Sarai Kale Khan ISBT at eleven-forty at night was not supposed to look like this.
Shyam had expected chaos — stalled traffic, maybe a crowd being pushed back by Delhi Police who had no idea what they were actually being asked to contain. What he got instead was worse: a bus bay gone eerily still, three motionless figures slumped against a shuttered ticket counter, upright but wrong, the way a puppet is upright when nobody's holding the strings.
"Soulless bodies," Dr. Sen's voice said in his ear, flat and fast. "Three of them. Confirmed."
"That's not normal for a Class Six first sighting," Shyam said. He didn't need her to confirm it; he'd read the file twice on the drive over. Deformed Tree-footed UMAs produced soulless bodies as a defensive measure, under sustained threat, and sustained meant time — minutes, plural, of active aggression. Nobody had reported anything before tonight's alert went out forty minutes ago.
"No," Sen agreed. "It's not."
Rathore was already out of the vehicle, the rest of Team 7 fanning into the terminal's dark mouths — Birju and Farah toward the eastern platforms, Ishita and Dev toward the bus wash bay, the three juniors moving as a loose triangle toward the ticketing hall where the soulless bodies stood. Within ninety seconds the terminal had swallowed all eight combatants whole, leaving behind exactly what Rathore's protocol dictated should be left behind: two armoured vehicles, two drivers, and two field researchers who could not, under any circumstance, throw a punch that mattered.
Shyam stayed in the back seat of Rathore's ATS with the driver — a wiry, unsmiling man named Pramod who hadn't said six words all night — and toggled his headset back to the research channel.
"Ma'am, something's bothering me about the interval."
"Go on." Sen's voice, from the second vehicle parked forty meters back near the terminal's north gate, had the particular sharpness of someone who wanted to be interrupted with exactly this kind of thing.
"The soulless bodies. If mutation-stress triggers them roughly every twenty-eight minutes under normal escalation, and this creature's produced three, that's — what, an hour and a half of continuous aggression, minimum? But the sighting report says civilians only noticed anything wrong twelve minutes before the alert went out."
"So either the timeline in the report is wrong—"
"Or something was provoking it for over an hour before anyone called it in." Shyam's own voice sounded strange to him, too calm for what he was actually suggesting. "Ma'am, this doesn't look like a sighting. It looks like someone's been running an experiment."
There was a pause just long enough to feel deliberate.
"I want you to pull every camera feed within four hundred meters the second we're back at base," Sen said. "If you're right, I want to know who's been standing near this thing longer than a civilian should be comfortable standing near anything unusual, and I want—"
The line dissolved into static.
Not the ordinary crackle of a bad connection — a wall of white noise, sudden and total, cutting her off mid-sentence like something had reached out and closed a fist around the signal.
"Ma'am?" Shyam pressed the headset closer, as if proximity to his own ear could fix it. "Dr. Sen?"
Nothing. Not even the static now — dead air, the specific, airless silence of a channel with nobody transmitting on either end.
"EM interference," Pramod said from the front seat, not turning around. "Means something's active nearby. Could be nothing. Could be—"
The noise that cut him off wasn't static. It was real, physical, close enough to shake the ATS on its suspension — a groaning, tearing crash of metal folding wrong, followed by the specific, sickening bounce of something heavy losing contact with the ground and finding it again badly.
Shyam twisted in his seat. Through the rear windscreen, forty meters back at the north gate, the second armoured vehicle — Dr. Sen's vehicle — was no longer where it had been parked. It was on its side, one wheel still spinning uselessly in the sodium light, steam or smoke curling up from somewhere underneath it.
"Go," Pramod said, already reaching for the ignition, engine turning over with a snarl. "Captain's protocol, non-combat personnel evacuate on any confirmed engagement, that's an overturned vehicle, that's confirmed, we are not authorized to—"
"Stop." Shyam's hand was on the man's shoulder before he'd decided to put it there. "That's Dr. Sen's car."
"I know whose car it is."
"We can't just leave them."
"We're not combatants." Pramod's voice had the flat patience of a man repeating something he'd been trained to say exactly once, to exactly this kind of protest. "You understand what that word means? Meat-eaters can take a hit from one of these things and get back up. You and me, we get hit once, that's it, that's the whole story. There's a reason the protocol exists, and it's not because Captain Rathore doesn't care if her researcher dies. It's because a UMA doesn't care how much you care."
