Chapter 8 — Paro

She found the girl alone at seven in the morning.The village was doing what it did in the early hours — the adults moving through the slow routines of a cold morning, collecting water, carrying wood, beginning the stove fires that sent smoke up in thin straight columns in the still air. The children were in the square, as they always seemed to be, in a loose arrangement that looked like a group and felt like something more organized than a group.Paro was at the edge of the square, near the path that led to the eastern terrace. Alone — separated from the others by perhaps fifteen meters, which might have been coincidence and might not.Meera walked toward her at the angle that would take her past without direct approach. She carried her notebook. She stopped two meters away and crouched to look at something on the ground — she found a stone to examine — and did not look at the girl directly.In a low voice, without looking up, she said: "Paro. Yesterday you checked the door before you answered me. I noticed that. I think you wanted to tell me something."Nothing for three seconds. Meera turned the stone over in her hands.Then, very quietly — so quiet that Meera almost misread it as wind — the girl said: "You should not stay tonight."Meera did not move. Did not look up. "Why?"The three-second delay. Then: "They will not let you go in the morning."Meera felt the particular quality of cold that had nothing to do with temperature. She kept her hands moving on the stone. "Who will not let me go?"Long pause. Longer than the assessment delays. Longer than retrieval. The pause of someone fighting something internal."She gives the tea," Paro said. "Don't drink the tea."Meera looked up now. She looked at the girl's face. The eyes were open, dark, clear. Not blinking. But in them — she had not seen this before in any of the children — something that was not the absence of expression. Something that was straining against the absence. Something that was trying, from very far inside, to come forward."Paro," she said. "How long have you been here?"The longest pause yet. Twelve seconds. The girl's lips moved slightly before the sound came: "I don't know now.""Are you afraid?"Five seconds."I don't know now," she said again.Meera looked at the girl's hands. Small. A child's hands. The hands of a girl who had pressed her palm into a stone on the eastern terrace sometime in — when? The stones she'd found went back to 1988. Were there older ones she hadn't found?"I'm leaving today," Meera said. "Before evening." She held the stone she'd been examining and did not look away from the girl's face. "Can I take you with me?"The girl's expression changed. Not dramatically. A compression, a tightening — not of fear, of something more complex. The face of someone who has heard an offer and is trying to remember what wanting feels like."I can't—" she started. Then stopped. Then, almost inaudibly: "I don't know if I can go.""What does that mean?"But the girl's eyes had moved. Looking at something behind Meera.Meera turned.Kamla Devi was in the doorway of her house, forty meters away, looking in their direction.Paro had already turned away. She was picking up a stone from the ground, the performance of a child who had been doing nothing except what a child does in the morning.Meera stood. She walked toward the community hall.Her hands were shaking.She put them in her pockets so no one would see.