He went back to the others.
"Our bags are gone," he said.
Tanya's face went through several things quickly. Priya's face went still — the stillness of someone processing rather than reacting.
Kabir said: "They took the bags but left the camera."
"Yes."
"They want the camera to keep rolling." Kabir said it slowly, like a man testing the weight of a sentence before committing to it.
Aryan looked at him. "What?"
"They left the camera. They took everything else — your money, your chargers, Vikram's incapacitation keeps him from driving you out — they've made sure you have reduced options. But they left the camera." He paused. "Someone wants to be filmed."
The old woman was watching them from her doorway. In the last of the evening light her face was the face of the land around her — creased and weathered and very old, containing things that had happened long before any of them had been born.
"The forestry road," Aryan said. "The access point you mentioned. Can we drive to the highway from there?"
"In theory," Kabir said. "I don't know the road's condition."
"In the morning," Priya said. "We spend the night here. The son comes back from Morena by morning. We have the Innova. Tomorrow morning we drive out via the forestry road."
"And if we can't?"
She looked at him. "Then we figure out the next thing."
They stayed the night in the house that the son's family offered — a single room, clean and spare, with a charpoy and two floor mats. The family gave them food and asked nothing about what had happened, which told Aryan something about how unusual they considered it to be.
He did not sleep. He lay on the floor mat and listened to the night sounds of Bargawa — an owl, the distant current of the Chambal, the creaking of the old house settling. He thought about the camera. He thought about what Kabir had said.
He thought about the shape at the ravine entrance.
Someone who wanted to be filmed but hadn't introduced himself yet.
In the dark, he picked up the camera. He turned it on. He looked at what they had recorded that day — the ravines, the caves, the signal marks, Vikram's disappearance, all of it. And at the very end of the recording, in the final seconds before he had stopped filming at the ravine path: a frame of the third cave entrance, dark and still. And in the darkness of the third cave, barely visible, at the very edge of where the light reached — a pair of eyes.
Looking directly at the camera.
