CHAPTER FIVE

Meera and Vikram were back at the Mountain Rest dhaba in Kullu, sitting in a corner booth, waiting for someone.

"You said you'd take me, and the minute I agreed, you dragged me back to town." Meera's irritation was building like steam in a pressure cooker. She was beginning to suspect that Vikram was leading her on a wild-goose chase to exhaust her into giving up. "Who are we waiting for?"

"Dev."

"The bartender?"

"He's that as well." Vikram's expression suggested he'd bitten into something sour. "He can take us through, but we'll need to bargain with him. Don't say anything unnecessary, and for the love of all gods, don't tell him your name."

Meera stared at him. "He already knows my name. I told him last night."

Vikram closed his eyes. A muscle in his jaw jumped. "Of course you did."

"What? He asked."

"He asked." Vikram repeated the words like a man who had been expecting this particular disaster and was angry at himself for not preventing it. "Meera, the stories you teach in your classes — the rules about names, about eating fairy food, about bargains with supernatural beings — those aren't metaphors here. They're survival instructions."

Before she could respond, a voice cut through the afternoon noise of the dhaba.

"Vikram Rathore."

Dev moved through the crowd like smoke — a sinuous, graceful slide between chairs and bodies that made the space around him seem to bend. He was wearing the same clothes as the night before, or different clothes that looked identical, and his blue eyes found Meera before they found Vikram.

"And Meera Sharma."

"Not from her, you don't," Vikram growled. "So don't be getting ideas."

Dev smiled — the kind of smile that saints painted warnings about. "I asked around about the woman from the plains looking for Arjun Rathore. People in these mountains are so wonderfully forthcoming." He slid into the booth across from them, and Meera felt the temperature change — warmer where he was, as if he carried his own climate. "Do you need my help, Vikram Rathore?"

"You know I have leverage."

Dev's eyes narrowed, the blue darkening to something like the sky before a hailstorm. "Are you saying you want to trade one of your favours? For her?"

"Don't make this complicated, Dev."

The two men leaned in, and Vikram switched to Pahari — or something that sounded like Pahari but older, thicker, with sounds Meera's ear couldn't catch. Dev responded in the same language, his voice dropping to a register that vibrated in Meera's teeth.

They went back and forth for several agonizing minutes while Meera's patience shredded like wet paper. She hated not knowing what was happening. She hated being talked about in a language she couldn't follow. She hated the exclusion, the gatekeeper energy, the feeling of being kept outside a room where decisions about her life were being made.

She'd spent her entire childhood watching her father navigate rooms where he wasn't fully welcome — the Pune academic circles where a Goan art teacher was always slightly out of place, slightly too brown, slightly too accented. She'd inherited his stubborn refusal to accept it.

"Enough." She broke into their conversation. "Either tell me what you're discussing or I'm leaving."

Dev's eyes lit up like someone had struck a match behind them. "And who are you to dictate terms, Meera Sharma, stranger to two worlds?"

Vikram blinked. "What are you talking about?"

"She'll know when she knows." Dev turned to Meera and — seemingly from nowhere, as if the laws of physics were suggestions he chose to ignore — produced a bottle of Old Monk and three glasses. He poured a finger of rum in Meera's glass and pushed it toward her. "Drink with me and I'll know you. See you safe through the shadows tonight."

She eyed the glass with suspicion, then turned to Vikram. He gave her a barely perceptible nod.

Dev poured for Vikram, then for himself.

"We have an agreement then."

Meera didn't know what made her do it — instinct, something half-remembered from the Panchatantra, a story about a clever girl who swapped cups with a yaksha — but just before Dev lifted his glass, she reached across and switched hers with his.

He looked at her with an expression that was equal parts surprise and delight. Then he picked up the glass she'd poured for him and drank.

Vikram sighed and downed his rum. "Done."

Meera lifted the cold glass — it smelled of rum and something else, something green and wild, like crushed pine needles after rain — and drank it in one shot. It burned down her throat and landed in her stomach like a warm fist.

"Done."

