The train to Ghansoli was a slow, grinding torment. Each lurch sent a fresh bolt of pain up his arm, the plaster cast feeling less like a shield and more like a brand announcing his vulnerability. He was a wounded animal moving through a forest of predators, and every glance from a fellow passenger felt like a threat.
Dr. Desai's words were his only compass. The empire's weakest point is its people.
He got off at the lonely station. The air here still carried the chemical tang of the shipyard, a constant reminder of the monstrous secret hidden within. He wasn't going to the main gate. That was suicide. Instead, he followed the doctor's directions to a cramped, dusty colony of company housing a kilometer away—rows of identical, boxy apartments where the foremen and junior managers lived.
He found the building and the apartment number. Sharma's apartment. The man whose life he had unintentionally stolen, and who was now living a gilded nightmare.
He knocked. The door opened a crack, held by a chain. A woman's tired, anxious face appeared. Sharma's wife.
"Yes?" she said, her voice thin with a worry that seemed permanent.
"I need to speak with Mr. Sharma," Harsh said, keeping his voice low, respectful. "My name is Harsh. I… I work at the docks. He knows me."
The mention of the docks made her flinch. She looked past him, scanning the empty corridor for watchers, before closing the door to unlatch the chain. The paranoia was already there, a third occupant in their home.
She led him into a small, sparsely furnished living room. A framed photo on a side table showed a younger, smiling Sharma with his wife and a bright-eyed boy. The same photo now looked like a memorial to a life they had lost.
Sharma emerged from a back room. He looked older than Harsh remembered, his shoulders stooped not from physical labor, but from an invisible, crushing weight. His eyes, once sharp with authority, were now hollowed out by exhaustion and fear. He saw Harsh's cast and a flicker of grim recognition passed between them—a shared understanding of the empire's brutality.
"Patel," he said, his voice flat. "You should not be here." His eyes darted towards the window. "They watch."
"I know," Harsh said. "I know about the shipyard. I know about Apex Holdings. I know about your son."
The words hung in the air, toxic and dangerous. Sharma's wife gasped softly and retreated into the kitchen, her hand over her mouth. Sharma's face went pale. He looked like a man who had been waiting for this knock on the door for months.
"You know nothing," he whispered, but the denial was weak, terrified.
"I know that a good man is in a cage," Harsh said, echoing Dr. Desai's words. "I know his son's life is the price of his silence. I am not here to threaten you. I am here because you are the only one who can help me break the lock on that cage."
Sharma laughed, a dry, hopeless sound. "Break it? You are a fool. There is no breaking it. The treatment… it is every month. In London. The cost… it is more than I could earn in ten lifetimes. He owns me. He owns my son's breath."
"What if there was another way?" Harsh pressed, leaning forward. "What if you could get your son the treatment and be free of him?"
"There is no other way!" Sharma's voice broke, a crack of raw despair. "Do you think I want this? Do you think I sleep at night knowing what I help them build in that place? My boy… he asks me what I do. What do I tell him?"
This was the opening. The crack in the armor that Dr. Desai had promised existed.
"You tell him his father is a hero," Harsh said, his voice low and intense. "You give me something. Something I can use. A way inside. A schedule. A manifest that doesn't match. Anything. And I will use it to bring it all down. And when it falls, I will make sure your son's treatment is paid for. Not by Swami. By me. I have money hidden away. Enough."
It was a breathtaking gamble. A promise made on resources he couldn't fully account for. But he saw the flicker in Sharma's eyes—not of hope, but of a desperate, impossible curiosity.
"You?" Sharma breathed, looking at the young man with the broken hand, the dockworker's clothes. "How?"
"Because I am not just a loader," Harsh said, the truth of his past life giving his words a sudden, unexpected weight. "I was a king before I was a slave. And I will be a king again. But I need a key. You have it."
He was asking Sharma to trade one devil for another. To bet his son's life on the word of a broken man.
The silence in the room was absolute. Sharma looked at the photo of his son. He looked at his terrified wife in the kitchen doorway. He looked at his own trembling hands.
He was the empire's weakest link. And Harsh had found the precise pressure point to apply.
Finally, Sharma spoke, his voice a barely audible whisper, as if the walls themselves were listening.
"The manifests are lies," he said. "The real bills of lading… they are kept in a separate safe. In Dalal's office at the shipyard. The combination is his wife's birthday. Seventeen, twenty-nine, four."
He had done it. He had given up a secret.
Harsh felt a surge of triumph so potent it momentarily eclipsed the pain in his hand. He had his thread.
"Your son will be safe," Harsh vowed. "You have my word."
As he slipped out of the apartment and back into the fading light, he knew the dice had been thrown. The war for his life, for his future, had finally, truly begun. He was no longer a victim. He was a rebel with a target, a combination, and a cause.
The weakest link had just broken. And the entire chain was about to unravel.
(Chapter End)