too late, that he'd just handed her the exact same kind of thread he'd spent the whole walk asking her to pull.
She didn't pull it. Not tonight. She only studied him a moment longer, filing something away behind that careful, composed face, and said, "Go to bed, Raj. Whatever you're carrying, it'll keep till morning. Most things do."
He walked back to the dormitory with more questions circling in his head than he'd brought out with him — about Farah's family, about Sen and Anya's old argument, about how much he'd just given away without meaning to — and slept badly, and dreamed of nothing he could remember by morning.
Rathore was still in the meeting room long after midnight, alone under a single desk lamp, when Ishita knocked and let herself in without waiting for an answer, two folders in hand.
"You should see this now, Captain. Both of these."
She set them down on the table and stepped back. Rathore opened the first one — thin, frustratingly so for the amount of digging that had clearly gone into it — DARF's records on the Sheikh family ran deep, historically, then thinned abruptly into redaction somewhere around three decades back, the kind of gap that wasn't an oversight so much as a decision someone senior had made a long time ago and never revisited.
The second was thinner still: a single page, freshly printed, forensics' first successful crack into a fragment of the data card's encryption. Not the whole thing. Just enough — a partial name, a transaction log header, a signature line half-recovered from corrupted data.
Rathore read it twice before she let herself believe it.
The surname on the fragment was Sheikh.
She sat back slowly, the desk lamp throwing long shadows across both folders, and for a long moment said nothing at all, turning over the specific, uncomfortable shape of a coincidence that was very possibly not a coincidence, in a case that had just stopped being simple in a way she suspected none of them were prepared for.