By the time Shyam made his way toward the debrief room, the ache in his wrist was gone entirely — no stiffness left, not even the itch of new skin knitting closed. He'd noticed it changing the bandage after breakfast and sat on the edge of his bunk a full minute, turning the joint over in the light before he trusted it enough to leave the wrap off.
He caught Dr. Sen in the corridor outside, mug still in hand, and mentioned it half as a joke.
"You're on the agent," she said, like it was obvious. "Everyone non-combat is, after a field injury. Did nobody explain that to you?"
"Nobody explained a lot of things to me, ma'am. I've been assuming that's normal."
"It's not normal, it's just Delhi." She stirred her tea, unbothered. "The agent's derived from Deformed Tree-footed extract — the same trait that lets Verma regrow half his own chest. We can't give ordinary people superhuman strength, but we can give them superhuman recovery, and honestly that matters more, in this line of work. A researcher who heals like Aakash's class can survive a mistake that would end anyone else's career in one op." She glanced at him over the rim of her cup. "You've had two doses already. So has Kajal. So have I, more times than I'd like to admit."
"Is there a downside?"
"There's always a downside." She didn't elaborate, and something in the way she didn't made Shyam decide not to push it before they reached the debrief room door.
The debrief room at thirteen hundred hours had the specific, over-bright hush of a meeting everyone had shown up to and nobody wanted to be in. Rathore stood at the head of the table, data card sealed in its evidence sleeve propped against a tablet screen behind her, the cuneiform-like scratch on its casing magnified and rotating slowly for the room to study.
"Forensics couldn't crack the encryption," Rathore said, without preamble. "Whatever's on it is locked behind something beyond our current tools. But the casing itself was traced. Manufacturing signature matches a supplier network operating out of Old Delhi — Sadar Bazaar, specifically, under a front dealing in electronics parts."
"Black market," Farah said. It wasn't a question.
"Confirmed black market, tangential UMA involvement, unconfirmed how deep." Rathore's gaze swept the table. "Given what we now know — a man who provoked a Restricted UMA into Tactical crossing on purpose, and walked away from Meher Kaur in the open — I'm treating this as connected until proven otherwise. We need eyes in that market. Quiet ones."
"With respect, Captain," Birju said, and Shyam heard the careful weight he put behind the word respect, the sound of a man choosing his phrasing with real effort, "whose op is this? Ours, or IARF's?"
The room went very still.
"Mine," Rathore said, flat, immediate, no hesitation at all. "DARF territory, DARF jurisdiction, DARF call. IARF sent tactical support for one op, Havildar, not a change of ownership. If you have a concern, say it plainly instead of asking me sideways."
Birju held her gaze for a second longer than was entirely comfortable, then looked down at the table. "No concern, Captain. Just wanted it said out loud."
"It's said." Rathore didn't blink. "Pairings for the market op. I want low visibility, two-person teams, nothing that reads as official." Her eyes moved down the roster. "Yadav, with Chauhan. Pillai, with Bhatt. Kaur, with Verma."
Meher and Aakash traded a glance and a nod, easy, already sorted.
"Sheikh, solo. You know that market better than the rest of us combined, and you know how to disappear into it. That's not strength, that's terrain — and it's not a luxury I'm extending to anyone else tonight."
Farah inclined her head, once, unsurprised.
"Sen." Rathore's eyes stopped on Anya, and something in the room's temperature dropped again, the way it had in the mess hall that morning. "You'll need a partner too."
Nobody volunteered.
It wasn't dramatic — no one looked away pointedly, no one said anything at all — but the silence stretched two full seconds longer than any of the other pairings had taken, and Shyam felt it land in his chest like a small, specific weight. Ramesh studied the tabletop. Meher, for once, wasn't smiling. Even Ishita's serene stillness had gone a shade more deliberate, a woman very carefully not making eye contact with anyone.