Shyam's mouth was dry. He looked past Pramod's shoulder, out through the windscreen, and that was when he saw it properly for the first time — a shape unfolding itself out of the terminal's shadow near the overturned vehicle, too tall, limbs wrong in the way Dr. Sen's briefing had only let him imagine in the abstract, bark-dark skin catching amber streetlight in patches like a creature built out of a dying orchard.
It hadn't noticed them yet. It was circling the overturned vehicle instead, patient, curious, the way something investigates a thing it has already decided is helpless.
Then Shyam's eyes dropped — from the creature, to the vehicle, to the roof of their own ATS visible in the wing mirror, where a heavy machine gun sat bolted exactly where Rathore's team had shown him during the pre-op walkthrough, mounted, loaded, entirely useless to anyone who didn't know how to use it.
Except somebody in this car did. He had asked Meher Kaur exactly how the mount traversed, because he was the kind of person who asked how things worked even when nobody expected him to need the answer as he was curios from his childhood and while curiosity killed the cat, this one was going to save someone.
"Pramod." His voice came out steadier than he felt. "Don't drive away. Drive toward it. Get its attention, keep moving, don't let it get a clean angle on us — kite it, the way Meher explained pursuit patterns to me on the ride over. I'll take the gun."
"You've never fired that thing in your life."
"No. But right now neither has anyone else in this vehicle, and Dr. Sen's driver isn't getting up on his own."
Pramod stared at him for one full second — long enough that Shyam thought he'd refuse outright — and then swore in Bhojpuri, threw the ATS into gear, and drove straight at the creature instead of away from it.
Shyam scrambled up through the roof hatch into the gunner's cradle, cold night air hitting him like a slap, hands finding the grips exactly where the walkthrough had shown him. The creature's head — if that word even applied — swung toward the noise of the engine, toward the new and much closer threat, exactly as Pramod cut hard around its flank to put the terminal's support pillar between it and the downed vehicle.
Shyam fired.
The recoil nearly threw him out of the cradle. He hadn't hit anything vital — he wasn't sure this creature had anything vital in any place he could aim — but the rounds tore bark-flesh loose from its shoulder in a spray of pale sap-blood, and it screamed, a sound like a tree splitting in a storm, and turned fully toward them.
"That's — that's good, that's the plan working," Shyam said, mostly to himself, as Pramod swung the ATS in a wide loop across the empty forecourt, tires screaming, the creature loping after them now instead of the overturned vehicle, faster than anything that size should move.
It was almost working. It was working right up until the moment the creature's arm — longer than Shyam's whole body, ending in something between a branch and a claw — came down across the ATS's rear axle, and the vehicle didn't so much stop as stop being a vehicle, spinning sideways in a shriek of tearing metal before slamming into a concrete divider hard enough to throw Shyam back down through the hatch and into darkness at the edges of his vision.
He didn't lose consciousness. He wished, for one very long half-second, that he had, because that would have meant not seeing the creature's shadow fall over the crumpled ATS, not hearing Pramod's breathing gone ragged in the front seat, not understanding with total, cold clarity that whatever happened next was not something either of them could survive on their own.
Then the shadow flickered — scaled, sudden, catching what little light there was in a wrongness that made Shyam's eyes want to slide off it — and something hit the creature from the side with the force of a car crash in reverse, driving it three full meters sideways into the terminal's outer wall.
Captain Ananya Rathore stood where the creature had been a half-second earlier, scales rippling black along one forearm, eyes carrying that same oil-slick sheen Shyam had first noticed in the briefing hall, except now it wasn't subtle at all. She didn't look back at the wrecked ATS. She looked at the creature, snarling and scrambling upright against the wall, and said something too quiet for Shyam to hear over the ringing in his ears — and the Deformed Tree-footed UMA, easily three times her size, turned and fled into the dark of the terminal's service road like something that had just remembered it was afraid.
Only then did Rathore turn around.
"Raj." Her voice, when it reached him, was carefully, deliberately even — the voice of someone doing the arithmetic on how angry to be later, once she'd confirmed he was still alive to be angry at. "Report."