Riya came to the house on Friday at 7 AM, before college, in a plain cotton kurta with her bag on both shoulders, and stood in the doorway of the back bedroom looking at the grey circle on the floor.
Riya- " That's it? "
Alex- " That's it. "
Riya- " It looks like someone spilled tea. "
Alex- " Step on it. "
She looked at him the way people look at a doctor holding an injection. Then she took a breath and stepped onto the circle, and he stepped on with her.
Grey ground. Grey sky. The soft light from nowhere.
Riya stood very still. Her hands went slowly up to her ears, and then away from them, and then back again, like she was checking something.
Riya- " Alex. "
Alex- " What? "
Riya- " I can't hear them. "
For as long as she could remember, she had told him once, there had always been bells. Sometimes far, sometimes near, but always there, under everything, under her mother's voice and the TV and the traffic. She had thought everyone could hear them until she was eight.
Now, for the first time in her life, there was nothing.
She sat down on the grey ground with her college bag still on, and put her face on her knees, and cried. Not loudly. Just steadily, like a tap left running.
Alex sat down next to her and waited. Inside, there was nobody to see, and nowhere to be. They had time. Four times as much as outside.
After a while she wiped her face on her sleeve.
Riya- " Sorry. "
Alex- " Don't be. "
Riya- " Can I come here sometimes? Just to sleep? "
Alex- " Whenever you want. I'll make you a key. "
He didn't know yet how to make a key. He would find out.
Then they worked. That was why he had asked her to come. Inside the realm she couldn't hear the bells, but the moment she stepped out she could, and the contrast made them sharper. He took her in and out, in and out, ten times, and each time she came out he made her point.
Riya- " There. "
She pointed east, towards the river.
Riya- " There. And there. That one's far. That one is very far, it's like a phone ringing in another house. "
He marked them on a map of the city on his phone. A red dot for each bell.
The kiln was silent now. She checked three times to be sure. The race ground was silent too, as it had been since Saturday.
Five left.
Four of them were faint. Far from the centre, in places that made sense. A railway yard. An old jute mill. A filled-in lake. A burning ghat by the canal. Places where nobody walked at night.
The fifth was loud. Louder than all the others together. She didn't have to point at that one. She just turned her whole body towards it, like a plant turning to the sun, and her face went pale.
Alex looked at the map. The red dot sat on top of a big grey rectangle.
The Acropolis mall.
Riya left for college at 7:50 with red eyes and a strange light face, like someone who had slept for a week. She had been inside for almost two hours by her own watch. Outside, it had been thirty minutes.
Alex went back in alone.
He had one more hour before college, which meant four inside. He summoned the Tier 4 sparring monster and fought it until it could not stand, then let it rest and fought it again. He practised the earth spell that had opened the kiln flue, over and over, on the grey ground, until he could loosen a patch the size of a car in half a second instead of two. He practised the cold layer on his skin. He practised teleporting with his eyes closed, by feel, to a spot he had marked with his own shoe.
Tier 6 was a bigger house than Tier 5, and he was still walking through the rooms. Every hour inside showed him a new door.
[Vessel Sync: Tier 6 · Stage 1/5 · Next stage: 34%]
When he came out, the phone said 8:52. He was late for college, and his legs felt like someone else's, and he had never been happier to be late.
At 10:30 that morning, during the second lecture, his phone buzzed with a number he had saved on Sunday as Varma.
Varma- " A message for your friend. He doesn't need to answer. "
Varma- " We have six on our map now. One is sealed, thanks to him. One of them is under a shopping mall. We can't get a team inside without the owners asking questions, and the owners have friends. "
Varma- " Tell him that whoever is down there has been visiting it for months. "
Alex read it twice. Then he typed one word and sent it.
Alex- " Received. "
That evening, the four of them went to Acropolis.
It was Marina's idea, officially. A celebration, she said, for Malhotra's arrest and John's ribs and the end of the week. Sara wanted to go because Marina wanted to. John wanted to go because there was a KFC. Alex wanted to go because the loudest bell in the city was under the building, and four college kids eating chicken were the best cover in the world.
He hadn't told them that.
The mall was full the way malls are full on Friday nights. Families with strollers. Couples sharing one ice cream. Boys in caps walking slowly past girls in groups. The food court was on the top floor, loud and bright and smelling of fried things, and they got a table near the window after waiting eight minutes for one.
John- " Bucket. The big bucket. I'm a patient. Patients need protein. "
Marina- " You need to stop eating. "
John- " I'm healing, Marina. "
Alex ordered, paid, and while John and Marina argued over who would carry the tray, he said he was going to the washroom.
He went down the escalators to the ground floor. Then down the ramp to the basement parking. B1. B2. The car park got quieter and darker as he went down, and the air got cooler, and by the time he reached B3 he could feel it in his teeth.
The hum. The same hum as the kiln, but deeper. Older.
He went invisible.
B3 was half empty. A few cars. A security guard asleep in a plastic chair beside a fire extinguisher. And at the far end, behind a row of pillars, a long section closed off with blue metal sheets, the kind builders put around a site. A board hung on it. UNDER MAINTENANCE. NO ENTRY.
Alex teleported through the sheet.
The crack was there.
It ran along the floor of the car park like a scar, maybe twenty metres long, glowing faintly purple at its edges. Someone had painted around it. On the concrete pillars, on the floor, on the back of the blue sheets. The same sun, again and again, in red and gold, in circles inside circles, some fresh and some old and faded.
Three men in plain clothes sat on folding chairs beside the crack. One of them was reading a newspaper. The other two were dropping something into the crack, one at a time, slowly, from a cloth bag.
Cores.
Small grey rat cores, like the ones Alex had fed to his realm. One by one, they dropped them into the purple light. Every time a core fell in, the hum got a little deeper.
They weren't hiding the crack. They were feeding it.
Alex stood behind the nearest pillar and listened.
Man- " How many left? "
Second Man- " Thirty. His Grace says it's enough. "
Man- " For Sunday? "
Second Man- " For Sunday. He said Sunday, when the guest is ready. "
Alex didn't understand guest. He understood Sunday.
Thirty cores. Two days. He looked at the crack again and tried to imagine what a hole this deep and this old would push out if someone kept feeding it. The Brute had come out of a kiln that nobody fed. This one had been eating for months.
He waited three more minutes, but they only talked about cricket after that. He teleported back out through the sheet, walked past the sleeping guard, and took the stairs up instead of the escalator, so his face would have time to calm down.
By the time he got back to the food court, the bucket was half empty and John was licking his fingers.
John- " Bro. You took twenty minutes. Are you okay? "
Alex- " Long queue. "
He sat down. He picked up a piece of chicken. His hand was very steady.
Sara was watching him again. Marina was taking a selfie with the bucket. John was explaining to them both why the spicy one was better than the original.
At the next table, alone, sat an old man with a cup of tea from the KFC counter and a plate with one untouched piece of chicken on it.
Alex had not seen him sit down. But he had seen that face once before, through a gap in a guest-house curtain.
He was thin and neat, in a white kurta with a grey shawl. A wooden walking stick leaned against the table beside him. His hair was white and combed back with oil, and his face was kind, the kind of face that belonged in a temple or on the back of a biscuit packet.
He turned his head and smiled at Alex as if they were old friends.
Old Man- " Hello, child. "
His voice was soft. Alex knew it. He had heard it on Wednesday evening, through a listening spell under a coffee table.
Old Man- " You can hear it too, can't you? "