The emergency ward of the government hospital smelled of Dettol and old blood, and John was sitting on a steel bed in the corner with a cotton pad taped over his eyebrow, arguing with a nurse.
John- " I don't need an injection, sister. I need a burger. "
Nurse- " You need the injection first. Then you can need whatever you want. "
Alex stopped at the curtain.
John's left eye was swollen almost shut, purple and shiny like a ripe brinjal. His lower lip was split in two places. He was holding his right side with one arm, very carefully, the way people hold something that hurts to breathe around. His mother was sitting on a plastic stool beside the bed, still in her house nightie with a shawl over it, and her eyes were red.
When John saw Alex, he tried to grin. It looked terrible.
John- " Bro. You should see the other guys. "
Alex- " Were they hurt? "
John- " No. Not even a little. I was speaking metaphorically. "
His mother started crying again. John patted her hand with the arm that wasn't holding his ribs.
Alex sat on the edge of the bed. Up close he could see more. Knuckle marks on John's jaw. A long scrape on his forearm where he had gone down on the road. Two of his fingers were taped together.
He felt the anger come up from somewhere very deep, slow and hot, the way it used to come in Zaroth before a city burned. He held it. He breathed through it. The tube light above the bed flickered once and steadied.
Alex- " Tell me exactly. "
John told him. Four men on two bikes, waiting outside his building when he came back from buying bread at 8:30. They knew his name. They knew he was Alex's friend. One of them had a photo on his phone, a screenshot from John's own Instagram story from the race, the one where John was screaming with his arms around Alex. They had asked where Alex lived. John had said he didn't know. They had asked again with a fist. He had said he didn't know again.
John- " The fourth time, I said he lives in my heart. That's when the big one kicked me. "
Alex- " John. "
John- " What? It's true. "
He laughed and then stopped laughing very quickly, holding his side.
John- " Two ribs. Cracked, not broken. Doctor says I'm lucky. I don't feel lucky. "
The curtain moved, and Sara came in with Marina behind her. Sara looked at John's face and her mouth went thin and white. Marina put a bag of oranges and a packet of Good Day biscuits on the bed without saying anything, then sat down beside John's mother and held her hand.
Sara- " Who? "
John- " Malhotra. Vikram's dad. They said his name. "
Sara- " Because of a race? Because his son tripped himself on a race? "
John- " Because his son tripped himself in front of nine hundred thousand people. The video crossed nine lakh views this evening. Vikram is a meme now. Someone put the Titanic song on it. "
Marina- " I sent it to my cousins. "
Sara- " Marina! "
Marina- " Before. I sent it before. "
While they argued, Alex put his hand on John's side, over the ribs, as if he was only resting it there.
He couldn't heal John properly. Not here, with a nurse walking past every thirty seconds and John's mother watching. A real healing spell would knit the bone in front of everyone, and John would feel it, and questions would begin that Alex could not answer in a government hospital at ten at night.
So he did something much smaller. A thread of mana, warm and slow, like a hot water bottle. Enough to take the swelling down a little. Enough to stop a crack from becoming a break if John turned over badly in his sleep.
John blinked.
John- " Bro, your hand is very warm. "
Alex- " I ran here. "
John- " From your house? That's six kilometres. "
Alex- " I'm fast now. You saw. "
John looked at him for a second with his one good eye, like he was trying to remember something from a dream. Then the nurse came back with the injection and he forgot everything except fear.
They let him go home at midnight with painkillers and a sheet of instructions. Sara's driver took John and his mother. Marina went with them. Sara stayed behind on the hospital steps with Alex for one minute.
Sara- " You're going to do something. "
Alex- " I'm going to sleep. "
Sara- " Alex. I've known you since school. When you say I'm going to sleep in that voice, it means you're not going to sleep. "
He didn't answer. She sighed and pulled her dupatta tighter around her shoulders.
Sara- " Don't get hurt. That's all. And don't do anything that gets you in the newspaper. "
Alex- " I promise I won't be in the newspaper. "
It was a very precise promise, and Sara was too tired to notice how precise.
At 1:30 AM, Alex stood invisible on the roof of a three-storey building in the old market, looking down at a narrow lane full of shuttered shops.
