Chapter 12 — The Night

The whisky moved around the group.Haripada was outside on the deck. He had not joined them. Through the small cabin window, Lata could see him sitting at the bow, looking at the water."What about you?" she said to the others. "Samir. Priti. What did it—""I don't know yet," Samir said. He said it carefully. "I feel — the same. I think. But Rohan said that too, at first.""Something around my peripheral vision," Priti said. She touched her temples. "I've had very good spatial memory my whole life. I can walk through a place once and describe it afterward with precision. Since we came out, I keep trying to picture the interior of the temple." She paused. "I can picture the teeth. I can picture the walls. I can't picture the spatial arrangement. I can't hold the geometry of the interior in my head. Every time I try, it—" She paused. "Slides.""Your spatial memory," Lata said."Part of it," Priti said. "I don't know how much.""And you?" Samir said to Lata.She thought about what she had felt inside the walls. The reading sensation. The customs inspection. She had felt it more strongly than the others, she thought, or had felt it differently — not as a question or a request but as a certainty, the specific sensation of something that already knew exactly what it wanted."I'm not sure yet," she said.She was sure.She didn't say it because she was still checking. Because what she suspected it had taken — the specific thing she had noticed beginning to go even inside the walls — was something she needed to verify before she described it.She looked at the cabin around her. At Samir, Priti, Rohan.She felt for the thing.It wasn't there.She looked at Rohan and thought: I know what he took from me. I know exactly what it took.She felt no urgency about this. No alarm.And the absence of urgency, she understood then, was itself the thing that was gone.