Vansh prided himself on never losing his temper, but rage rushed through him. “Okay, we have a lot of things we need to sort out. It’s nothing a good lawyer can’t do.”

Yash would be the best person to go to. But of course even mentioning Yash would send Hari into panic again. When he’d met Makayla, the lawyer on Naina’s team, she’d told him that she was particularly adept at making sure people weren’t preyed upon in this exact way. Bingo. “I know someone who can help us.”

“No. No one can help me. Jim told me no one can help me. He warned me against lawyers.”

“We’re going to take care of Jim, okay? Tell me what happened.”

Turned out Hari had architected and created a tool that aggregated and analyzed people’s social media data to predict their buying and voting behavior. As the company grew, Hari had become more and more depressed about the state of the world and what the social media data was telling him about it.

Then Jimbo—who seemed like a shark who’d brought nothing to the table and zeroed in on Hari as an easy target in the first place—had cheated Hari out of his part of the business and siphoned off all the company’s money, saddling Hari with all the debt, leaving him hounded by collectors. In the end Hari had been evicted from his home and had ended up on the street.

He’d been living on the streets when he got a call back from Nisha about his application to work on Yash’s campaign. He’d used the community showers and somehow gotten himself together for the interview because he’d become obsessed with Yash’s speeches.

Hari’s faith in him had spoken to Yash, not to mention his genius with numbers, and he’d gotten the job. But working on a political campaign didn’t pay enough to afford rent for a place that was within walking distance from the campaign office in San Francisco, nor was it enough to pay rent somewhere else and then buy a car, with a nonexistent credit history. So Hari had worked on the campaign for nine months while living, literally, down the street.

The only shred of good news in this infuriating business was that Hari had spent most of the time he’d worked on the campaign sleeping at the office because he had worked almost around the clock. After Yash won, he’d been back on the street with no income.

A familiar fire was starting to burn inside Vansh. The injustice of it was sickening. Hari needed help. Thousands of others like him needed help.

“You still have a laptop, correct?” Vansh asked.

Hari nodded and squeezed his backpack with the kind of reverent affection one saved for one’s firstborn child.