"What?" Priya said. She had lowered the camera now too.
Kabir turned the phone so they could see the archive photograph. The pattern matched exactly. Under it, the police report's annotation: Territorial warning. Known meaning: "One caught. Others: run."
The silence that followed was of a different quality from the silence of the ravines. It was the silence of four people rapidly revising what they thought was happening.
"Someone's having us on," Tanya said. "Vikram probably went ahead and cut that mark himself. He's trying to scare us. He's probably at the vehicle laughing right now."
"Vikram doesn't laugh," Aryan said. It came out more certain than he felt.
"One caught," Priya said. She was looking at the mark. "That's what it says."
They ran. Or as close to running as the ravine path allowed — fast, stumbling over loose shale, the camera swinging from Priya's hand. They went around the final two curves, through the tight section where the walls closed in, and came out into the clearing.
The Innova was there.
Vikram was not.
Aryan went to the vehicle. The driver's door was unlocked. The keys were in the ignition. Vikram's own bag — a cloth shoulder bag he had carried the whole trip — was on the front seat.
Nobody took their bag and left voluntarily. Nobody left their keys in the ignition and walked away. These were not things that happened.
Tanya dialled her phone. "No signal." She tried anyway, four times, with the slightly frantic determination of someone who is very good at solving problems and is encountering one for which her tools are wrong. "No signal."
"Kabir," Aryan said. "The signal mark. Could Vikram have cut it? As a warning? Like, could he have seen something and done it himself?"
Kabir thought about this with a seriousness that did not comfort. "Maybe. If he knew the system. If he'd encountered it before." A pause. "Or someone else cut it."
"To tell us he'd been taken," Priya said.
Nobody refuted this. The clearing was quiet around them — the ravine entrance ahead, the dead-end track behind, the Innova sitting in the afternoon light with its engine silent and its driver gone.
"We drive out," Aryan said.
"Yes," said Priya.
"Yes," said Kabir.
Tanya had not said anything. She was looking at the ravine entrance. "There's something there," she said.
