THE MEDICAL BAY
Reyan hadn't moved in two hours.
They'd wrapped his ribs in so much gauze he looked like he was wearing a second, whiter torso. Both legs bandaged from the knee down. A square of tape over the cut on his forehead, already spotting through. Someone had cleaned the blood off his hands, but not all of it. It sat in the creases of his knuckles and under his nails, and nobody had the heart to scrub harder.
The bed beside his belonged to Ravi, who was not sleeping either.
He sat propped against the wall, left arm strapped tight across his chest, the shoulder wrapped and padded under his shirt. He'd been staring at the ceiling for a while. Counting the water stains, maybe. There were eleven.
Across from them, on a folding chair someone had dragged in from the cafeteria, sat Samir. Forearm bandaged from wrist to elbow. He held it in his lap with the other hand, thumb rubbing the edge of the gauze back and forth, back and forth. He wasn't trying to sleep. He'd given up on that an hour ago.
Dr. Aggarwal finished checking Ravi's pulse and made a small note on a clipboard that was mostly held together by tape.
"The shoulder's out of the socket again," he said. "I put it back, but it'll keep doing that until it's had real rest. Weeks. No swinging anything."
"Define weeks," Ravi said.
"More than two."
"Two I can do."
"I said more than two."
"I heard you. I'm choosing to hear the two part."
Dr. Aggarwal gave him a look over his glasses, the kind a man gives to a child who is clearly going to ignore him, and moved on.
Ahmed was already at Samir's side. Taj hovered a step behind him, hands in his pockets, trying to look like he belonged there and not like he'd been told to stay out of the way.
"Can I see it again?" Ahmed asked.
Samir held out his arm. Ahmed unwrapped the gauze slowly, the way you do with something that might bite. Four long lines, scabbed over already, edges pink. Clean. Not weeping, not swollen.
"Does it hurt?"
"Sore. Like I got it caught in a car door."
"Any burning? Tingling? Numbness?"
"No."
"Cold? Hot? Feel feverish at all?"
"No. Ahmed, I told you, I feel normal."
"I know. I'm asking anyway." Ahmed pressed two fingers lightly along the skin beside the wound. "Are you sleeping?"
Samir hesitated. "No."
"Tired?"
"Yeah. Not sleepy though, if that makes sense. I lie down and my brain just..." He made a vague circling motion with his free hand. "I get these dreams. Weird ones. Not bad exactly. Just strange. I wake up and I can't remember them, only that they were there."
Ahmed and Dr. Aggarwal exchanged a glance across the bed. Short. Neither of them said anything.
"What?" Samir said. "What was that? Don't do that."
"It's nothing," Ahmed said. "It's probably nothing. Stress does that. So does blood loss and not eating."
"Probably."
"Probably. I'm not going to lie to you and say I know what a scratch from one of those things does, because I don't. Nobody does. We've never had one to look at." Ahmed started rewrapping the gauze, careful and neat. "What I can tell you is the wound looks like a wound. It's healing like a wound. And you've got no fever and no bad signs. That's a good start. We're going to keep checking, that's all. Every few hours."
"You're going to watch me."
"We're going to check on you."
"That's the same thing."
"It's a kinder way of saying it."
Samir almost smiled. "Can I get some water, doc?"
Taj moved before anyone else. There was a jug on the shelf by the door. He filled a tin cup and brought it over, and Samir drank it down in four long swallows. Held the cup out again without a word. Taj refilled it. Samir drank that too.
Ravi watched all of this from his bed. The third cup, specifically. He watched Samir's hand on it, the slight tremble in the fingers that probably meant nothing, and opened his mouth, and shut it again.
"Thanks," Samir said, handing the cup back. "Just thirsty."
"Sure," Taj said. "Course you are."
The door swung open, and a wheelchair came through, bumping against the frame.
"Sorry, sorry, one of the wheels does this—"
"Because you keep steering with your elbows," Arjun said, coming in behind her. Dev followed, and between them, half hidden behind Arjun's leg, a small girl in a sweater two sizes too big.
