Chapter Text
The air in Lyari did not just sit; it pressed. It was a thick, humid concoction of unwashed streets, burning rubber, and the metallic tang of dried blood, the kind of atmosphere that suggested if you didn’t kill the day, the day would certainly kill you.
Jaskirat Singh Rangi, a name that existed only in the classified, redacted files of a Delhi vault, lay on a cot that felt less like furniture and more like a torture device. He stared at the ceiling fan, which performed a rhythmic, agonizing squeak that sounded suspiciously like a death rattle.
"Jaskirat," he whispered to himself. The name felt like a sweater he’d outgrown three summers ago. It felt itchy, wrong, and perilously close to treason.
To the bureaucrats in New Delhi, this was 'Strategic Alignment.' To the men holding AK-47s in the gullies of Karachi, it was Kismat. To Jaskirat, or rather, the man who had been hollowed out and refilled with the persona of Hamza, he was Hamza now, had been Hamza for three hundred and sixty-four days, fate was just a piece of plasticine. It was bendable, provided you were willing to get your hands dirty enough to mold it.
Tomorrow was the hinge upon which his entire mission turned. Rizwan, another operative, had whispered the intel while they were huddled in Alam Bhai's place that doubled as a tactical meeting room: Naieem, the son of Rehman Baloch, was attending a wedding reception. Alam Bhai’s juice stall was positioned perfectly. It was a setup so cliché it could have been ripped from a trashy pulp novel: goons from Babu Dakait would attack, the hero would intervene, and suddenly, he’d be the flavor of the month in the gang hierarchy.
Fate, Hamza thought, closing his eyes, is a son of a bitch.
The hospital smelled of antiseptic and decay, a marriage of hope and hopelessness.
Hamza leaned against the cold, tiled wall, his white shirt ruined. A dark, tacky bloom of red covered his chest and sleeves. It wasn't his blood, but it might as well have been. He was vibrating with a mix of adrenaline and the dull, throbbing realization that the universe enjoyed irony.
He’d saved the kid, yes. But he’d saved the wrong one. Faizal. Rehman’s other son.
The chaos of the wedding attack, the screaming, the gunfire, the frantic scramble, had been a blur of choreographed violence. He had played his part to perfection, shielding the terrified boys, taking a few bruises to his arm to look authentic. But the collateral damage, Naieem, lay in the ICU, a cold, silent weight on the mission’s progress.
Faizal sat on a plastic bench three feet away, wrapped in Alam Bhai's arms, he was crying quietly, shoulders hitching. Hamza should have comforted him. The asset was salvageable. The mission, however, was circling the drain.
Strategic Alignment, he thought bitterly, watching a cockroach scuttle across the linoleum. Right.
Footsteps. Heavy. Multiple. The kind that didn’t belong to doctors or anxious relatives.
Hamza lifted his head.
Rehman Baloch walked like weather, inevitable, heavy with pressure, leaving stillness in his wake. In the posters plastered across Lyari’s corrugated walls, he looked fierce. In person, he was devastatingly intense. Rehman's eyes found Faizal first, and something in the gangster’s granite face cracked.
“Abbu,” Faizal choked, launching himself from the bench.
Rehman caught his surviving son, crushing him in an embrace that looked like it hurt. He spoke into Faizal’s hair, low and urgent, and Hamza caught fragments, thank God, my boy, thank God, before Rehman’s gaze lifted.
It landed on Hamza. Specifically, on the blood staining Hamza’s shirt.
The look was not gratitude. It was calculation. A predator assessing a new variable in his territory. Hamza felt his face slip into the mask he’d perfected in training camps where the instructors broke you down until you were nothing but useful clay. Blank. Helpful. Unthreatening. Just a Good Samaritan with convenient reflexes. Nothing to see here.
Faizal pointed at Hamza, speaking to Rehman as he wiped his face, babbling about the stranger who’d pulled him from the slaughter.
Great, Hamza thought, managing a weak smile that he hoped looked humble and not homicidal. Just what I needed. A testimonial.
Rehman broke away from his son, moving toward the room where Naieem’s body lay. As he passed Hamza, the air pressure changed. The don didn’t stop, but his eyes lingered, tracking the blood, the stance, the too-still hands. Then he was gone, leaving Hamza with the distinct sensation of having been weighed, measured, and temporarily filed for later consumption.
The silence that followed was orchestral in its tension.
Then: a throat clearing. Rough. Resonant. The sound of gravel being poured over silk.
Hamza turned.
Uzair Baloch.
He’d read the files. He’d seen the intel photos. But nothing prepared him for the reality of Uzair Baloch in a green kurta that should have looked soft but instead looked like armor. He was younger than Rehman, built leaner, with hands that hung loose and easy at his sides, the hands of a man who’d learned early that violence was just another language, and he was fluent.
But his eyes.
Oh, thought Hamza, feeling something dangerous and stupid flare in his chest. That’s unfortunate.
They were dark, yes, everyone in Lyari had dark eyes, it was hardly a distinguishing feature but they were expressive. Unfairly so. They held something that wasn’t quite kind, intelligence that cut quick, and a curiosity that made Hamza feel like a bug under a microscope who’d just done something unexpectedly interesting.
