"Your name is Vikram," Farah said, sliding a thin folder across the table. "Vikram Nair. Your family's from Lucknow, your father sells auto parts, and you've been saving money quietly for two years because your girlfriend's family won't take you seriously until you're something more than an ordinary man."
Shyam picked up the folder and stared at his own face pasted beside a name that wasn't his. "Vikram."
"You don't look like a Vikram," Anya said, not unkindly, peering over his shoulder.
"What does a Vikram look like?"
"Taller. More confident. Possibly a moustache."
"I could grow a moustache in the next two days if it's really that important to the mission."
"It is not that important to the mission," Farah said, in the exact tone of someone who had clearly had this argument with juniors before and did not intend to indulge it further. "Sen — Anya," she corrected herself, with a small, private smile at her own near-slip, "you're Reet. Reet Malhotra. You've been with Vikram for a year and a half, you work at a call centre in Gurgaon, and you're the one who actually pushed him to consider this, because you're tired of your own family looking down on him."
"Why am I the pushy one?"
"Because that's the story that makes sense of why a girl your age would drag a powerless boyfriend into a black market transaction instead of simply finding someone with power already." Farah's tone didn't shift, but something amused flickered at the corner of her mouth. "You're allowed to be pushy, Reet. It suits you."
Anya crossed her arms, unconvinced, and Shyam found himself smiling despite the tightness in his own chest, because watching Anya look genuinely affronted by a fictional character was, against every reasonable expectation, one of the more entertaining things he'd witnessed all week.
They ran the story properly that evening, in the small briefing room Rathore had cleared for exactly this purpose, walking through it the way Dr. Sen had insisted — out loud, back and forth, until the lies sat as comfortably as the truth.
"How'd you two meet?" Rathore asked, arms crossed, playing interrogator with an ease that made Shyam wonder, not for the first time, what she'd done before DARF existed.
"College fest," Anya said immediately. "DU. I was helping run the food stalls, he tripped and knocked an entire tray of samosas onto a professor."
Shyam blinked. "That's — extremely specific."
"Specific details sell a lie, Raj," Farah said. "Vague ones invite questions."
"Fine. I knocked over the samosas. Then what?"
"Then you apologized so badly it was somehow charming, and I decided you were worth the trouble." Anya delivered this with a perfectly straight face, and Shyam felt something warm and entirely unhelpful flicker in his chest at the ease with which she said it, at how natural it sounded coming out of her mouth even though every word of it was invented.
"And why," Rathore pressed, "does Reet's family disapprove of Vikram?"
"Because he's nobody," Anya said, and this time there was the faintest crack in the performance, something genuine slipping through the fiction. "No power, no name, no prospects by their measure. They think I'm wasting myself."
"And you don't think that," Shyam said, quieter, not entirely sure if he was still in character.
Anya looked at him for a moment too long before answering. "No. I don't think that."
The room went very slightly still. Rathore cleared her throat, professionally oblivious or professionally polite, Shyam couldn't tell which. "Good. Keep that energy. It'll read as real because apparently it mostly is."
Shyam felt his ears go warm and didn't dare look at Anya to see if hers had done the same.
Farah briefed them properly the next morning, spreading a hand-drawn floor plan across the table with the ease of someone who'd walked those rooms a hundred times before.
"My family doesn't operate like DARF, or like anything you've trained for. There's no rank structure you can read off a uniform. Respect is entirely about who you're standing next to and whose attention you've earned." She tapped a section of the floor plan. "The transaction room is here. Whoever runs the sale tonight will not be the most senior person in the building — that person will be watching from somewhere you won't be able to identify, and you should assume you are being watched the entire time you're inside."
"Comforting," Shyam said.
"It's meant to be useful, not comforting." Farah's expression didn't shift, though something careful entered her voice. "Two rules that matter more than any other. Never volunteer information you weren't asked for — silence reads as respect in that world, not evasion. And never, under any circumstance, let anyone see you flinch at the idea of what you're buying. Fear is data to these people. They'll use it."
"And you?" Anya asked. "How will they treat you, walking back in?"
Something in Farah's posture changed, subtle enough that Shyam might have missed it back when he'd first joined the team, before he'd learned to watch her the way she clearly watched everyone else.
"Warmly, publicly," she said. "My family is very good at warmth, when warmth serves them. Whether it's genuine underneath that is a separate question, and one I stopped trying to answer a long time ago." She rolled up the floor plan, brisk again, closing the subject the way she closed most subjects about herself — cleanly, with no room left to push. "Just remember your names. Remember your story. And remember that the moment either of you looks like DARF instead of two desperate kids in love, we don't get a second chance at this."
They left before dawn two days later, in a car that belonged to no government fleet Shyam had ever seen, Farah in plain clothes again, hijab pinned the same careful way, Anya's hair down and unbraided, dressed like exactly the kind of ordinary young woman she was supposed to be pretending to be tonight and hadn't been in years.
Shyam sat beside her in the back seat, close enough that their shoulders brushed with every turn, and found himself unexpectedly grateful for the excuse of the cover story, for the permission it gave him to notice things he'd otherwise have talked himself out of noticing.
"Nervous?" Anya asked quietly, as the city thinned out around them into narrower, older streets.
"Terrified," he admitted. "You?"
"A little." She looked at him sideways, something unguarded in her expression that had nothing to do with Reet Malhotra at all. "Mostly worried about you, if I'm honest. You're the one walking in without a way to fight your way back out."
"I have you."
"You have Reet's version of me," she said — the cover self, the invented one — but she was smiling when she said it, small and real in a way the script hadn't written for her, and Shyam decided, foolishly, dangerously, that he'd take it anyway.
The car slowed as the road narrowed further, old brick and older iron gates rising on either side, a part of Delhi that had clearly stood in exactly this shape for far longer than any agency's paperwork could account for. Farah sat up straighter in the front seat, some old, practiced composure sliding over her features like a second disguise laid on top of the first.
"We're here," she said, and Shyam, looking out at the gates ahead — carved, old, watching in a way that had nothing to do with cameras — understood, with a cold certainty settling low in his stomach, that whatever waited on the other side of them was not going to care in the slightest whether his name was really Vikram.