Meera got herself turned around and saw the bed. Saw Reyan in it.
She didn't say anything for a moment. Her hands tightened on the wheels.
"He's okay?" she asked, finally. Not quite to anyone.
"He's okay," Dr. Aggarwal said. "Exhausted. Dehydrated. A few cracked ribs, a sprained ankle, a lot of scrapes. He'll be sore for a while. But he's okay."
Nitya had taken a step into the room. Stopped. She stared at the bed the way you stare at a thing you've been told is real but haven't seen yet.
"Papa's sleeping?"
"He is," Arjun said softly. He crouched next to her. "He's really tired, sweetheart. He walked a long way. Let's let him rest a little, okay? When he wakes up, you'll be the first one he sees. I promise."
"Can I just look?"
"Sure. Just look."
She walked to the bed on her toes like the floor might make too much noise. Stood beside it. Reached out one finger and touched the edge of the blanket. Then pulled her hand back, quick, as if she'd done something wrong.
Meera wheeled up next to her, a little clumsily. She looked at Reyan's face for a long time.
"He didn't have to do that," she said. "At the end. He could've kept running. Left me."
"He didn't leave you," Samir said from his chair.
"I know. That's what I'm saying." She turned to him. Her eyes were red. "Karan told me you were the one who got him up the fire escape. Carried him."
"Me and Vikram. And everyone, honestly, I mostly just held on."
"Thank you anyway."
"You don't have to—"
"Samir. Take the thank you."
He closed his mouth. "Okay. You're welcome."
"What happened to your arm?" Dev asked, nodding at it. He asked it casually, without the weight the others had been carrying around it.
"Scratch. Got clawed."
"That's it?"
"That's it."
"That's metal," Dev said. "Mine's just a little bruise from tripping on the stairs."
"You're not helping," Arjun muttered.
"I'm trying to make it normal!"
Ravi snorted from his bed. It turned into a wince halfway through. "You two should do a show."
"Which one of us is the funny one?" Dev asked.
"Neither. That's the show."
Meera laughed, once, short and cracked. It did something to the room. Nitya looked up at the sound of it and, after a second, almost smiled too, though her eyes went straight back to her father's face.
"We should go," Arjun said quietly after a while. "Let them rest. Nitya, come on, let's find Vikram."
She nodded and went, though not happily. Looked back twice before the door closed.
THE CELL BLOCK
It wasn't a jail. That was the first thing the guard said, and he said it twice, so it was clear he'd been told to.
It was a long storage corridor on the lower level, with a row of old supply rooms along one side. Somebody had cleared out the shelves, put in cots, a bucket with a lid, a lantern on a hook. The doors were heavy steel with the handles taken off the inside.
"Not a jail," Zara said, flopping onto a cot with her boots still on. "Sure. And the sky's just a very large blue ceiling."
"Zara," her mother said, mildly.
"I'm just saying. It's cozy. Very welcoming. Love the bucket."
Their mother sat on the other cot with her blanket back over her knees. Dev, Zara's brother, sat on the floor against the wall, knees pulled up, watching the door. He hadn't stopped watching it since the lock turned.
The door opened.
Priya Sen came in alone. No weapon in her hand, though two guards stood just outside, and behind them a young man in a plain gray jacket with a notebook tucked under his arm. He stayed in the corridor. She pulled the door mostly closed and looked around the room.
"Is everyone being treated all right?"
"Depends who you ask," Zara said. "Ask my mother, she'd say yes. Ask me, I'd say I've slept on nicer floors, but I've also slept on worse. So, fine. Average."
"Zara," her mother said again.
"I'm being polite!"
Priya almost smiled. Almost. She pulled an overturned crate toward the cots, sat on it, put her hands on her knees. "I'm Priya. I'm sorry about the room. You've been through a lot and this isn't what you expected. But I can't just let strangers walk around with access to everything. You understand that."
"Totally." Zara sat up. "Honestly if you'd let us stroll in, I'd have thought you were an idiot."