“Where are you from?" Uzair said. A question. A test.
Hamza straightened, letting his posture suggest deference, respect, and just enough nervousness to seem authentic. “Quetta,” he said, the lie rolling off his tongue with the ease of practice. “Came here last year. I work in Alam Bhai’s shop.”
The words sounded hollow. Quetta. A homeland he’d never seen, a heritage stitched onto him by Ajay Sanyal’s careful narrative design. It tasted like ash.
Uzair didn’t blink. He studied Hamza with the focus of a man who’d grown up in a place where mistakes got you killed before lunch. Then, slowly, a smile tugged at the corner of his mouth, not friendly, not warm, but amused. As if Hamza had told a joke only Uzair understood.
“You saved the kid,” Uzair said, gesturing vaguely at Faizal, who was now being fussed over by several armed men.
“Anyone would have,” Hamza replied, looking down at his bloody hands. Truth and lie, perfectly married.
“Anyone didn’t,” Uzair pointed out. “You did. While my nephew-” He stopped, glance flicking toward the room where Rehman had disappeared, the humor dimming for a fraction. “While Naieem.”
He didn’t finish. He didn’t need to.
Uzair turned to a man standing nearby, Donga, Rehman’s another goon, with a face like a kicked brick and hands like shovels. “Give him an Alvida,” Uzair said, voice dropping to that rough register again.
Return gift.
Hamza’s stomach executed a slow, nauseating somersault. In Lyari, an Alvida wasn’t a thank-you card. It was a test. A initiation. A gun pressed into your palm with the implicit understanding that you now owed the giver a debt paid in blood or loyalty, often both.
Donga stepped forward, holding out a handgun. The metal caught the light, obscene and beautiful.
Hamza looked at the gun. Then at Uzair. The bastard was smirking, head tilted, watching Hamza’s reaction with the avid interest of a cat deciding whether the mouse was worth the chase.
This is it, Hamza thought. The moment. The pivot.
If he refused, he was dead. If he accepted, he was in, deeper than the plan had ever intended. Hamza reached out. His hand didn’t shake. Thank you, training.
The gun was cold, heavier than expected. It fit into his palm like it had always belonged there, which was perhaps the most terrifying thing of all.
“What's your name?,” Uzair asked again, stepping closer. Close enough that Hamza could smell sandalwood and cordite.
"Hamza." He breathed in reply, his fingers still curled around the metal.
“You’ve got good hands, Hamza. Steady.”
“Thank you, Uzair Bhai,” Hamza said, the honorific slipping out with practiced ease.
Uzair laughed, a short, surprised sound. “Bhai, is it? Already?”
I’ve been calling you much worse things in my head, Hamza didn’t say. Including beautiful. Including dangerous. Including the reason I might fail this mission spectacularly.
“Just being respectful,” Hamza said instead, eyes downcast.
“Respect.” Uzair reached out, his fingers brushing Hamza’s shoulder where the blood had dried stiff. The touch was casual, intimate, deliberate. “Respect is earned, Hamza. You’ve earned a chance. Don’t waste it.”
Uzair stepped back, the moment breaking like a fever. “Get him a new shirt,” he told Donga. “And find out where he sleeps. Might need him.”
As he walked away, green kurta disappearing into the swarm of gunmen and grieving relatives, Hamza let out a breath he hadn’t known he was holding. The gun weighed down his pocket, an anchor dragging him toward depths he hadn’t trained for.
Faizal approached, tentative now, his eyes red but his voice steady. “Thank you,” he said again. “Truly. I won’t forget.”
You shouldn’t, Hamza thought. Because I’m lying to you. Because I’m going to use you. Because I’m already calculating how to turn your gratitude into access, and how to betray your father, and how-
He stopped. Looked at Faizal, just a kid, a kid who’d watched his brother die tonight.
“I’m sorry,” Hamza said, and meant it more than anything else he’d said all year. “About Naieem.”
Faizal nodded, throat working. Hamza guided him back to the bench, sitting beside him in the awful lighting, the gun a cold promise against his ribs.
Fate, he thought, listening to the symphony of grief and power around him, you absolute, unmitigated son of a bitch.
He’d come to Lyari to bend fate with blood and bullets. Instead, fate had handed him a dead heir, a living spare, and a gangster’s brother with eyes like dark water who looked at him like he was a puzzle worth solving.
Somewhere, buried under layers of Hamza, Jaskirat Singh Rangi whispered his own name into the stale air, but the sound was swallowed by the hospital’s hum, drowned out by the beating of his own traitorous heart that had stopped listening to reason the moment Uzair Baloch had smiled.
The mission was compromised. The target had shifted.
And Hamza, clutching his Alvida like a ticket to a show he hadn’t bought entry for, realized with terrible clarity that he was no longer sure which man he was betraying: the one who’d sent him, or the one who was watching him now from across the hall, green kurta a banner in the chaos, waiting to see what the boy from Quetta would do next.
Strategic Alignment, he thought bitterly, closing his eyes.
Kismat.
Same bloody thing.