Aditi Kapoor was not what Karan expected.
He'd built an image — a rebel, a rogue engineer, someone who radiated defiance the way Zara did. What he got was a woman of thirty-nine who looked like every other senior tech professional in Hyderabad — well-dressed, composed, carrying the particular exhaustion of someone who worked fourteen-hour days in a secure facility and then went home to an apartment in Gachibowli where she fed a cat named Quantum and watched old Malayalam films to decompress.
They met in a park — Necklace Road, by Hussain Sagar Lake, at 6 AM, when the joggers were out and the surveillance density was lowest. Aditi was sitting on a bench, feeding breadcrumbs to pigeons, wearing the kind of expression that could be either peaceful contemplation or deep-cover espionage. In her case, both.
"You look terrible," she said to Karan by way of greeting. Three days in a truck had not improved his appearance.
"I've had a rough week."
"I've had a rough three years." She tossed a breadcrumb. A pigeon caught it mid-air with the aggressive competence of a Hyderabad pigeon. "Zara told me about you. Data analyst. Ministry of Urban Development. Accessed the Score Algorithm file."
"That's why I was deleted?"
"That file is a tripwire. Anyone who accesses it gets flagged. The system monitors the file's access log in real-time. When your credentials showed up, the deletion protocol was triggered automatically."
"Automatically? No human decision?"
"The protocol is autonomous. That's the beauty of it — from Rathore's perspective. No human needs to approve a deletion. The algorithm decides. The algorithm executes. No paperwork, no audit trail, no accountability. A person accesses restricted information, and the system eliminates the threat before any human administrator even knows it happened."
"So Rathore doesn't personally delete people."
"Rathore built the machine. The machine does the deleting. But Rathore decides what the machine considers a threat. He wrote the criteria. He defined the parameters. He chose which questions are too dangerous to ask." She paused. "And he chose to build a system where asking those questions means ceasing to exist."
"You've been inside for three years. Why haven't you gone public?"
"Because going public requires evidence. Not allegations, not theories — evidence. Code. Data. Proof that the deletion protocol exists, proof that it's been used, proof that it was designed deliberately and not as an accidental feature."
"And you have that proof?"