"Thank you, I think."
"I meant it nicely."
"I'm sure you did." Priya took a breath. "I want to ask you some questions. You don't have to answer anything you don't want to. But the more I know, the faster I can let you out of here."
"Ask."
"How long were you watching us?"
"Two days. Little over, actually. Came in from the north side." Zara said it casually, as if she were reporting the weather. "Your walls are good. Your gate's good. Your guard rotation's lazy on the east side between three and four, though. Not that I'd know."
Priya's eyebrow moved a fraction. "Noted."
"Wasn't going to do anything about it! Just, you asked."
"I did. Why were you watching?"
"Same reason anyone watches anything. To find out if it's safe." Zara shrugged. "I've got a mother who can't run and a brother who can't scream for help. I don't walk us into anywhere I haven't seen with my own eyes. Standing orders."
"Whose?"
"Mine. I wrote them."
"And what did you see?"
"A lot of people going out. Fewer people coming back." Zara tilted her head. "You lost a whole team on that run, didn't you? I watched five of them leave. Only two came back alive, one of them in a wheelchair, and the other one's up in your infirmary with half his ribs wrapped."
The room went a little quieter.
"Two of them were killed," Priya said evenly. "Yes."
"That's what I thought."
"And the third one was shot at the gate. You saw that too?"
"I did." Zara's voice flattened. For just a second the joke dropped out of it and what was left underneath was lower, rougher. A voice that sounded like it had been left out in the cold too long. "Wasn't pretty."
Priya let that sit. Then, "Where did you live before this? Before the outbreak?"
"Vaishali. East side. Near the river."
"And during? After?"
"Oh, you want the whole thing."
"Whatever you're comfortable sharing."
"I'm not comfortable with any of it, but fine." Zara settled back against the wall. "Started out at home. Me, Ma, Dev. Dad passed a few years before, so it was just us. First week we stayed inside, ate everything in the kitchen, and then there was nothing in the kitchen. Went out to look for food and found more of them than food."
"How did you survive?"
"Ma's a wonderful cook. Not a fighter. Dev's a gentle kid. So that left me." Zara tapped her own chest. "I was the muscle. Lucky for everyone I'm good at running."
"Where'd you end up?"
"There was a bunker." She said the word like it tasted odd. "Three towns over, maybe a day and a half walking. Heard about it from a guy on a radio. Went. Eleven of us by the end, counting the three of us."
"And that's where you stayed."
"For a while."
"What happened to it?"
Zara didn't answer right away. She picked at a loose thread on her jacket cuff. "Someone let them in. Accident or not, I couldn't tell you. Doesn't matter anymore. It was fast."
"Who was it?"
"Don't know. Don't care. They're dead, and so's everyone else except us."
Priya turned her head, just slightly, toward Dev. He hadn't looked away from the door.
"Was he there for it?"
"We both were."
"Did he see something?"
"Oh, he saw something." Zara said it flat, then caught herself, and her voice went light again. "He sees a lot of things. Birds mostly. Last week he saw a squirrel with a really weird tail."
"What did he see at the bunker?"
"You'd have to ask him."
"He doesn't talk."
"Then I guess that's your answer." Zara smiled. It was a sharp smile, not unfriendly. "Look. I'm not hiding anything, I promise. It's just not mine to tell. Maybe someday he'll want to. If he does, you'll hear it from him. Not me."
Priya considered her for a moment. Then nodded, once, and Zara realized, a beat too late, that the nod meant she'd been believed.
"All right," Priya said. "One more. Before all this. What did you do?"
"For work?"
"Yes."
"Oh." Zara brightened. "Delivery. Food. Bike courier, best in the district. Average rating four point nine."
"Four point nine."
"Out of five. I got a one-star once because a guy said his samosa was cold. It was July. It was forty degrees. It was not cold."
Dev, on the floor, made a small noise in his throat. It might have been a laugh. It might not.
"Her whole life she's been giving people grief for living in the wrong part of town," their mother said, with the dry fondness of someone who has said this a hundred times. "And she has the nerve to be proud."
