The alarm never actually needed to ring. Amogh was awake, as he always was, a few minutes before four, his body long since trained out of requiring the sound at all, even after a night as short as the one before it had been.

He ran his usual six kilometres through streets still holding onto the last of the night's cool, the particular quiet of a city that hadn't yet decided to start performing itself for the day. His mind, unguarded at this hour in a way it rarely was anywhere else, drifted back over the previous night's work without his permission — the seizure inventory, Shinde's careful paperwork, the specific, satisfying click of a case closing exactly the way it was meant to. It was, in its own way, a good kind of tired to carry into a new day, the tired of having done something that mattered rather than simply having survived another twenty-four hours.