They reached Delhi in forty-one hours. Gurpreet drove like a man possessed — or rather, like a man who'd spent thirty years on Indian highways and had developed reflexes that operated independent of conscious thought. They stopped twice: once for fuel (barter — two crates of mangoes for a full tank) and once because a herd of nilgai had decided the highway was a pleasant place for an evening stroll and wouldn't be persuaded otherwise.
Delhi was waiting. The city pulsed with the AIN's blue glow — signal towers on every major building, cameras on every intersection, Bands on every wrist. To Karan, who'd been outside the system for two weeks now, the city looked different. The glow wasn't welcoming. It was watchful. A city-sized eye, blinking blue.
The EBS transmission centre was beneath Raisina Hill — the seat of government, where the Rashtrapati Bhavan sat at the top and the Secretariat buildings flanked the ceremonial avenue. The Defence Ministry maintained the EBS as a separate system precisely because it was designed to survive the failure of everything else — including, theoretically, the AIN.
The entrance to the EBS centre was in a sub-basement of South Block — the Secretariat building that housed the Defence Ministry. Aditi had provided the layout: a service tunnel, accessible from the old Delhi Metro maintenance corridor beneath Central Secretariat station, that connected to the sub-basement through a ventilation shaft.
The ventilation shaft was the gap. The one piece of infrastructure that predated the AIN's security integration, that had been built in the 1930s by the British and never upgraded because it was structural — part of the building itself, not a system that could be digitised.
"The British built these tunnels to move classified documents between ministries without being observed," Karan said, navigating the corridor by flashlight. The walls were brick, the ceiling was arched, and the air smelled of eighty years of government secrets and accumulated dust. "And now we're using them for the same purpose."
"History is circular," Zara said. "The tools of the oppressor become the tools of the liberator. It's practically the national anthem."
The ventilation shaft was narrow — barely wide enough for a person to crawl through. Karan went first, because he was the thinnest. Zara followed. They crawled for forty metres through darkness, guided by Aditi's hand-drawn map — she hadn't trusted any digital format — counting ventilation grates until they reached the seventh one, which opened into a maintenance closet in the sub-basement of South Block.
From the closet to the EBS centre: one corridor, one locked door, one guard.
The guard was unexpected. Aditi's intelligence hadn't mentioned a physical guard — the EBS centre was supposed to be secured by digital locks, which Aditi had provided bypass codes for. But here was a man — mid-fifties, Defence Ministry uniform, sitting on a plastic chair outside a steel door, reading a newspaper.
A newspaper. Physical. Paper. In 2031.
Karan felt an absurd affection for this man. A guard who read newspapers was a guard who valued the analogue, and anyone who valued the analogue in 2031 was, in some small way, a kindred spirit.
"We need a distraction," Zara whispered.
"I have an idea," Karan said. "But it requires trusting a complete stranger."
He stepped out of the maintenance closet. The guard looked up. His hand moved toward his sidearm — not fast, but deliberate, the movement of a man who'd been security-trained but hadn't drawn a weapon in years.
"Ruk jao. Kaun ho tum?"