"I know every alley in Vaishali," Zara said. "Every shortcut, every back road, every place a person could hide. That's useful, isn't it? Admit it. That's useful."
"It is," Priya said, and this time there was an actual smile at the corner of her mouth, brief, there and gone. "That's very useful."
She stood. Brushed off her knees.
"Thank you. I'll be back. You'll have food in an hour."
"Is it good food?"
"It's food."
"That's a no."
"That's a no," Priya agreed, and went out. The door closed behind her.
The young man in the gray jacket was waiting. She spoke to him quietly in the corridor while the guards pretended not to listen.
"Rudra. Stay here. Two guards on the door. Keep an eye on them, talk to them if they want to talk. Don't push. If they say anything that doesn't line up with what I just heard, write it down."
"And if nothing?"
"Then we let them out by morning. Come find me at my cabin either way. I want your read."
"What's yours?"
Priya glanced back at the door. "Honestly? I don't think she's lying." She paused. "But I'd feel better if you disagreed with me."
"I'll try."
"Thank you."
She left. Rudra stood there with his notebook and his two armed guards, listening through the steel to Zara's voice, muffled, explaining something to her mother in a tone that was either complaining or telling a story.
He took out a pencil. Wrote the time at the top of a fresh page.
THE LAB
Taj had taken the stool in the far corner. The one nobody used because the seat was cracked.
He wasn't doing anything. A rack of test tubes sat in front of him and he'd arranged them by height, then by color, then by height again.
"Why are you sitting alone?" Ahmed asked, coming in.
Taj didn't turn around. "Not alone. There's a rack of test tubes."
"You're not a very good conversationalist. Is it tiredness or something else?"
"Both. Maybe."
Ahmed pulled over another stool. A better one. Sat. They hadn't really talked since the argument. Since Ahmed's voice had gone up and the whole lab had gone quiet. Neither of them had mentioned it. It sat in the room like a piece of furniture.
"Out there," Taj said. "In the street. The flare."
"Go on. I am listening."
"They didn't like it. The fungal ones. The normal ones didn't care, they kept coming. But the black-veined ones backed off. Like they could feel it." He turned the tube in his fingers. "Not just stumbling away. Backed off. Like they'd decided to."
Ahmed was quiet for a while. "Fire. Or the light."
"I don't know which. I didn't have time to test."
"It might be either. It might be both." Ahmed rubbed the bridge of his nose. "Thank you for telling me. Genuinely. That's the kind of thing we need to know."
"Do we do something about it?"
"We will. Later." He said it carefully, watching Taj's face. "Look. Right now we're safe. The walls are good, the gate's good, people are eating something. You've got your friends back. Your friend is in a bed, breathing. That's a good day. That's a day you're allowed to just have."
"It doesn't feel like one."
"I know. They almost never do, in the moment." Ahmed leaned back. "What happens tomorrow isn't in our hands. I used to think that was a bad thing. Now I think it's the only way to get through anything. You do the next thing, and the next. We'll figure out the fungal ones. I promise, we'll figure them out. But not today, Taj. Today, just let it be a good day."
Taj looked at him for a long moment.
"You're really bad at this," he said. "The comforting thing."
"I'm aware."
"But thank you."
"Anytime."
Taj stood. Put the test tube back in the rack, exactly where it had been.
"I need some air," he said, and went out.
OUTSIDE THE CELL BLOCK, A LITTLE LATER
Rudra sat on a stool near the door, notebook open on his knee. He'd written maybe four lines. Subject Z.: cooperative. Humorous when nervous. Mother: calm. Brother: observant, silent. He crossed out humorous and wrote deflects. Then crossed that out too and just wrote Zara.
One of the guards shifted his weight. "You really think they're harmless?"
"I think they're what they said they are," Rudra said. "Which could still be a problem. We'll see."
From inside the room, muffled, came Zara's voice: "Is nobody going to bring us a deck of cards? I'd even take a bad one."
Rudra closed his eyes briefly. "She's going to be a lot of work."
