"I think someone who knows these ravines knows which decisions we'll face and has positioned himself to benefit from each one." He looked at Kabir. "Could someone steer people in a specific direction using this terrain? Deliberately?"
"Yes," Kabir said, without hesitation. "The dacoits called it 'making the pinjra' — the cage. You use your knowledge of the terrain to create a situation where there appear to be multiple options but all of them lead to where you want the target to be. They used it for escape as well as for trapping. You make the hunter think the prey has many choices while actually having only one."
"Left channel," Aryan said. "We all go. Together."
Left channel it was. They entered it in a line, Aryan at the front now, Kabir in the middle, Priya second from the back, Tanya at the rear. They had agreed on this formation at the rest stop and they maintained it, two arm-lengths between each person, close enough to see each other, far enough that a single action couldn't take all of them at once.
The left channel ran south and curved right as Priya had predicted and narrowed over the course of three hundred metres to something uncomfortably tight — Aryan with his shoulders brushing both walls in the tightest section. Then it opened, and the sound changed, and there was light ahead of a different quality — broader, higher — and they came around a final curve and the ravine opened into a wider valley section that Kabir recognised from the survey map as being approximately one kilometre from the south exit road.
"There," he said.
