Devika watched through the window as the teacher was lifted. She watched the teacher's face as she came up — the specific expression of someone in a harness over a gorge that was not the comfortable expression, but the expression of someone who was doing something frightening because it was the next required thing and had a long practice of doing the next required thing regardless of how frightening it was. The teacher's hands were on the harness straps. Her eyes were open. Her face was entirely present in the way of someone who had been entirely present since seven AM and was not going to stop now.
She came aboard. She sat down in the seat that Devika's co-pilot indicated. She looked out the helicopter window at the gorge and the bus and the flooded road and the slope where thirty-two children had spent three hours on a rock shelf, and she looked at all of it for as long as the helicopter's banking turn allowed her to see it, which was about seven seconds. Then it was gone behind the cloud layer and there was only the helicopter sound and the rain on the windows and the forward motion toward Rudraprayag.
"All thirty-two?" Devika said, from the front. She had been told the count multiple times but she asked again, because asking again was how you confirmed.
"All thirty-two," Priya Nair said. "And the driver."
"Good work," Devika said. It was what she said when the right thing had happened. She meant it every time.
