"Report," Rathore said again, when Shyam didn't answer fast enough the first time.
"I'm — fine. Pramod's fine. Dr. Sen's vehicle went over near the north gate, I don't know how badly they're—"
"Ishita's already there." Rathore didn't look relieved so much as recalculating, the way she'd been recalculating since the moment she'd landed between Shyam and the creature. "You fired the mounted gun."
"Yes."
"You've never fired that gun."
"No."
A beat. Something moved behind her eyes that wasn't quite anger, though it was standing very close to anger's front door. "You disobeyed a standing evacuation protocol, Raj, in your first live operation, to draw a restricted-Mature UMA onto your own vehicle instead of away from it."
"I know."
"You could have gotten Pramod killed doing something a driver isn't paid to volunteer for."
"I know that too." Shyam's hands hadn't stopped shaking since the crash, and he was fairly sure Rathore could see it, and he decided he didn't have the energy left tonight to hide it from her. "Dr. Sen wasn't getting out of that car on her own, Captain. I did the math on what happens if we drive away. It came out worse than the math on staying."
Rathore looked at him for a long moment. Then, unexpectedly, something that wasn't quite a smile crossed her face — there and gone so fast Shyam half-convinced himself he'd imagined it.
"Don't do it again," she said. "Not because you were wrong. Because next time I might not get there in ninety seconds." She was already turning, voice sharpening back into command mode. "Command, this is Rathore. Target is Mature-Restricted, wounded, last seen fleeing terminal service road, heading east. All units converge, non-lethal only, I want it slowed and I want it contained, not cornered into a civilian zone. Move."
Sen's driver had a broken collarbone and a concussion, Ishita reported over the restored channel — the static had cleared the moment the creature moved far enough from the vehicles, which told Shyam something about the EM field's range that he filed away to write up properly once his hands stopped shaking. Dr. Sen herself was bruised, furious, and already back on comms coordinating from the wreck, which Shyam decided was probably the most reassuring thing he'd heard all night.
The creature was not slowing down.
If anything, it was accelerating — Shyam could hear it over the open channel before he saw it again, a groaning, splintering sound moving fast through the terminal's service corridors, and when Meher Kaur's voice cut in it had lost all its earlier boredom.
"It's mutating again. That's — that's the fourth shift since first contact, Captain, that's fast—"
"Confirmed," Shyam said, without meaning to, the words out before he'd decided to say them. "Ma'am, if it's genuinely on its fourth mutation already, either the wound from the gun accelerated its stress response, or—"
"Or it was already close to its fifth shift before we even arrived," Sen finished grimly, over the line. "One more mutation and it jumps out of Restricted-Mature entirely. Rathore, you need to end this now, not corner it and negotiate."
"Copy." Rathore's voice was already moving, footsteps pounding somewhere ahead of Shyam in the dark. "Kaur, air support, keep it visible, don't engage alone. Chauhan, block the platform three exit before it reaches the crowd. Verma—"
A pause, half a second too long.
"Verma, report your position."
Aakash Verma's voice came back thin, strained in a way that had nothing to do with exertion. "Captain, I have visual. I don't — I don't think it's going to be easy to bring this one down clean."
"Explain."
"It's the same class as me." A breath, ragged. "I can feel it trying to regrow the shoulder Raj's rounds took off. It's not attacking to kill anymore, it's attacking because it's in pain and it doesn't know how to stop being in pain, and I don't—" He stopped himself. "I don't know if I can hit it the way the rest of you can."
Nobody answered him for a second. Then Rathore, flat and certain: "You don't have to hit it, Verma. You have to slow it. Use what you know about your own class against it — you understand its regeneration better than anyone alive in this operation. Use that."
Shyam, jogging to catch up with a headset that wouldn't stop crackling and legs that hadn't fully forgiven him for the crash, rounded the corner of the service corridor just in time to see the fight properly for the first time — Ramesh Chauhan planted like an actual bulldozer across the platform three exit, lower body already shifted into something huge and horned and immovable, taking a glancing blow from the creature's branch-claw arm without so much as sliding backward; Meher a blur overhead, talon-legs raking twice across the creature's back in passes too fast to properly see, forcing it to keep turning, keep exposing new angles; and Aakash, hanging back at the corridor's edge, one hand pressed to his own sternum like he could feel the wound in his own chest instead of the creature's.
It was working, in the ugly, grinding way containment ops apparently worked. It was not working fast enough.
The creature broke through Ramesh's block by simple mass, shouldering past him into the wider concourse, and for one terrible second Shyam thought this was it, this was the crowd, this was the thing Rathore had specifically ordered against — and then Farah Sheikh was there instead, stepping out of a shadow that hadn't seemed deep enough to hide a person a moment before, murmuring something low that Shyam didn't catch, and the creature's next stride landed wrong, off-balance, missing its footing entirely as though the ground itself had decided not to cooperate with it.
Curse ability, Shyam thought, distantly, professionally, even with his heart still hammering. Lowered accuracy. That's — that actually works.
It still wasn't enough. The creature, off-balance but not down, wrenched itself sideways through a maintenance gate and out into the dark beyond the terminal's floodlights, and by the time the team funneled through after it, there was nothing left to funnel toward. Just torn chain-link, one more soulless body left standing forgotten against a wall, and the sound of something enormous crashing away through scrubland that Delhi's urban planners had never quite gotten around to lighting.
"It's gone," Birju said, arriving last, breathing hard. "Captain, it's gone, we lost it."
Rathore didn't answer immediately. She was looking at something else — past the chain-link, past the scrubland, at the thinning edge of the small crowd that had gathered at a safe distance to watch, the way Delhi always gathered to watch anything, phones half-raised, faces lit blue-white by their own screens.
Shyam followed her gaze and understood, a half-second before she said anything, what she was actually looking at.
Almost everyone in that crowd was panicking, in the ordinary human way people panic near something they don't understand — pushing back, shielding children, filming with hands that shook too badly to hold the frame steady.
One man wasn't.
He stood near the back, unremarkable, a laptop bag over one shoulder, watching the chain-link gate with an expression Shyam had only ever seen before on his own advisor's face during a particularly interesting seminar — not fear. Interest. He wasn't filming. He was simply watching, timing something on his wrist with the small, private satisfaction of a man confirming a hypothesis.
"Captain," Shyam said quietly. "Third row back, laptop bag. He's not scared."
Rathore's head turned a fraction. "I see him."
By the time she'd said it, he was already moving — unhurried, almost lazy, angling toward the metro station exit with the easy confidence of someone who had never once in his life needed to run from anything in this city.
"Kaur, cut him off—"
Meher was already airborne, dropping toward the station exit in a controlled dive that should have ended the question entirely. It didn't. The man simply wasn't there anymore by the time she landed — not fled, not hidden, just absent, the way a name slips out of a sentence, leaving Meher standing alone on the empty stairwell with nothing to show for the pursuit except a single object left behind on the top step, placed there, Shyam understood with a cold, sinking certainty, on purpose.
A slim data card, matte black, no markings at all except a symbol scratched into its casing — a symbol that, when Shyam crouched to look at it properly under Meher's torchlight, resolved into the same unreadable cuneiform-like script every UMA carried burned into its own flesh.
Nobody said anything for a moment.
"Bag it," Rathore said finally, voice very controlled. "We didn't contain the target, we didn't catch whoever that was, and now we're standing here holding an invitation." She looked at Shyam, and for the first time all night, the look wasn't checking whether he was hurt. It was something closer to this is now officially your problem too.
"Welcome to Team 7, Raj," she said. "This supposedly easy job looks not so easy anymore."