Aryan had designed it himself the night before — a photograph of the Chambal ravines at golden hour, the land split open like an old wound, all red earth and shadow and the suggestion of something in the dark below. Over it, in the white block letters that had gotten Dark India to 2.3 million subscribers: WE ENTERED INDIA'S MOST DANGEROUS RAVINES (GONE WRONG??)
He stared at it in the passenger seat of the Innova and wondered whether the question marks were overdoing it. Then he decided the question marks were exactly right. The question marks were what made people click.
"Stop doing the thumbnail face," Priya said from behind the camera. She had been filming since Gwalior, which was four hours ago, capturing the drive through the agricultural belt and then the first appearance of the ravines — the land changing around them, the flat fields giving way to the broken, folded terrain of the Chambal valley.
"I'm not doing a face," Aryan said.
"You're doing the face where you look serious but also excited. The face that says 'I have prepared for this but also I'm not sure I've prepared enough.'"
From the back: Kabir laughed. He was thirty, their sound guy and de facto research coordinator, the one who had found the location and spent six weeks reading everything he could find about the Chambal dacoits before they left Delhi. He had a notebook full of notes and the specific energy of a person who knows more about their destination than is entirely comfortable.