"She's loud," the guard agreed.
"She's loud on purpose." Rudra opened his eyes and went back to his notes. "That's the part I'm trying to figure out."
TAJ
He took the long way around. Past the water tanks, the greenhouse corner where someone had started growing tomatoes in old oil drums, up the stairs to the roof of the east wing, where there was a bench and a bit of sky.
He sat. The sun was already tilting low, everything gone orange and gold.
His mother would've been home by now. That was the thing that always got him. Not the big stuff. Not the dead. It was five o'clock, and somewhere in his head she was coming through the door, setting her bag down, putting on music. Old Hindi songs. Kishore Kumar, mostly, that she'd hum off-key while she cooked. His father would complain about the volume and then hum along from the other room.
Taj used to roll his eyes at it. Plug his ears. Study with headphones in.
He'd dropped out of medical school after two years. He'd told them over dinner, and his father hadn't said anything, and his mother had just looked at him, and then looked at her plate, and then gotten up and turned the music louder. Like she couldn't think of anything else to say, so she'd said that.
He wished he could tell them now. That he was doing it anyway, in some way. Learning the bones and the nerves and how to hold a scalpel in a real room. Late, and wrong, and in a world where it barely mattered. But still.
He wiped his face with his sleeve.
Samir's noodles. That was the stupid one that came next. Taj complaining about the instant noodles back at the office, calling them regret. Now he'd have given anything for a packet. Salt, MSG, that fake chicken flavor. A whole bowl of it, burning his tongue.
and Reyan showing up with a paper bag of pastries from Arjun's bakery, the chocolate croissants. Taj had mentioned liking just once, in passing. Taj sat there, suddenly missing the dumb little stick-figure drawings he used to scribble back at the office with whatever blue pen was nearby, and how Samir would always complain about them.
He was probably in a bed downstairs right now, bandaged to the eyeballs, and if Taj thought about it for too long he was going to start crying on a bench like an idiot.
"Coffee," he said out loud, to nobody. "I need coffee."
THE CAFETERIA
Two people stood in line. He took his place third and waited, hands in his pockets, staring at the floor tiles.
The man in front of him got a cup and left. The woman got hers. Then it was his turn. He took a tin cup from the stack, filled it from the big dented urn, and turned around, thinking about nothing, thinking about everything—
—and nearly walked into someone.
Someone standing right beside him. A woman, a little shorter than he was. She'd been there in the line, he realized, a second ago, just ahead of him, and he'd been so busy being inside his own head he hadn't registered a human being three feet away.
The coffee sloshed. A little spilled over his thumb.
"Sorry," he said. "God. Sorry. I wasn't looking, I was just—"
"You're fine." She had a calm voice. Not quiet, just unhurried. "I was standing in your way."
"No, you weren't. I wasn't paying attention."
He scurried to the nearest table and sat, mortified, wiped his hand on his pants, took a sip of what turned out to be the worst coffee he had ever put in his mouth. He winced.
A shadow fell across the table.
"Is this seat taken?"
He looked up. It was the same woman. Mid-twenties, dark hair tied back loosely, sleeves pushed up to her elbows. Pretty, in a way that didn't seem to care much whether anyone noticed. She had a cup in each hand.
"Oh," he said. "No. Go ahead."
She sat. Put one cup down in front of him.
"That's different." he said, confused.
"Yeah. That one's from the second pot. It's slightly less terrible."
"There's a second pot?"
"There's always a second pot. Nobody tells you." She took a sip of her own and didn't even grimace. "First pot's for people who don't know any better. They put the old grounds in it."
He tried it. It was, objectively, still terrible. But it was a less terrible kind of terrible.
"Okay, that's a little better."
"Told you."
"Do you work in the kitchen?"
"No. Just been around long enough to know." She said it lightly. "You're one of the ones from the search party, aren't you? I saw you come through the gate."
"Yeah. I mean, I guess. Not one of the important ones, I just carry things."
"You looked pretty important from where I was standing."
