Forest

2026 · Kanchipuram, the weavers’ street · 6:52 PM

“Out the back,” said Amma, not looking up from her loom. “Through Selvi’s kitchen. She won’t mind. Tell her the rice is burning.”

“Is her rice burning?”

“It is always burning.”

Kanchi grabbed the towel with the dial in it and Puram grabbed his bag, and they went through the back door into a wet courtyard, and through a gap in a wall, and into a kitchen where a large woman in a blue nightie was stirring a pot.

“Your rice is burning,” said Kanchi.

“It is not,” said Selvi, and looked, and swore, and they were out her front door into the next lane before she turned around.

Behind them, far back, someone was knocking on Amma’s door. A woman’s voice, polite and tired, carried over the rain. “Ms. Roy? Mr. Mehrotra only wants to talk. Nobody needs to get wet.”

“She knows my name,” Kanchi said.

“She knows everything.” Puram was already looking left and right. “Car’s the other way. We can’t go back for it.”

“Then we don’t go back for it.”

The next lane was a weaving lane, the long kind, where the warp threads are stretched out in the open before they go onto a loom. Hundreds of silk threads, red and green and gold, ran on poles at waist height for fifty meters down the middle of the street, shining with rain. Men were rolling them up, fast, cursing the weather. At the far end, a big shed with its doors open and ten looms inside, all going. Clack, thump. Clack, thump.

Kanchi ran along the threads. Puram ran behind her, saying “sorry, sorry, sorry” to every man they passed.

Headlights swung into the far end of the lane.

They ducked into the shed. It was warm and loud and smelled of silk and machine oil. The weavers looked up, saw two wet strangers crouching behind a stack of spools, and went back to weaving. Kanchi decided she loved them all.

She was humming. She only noticed because Puram looked at her. It was the song her mother used to sing when it rained in Kolkata, the one with no real words, just a tune that went up and came down like water off a roof. She always hummed it when she was scared. She had never once told him that. He knew anyway. She could see him know it.

“How many?” she whispered.

He looked through a gap in the spools. “Four. The woman. Three men. They’re checking the houses.”

“Plan?”

“I’m making one.”

“Make it faster.”

“I need two minutes, Kanchi. Plans need—”

The shed door banged. One of the men stood in it, shaking rain off his jacket, looking around.

Kanchi moved. She didn’t decide to. She stood up to run for the back door, and the towel caught on the corner of a loom, and the dial fell out.

It hit the warp threads of the nearest loom and bounced, and spun, and rolled across the floor toward the man in the door.

She dived for it. So did Puram.

Her hand closed on the bronze edge, warm as a cup of coffee. His hand closed on the other side.

Every loom in the shed stopped. All ten at once, mid-thump. The shuttle in the nearest one hung in the air between the threads.

Then the rain stopped too.

Then there was no shed.

3102 BCE · Kanchi · 38 days before the turn

Dark. Real dark, the kind she hadn’t seen since a dig in the Rann of Kutch years ago, where the nearest bulb had been sixty kilometers away.

Wet earth. Leaves. A smell of something green and sharp being crushed under her knees. Frogs, thousands of them, all talking at once. Above her, through a gap in trees taller than any trees she knew, more stars than sky.

She was on her knees. Puram was on his knees across from her. Between them, in both their hands, the dial glowed very faintly, the way a coal glows when you blow on it.

“Let go,” said Puram. “Slowly. Together.”

They let go. The glow faded.

For a long time, neither of them said anything. The frogs said plenty.

“Where are we?” said Kanchi at last.

Puram had his phone out. The screen lit his face blue. “No signal. No GPS.” He tapped. “Offline maps don’t know where we are either.”

“Try the star thing.”

He opened the star app he used for his drone flights. He held it up to the gap in the trees. It thought. It turned a slow circle on the screen. Then a red warning box came up, and he read it, and read it again.

“What?”

“It says the pole star is wrong.”

“Stars can’t be wrong.”

“No, but they move. Very slowly. The one that sits over the north pole changes over thousands of years.” He turned the phone so she could see. The app had drawn a line to a dim star she didn’t know. “Right now, the north star is Polaris. The app is saying it’s this one. Thuban.”

“And when was Thuban the north star?”

He didn’t answer at first. His thumb moved on the screen.

“About five thousand years ago,” said Puram.

Kanchi laughed. She couldn’t help it. It came out of her like air out of a balloon, and it was too loud for the forest, and the frogs stopped for a moment to listen.

“Five thousand years,” she said. “Puram. The textbooks say nobody lived here yet. There’s no city. There’s no temple. There’s nothing here. I could write a paper. I could write ten papers, and they’d throw me off every dig in the country, and I’d be right…”

She stopped laughing.

She looked at the dial on the ground between them, and at her own hand, and at his.

Never touch it together.

“We can go back,” said Puram quickly. “Both hands on it, same as before. We just go back.”

“To a shed full of Vik’s men.”

“To a shed full of Vik’s men who are five thousand years away. I’ll take the men.”

“If we go now, we land right in front of them. Give it ten minutes. Let them get bored and leave.”

“Your plan is to wait?”

“My plan is to wait,” she said. “Write it down. It’s the first time.”

He almost smiled. Then his face changed, and he was looking past her, into the trees.

Kanchi turned.

Far off, between the black trunks, there were lights. Orange lights, moving, bobbing, the way lights move when people carry them. Torches. Five, six, more. And voices, calling to each other through the forest, getting closer.

She understood the words. That was the first strange thing. The second was what they were calling.

“Builder!” someone shouted. “Builder! Where are you?”