Dev's eyes came alive, and the blue in them deepened until she could swear she saw lightning flicker in his irises. "I'll see you at the edge of the forest, Vikram Rathore. Be there at sunset."

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"Leave it." Vikram took her phone from her hand and set it on the bed. "We don't have much time. The sun sets early this time of year."

"I'm not leaving my phone —"

"If you take it, they'll take it."

"Who will take it?" She shook her head. "You keep telling me rules that sound like they come straight out of a folklore textbook, and I know they do because I wrote one, but —"

"Ha!" He snorted. "Folklore textbook. Listen, I traded something valuable for this passage, so you'll follow the rules I give you. No phone. It'll be safe here with Malti and Ajay. If you bring anything modern to the forest tonight, you'll lose it. No cameras. No electronics. No iron."

"What does no iron mean practically?"

"No steel. No stainless steel. No iron alloys." He looked at her necklace — a gold chain with a small pendant she'd worn since her mother gave it to her. He leaned closer, and the heat of him filled the space between them. "What's that?"

Meera's hand went to the pendant. It was a small gold disc with two serpents coiled around each other — Naga motifs, her mother had said. She'd bought it from a temple goldsmith in Goa before Meera was born.

"Gold," she said. "Old gold."

"That's fine." He stepped back. "Basically, anything modern, leave it here. I can't even carry a proper knife through."

She pointed to the blade on his belt — an ornate thing with a dark handle and a matte sheen. "What's that?"

He drew it from its leather sheath. "Bone handle. Flint blade. And I'll be hiding it before we meet Dev."

"Is this going to be dangerous?"

Was Vikram Rathore actually a serial killer who was going to dispose of her in a forest in Himachal Pradesh?

After meeting you at a dhaba in broad daylight and introducing you to his housekeeper?

She listened to too many crime podcasts.

"Dangerous?" He shrugged, massive shoulders rolling like boulders. "Could be. Could be fine. You wanted to see Arjun, so we're going."

"You said you went through as a child, so I assumed this was —"

"What?"

Some kind of elaborate prank, if she was being honest. She was going along with Vikram's plans because the alternative was giving up, but in her heart — the rational, Fergusson College-educated part of her heart — she didn't really believe in portals to parallel dimensions, no matter how many times her friend Priya told her that the physics of dimensional theory was entirely sound.

In theory. Not in practice.

"Text your friends," Vikram said. "Tell them you're going trekking for a few days and you'll be out of network range. Leave your phone here and give them Malti's landline number."

Good advice. Practical advice. Also exactly the kind of advice a murderer would give.

"Fine."

She texted the group chat: Going on a trek with Arjun's brother. Multi-day. No network. If worried, call Malti at Rathore House. She added the landline number and then, because she couldn't help herself: If I die, my laptop password is MeeraSharmaNotInsane2024.

Priya: That is a terrible password. Please come home alive.

Noor: I will kill the brother if anything happens to you. Also bring apples.

She put the phone down. It felt like setting down a limb.

Vikram left the room, and Meera walked to the window. The deodar forest behind Rathore House rose like a dark wall, the trees so tall and close together that the space between them was black even in daylight. Mist threaded between the trunks, and somewhere deep inside, she caught a glint of something — a light, amber and brief, like a lamp being carried through the trees.

She was going in there. Tonight. With a man she'd known for two days.

You're following the rabbit all the way into the forest, Meera. And the wolf is the one showing you the way.

She changed into the warmest clothes she had — thick cotton salwar, a thermal layer, a wool sweater Malti had lent her, and a heavy Himachali shawl that smelled of cedar and woodsmoke. She stuffed her feet into the sturdiest shoes she'd brought — trekking shoes from Decathlon, which were going to have to be enough because her Bata chappals weren't going to cut it on a mountain path at sunset.

She went downstairs to find Vikram waiting at the door in similar outdoor clothes — heavy kurta, a Himachali cap, leather boots, and a thick cloak fastened at his shoulder with a bronze pin.

"Ready?" he asked.

No.

"Let's go."

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