The road condition declared itself at the three-kilometre mark: a section where the gravel had not just washed away but had subsided entirely, the earth beneath it having developed a hollow that the forestry road had quietly collapsed into, leaving a gap two metres wide and a metre deep across the full width of the track.
The Innova was not crossing it. Nothing with four wheels was crossing it.
Aryan got out and stood at the edge of the gap and looked at it. He was doing the thing he had been doing since the previous afternoon — trying to find the engineering solution, the way out, the logical path. He was not trained for this. He was a YouTube producer who had been in uncomfortable situations before — a night in a supposedly haunted haveli, a trek to a flooding river, a drone that had crashed in a wildlife reserve — and had always found the path back to the Innova and the highway and the hotel. He did not have vocabulary for a situation in which the path back kept closing.
"On foot?" Tanya said. She had gotten out and was standing beside him.
"It's six kilometres of ravine," Kabir said. "On foot, three to four hours."
"Or we walk back north to Bargawa and wait," Priya said.
"Wait for what?" Tanya said.
Priya didn't have an answer for this either. Wait for the son to return from Morena. Wait for someone to wonder where they were — their Delhi office knew roughly where they had gone, but "roughly" was doing a lot of work in that sentence, and "roughly" plus no phone signal meant days, not hours, before anyone came looking in a specific enough way to find them.
"On foot," Aryan said. "Six kilometres. We stay on the ravine road, we stay together, we keep moving."
"There is someone in there," Tanya said.
"There is also a way out in there," Aryan said. "And I would rather be moving toward the way out than standing next to a broken road waiting for someone to help us who may not come."
