Chapter 7 — Night

She woke at midnight to the sound of — nothing.This was what woke her. She had been sleeping lightly, and the specific quality of the silence had changed. Not louder. Deeper. As if the normal ambient frequencies of a night in the mountains — the wind, the insects that persisted even in early March, the sound of water somewhere — had been switched off.She lay still. She kept her breathing even and her eyes half-open, the technique for assessing an environment before signaling to it that you were awake.The window had a wooden shutter that she had latched. In the lantern's last light she could see the shutter was still latched.But the crack at the bottom of the shutter, where the wood had warped away from the sill, showed something she had not seen before going to sleep.Light.Not moonlight — moonlight came and went with cloud cover and was silver. This was steady and warm. A lantern or a fire.She sat up carefully. She put her feet on the floor and stood and crossed to the window in four steps without sound. She put her eye to the crack.The square.They were all there.All seventeen children, in the square, arranged in a circle around the well. In the center of the circle, a fire — small, controlled, contained in a ring of stones. The light she had seen was the fire.They were standing. All of them. Facing the fire. Not moving. Not speaking. The fire lit their faces from below and cast their shadows outward against the houses around the square.She counted them. Seventeen. All present.In the middle of the night.Standing at a fire in a circle.Not moving.She watched for twenty minutes, her eye against the shutter crack, not allowing herself to move or change her breathing. In twenty minutes the children did not speak, did not move, did not shift their weight. They stood.At the end of the twenty minutes, Kamla Devi came out of her house at the far end of the square. She was wrapped in a shawl, her silver braid down her back. She walked to the fire with the unhurried ease of someone performing a routine that was very old.She said something. Meera could not hear the words.The children turned. Together. Away from the fire. They dispersed — not toward the houses in the random way of children released, but in a specific movement that had the quality of choreography. Each child moving to a specific place, each path not crossing another, the whole thing resolving in perhaps thirty seconds into an empty square with a dying fire.Kamla Devi stood at the fire. She did not look toward the community hall.But she said, in a voice that was quiet enough to be addressed to no one and clear enough to be heard at the window ten meters away:"Sleep, Dr. Vashisht."Meera stepped back from the window. She stood in the center of the room.She picked up the satellite phone. She pressed the emergency dial that connected to Devraj's personal number.No signal.She tried again. No signal.She had had signal that afternoon when she'd called about the forensic team. The satellite phone was designed to work in the most remote locations in the mountains. It had worked for three days in the Niti Valley the previous year, in terrain far more difficult than this.She held it up toward the window. Nothing.She put it in her backpack. She put the backpack on the bed beside her. She lay on top of the blanket with her coat on.She did not sleep for the rest of the night.