Chapter Four The Twelfth Man #2
Vinay stopped near the door, resting a wrinkled, sun-browned hand on Hasan’s shoulder.
He didn’t ask if Hasan knew what he was doing.
If he felt any doubt at all, he didn’t show it.
Instead, he said, “I was there, when we lost your father. I know it’s not the same, but it’s hard nonetheless. I’m here if you need to talk.”
Hasan’s throat tightened. “We haven’t lost Paranjay,” was all he said. Not yet. The elder man squeezed his shoulder, then left.
Hasan turned around to see Harithi still there, her gaze pinned on Zeyar.
She rose, readjusting the dupatta on her shoulder.
“Splitting up is a bad idea,” she warned.
Turning, she addressed Hasan. “You’re wasting your time.
You boys will need to get more creative than bribery and violence if you want to get out of this. ”
Hasan tightened his jaw. On any other day, in any other crisis, he’d have been more appreciative of Harithi’s direct counsel. But today, it was all he could do not to make a scathing retort back. “Noted.” He tilted his head at the door. “You’re dismissed.”
She pressed her lips together but left without another word.
Zeyar pushed off the wall and collapsed into her empty chair, a cigarette dangling between his lips as he fumbled around for a lighter.
Hasan’s temper cooled. He reached over and used a pinch of his daivyakhi to light the end of his brother’s cigarette.
“Thanks,” Zeyar mumbled, inhaling deeply.
Hasan didn’t say anything back.
Zeyar exhaled, blowing a thin stream of smoke into the air. With his eyes closed, he said, “I should have insisted that he make naumya before he left. If he’d been at full strength, he wouldn’t have been captured.”
Hasan’s stomach twisted around something sharp. He knew Zeyar had been affected—how could he not be?—but he hadn’t imagined that his brother was shouldering blame alone.
“Neither of us knew,” he said. “How could we?”
“Well, I should have guessed,” Zeyar said, acid in his voice. “After all, I haven’t yet bribed all the police in the city. Just another weak spot I left open.”
“Zeyar—”
“Don’t, Hasan. Just don’t.”
“Fine.” Hasan extended a hand. “At least give me a cigarette, then.”
That earned him a raised brow. “You hate smoking,” Zeyar said, but he gave Hasan a cigarette anyway.
That much was true. Hasan grimaced around the foul taste of tar.
But he’d lost one elder brother, and all he wanted was to be with the other—even if they didn’t know how to speak to each other without drawing blood.
Cigarettes were safer than words. So, for the length of one cigarette, he sat with his brother, chest aching with grief, and inhaled smoke as the seconds turned to ash.
· · ·
Two days later, the telephone rang again. Hasan picked it up on the second ring. On the other end of the line was Azha, a vasudhakt woman who served as one of the gang’s healers.
“I’ve got the twelfth crewmate,” she said. “Come quickly.”
Hasan and Zeyar wasted no time. Zeyar drove them toward the industrial sector of the city, where a plethora of makeshift healers’ dens had cropped up in response to the countless daily factory accidents.
The air grew impossibly thicker, the stench of factory smoke clogging their lungs.
Eventually, the backstreets grew too narrow, forcing them to get out and walk.
Coal dust clung to the soles of Hasan’s shoes.
Ahead of him, Zeyar meticulously avoided the oil-slick puddles, mouth twisted in distaste.
When they got to the healer’s, a dark-skinned woman in her thirties greeted them, her hair tied back into two tight braids.
“Azha,” Hasan greeted her. “Where is he?”
“With Madam,” Azha said. “The wound was infected. I needed her expertise.”
Zeyar and Hasan exchanged an uneasy glance.
There was only one woman Madam could be, and it was the last person they wanted involved right now: their mother.
They’d both agreed not to tell her about the arrest until they’d settled on a plan of action, hoping to spare her—and themselves—for as long as possible.
If she knew they had no plan, she would be merciless.
Given that she had trained most of the healers affiliated with their gang, they should have known that there would be no excluding her for long.
Azha led the brothers into a den, the makeshift beds separated by an old curtain. Hasan yanked it aside, the curtain rings screeching against the bar.
Sure enough, Hasan’s mother sat tending to her patient, strands of her black-and-silver bun coming loose as she bent over him.
Rohini Devar was a woman of middling height and a soft build, though none who knew her would ever describe her as such.
She’d once been a fearsome fighter in the gang, her intuition sharper than her blades, but as Hasan and his brothers had taken over, she had retired to the countryside, where she’d repurposed her intimate knowledge of human anatomy to teach other women the basics of healing.
His ma straightened to see who had arrived, leaving the patient’s face clear: Paranjay’s first mate, Sunil.
Surprise winded Hasan—not because he was particularly shocked to see Sunil, but because he hadn’t realized he was harboring hope like a dagger in his boot, and that misguided optimism had just stabbed him in the foot.
He’d known it was impossible for Paranjay to be anywhere but in the clutches of the police, but there had still been opportunity for a miracle.
Not anymore, not with Sunil lying in front of him. An ugly gash on the side of his head wept pus, the stench so putrid that Hasan gagged involuntarily. Sunil whipped his head up at the sound, catching sight of Hasan. A medley of emotions played across his face: shock, guilt, fear, and anger.