"I'll go alone," Anya said into the silence, evenly, like it cost her nothing at all to say it. Shyam suspected it cost her something.
"You've been in this city four days, Sen." Rathore's voice stayed level, which somehow made it land harder than if she'd raised it. "Old Delhi doesn't care how fast you fly. It cares whether you know which lane doesn't have a second exit. You don't. Not yet."
Nobody at the table filled the silence that followed. Rathore's gaze moved instead, unhurried, and landed on Shyam.
"Raj goes with you."
He blinked. "Ma'am — I'm not combat personnel."
"You fired a mounted weapon at a Restricted-Mature UMA three nights ago and hit it, Raj. You've cleared the bar." Rathore's voice was perfectly level, perfectly reasonable, and Shyam understood — with the same cold, arithmetical clarity that had let him call the mutation timing back at the terminal — that this wasn't really the reason at all. Pairing a Tactical-Intermediate combatant with a proven field researcher instead of one of her own eight cost her nothing tactically. Anya barely needed backup. And it kept every one of her restricted-level fighters free, and paired with each other, and nowhere near the newest member of a team that had, without anyone officially declaring it, already split quietly down an invisible seam.
He looked at her face for some sign she knew that was what she was doing. Her expression gave him exactly nothing.
"Understood, Captain," he said, because there wasn't really another answer available.
Kajal found him afterward in the vehicle bay, running a final check on the car she'd be driving to the market's outer perimeter, and fell into step beside him without being asked.
"You looked like you wanted to say no back there," she said. It was, Shyam realized, the most words she'd said to him at once since they'd met.
"I wanted to say a lot of things back there."
"Good instinct not to." She popped the hood, checked something with brisk efficiency, closed it again. "For what it's worth — I don't care what the others are murmuring about factions. You put your body between a UMA and my colleague's overturned car when the smart, protocol-correct thing to do was drive away. I don't forget things like that. Neither does Dr. Sen. Neither does Anya."
"Is that what this is? A faction?"
"That's what everyone else has decided to call it, whether we asked for the label or not." She shrugged, unbothered in a way that made Shyam like her considerably. "Four people who happen to trust each other isn't a conspiracy, Raj. It just looks like one to people who are nervous about something else entirely."
She said it lightly enough, and Shyam almost let it go at that — except he caught, in the set of her jaw as she said it, something that suggested she believed it a great deal more than she was letting the lightness of her tone admit.
Anya was waiting by the gate when he came out, out of uniform, hair pulled back, looking — Shyam noted, and immediately filed the noting away somewhere he didn't intend to examine — entirely unremarkable in a way that had clearly taken real effort to achieve, a woman built for supersonic flight doing her best impression of someone who'd never run in her life.
"You don't have to like this," she said, without preamble, watching him approach. "Being assigned to me. I know what it looks like from where you're standing."
"I don't mind."
"You should mind a little. It's not fair to you." She fell into step as he passed, matching his pace instead of overtaking it, which he suspected was also an effort. "My mother thinks the world of you. I think — " she paused, choosing the words with more care than she'd shown all morning, " — I think I'd like to, given time. That doesn't mean I don't see what it's costing you with the rest of them."
"I've had worse costs than a few cold shoulders, Anya."
She glanced at him sideways at that, something sharpening behind her eyes — not suspicion exactly, but the specific attention of someone recalibrating an assumption. "That sounded like it meant something specific."
"Everything means something specific if you dig far enough." He kept his eyes forward, on the gate, on Old Delhi's noise already rising beyond it — horns, hawkers, the particular density of a city that had never once in its history agreed to be quiet. "Some digging's better left for later."
Anya didn't push. She only nodded, once, filing it away the same careful way Shyam suspected she filed everything, and together they walked out through the gate and into the crowded, indifferent, endlessly noisy heart of the old city, where somewhere among the electronics stalls and the shuttered lanes, whoever had left that data card was still out there, still watching, still one step ahead.