Anand found a job in three weeks. Preethi in two. Meera began consulting work — she had enough for that, and consulting kept her mobile, which she was not yet ready to not be.
They stayed in contact. They compared notes. They watched the building from outside — not surveilling it, just aware of it, the way you stay aware of a thing that has shown itself to you. They watched the employee turnover data that became public through the journalist's reporting. Unusually high attrition. Unexplained departures. HR statements that said personal leave in the specific pattern that they now knew to read.
The journalist's story was published four months after Meera had left the building. It was long, careful, meticulous — the facts that could be confirmed in the confirmed section, the facts that could not be confirmed but that multiple sources corroborated in the corroborated section, and at the end, a section that the journalist had headlined simply: What the sources believe happened.
The story produced the response that stories about things that are difficult to categorize always produce: some people dismissed it entirely, some people believed it completely, most people existed in the uncomfortable space between, where you have been told something that you cannot verify and cannot disprove and that sits in you like a splinter — small, specific, occasionally painful.
Zenith Solutions' management issued a statement. The statement said: The welfare of our employees is our primary concern. We are fully cooperating with relevant authorities on the matter of former employees who have been reported missing. We categorically deny any knowledge of or involvement in—
She stopped reading. The statement was not interesting. The statement was the shape of the thing, not the thing.
Vikram called her, three months after. She answered.
"Meera." His voice was his voice, the right voice, the professional warmth and the night-shift tiredness. But she was listening carefully now, as she had learned to listen carefully, and beneath the voice she could hear the thing that was different — still there, still that slight not-quite-right quality that could not be placed directly.
"Vikram," she said.
"I'm fine," he said. "I want you to know that. I'm working. I'm okay."
"I know," she said. She did not say what she knew, which was that okay was doing a lot of work in that sentence, and that the person who had planned the outage with her and said I've been waiting for someone to make that sentence for eight years was present in the voice but present the way a recording of someone is present — technically accurate, not quite alive.
"It wasn't—" He stopped. "It wasn't a bad outcome," he said. "What happened on the mezzanine. I'm still here. I still know who I am."
"Yes," she said. Because it was true, in the way that true things were sometimes not comforting.