“You told them I was here?” he demanded. “What happened to patient confidentiality?”
“Unfortunately, you only get that in a real hospital,” Zeyar sneered, falling in line beside Hasan. “Why so nervous, Sunil? We aren’t the police.”
Sunil pressed his mouth into a flat line. “If you’re here to blame me for what happened, then don’t bother.”
“No one’s here to assign blame,” Zeyar said. “We want to know what happened.”
Sunil crossed his arms over his chest. “Swear you aren’t here to punish me.”
“We’d only punish you if you did something wrong.” Hasan narrowed his eyes. Sunil’s caginess reeked worse than his infected wound. “Got something to hide?”
Zeyar held up his hand. “You have my word. We won’t harm you. Now, tell us what happened.”
Sunil sighed, relenting. “We were loading the ship. It took longer than normal because Paranjay was late, so we had to load his share, and then we had a couple of new boys with us on this trip who were moving slowly. Paranjay was doing the final check in the hold when several cops—maybe twenty, thirty?—came up the dock. Most of them had nightsticks, some had handguns. It wasn’t much of a fight.
Paranjay tried to use his daivyakt to suffocate the officers, but he ran out quickly, and they overwhelmed him.
One of them caught me in the back of the head, but he didn’t knock me out fully.
I jumped off the dock and swam under the boat.
I had enough daivyakhi to create an air bubble there, so I waited—hey! ”
Hasan launched himself at the first mate, striking him in the face with a satisfying crack.
“No attacking my patients,” his ma scolded, shoving him away. She lifted Sunil’s chin, examining Hasan’s handiwork as he cursed.
“You gave me your word!” Sunil cried. Blood oozed from both a broken nose and split lip, staining his teeth.
“You ran away, you coward!” Hasan moved to strike him again, but Zeyar grabbed him by the back of the jacket. “You could have fought, but instead you chose to save your own sorry hide.”
“There was nothing I could do!” Sunil said. “They outnumbered us. What did you want me to do?”
“You could have come to us!”
“That is true,” Zeyar said, turning to Sunil. “Why did you hide for two days instead of coming for help?”
“I didn’t know what black deal you’d strike with the pigs,” Sunil spat at Zeyar. “You’d trade anyone if you stood to profit. Obviously, Paranjay is the same, too, sending his thug brothers after me instead of dealing with me himself.”
“He can’t come after you because he’s in jail,” Hasan snapped.
Zeyar winced. His ma went deadly still. Even Sunil gaped in shock, blood continuing to drip unnoticed from his broken nose.
His ma recovered first. “Paranjay is in jail?” she whispered.
“He is.” Hasan jabbed a finger at Sunil. “Because this gutless idiot abandoned his crewmates.”
“The only people responsible for Paranjay’s kidnapping are you!” Sunil sat upright, glaring at the brothers. “I told him smuggling that much opium was dangerous, but you lot wanted to make more money per trip. It’s your own greed that—”
Sunil stiffened. A scalpel gleamed at the base of his neck, sharp as the look in Rohini’s eyes. “Get out of this clinic, before I cut you open to see if you’re truly as spineless as you act.”
“Madam!” Azha exclaimed. She’d been so quiet the whole time, Hasan had nearly forgotten she was there. “What about the healer’s code? Do no damage, take no sides.”
“Oh, damn the bloody code,” Rohini said, but she lowered her scalpel. “You can finish draining his wound, Azha. I’ve gotten most of it, anyway.” She turned to look at her sons. “I want to speak to you both. Now. Outside.”
“Now you’ve done it,” Zeyar whispered as they followed their ma. “Great job. Magnificent.”
Now that his rage had ebbed, Hasan found himself regretting his outburst. “She was going to find out eventually.”
Rohini stopped in the hall, turning her furious gaze on the two of them. “What’s this about your brother being arrested?”
Zeyar gave Hasan a look that said, All you, buddy.
Hasan sighed. “Paranjay was supposed to make another shipment,” he said. He recapped Sunil’s story, combining it with the information Raman had given them to lay out what they knew thus far.
Their ma’s eyes flashed. “You’ve known about this for two days, and your first thought wasn’t to call your mother?”
“We didn’t want to worry you until we could get a plan in motion,” Zeyar said.
“And did you?” Rohini put her hands on her hips.
Hasan blinked. “Did we what?”
She narrowed her eyes at them. “Did you get a plan in motion?”
“Yes,” Zeyar bluffed.
“Okay,” she said slowly. “So, what is it?”
“We’re going to raid the precinct,” Hasan announced as Zeyar said simultaneously, “We’re going to bribe the guards.”
Hasan winced. “We have two plans,” he recovered. “Just to cover all our bases.”
“Dual strategies.” Zeyar nodded emphatically. “A two-pronged approach.”
“Okay,” Rohini said. She stared at them dubiously, her sharp-eyed scrutiny piercing through their subterfuge. “I don’t know what the hell you boys are doing. But you’re adults now, and you have to learn how to take care of each other without my interference.”
“We are,” Zeyar promised. “We have it under control.”
“Good.” Their ma smiled dangerously. “Then prove it. Get your brother back, or die trying. Am I understood?”
Hasan swallowed. “Yes, Ma. Understood.”