He laughed, a startled little laugh. "I held a road flare. That's the entire résumé."
"Sometimes that's the one that matters."
They sat for a moment. It was quiet in the cafeteria, a few people eating at the far tables, someone laughing about something in the corner, a low scrape of chairs.
"You looked sad," she said. "When you were standing in the line. I didn't want to interrupt."
"Was it that obvious?"
"A little."
"I was just thinking about my parents," Taj said, and heard how strange it sounded out loud. "Nothing special. Just thinking."
"Do you want to talk about them?"
"Not really."
"Okay."
She didn't push. Didn't say she was sorry. Didn't fill the space. She just stayed there, turning her cup, looking out at nothing, and somehow that was easier than anything anyone else had done all day.
"My mom used to put on old songs," he said eventually. "Kishore Kumar. While cooking. Out of tune."
"That's the best kind."
"That's what I always thought, privately. I never told her."
"She probably knew."
"Probably." He smiled at his cup. "Thanks. For the better coffee."
"Anytime." She stood, picked up her own cup, and held out her free hand. He stared at it for a moment, then shook it. Her grip was warm and dry and firm. She held it a half-second longer than strictly necessary.
"I'll see you around," she said. "Soon."
"Sure. Yeah. Soon."
She left, unhurried, and was out the door before he realized he hadn't asked her name.
He sat there a while longer. He didn't know why, but he felt lighter than he had in days. Like someone had opened a window in a room he hadn't noticed was stuffy.
He finished the second-pot coffee. It was still awful. He drank every drop.
THE MEDICAL BAY
Reyan woke up the way a diver surfaces.
Slowly. Then all at once. One moment: heavy black. The next: ceiling. Water stains. A strip of yellow light. The smell of antiseptic and old cotton.
He tried to sit up and every muscle he owned filed a formal complaint.
"Easy," someone said.
Karan. Pulling a chair up beside the bed. He looked terrible, hollow under the eyes, a fresh bandage on his own arm.
"Where—"
"Sanctuary. Medical bay. You've been out about four hours." Karan leaned his elbows on his knees. "You're okay."
"Nitya."
"She's fine. She's right—" Karan glanced at the door. "Give me a second."
He stood, stuck his head into the corridor. Said something low. Then stepped aside.
Vikram was in the doorway. And in front of him, one hand clamped on the strap of a very worn stuffed rabbit, was a little girl in an oversized sweater.
Reyan's heart stopped.
Not figuratively. He felt it. A single hard stop in his chest, a held breath, a skipped beat. Then it started again, too fast, too loud.
Nitya didn't move. She just stood there, looking at him, like she was afraid that if she blinked he'd disappear.
"Papa?" she said, very small.
He tried to say her name. It came out broken, half a sound.
He pushed himself upright. Pain tore through his ribs and he didn't care. He swung his legs over the edge of the bed. Tried to stand. His ankle gave and he sagged back, and Karan caught his arm.
"I can't—" Reyan's voice cracked. "I can't get up, I can't—"
He didn't need to.
Nitya ran.
She crossed the room in about four steps and threw herself at him, and he caught her, ribs screaming, and held on. Her arms went around his neck so tight it almost choked him and he wouldn't have stopped her for anything.
"Papa," she was saying, again and again, into his collar. "Papa, Papa, Papa."
"I'm here," he said. His whole face was wet. "I'm here, I'm here, baby. I'm here."
"You said you'd come back."
"I know."
"You said you always come back."
"I did. I did come back."
"You were gone so long." She was crying now, properly, shaking. "I waited and waited. I did what you said, I stayed with Uncle Vikram and I was good, I didn't wander off, but you didn't come, and everybody kept saying you would but nobody knew—"
"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I'm sorry I was late."
"You're not allowed to be late again."
"I won't. I..." He swallowed hard. "...promise."
"Say it properly."
He laughed, a wet, gasping laugh, and held her tighter. "I promise. I will never be late again."
She pulled back to look at his face. Studied it with the dead seriousness of an eight-year-old. Touched the bandage on his forehead.
