Time did not stop for Aarav. It never had.
One year and four months.
That was how long he had been in this house on this mountain, in this cold, in this life. He kept count the way he kept count of everything — quietly, precisely, without letting it show on his face.
He was fourteen months old now. He had the strength of a grown man.
It was, he had to admit, deeply strange. He would catch his own reflection sometimes in the water bowl they were given to wash with — a small, round-cheeked baby face staring back at him, dark hair, blue eyes, chubby fists — and feel a complete disconnect between what he saw and what he felt in his body. He could grip the table leg and lift his own weight off the floor without shaking. He could crawl the full length of the house and back without tiring. His hands, tiny as they were, closed with a force that had surprised even him the first time he had tested it properly.
But strength was not the only thing that had changed.
Somewhere around the tenth month, something had clicked into place in a way he hadn't expected. It wasn't just his muscles that the basic function had been quietly working on — it was everything. His coordination had sharpened until the clumsiness of infancy felt like a costume he was choosing to wear rather than a genuine limitation. His fingers moved exactly where he told them to. His balance, when he chose to use it, was solid. He could stand, walk, and stop without wobbling, though he was careful never to do any of this where That Man or That Woman might see.
And then there was his tongue.
That had been the real surprise. Around the eleventh month he had been whispering practice words to himself in the dark — he had been doing this for months, quietly mouthing vocabulary, working the muscles of his mouth the same way he worked everything else — and one night the words had simply come out right. Clear, shaped properly, landing where he aimed them.
He had said, in a perfectly formed whisper: "This is unexpected."
Then he had lain in the dark for a while, thinking about what to do with this.
He had decided to keep it hidden from That Man and That Woman. A baby who could speak clearly was a baby who attracted attention, and attention was the last thing he wanted. In front of them he babbled the way they expected him to babble, formless sounds and the occasional single word, perfectly ordinary.
But at night, in whispers, he talked to Meera.
Her language was limited. The environment hadn't been kind to its development. She knew perhaps thirty words, strung together in combinations that were more feeling than grammar. But she understood more than she could say — he had noticed that early — and she watched everything with an attention that missed very little.
It had started simply — pointing at objects, naming them quietly, repeating until she repeated back. She learned faster than he expected once someone was actually trying. He hadn't realized until he began teaching her how starved the environment had been — not just of food or warmth but of words, of someone actually speaking to her like she was a person worth speaking to.
One night, about four months in, he had pointed at himself.
"Aarav," he whispered.
She looked at him for a long moment with those pale grey eyes.
"Av," she said.
He had accepted this.
He pointed at her and waited.
She didn't answer. She didn't know. She just looked back at him with an expression that lived somewhere between confusion and a sadness too quiet for a child her age — the expression of someone who had never been given something and therefore didn't know to miss it.
The little girl had no name.
He had figured that out early — That Man and That Woman never called her anything except "it" or "the girl" or nothing at all. She didn't seem to know she was supposed to have one.
He thought about it for a moment.
"Meera," he said, pointing at her.
She tilted her head.
"Meera," he said again.
Something shifted in her face. Small and careful, like light coming under a door.
"Meera," she repeated softly, tasting the shape of it.
He nodded.
She looked down at her hands for a moment, then back up at him. Then she smiled — not her usual fast bright smile but something slower, something she kept close.
He filed the warmth neatly away and moved on.
Although she is older than him physically, he is far older than her mentally. So he now considered her as his little sister. He didn't have one in his previous life but now he wanted to protect her.
She had attached herself to him with a completeness that left no room for negotiation. She followed him through the room. She slept against his side every night without asking permission. She handed him things she found interesting — small objects, scraps of food she had saved, a strip of torn cloth presented one morning with the gravity of a formal gift.
He looked after her in return. He kept himself between her and the colder corners of the room. He kept her calm on the days That Woman's moods turned ugly. When she woke frightened in the night he didn't say anything, just stayed still and solid until her breathing slowed.
He did not let himself think too hard about what this house had been like for her before he arrived. The months she had spent here alone. Every time he came close to thinking about it something went very quiet and very cold inside him, and while that cold had its uses, this was not the moment for it.
The moment for it was coming.
It was coming in exactly one month.
He had overheard it three weeks ago. The buyers were coming. Children had to be at least three years old — that had always been the rule — and the little girl was nearly three now. Aarav was only fourteen months, too young by their standard. What happened to him after the sale he didn't know and didn't intend to find out.
One month.
He had been ready for two.
He had not spent fourteen months sitting still.
From the very first week that his body had grown strong enough to move quietly and quickly, he had begun scouting. Not in the daytime — never in the daytime. But at night, after That Man and That Woman had drunk themselves to sleep, after Meera's breathing had gone slow and even, he would slip out of their room and move through the house like a shadow.
He had mapped every inch of it.
The main room. The storage area to the left where they kept dried food, rope, and three large clay jars of lamp oil. The narrow hallway connecting the children's room to the couple's room at the far end. The single front door with its iron latch, stiff but manageable now that his hands had the strength to work it. The low window in the main room sealed with a wooden bar that lifted straight up — he had tested it twice, in the dark, putting it back exactly as he found it each time.
He had also gone outside.
That had taken longer to work up to. The first time he slipped through the front door into the night air he had stood on the wooden step for a full minute, breathing cold mountain air, feeling the sheer openness of it after months of walls and low ceilings. Then he had gotten to work.
They were high up. That much was clear from the first night. The house sat on a ledge near the upper third of the mountain, surrounded by dark forest on three sides. The road — a single dirt track barely wide enough for a cart — wound down from the front of the house in a long series of curves, disappearing into the trees below. He had followed it for ten minutes on the first night, moving carefully in the dark, before turning back.
On subsequent nights he went further.
He now knew the road for the first two hours of travel on foot. He knew where it widened and where it narrowed.
He also knew, from careful observation over many weeks, that That Man and That Woman were ordinary people.
No powers. No urja. Common folk who had found a cruel and profitable trade and stuck with it.
It meant his plan had no variable he couldn't account for.
He had spent the last three weeks preparing.
Small things, moved carefully, hidden under the loose corner of the blanket in the far side of their room. A cloth bundle containing strips of dried food taken in pieces small enough never to be noticed from the storage shelf. Two strips of thick fabric he had cut from the bottom of a spare sack — long enough to wrap Meera against his body if carrying her became difficult. A length of rope, coiled tight. The small bone-handled knife he had found at the back of the storage shelf behind a clay jar, forgotten or overlooked, which he had taken the third week and not returned.
Now all he waited for was an opportunity, which came sooner.