The "controlled, supervised access" given to the forensic data journalist, a relentless woman named Aparna, was like dropping a lit match into a parched forest. She didn't just ask questions; she followed the data's scent with the tenacity of a bloodhound. Her series, "The Silent Numbers," began not with accusations, but with a simple, devastating graphic: a map of the Gujarat town overlaid with the Arogya health anomaly data, time-aligned with the incinerator's operational start date. The correlation was visual, undeniable.
She didn't stop there. Using public records and leaked environmental audit reports (sourced mysteriously, but verifiably), she cross-referenced the plant's emissions logs with wind patterns. She interviewed families from the anomaly clusters, their stories giving human faces to the abstract biomarkers. She confronted the plant's owners and the local pollution control board with her findings, recording their spluttering denials and bureaucratic stonewalling.
The story detonated. It was no longer a quiet data point in Harsh's war room; it was a national scandal. The stock of the industrial house plummeted. The opposition in parliament erupted. The National Green Tribunal took suo moto cognizance.
And the backlash, this time, was not from foreign lobbies or domestic rivals. It was from the system itself.
A week after Aparna's third article published, a convoy of black SUVs with government plates arrived at the Foresight Institute. It wasn't Sharma's quiet, single emissary. It was a team from the Central Bureau of Investigation, armed with a search warrant. The charge: "Violation of the Official Secrets Act and the Data Protection Act through unauthorized aggregation and disclosure of sensitive national infrastructure and health data."
They didn't raid the servers—the Golden Share and the sovereign nature of the core tech made that politically impossible. They seized workstations. They served notices to Bhavna, to the Arogya data heads, and to Harsh himself, summoning them for questioning. The message was clear: you have overstepped. You have used your tools to scrutinize the powerful. That will not be tolerated.
Simultaneously, a flurry of legal notices arrived from the industrial house, suing the Harsh Group for defamation and "tortious interference with business expectancy," claiming their data was "manipulated and maliciously correlated."
The Garden was under assault from two sides: the state's legal might and private capital's ruthless litigation.
Harsh sat in his office, now shadowed by the presence of CBI officers cataloguing files in the outer room. Vikram Joshi stood guard at the door, his face a thundercloud. "They can't touch the tech. So they're going after the people. They want to make an example."
Priya called, her voice tight with fear. "They're outside the house, Harsh. Reporters. Vans. Should I take Anya to her grandmother's?"
"Yes. Go now." His voice was calm, a stark contrast to the storm raging around him. This was the cost. He had known it might come. He had opened the gate to let the sunlight in, and with it had come the locusts.
He made two calls. First, to Elias Thorne. "Your prediction about weaponized transparency has come home to roost."
Thorne's sigh was audible over the secure line. "You poked a bear, Harsh. A bear with lawyers and police powers. The Pioneer Institute's legal framework protects us in Switzerland. You have no such protection. My advice? Settle. Retract. Make the data go away. You can't win a war against your own state."
The second call was to Sharma. This time, the bureaucrat's voice held no cryptic calm, only cold fury. "You were given a partnership to safeguard the nation's interests, not to become a rogue investigative agency. You have jeopardized a major industrial project, created a political firestorm, and compromised our liaison. The protection you enjoyed is now forfeit. You are on your own."
The line went dead. The General had withdrawn his troops.
Alone in the besieged silence, Harsh did not feel fear. He felt a strange, crystalline clarity. This was the true test of the Garden. Not whether it could grow in calm soil, but whether it could survive being scorched.
He would not retract. He would not settle. The data was true. The tool had worked exactly as designed: it had revealed a hidden cost. To deny it now would be to murder the soul of everything he had built.
He stood up, walked past the CBI officers, and went to the Udaan lab. He found Rohan and his team, their faces pale with shock.
"We're going to do a live lesson," Harsh told them. "For every student on Udaan. We're going to show them what happens when you use data to speak truth to power. We're going to show them the warrants, the lawsuits, the intimidation. And we're going to show them the data that started it all. We're going to teach them the price of the compass."
He was no longer just defending a company. He was defending an idea. And he would defend it not in the closed courtrooms or the secretive ministries, but in the open, in the digital town square he had helped build. The Gardener would let the locusts come. And he would show the world what happened to a Garden that had sunk its roots too deep to be torn out by mere storms.
(Chapter End)