"You have the coverage map."
"I have the coverage map."
She produced a data chip — standard issue, nothing classified about the chip itself. But the data on it was the AIN's own surveillance blind spots: a route map of every place in India where you could move without being seen.
"Delhi via the ghost routes," Zara said, studying the map. "Three days. Same method as before."
"There's a complication," Aditi said. "I can't come. The moment I don't show up for work tomorrow, the Command Centre will flag my absence. They'll check the logs. They'll find inconsistencies — not the crystal, but the data access patterns. I've been careful, but three years of careful leaves traces for someone who knows where to look."
"How long before they connect it to you?"
"Forty-eight hours. Maybe less if Rathore is personally monitoring."
"Then we have forty-eight hours to get from Hyderabad to Delhi, infiltrate the EBS centre, and broadcast to the nation."
Aditi nodded. Then she did something unexpected. She removed her Band.
The gesture was quiet — just a woman unclasping a device from her wrist. But the significance was seismic. Three years undercover, three years of maintaining the fiction of a compliant citizen, three years of wearing the chain that she was helping to break. She placed the Band on the table beside the crystal.
"I'm a Zero now," she said. "Officially. By choice."
"You can't undo this," Zara said.
"I know. But I can't be a Zero who still wears a Band. It's... contradictory."
She looked at Karan. "Your mother. Is she in Delhi?"
"Yes. Why?"
"When this goes public — if it goes public — Rathore will retaliate. Not against us; we're already ghosts. Against our families. He'll use the system to punish anyone connected to us."
Karan hadn't thought about this. His mother — Asha Mehta, sixty-one, retired school teacher, Aadhaar Score 812, living in a one-bedroom flat in Dwarka. She didn't know he'd been deleted. She'd been calling his phone for a week and getting dead air. She was probably worried. She was probably sitting in her kitchen, drinking chai, wondering why her son wasn't returning her calls.
"We need to warn her," Karan said.
"We need to warn all of them. Every Zero's family. Before the broadcast."
Zara nodded. "I'll activate the Shadow Grid. We have runners in every major city. They can reach the families physically — in person, not through any network the AIN can intercept."
The plan crystallised. Forty-eight hours. Three legs: the journey to Delhi, the infiltration of the EBS centre, and the broadcast itself. Three people who didn't exist, carrying evidence of a conspiracy that reached the highest office in the country, racing against a system that was designed to find and eliminate exactly this kind of threat.
They left Hyderabad at midnight. Gurpreet's truck was waiting at the old city's southern gate, loaded with mangoes that nobody had ordered and three passengers that nobody could see.
The highway stretched north. Delhi was sixteen hundred kilometres away. The clock was ticking.
And somewhere in the AIN Command Centre, a monitoring algorithm was processing Aditi Kapoor's absence and beginning the slow, methodical work of connecting dots that would lead, inevitably, to the conclusion that its most dangerous enemy had been inside the building all along.
