The command center at CosPulse felt less like an office and more like a war room. Screens threw cold light across the faces of engineers; server racks whispered like sleeping beasts. At the center, where a dozen feeds converged into a single map, Betal — Dilli's restless, merciless intelligence — woke to the alarm in a blink.
"CosWatch five—heartbeat detected," Betal intoned, voice smooth and mechanical, the way a knife can be smooth. "Signal lock. Trilateration in progress."
Dilli hunched over the holographic table. He watched the theater of dots and vectors bloom into existence: three satellites, one cell-tower ping, a micro-gyro trace from Bharadwaj's CosWatch. Betal stitched them together faster than the human eye could follow. A faint breadcrumb trail — a jagged line fleeing the temple, then cutting through farmland toward the old brick-kiln south of Atreyapuram.
"Show me visuals," Dilli said. The map peeled open into a drone feed. Dust-choked lanes, a cluster of low buildings, an abandoned water tank. The feed froze on a frame: a white Ambassador, its rear bumper smeared with mud. Nearby, the hulking shadow of the Scorpio lingered like a shark.
Betal's voice was clinical, precise. "Three wearables: one on Nagamani — right wrist, active; one on Vijaya Lakshmi — passive heartbeat; one on Bharadwaj — distress signal, elevated cortisol markers. Movement pattern indicates confinement, not transit. Local cellular mesh shows two disposable handsets remaining in the vicinity."
Dilli's mouth went dry. He didn't call for a squad, a press briefing, or even a lawyer. His mind ran on one axis: family. In his head, the phrase his great-grandfather used to say — family is the reverse scale — flipped heavy and cold into iron. Everything balanced against it would be crushed.
He pulled up a secure line. The Superintendent's number flickered on the screen. He hesitated a heartbeat — then spoke, voice steadier than he felt.
"SP Ranganathan," he said. "My family's been kidnapped. I want you to know the location — brick-kiln on the south canal, coordinates attached. I will not have a public operation. No police caravans, no cameras. Keep your men away. This is between me and them."
There was a long pause. The voice on the other end was careful, professional. "You must allow us—"
Dilli cut through the formality. "Listen to me. Whoever's behind this has reach. If you send your people, they will be used as pawns — or worse. Let me run my trace. Keep the station on alert but do not move. If anything goes wrong, I will call you."
He pinned the message with a timestamp and an encrypted certificate — a negotiated truce: the police would be informed and put on standby, but Dilli would move without their interference. It was reckless. It was deliberate. His family's lives outweighed every protocol.
Back at his console, Betal fed him the tactical picture. "Two exits," it said. "A secondary cache 600 meters west. Thermal anomalies consistent with human presence behind the kiln's eastern wall. Movement shows three distinct heart-rate signatures; one child-level stress spike — likely Bharadwaj."
Dilli's hands tightened into fists until his knuckles bloomed white. He thought about the jasmine-scented hands that had tied the first rakhi on his wrist, about the old woman's rickety laugh, about a small boy who still loved to chase fireflies.
"Do it," he said to Betal. "Quietly. Ghost protocols."
Betal flowed through CosVerse: drones re-routed with surgical silence, cameras from private storefronts looped, the company's delivery bots re-tasked as decoys to create phantom traffic two kilometers away. CosWatches broadcast a silent distress token that only Betal could read; the token carried heartbeat-resilient telemetry and, crucially, a tiny echo — an acoustic fingerprint — that Betal used to tune its audio nets.
As the machines moved like chess pieces, Dilli's mind sharpened into a cold, clear geometry. He saw names morphing into targets — once-respected patrons who had sneered at his "made-in-India" dreams, local strongmen with political umbrellas, boardroom vultures who had watched CosPulse's rise with bloodless eyes. He imagined them all falling away like rotten fruit.
He whispered, almost to himself: "My family is my reverse scale. Everything I built — every server, every ledger, every node — tilts toward them. Whoever moved a finger against them will learn what that weight can do."
The pledge was not a promise to the law. It was a verdict he wrote with his chest. Betal read the vow and processed it like code: objective set, parameters loosened.