Shyam had seen Captain Ananya Rathore in uniform, in combat, invisible, scaled, and once — memorably — mid-command with blood on her collar and not a flicker of concern for it. He had not, until this exact moment, standing outside the changing rooms with a borrowed kurta hanging loose off his own shoulders, seen her in a plain grey salwar kameez with her hair down.
It undid something in his brain he hadn't expected to have undone.
She looked — he searched for the word and landed, unhelpfully, on ordinary, which was wrong the second he thought it, because there was nothing ordinary about the way she still stood like she was bracing for a strike that wasn't coming. But the sharpness that usually sat behind her eyes in the briefing hall had eased into something quieter, and for one unguarded second in the corridor light she looked less like a captain and more like a woman who might, on a different day in a different life, have simply been walking to a market to buy vegetables.
"You're staring, Raj," she said, without looking at him, and he understood immediately she'd developed a habit of catching him at it.
"Sorry, Captain. Wasn't expecting—" He gestured vaguely at all of her. "This."
"This is called plain clothes. It's meant to make you not stand out. If you keep looking at me like that, we're going to fail at the one job we came here to do."
He mumbled an apology and found somewhere else to look, which turned out to be an equally bad decision, because Anya chose that exact moment to step out of the other changing room in a plain kurti and jeans, hair braided back instead of loose for once, and the effect — Shyam thought, with the specific, helpless clarity of a man watching his own good sense leave the building — was somehow worse. Not because she looked more striking than Rathore. Because she looked so entirely, disarmingly normal, like someone he might have actually met at a university canteen, and it was strange and a little destabilizing to realize how much of her fierceness lived in the uniform rather than underneath it.
"What," Anya said, catching his expression, "do I have something on my face?"
"No. Sorry. You just look—" He gave up on finishing the sentence, which was probably the wiser choice.
"I look like someone who isn't wearing a flight harness, is what I look like," she said, not unkindly, and there was something almost shy in the way she tucked a loose strand of hair back, like she wasn't used to being looked at this way and hadn't decided yet whether she minded it.
It was Farah who broke the moment entirely, stepping out last, and Shyam actually blinked twice before his brain caught up with what he was seeing — Farah Sheikh, severe, precise, curse-forging Farah Sheikh, in a plain black burkha with a hijab pinned neatly at her jaw, looking, if anything, more at ease than he'd ever seen her.
"You're surprised," she said, reading his face without seeming to try.
"A little. I didn't expect—"
"Nobody does. That's rather the point." A small, genuine smile crossed her face, warmer than anything he'd seen from her yet. "It's very good for blending in, Raj. Nobody looks twice at a woman in a burkha in Sadar Bazar — they look straight past her, every time, which means I can stand in the middle of a black market conversation for twenty minutes and be furniture. Try that in tactical gear."
"I didn't know you—"
"There's a great deal you don't know about me," she said, still smiling, and somehow it didn't land as cold the way her silences usually did. "Ask sometime. I might even answer."
Rathore checked her watch, already moving toward the vehicle bay. "Enough. We're burning daylight standing here admiring each other's wardrobe choices." A pause, and something almost like amusement flickered at the corner of her mouth. "Though I'll admit, Sheikh, that's better tradecraft than half the training manual."
"Twenty years in this city taught me more than the manual ever did, Captain."
The drive to Sadar Bazar took forty minutes through traffic that seemed to actively resent their presence, Kajal navigating a route that avoided every obvious camera without ever looking like she was avoiding anything, and for once nobody in the vehicle was in a hurry to fill the silence.
"You two are quiet," Rathore said eventually, glancing at Shyam and Anya in the rearview mirror.
"Just thinking," Anya said.
"About the case?"
"About the case." A beat, and something wry crept into her voice. "Mostly about the case."
Farah, beside Shyam, made a small sound that might have been a laugh if she'd let it get any further than her throat.
"You're going to be insufferable about this, aren't you," Rathore said, not quite a question, eyes back on the road.
"I don't know what you mean, Captain."
"I think you know exactly what I mean."
Anya said nothing, which Shyam understood, with a small and entirely unhelpful lurch in his chest, to be its own kind of answer. He decided, firmly, that this was not the moment to examine that feeling either, and turned to look out the window instead, at Delhi sliding past in its usual chaos of colour and noise and heat, utterly unaware of what four of its own were driving toward.
"Sector layout," Rathore said, business returning to her voice as the market's outer edge came into view — narrow lanes crowding closer, electronics shopfronts stacked three deep with wiring and grey-market components, the whole district thick with the smell of solder and frying oil. "Three adjacent zones around the supplier front. I'll take the northern lane myself, personally — old contacts of mine still run a few stalls up there, people who won't talk to anyone they don't already know."
"And us?" Shyam asked.
"Sheikh takes the central lane, alone, same as we discussed. You and Sen take the southern stretch, near the loading yards — most public-facing, least dangerous, best place for someone who doesn't yet know how to disappear into this city to start learning." Rathore's eyes met his in the mirror, and for a moment there was something almost like concern under the professionalism, gone before he could be sure he'd actually seen it. "Stay together. Stay visible to each other, invisible to everyone else. If either of you sees anything that reads even slightly like that data card's design, you call it in before you do anything else. Understood?"
"Understood," Shyam said.
"Understood," Anya echoed, and there was nothing shy left in her voice at all now — just the flat, focused calm of someone gearing up for work, the fierceness sliding back over her like a second skin the moment the vehicle rolled to a stop.
Kajal pulled the car into a narrow side lane and killed the engine. For a moment nobody moved, the four of them sitting in the sudden quiet, Sadar Bazar's noise pressing in against the windows — hawkers, horns, the tinny overlap of a dozen radios playing a dozen different songs at once.
Then Rathore opened her door first, and the moment broke entirely, plainclothes and quiet contemplation replaced in an instant by the sharp, economical movements of four people about to do something that mattered.
"Comms check every fifteen minutes," Rathore said, already halfway out of the car. "Nobody goes dark on me. Not today."
She didn't wait for a response before disappearing north into the crowd, and a moment later Farah followed, black burkha swallowed almost instantly into the market's churn, gone the way she'd promised she would be — furniture, invisible, exactly where she wanted to be.
Anya looked at Shyam, and something passed over her face that he couldn't quite name — nerves, maybe, or anticipation, or something adjacent to both.
"Ready?" she asked.
"Not remotely," he admitted.
That, at least, got a real laugh out of her — bright, surprised, entirely unguarded — and together they stepped out of the car and into the noise and heat of Sadar Bazar, toward the southern lane, toward whatever was waiting for them among the loading yards and the grey-market stalls, and toward the first real thread of an answer neither of them yet knew how badly they wanted.