Malhotra Finance was on the first floor, above a sweet shop that had closed for the night. A red board with white letters. Gold Loan. Personal Loan. Easy EMI. Under that, smaller, a phone number and a picture of Lakshmi with coins falling from her hand. The shutter downstairs was pulled down and padlocked. Upstairs, behind frosted glass, one tube light was still on.
Finding it had taken four minutes. A business that sends four men to beat a boy is a business that half the market knows about. He had asked one sleepy paan seller, using a little nudge of Hypnosis, and the man had given him the address, the owner's full name, and the fact that the owner's men had broken his brother's arm in 2022 over eleven thousand rupees.
Rajesh Malhotra.
Alex teleported through the frosted window into the office.
It was smaller than he expected. A big wooden desk with a glass top and a red velvet chair behind it. Two steel almirahs. A Godrej safe in the corner. A framed photo of Vikram in a cricket uniform holding a trophy, and another framed photo of a fat man with a thick moustache and three gold chains, shaking hands with a local MLA. On the wall, a calendar from a jewellery shop and a garland of dried marigolds around a picture of a god.
There was nobody inside. The tube light had simply been left on. Money was not a problem for this man.
Alex opened the first almirah.
Ledgers. Dozens of them, long red cloth-bound books, the kind accountants used in his grandfather's time. He took one out and opened it on the desk. Names. Addresses. Amounts. And beside every amount, in a separate column, the interest.
Ten percent.
Per month.
He turned the pages. A vegetable seller in the next lane who had borrowed twenty thousand for his daughter's wedding, three years ago, and had paid back ninety thousand so far, and still owed thirty. A widow who had pawned her mangalsutra for a hospital bill. A school peon. A rickshaw puller. Under some names someone had written a small note in red: visit. Under a few, pressure. Under one, from last winter: taken care of.
Alex took out his phone and started photographing pages.
It took forty minutes. He did all of them. Every ledger in the first almirah, every page, one by one, while the sweet shop's fridge hummed below him and somewhere in the market a watchman banged his stick on the ground every half hour to show he was awake. When the phone said storage almost full, he moved the photos to his laptop at home with a quick teleport and came back.
At 2:10, a bike stopped in the lane below.
Alex put the ledger back, closed the almirah, and stood still in the corner beside the god's picture. Footsteps on the stairs. A key in the glass door. A thick young man in a tight black T-shirt came in, yawning, with a cut on his knuckles that was maybe four hours old.
Alex looked at the knuckles for a long time.
The man opened the desk drawer, took out a bottle of Royal Stag and a packet of cigarettes, and answered his phone with his shoulder.
Goon- " Haan bhai. Yes, done. The fat one didn't talk. Doesn't matter. Boss says no need now. Boss has a better plan. Wednesday, after college, we pick the boy up straight from the gate. Boss wants to talk to him nicely first. "
He laughed at nicely, switched off the light, and left. The bike went away down the lane.
Alex waited until the sound was gone. Then he switched the light back on, because Malhotra always left it on, and a dark window would be noticed.
The safe he left for the end. A Godrej lock was nothing to someone who had broken Demon Lord seals, but a safe opened with no damage was a safe the owner would never stop thinking about. He put his palm on the door, felt the shape of the levers inside, and turned them gently, one by one, with a thin wire of mana.
Click.
Cash, in bundles. More gold than he had ever seen outside a royal treasury. Chains, bangles, earrings, each wrapped in a small plastic bag with a name written on a paper slip. Somebody's wedding gold. Somebody's mother's gold.
And on the top shelf, a cardboard file with a fresh rubber band around it.
It had his surname on it.
Alex opened it slowly. Inside was a stamp paper, a loan agreement, two pages. Borrower: his father. Amount: eight lakh rupees. Security: the house. His house. The house with the plastic chair on the step and his parents' photo on the shelf. Interest: ten percent per month. Witnessed. Stamped. Signed.
At the bottom of the second page was his father's signature.
It was almost perfect. Whoever had copied it had been careful. They had got the loop on the A right, and the way his father always pressed hard on the last letter, so that the pen nearly tore the paper.
Only one thing was wrong. The date beside the signature.
It was the day after his parents' funeral.