Razor’s hand trembles as he holds out a small lead-lined vial. "This is the decoy," he wheezes. "The real hard drive… Mira has it. But she doesn't know it's set to auto-delete at sunrise unless I input a code."
Zara doesn’t argue. But she tosses Mira a second magazine. "That’s eleven minutes. Use the extra minute to run."
Razor laughs, black blood trickling from his nose. "I’ll give it to her . Face to face. You think I trust a soldier who couldn't save her own squad?"
Mumbai. Three days before the monsoon.
Zara – 24, former Para-SF spotter, dishonorably discharged for punching a superior who sold out her unit. Now she runs off-book extractions from a garage in Dharavi. She takes the job because the pay is twelve years of rent, and because the photo attached is of her younger sister, Neha.
Mira steps out of the shadows. She’s holding a .22 caliber Beretta—tiny, but pressed to Razor’s throat. "You trust me ? I built the canister that killed that village."
The low-res video file on the USB. It shows Neha, tied to a chair, mouth taped, eyes wide. Overlaid text: "Deliver the hard drive to the Bandra helipad. Or she bleeds first. And so does everyone else." Girls.Guns.and.Blood.2019.480p.WEB-DL.HIN-ENG.x...
A custom-modified IWI Tavor X95 with a smart scope that links to Zara’s retinal implant. It can’t be sold; it can only be fired by her. It’s also the only thing that can punch through the Sen-Gupta security droids’ ceramic plating. Zara calls it "The Divorce."
Zara lowers her gun slightly. She knows that look. It’s the same one she saw in the mirror after she walked away from her court-martial.
16 hours left. Three factions hunting them: Sen-Gupta’s private military, a rival cartel who wants Xanthe for themselves, and a corrupt police unit that wants to pin everything on "two hysterical girls with a gun." Razor’s hand trembles as he holds out a
Zara looks at Mira. Mira nods once.
At the helipad, sunrise bleeding orange over the Arabian Sea, Neha is alive—but the hard drive is a fake. The real Xanthe data is still in Razor’s dying blood. To destroy it permanently, they need to burn his body at over 3,000 degrees. That means blowing up the cold storage unit with him inside.
"I was seventeen and I wanted my father to say 'good job' just once." Mira’s voice cracks. "Instead, he sold it to a warlord. So I stole it back. And now everyone wants me dead." But she doesn't know it's set to auto-delete