Chapter 11 — What It Takes

The debrief transcripts are clearest here, because the events of the next thirty minutes are the ones that had the most witnesses and the most disagreement.What all three surviving accounts agreed on:Rohan set the camera down. He set it on the floor, pointed upward, still running — this was a technical habit, the practised instinct of a cinematographer who kept recording through a situation. He set it down and stood upright and put his hands at his sides.The sound from the floor — the rhythmic processing sound — changed. Accelerated. And moved: from below them to within the room, rising through the floor material, through the root systems, up into the air of the enclosed space."Rohan," Lata said. "Rohan, look at me."He looked at her. His face was not — Lata's journal: his face was not his face. Not changed. Not physically different. But occupied differently. Like a room in which the furniture is the same but everything has been moved two inches. The same features, the same man, but the arrangement of meaning in his face was different in a way she could not name but could not doubt."It's taking something," he said. His voice was entirely calm. "I can feel it. It's not — it doesn't hurt.""What is it taking?"He looked at her with an expression that was both present and absent."The thing that hurts," he said. "All of it. Everything that has ever hurt." He paused. "It's — careful. It's taking it carefully."Priti moved toward him.Haripada had said: stay together. He had said: touch nothing.She touched Rohan's arm.The sound stopped.In the silence that followed — which lasted, by the camera footage timestamp, eleven seconds — nothing moved. Not Rohan, not Priti, not Samir, not Lata. The forest was entirely still, the kind of still that was a held breath, the kind that preceded something rather than followed it.Then Rohan screamed.Not a scream of pain — that was what all three accounts specified, specifically and carefully, because the distinction mattered. A scream of loss. The specific sound of something being removed. Abrupt, very loud, and over in three seconds.Then he was standing and his face was entirely his own again, blinking, looking at his hands."I'm okay," he said. His voice was shaking. "I'm fine. I'm—""Can we leave?" Lata said. To Samir. The director's call. She could have made it herself but she wanted him to make it, wanted someone else to be the one to say the word."Yes," Samir said. "We leave."They moved toward the opening.It was Rohan who noticed, at the opening, that something was wrong. He stopped. He looked at the teeth above the gap in the wall. He looked at them for a long time."What?" Lata said."The teeth," he said. "They're different."She looked. The arrangement was different — she had studied it going in, had thought at the time it was a radiating pattern, a sun or a flower. Now it was different. Not dramatically — some teeth at different angles, some that had appeared overnight, some that had rotated in the surface material as if something had moved them.They formed something now.The arrangement, above the opening, was the shape of a mouth that was very wide.Wide, and open, and smiling.