"Survey report. 2008."
"Twelve kilometres north. Do we have fuel?"
Priya checked the gauge. "Three quarters."
"We go to this forestry road. We do not go back into the ravines on foot. We find signal on the way or we find people — a village, anyone — and we get help."
This was the plan. It was a reasonable plan. They drove north.
At the seven-kilometre mark, they found Vikram.
Priya saw him first — a shape at the side of the road, in the red dust at the edge of the plateau, twenty metres from the road. She said his name once, quietly, and Aryan braked without understanding why, and then he looked where she was looking and saw it too.
Vikram was on the ground. Face up. He was not moving.
They got out of the vehicle. Aryan was the first to reach him. He knelt and put his hand on Vikram's neck, feeling for a pulse with the frantic inexpertise of someone who had never done it outside of a first aid class six years ago, and found one — a pulse, present, steady — and said "He's alive, he's alive" and heard Priya exhale in a way that told him she had been holding the breath for seven kilometres.
Vikram was unconscious. On his right temple, a bruise — blunt impact, something hard. His shirt was torn at the shoulder. One shoe was missing.
And around his left wrist: a length of cord. Old cord, the type made from twisted plant fibre rather than synthetic material. It had been tied and then cut — the ends fraying — as if he had been bound and then released. Or escaped.
Kabir was photographing everything, methodical even in crisis, the researcher's reflex. "The cord," he said. "That's not modern rope. That's braided dhaman grass. They used to make it in the ravine villages specifically for—"
"Is he okay?" Tanya said. "Is he going to be okay?"
"He needs a hospital," Aryan said. "We need to get to a hospital."
They got Vikram into the Innova. He was heavy and unresponsive and the moving of him was difficult and frightening. Priya held his head. Kabir held his shoulders. They lay him across the back seat and Tanya sat in the front and Aryan drove as fast as the road allowed.