"You got hurt."
"A little."
"Did it hurt?"
"Yeah."
"Does it still?"
"Not right now."
She seemed to accept that. She wiped her nose on his shoulder, held out the rabbit. Vikram had walked it over, quietly, and placed it in her hands.
"Mr. Floppy was worried," she said. "He wanted to see you. He's been very brave."
"I bet he has."
"He didn't cry. I did the crying for both of us."
"That's very kind of you."
Reyan looked up. Vikram stood a few feet away, his hands in his pockets, eyes bright and not quite meeting his.
"You looked after her," Reyan said.
"She looked after me, mostly."
"Vikram—"
"Don't. You'd have done it for mine."
"I would've."
"Then we're square."
Reyan nodded, because he couldn't say anything else, and held his daughter, and let himself, for the first time since the cellar, breathe all the way in.
Behind Karan, the wheelchair squeaked.
Meera came forward slowly, hands on the wheels, jaw set. She stopped next to the bed. She looked at Reyan, and Nitya, and Reyan again. She didn't say anything for a while.
Then she put her arms around both of them, awkward and sideways, the chair tilted at a bad angle, and held on.
"Thank you," she said into his shoulder. "For what you did. For all of it."
"You'd have done it for me."
"I would've tried. I'd have been worse at it."
"I doubt that."
"Don't argue with me, I'm injured."
"You're the one who's arguing."
She laughed. Then she was crying, and so was he, and Nitya squirmed her way between them and said, "You're squishing Mr. Floppy," and none of that mattered.
Karan stood by the wall with his arms crossed, jaw working. Samir had come in from the next bed. Ravi propped himself up on his one good arm. Arjun and Dev hovered in the doorway, both pretending to be very interested in the ceiling.
"That's what friends are for," Vikram said gruffly, to nobody in particular.
"Don't," Arjun said, voice thick. "You'll set everyone off."
"Too late," Ravi muttered, wiping his face on his good sleeve. "We're all idiots. We've been idiots the whole time."
Reyan held his daughter's face between his hands and looked at her, memorizing it again, the way he'd tried to at their house.
He didn't tell them about the cellar. Or the soldier. Or the blood under his nails.
Not now.
Now he was just a man who'd come home.
ADVAIT'S OFFICE
The room still looked like a bomb had gone off in it.
Advait stood in the middle of the debris with a broom in one hand and a notebook in the other. The notebook was a cheap one, spiral-bound, bent at the corners. He'd been writing in it on and off for weeks. Names, mostly. Dates. The weight of things.
It wasn't his office anymore. Priya's people had said so, politely, that morning. The office belongs to the leader, and the leader is now someone else. They'd said he could take his personal things. Papers could stay.
He'd thought: I should be furious. Mostly he just felt tired.
He bent, picked up a splintered piece of the desk, and set it in the corner. Then another. The larger pieces were easier. The small ones, the pens and broken glass and scattered pages, those took forever.
Rohan, 12. His own handwriting, from a page that had landed face-up on the floor. He picked it up and stared at it.
Four weeks ago, he'd stood at a window and decided who lived. Now he was sweeping up what was left of a chair.
He folded the page, put it in his pocket, and kept sweeping.
The door opened. Nisha came in carrying a bucket and a rag, which struck him, for some reason, as the funniest thing he'd seen in days.
"What?" she said.
"Nothing. You brought a bucket."
"You've got a mess in here. Somebody's got to mop."
"You don't have to."
"I know I don't have to." She set the bucket down. Rolled up her sleeves. "Shut up and hold the dustpan."
He held the dustpan. She swept. They worked without talking for a few minutes, the broom scraping, glass tinkling into the pan.
"The vote's gone, hasn't it," he said.
"It's gone."
"Thirty-four to eighteen."
"I saw."
"I thought it'd be closer."
"It was closer than it could've been." Nisha leaned the broom against the wall. "Eighteen people still voted for you. After everything. That's not nothing."
"It's not enough."
"No. It isn't." She wrung out the rag. "But it's something to work with."
