She woke up at three-seventeen AM.
Not from a dream — or if from a dream, then the dream had not left enough of itself in her waking mind to be identified as a dream. Just the waking, sudden and complete, the way she woke in the building on nights when the call came in that was not a normal call. The body's knowledge preceding the brain's.
She lay in her flat in Jayanagar and looked at the ceiling and listened to the Bangalore night — the trucks on the outer ring road, the dog two streets away, her neighbour's television through the shared wall, speaking the late-night language of a news channel. All of it normal. All of it correctly present. The ceiling was the correct distance from her eyes and the room was the correct size and the corridor to the kitchen was, she estimated without getting up, approximately seven steps, which was what it always was.
She had moved flats after leaving Zenith. Not dramatically — she had not fled the city or changed her name or done any of the things that people did in stories when they were running from something. She had simply moved, because the old flat had been the flat of the person who had taken the math-based decision to do the night shift, and she was no longer entirely that person. Not worse. Not damaged, precisely. Different in the way that things were different after they had been through something significant — not broken, but re-formed in a shape that incorporated what had happened to them.
