They looked. At the ravine entrance — at the point where the path entered the rock, where the light stopped — there was a shape. Not moving. Just there. The shape of a person standing very still in the shadow at the edge of the ravine.
Aryan stared at it. The shape did not move. It was at exactly the distance where you could not be certain it was a person and not a trick of the rock and the shadow.
He looked for four seconds. Then he got in the Innova, turned the key, and drove. Fast, the track too narrow for the speed he was attempting, the vehicle jolting over the rough surface, red dust rising behind them like something that had been disturbed.
He did not look in the rearview mirror for the first minute. When he did, the ravine entrance was visible behind them, small now with distance. The shape at the edge of it was gone.
Or it had never been there. Or it had moved into the ravine before he looked. He would not know which, and the not-knowing would be with him for every minute of what followed.
