"Why?" Aryan said.
Vikram looked at him. "Because I said so."
There was something in his voice — not fear exactly, but its more experienced cousin. The controlled alertness of a man who has seen enough to know when something is not right before he can fully articulate why.
Aryan opened his mouth to push back. Priya put her hand on his arm — one light touch, the signal they had between them that meant: not now.
They explored the outer two caves. They found what had been a sleeping area — a raised stone shelf with the remnants of something that had once been a mat, now just fibre and dust — and what Kabir identified as a food storage area, a recessed hollow in the cave wall with the remains of a clay pot. Aryan narrated everything. The camera rolled. Tanya found an old rusted implement that might have been a blade or a tool and held it up for her phone.
The whole time, none of them went near the third cave. And the whole time, Aryan could feel the third cave's darkness at the edge of his peripheral vision, the specific weight of it, which was not quite the same as the darkness of the others.
He told himself it was the lighting. The angle of the sun.
He told himself that, and mostly believed it, and did not go near the third cave.
