"Or—" Priya started, and then stopped.
"Or?" Aryan said.
"Nothing. Let's move."
They moved. The ravine gave them no answers — just its walls, its shadows, the wind making the sounds that wind made in enclosed spaces. They reached the curve where they had last seen him, and went around it, and went around two more curves, and came out into a wider section they recognized — they had passed through it on the way in, Kabir had noted the double signal mark on the left wall.
Kabir was looking at the left wall now. His face had changed.
"What?" Aryan said.
Kabir pointed. On the wall, at about chest height: the double signal mark they had seen before. And next to it, freshly cut — the rock dust still bright against the older surface — a new mark. Three vertical cuts and a horizontal line through them.
"That wasn't there when we came in," Aryan said.
"No," Kabir said. He was staring at the mark. "No, it wasn't."
"What does it mean? The pattern."
Kabir was very quiet for a moment. "I don't know that specific one. I'd have to check the reference."
He checked. He had taken photographs of the police archive documents in Delhi, the 1974 and 1978 reports on dacoit territorial signaling. He found the pattern. His face did the thing that faces do when they have received information they were not ready for.
