She was in her office at seven AM when Rao came to find her.
She had expected this. The files on her laptop were encrypted and uploaded to three separate cloud accounts. She had sent three messages: one to Sunita, one to a journalist whose investigative work she had been reading for two years, and one to her sister in Pune that said only: I love you and everything is fine and if anyone contacts you pretending to be me, it isn't.
She was drinking coffee when Rao walked in. He closed the door and sat across from her with the expression of a man trying to calculate something quickly.
"The Waghmare assessment has been rescheduled," he said. "The subject is not responding to contact."
"I see," she said.
"Whatever you're thinking, I need you to understand the full picture before you act on it."
"I would love to understand the full picture. Walk me through it."
"When I started this programme, it was for twenty donors. Carefully selected. For single kidneys — a person can live with one kidney—"
"It began with kidneys and it became hearts," she said. "It began with twenty people and it became four hundred and twelve. And the consent that exists in a situation where a man in this city is offered life-changing money for a piece of his body by people who know exactly what his body is worth — that is not consent, Sanjay, that is a transaction between parties who do not have equal power."
"The alternative was synthetics. BioForge livers that reject at a three-percent higher rate. Synthetic hearts that degrade in fifteen years. These are real clinical differences for real patients—"
"Who can pay fourteen crore rupees for a heart," she said. "And who, in your moral calculus, deserve a natural organ more than a twenty-eight-year-old labourer deserves to keep the heart he was born with."
The silence was complete.