"Work with for what? She's the leader now. We're nobody."
"We're never nobody," Nisha said, and there was an edge in it. "Don't say that. Not yet."
He opened his mouth to answer.
Someone knocked.
Hard. Three times. Not the polite knock of a neighbor. The knock of someone who had been told to be firm.
Nisha looked at him. He looked at the door.
He opened it.
Two men stood outside, both in the gray armbands Priya's people had started wearing. Both with sidearms, both carefully not touching them.
"Advait," the taller one said. "You need to come with us."
"Where?"
"Please just come."
"I'd like to know where."
"I'm sorry. I've been told to bring you. Both of you." The man's eyes flicked past him to Nisha. "Now, if you can."
"What about the office? We're in the middle of—"
"It'll be taken care of."
Advait glanced back at the half-cleaned room. The bucket. The rag. The broken chair in the corner.
He knew what this was. He wasn't stupid. He'd given the same orders himself, once, in the same flat voice. A leader who had enough sense to know the difference between an invitation and an arrest.
Nisha stepped up beside him. Her hand brushed his. She didn't take it.
"It's fine," Advait said. He put the notebook in his jacket and set the dustpan down carefully on the floor. "Let's go."
THE HOLDING ROOM
It wasn't a jail. They'd said that, too.
It was a bare room, concrete floor, a lantern, two cots, a small high window that let in a thin line of orange evening. A guard outside. The door shut, and somewhere on the other side of it a bolt slid home.
Nisha didn't sit. She walked the length of the room, three paces each way, arms crossed.
Advait sat on the edge of one cot with his elbows on his knees and looked at the floor.
"I should've seen this coming," he said after a while.
"We both should."
"She's smart. Priya. She waited until the vote was over. Let the count finish, let people feel good about it. Then this."
"It's what I'd have done."
"It's what I'd have done too."
Nisha stopped walking. "Is that supposed to make me feel better?"
"No. Just saying."
The line of orange light on the wall crept lower. Somewhere deep in the building a door slammed. Footsteps in the corridor, then voices. A key in the lock.
The door opened.
A young man in a gray jacket came in, notebook tucked under his arm. He didn't look at Nisha or at Advait for the first few seconds. He was looking at the room, like he was checking it, making sure it was adequate.
"Rudra," Nisha said. She'd seen him earlier, beside Priya. "You're Priya's."
"I work with her. Yes."
"Why are we here?"
Rudra finally looked at her. He wasn't hostile. If anything he looked uncomfortable, a man carrying a message he hadn't written.
"Please don't take this the wrong way," he said. "No one is going to hurt you. You'll be fed. If you need anything, tell the guard."
"That wasn't my question."
"I know." He cleared his throat. "Tomorrow morning, there's going to be a public hearing. In the courtyard. Everyone will be there. The people have asked for it, and Priya agreed. They want to hear about what happened to the twenty-three soldiers. They want to hear about the boy at the gate. All of it."
Advait lifted his head. "A trial."
"A hearing. Priya's calling it that, so no one thinks the verdict's already decided."
"Is it?"
"I don't know," Rudra said honestly. "I really don't."
"And the verdict?" Nisha asked. "If it goes badly? What happens then?"
"I'm not the one who decides that."
"But you know."
"I know that the people of this place will decide." He shifted the notebook to his other arm. "It'll be public. Everything you say, everyone will hear. Everything you did, everyone will have a vote on."
Advait gave a dry, humorless laugh. "Another vote."
"It seems to be the thing we do now."
Neither of them said anything.
"Sleep if you can," Rudra said. He stood a moment longer than he needed to, as if there might be something else to add. There wasn't. He went out.
The bolt slid home again.
Nisha sat down on the other cot, finally. Pulled her knees up to her chest. Looked at the wall.
Advait took the notebook out of his jacket. Opened it to a clean page. Looked at it for a long time without writing anything.
Above them the last line of light slipped off the wall, and the room went dark.
They needed sleep. Tomorrow, everything would change.