The first thing Aryan noticed was the silence.
Not silence exactly — the ravines were full of sound. Wind through the cuts in the rock. The distant call of something he couldn't identify, high and repeated. The crunch of their footsteps on the loose red shale. Water moving somewhere below them in the channel they were following, too far down to see. But over all of this was a quality of silence that was not the absence of sound but the absence of human sound — the specific quiet of a place that had not had people in it for a long time and was not immediately sure what to do with them now.
"This is the main access route that the survey team used in 2003," Kabir was saying, consulting his phone while the signal lasted. "The first hideout complex is approximately two kilometres in. We should hit the outer marker — some kind of carved rock face — in about forty minutes at this pace."
