The ATS vehicle smelled like gun oil and the inside of Birju Yadav's jacket, which was apparently also gun oil. Shyam sat wedged between the reinforced door and Meher Kaur, who had her boots up on the dash and her eyes shut, as if she could nap her way to Sarai Kale Khan.
Rathore drove herself. No one had offered to relieve her, and Shyam got the impression no one dared.
"Command channel's live," said the voice in his ear, tinny and flat through the headset the computer operator had clipped onto him before they'd rolled out. "Dr. Sen, second vehicle. Raj, can you hear me?"
"Yes, ma'am." His own voice came out higher than he wanted.
"Good. You've got maybe eleven minutes before we're close enough that I'll need to stop talking and start working. I'm going to use them."
Through the windscreen, Delhi at eleven at night was doing what Delhi always did — indifferent, glowing, oblivious. Streetlights smeared amber across the wet flyover railings. None of the thousand other cars on the road knew what the two of them were.
"Ma'am," Shyam said, "what exactly am I looking at tonight?"
"Nothing, if we're lucky. A Class Six sighting — Deformed Tree-footed — is not usually dangerous on its own. It's slow, it's low-aggression, and normally it would just be tranquilized and crated." A pause, static crackling. "The problem is it's near a transport hub at eleven p.m. If it panics, if it mutates from stress, we have a different night."
"Mutates."
"UMA aren't fixed creatures, Raj. They're reactive. Every restricted-class UMA we've catalogued changes form under sustained threat — roughly every half hour under normal stress, faster if it's cornered by something stronger than itself. Five consecutive mutations and it jumps an entire power bracket. That's the theory you're here to turn into something useful. Right now all we have is a stopwatch and a prayer."
Shyam looked past Meher's boots at the dashboard clock. Eleven eighteen.
"How do you actually stop one? Permanently, I mean."
Static, longer this time. When Dr. Sen spoke again her voice had gone carefully neutral, the way people go neutral around something they've decided not to be afraid of anymore. "You don't. Not the way you're thinking. You can kill a UMA's current body — plenty of teams have — but it comes back. One to three months later, stronger, angrier, and it remembers exactly whose hands did it. There's no confirmed case in Indian records of anyone surviving that return visit."
"So containment—"
"Containment is the only survivable answer. Sedate, crate, transport to a secure facility. Alive, they're manageable. Dead, they're a debt that comes due with interest." A beat. "Write that down somewhere in that head of yours, Raj. Underline it."
Rathore, silent until now, spoke without turning her head from the road. "Tell him where the power actually comes from. He'll ask eventually, might as well be now instead of during an op."
"Fine." Sen's exhale hissed through the static. "There are two ways a person acquires ability, Raj. The first is exposure — the biomagnetic field a UMA generates during sustained proximity can trigger a genetic response in a very small percentage of people. Pure chance. We don't know why some awaken and most don't."
"And the second?"
"You eat the meat." Flat, clinical, no dressing on it at all. "A piece of contained UMA flesh, properly harvested, grants the abilities associated with its class. It's the only reliable method we have. It's also why every restricted-level combatant in this vehicle has done something most people would call unthinkable, and every one of them will tell you it was worth it, and every one of them is lying at least a little."
Nobody in the car corrected her. Birju's jaw tightened, once, and released.
"There's a market for it," Rathore added. "Black, mostly. Some of it slips out of facilities that swear it can't. You'll hear rumors. Ignore ninety percent of them and take the other ten percent very seriously, because that ten percent gets people killed in Karol Bagh basements."
Shyam swallowed. "You said Class Six sightings are usually rare. Are they getting less rare?"
"That," Sen said, "is the part they actually sent you here to think about."
The headset crackled as she reorganized her thoughts, or perhaps just checked something on her tablet in the other vehicle — Shyam pictured Dr. Sen exactly as she'd looked in the briefing hall, glasses pushed up, unbothered, telling him the truth the way you'd read out a weather report.
"India's relationship with UMA has never looked like the rest of the world's, Raj. We simply had very few of them, historically. A handful of confirmed bloodlines, mostly concentrated in specific forest belts and river systems, going back — as far as anyone's bothered to document — generations. For a very long time, it wasn't a government problem. It was a family problem."
"Family?"
"Certain lineages have handled UMA encounters the way other families hand down a trade. Quietly. Without paperwork. The armed forces knew, cooperated when it mattered, and otherwise looked the other way. There was never a need for an institution. No Indian equivalent of America's BPRD, or China's SIRA. We managed with tradition instead of bureaucracy, and frankly, it worked, because there was so little to manage."
"So what changed?"
"The same thing that changed everywhere else. Sightings worldwide have climbed sharply over roughly the last year, for reasons nobody — not BPRD, not SIRA, not us — can currently explain. India was not spared. The old family networks got overwhelmed fast, and quietly, because none of them were built to scale. Six months ago, three tactical-level UMA hunters from a single lineage in Uttarakhand died in one week. That's when Delhi stopped pretending the problem was manageable by tradition alone."
"IARF," Shyam said.
"Formed inside four months, which for the Indian government is basically supernatural speed on its own. The Indian Anomaly Response Force sits over everything — protects Parliament, the state assemblies, the people who'd be a genuine catastrophe to lose. Below that, city-level forces. DARF for Delhi. MARF in Mumbai, KARF in Kolkata, and so on, each one built almost overnight out of whatever combat talent could be recruited fast enough. We are, Raj, extremely new at this. Don't mistake anyone's confidence in that briefing room for experience. It's mostly nerve."
The car went quiet except for the wet hiss of tires on the flyover.
"One more thing," Sen said, "since you'll find out anyway and I'd rather you hear it from me sitting down than standing over something's containment cage. You're wondering why a research role exists at all, given none of you can throw a punch that matters."
"I was wondering, yes."
"UMA generate localized electromagnetic disruption. Comms, data links, remote sensor feeds — all of it degrades badly within a few hundred meters of an active one, worse the more agitated it gets. Which means whatever thinking a researcher does has to happen close enough to be useless from a desk. We can't run this from Headquarters with a live feed like APMT does in Tokyo. We have to be in the vehicle. In the blast radius, so to speak, doing math in real time while something with claws decides whether tonight is the night it mutates twice."
Shyam thought of the two redacted paragraphs on his predecessor. Cause of death: classified pending review.
"That's how Dr. Nautiyal—"
"That's how Dr. Nautiyal died, yes." No softening, no pause this time, which somehow made it land harder than if she'd hesitated. "He was in Rathore's car, same as you are now, running pattern analysis on a Class Six that decided to have a bad night. He wasn't quick enough getting out when it mutated early. I'd like you to be quicker. That's the entire substance of my hopes for this evening, Raj — that you're quicker."
Up ahead, past the flyover's curve, Shyam could see it: a knot of stalled traffic, hazard lights blinking uselessly, and beyond that, where the streetlights should have been steady, a patch of dark that flickered instead — the amber sodium glow bending and warping, like heat haze in the middle of a cold December night.
"Command," Rathore said, voice suddenly all business, "visual on disturbance, three hundred meters, Sarai Kale Khan northbound."
The line clicked. Somewhere behind them, in the second vehicle, Shyam heard Dr. Sen exhale once, sharp and final, the sound of someone closing a book they wished had a few more pages left.
"Then that's enough talking," she said. "Raj — headset stays on, mouth stays shut unless you see something none of us do. Good luck."
The static swallowed her voice, and the flickering light ahead grew larger.