Commissioner Nambiar's voice, when she called in the confirmation, carried none of her usual unhurried calm.
"Capturing Zaid himself is what closes this case for regional purposes," she said. "Disrupting his operation, saving lives, gathering intelligence — all of that matters, and all of it will be noted. But the seat goes to whoever brings him in. That's the standard, and I don't set it, I just enforce it."
"Understood," Rathore said. "We have two live contractors and a real lead on his supply chain. Give us time to work it."
There was a pause on the line that Shyam, listening from across the briefing table, didn't like at all.
"Work fast, then," Nambiar said. "Because somehow — and I'd very much like to know how — Zaid already knows his contractors were taken. He's gone dark. Every safehouse, every known associate, every thread we had on him two days ago has gone cold overnight. Someone tipped him, Captain, and it wasn't anyone in this room."
The silence that followed was heavy enough that Shyam felt it settle physically into his chest.
"He has people watching us," Farah said quietly, once the call ended.
"He has people watching everyone," Rathore corrected, jaw tight. "Us, the other DARF teams, probably half of IARF's own lower ranks for all we currently know. That's the cost of being backed by an international organization with real resources. We're not hunting a man anymore. We're hunting a man who already knows exactly how hard we're looking."
They visited the rival team's survivors that afternoon, in a recovery ward that smelled like antiseptic and old fear, three cots occupied by three people who'd nearly died on the same riverbank Team 7 had spent the last few days fighting over.
The youngest one — the one who'd been sobbing when Meher silenced her — sat up as they entered, something complicated crossing her face.
"You're the ones who—" She stopped, seemed to reconsider the sentence entirely. "You knocked me unconscious to save my life. I've been lying here for six hours trying to decide how I feel about that."
"How do you feel about it?" Anya asked, not unkindly.
"Grateful. Furious that I have to be grateful to the team we're supposed to be racing." A small, reluctant laugh escaped her. "Mostly grateful. I keep coming back to grateful."
"We'd have done it for anyone out there tonight," Rathore said. "The competition doesn't change who we are on that riverbank."
The older survivor, propped against his pillows with a bandaged shoulder, studied Rathore for a long moment. "Word's already moving through the other DARF units. What you did out there. Nobody's forgetting it, Captain — regional spot or not."
Rathore accepted that with a small, uncomfortable nod, clearly more at ease giving orders under fire than receiving gratitude in a recovery ward, and Shyam found himself, not for the first time, quietly proud of the team he'd somehow ended up part of.
Back at the compound that evening, the mood in the briefing room was heavier than Shyam had felt it in weeks.
"So Zaid's gone," Ramesh said. "Which means we're stuck. No lead, no target, no case to close."
"Not stuck," Rathore said. "Just aimed at something else for now." She pulled up the map of the Yamuna, the marked location of the camp, the cage. "We can't reach Zaid. Not tonight, not this week, maybe not for a while. But we know exactly where his actual asset is, and we know exactly what he needs it for. If we contain that creature ourselves — safely, properly, before his people get another chance at it — we deny him the one resource his whole long-term plan depends on."
"That's not nothing," Dev said slowly, following the logic. "Even if it doesn't win us the regional spot outright."
"It might not win it outright," Rathore agreed. "But it stops him cold on the exact plan those contractors described, and it protects this city from something Tactical-class we still don't fully understand. I'd take that trade even if there were no competition attached to it at all."
Shyam studied the map, the marked cage site, the wide dark curve of the river. "We still don't know its exact tier."
"No," Rathore said. "Which means before anyone goes near that water again, I want every scrap of intelligence we can gather. Sen, pull anything on record about Loch Ness-type UMAs anywhere in the world — sightings, engagements, confirmed classifications, anything at all that gives us a baseline instead of a guess." Her eyes moved to Ishita and Shyam both. "You two, work the mist. If it responds to sound the way we confirmed, there may be other patterns we haven't tested yet — patterns that could tell us its tier without anyone needing to get close enough to find out the hard way."
"And the rest of us?" Meher asked.
"Train. Hard. Whatever this turns out to be, I want everyone at their absolute best before we go back out there, not a version of themselves that's merely good enough." Rathore's gaze swept the room, steady and certain despite everything Nambiar's call had taken away from them that morning. "We can't have Zaid tonight. Fine. We'll take the ground out from under him instead, and make sure that when we finally do catch him, he's got nothing left to come back to."
Nobody argued. Nobody, Shyam noticed, even looked like they wanted to.
Later, alone by the compound's outer wall, Shyam found Anya staring out at the city lights, quiet in a way that felt different from her usual watchful calm.
"You're thinking loudly," he said, settling beside her.
"Just doing the math Rathore's been doing all day." She didn't look at him. "If Zaid's smart enough to vanish the moment he heard about the contractors, he's smart enough to know exactly what we'll try next. That creature might not be a fallback plan for us at all, Shyam. It might be exactly where he wants us looking while he does something else entirely."
Shyam turned that over, the cold, familiar unease of it settling in beside his own tiredness. "You think this is a trap."
"I think Zaid's never once done anything by accident since the night we met him." She finally looked over, something steady and unafraid beneath the worry in her eyes. "I think we go in anyway. Carefully. Because the alternative is doing nothing at all, and neither of us is built for that."
Below them, the Yamuna was invisible in the dark, patient, unknowable, waiting on the other side of a decision the whole team had already made.