MEERA

The Chandragad camp did not sleep the way Vanantara used to sleep, in the low hum of crickets and temple bells and the occasional dog barking at nothing in the middle distance. It hummed instead with the particular discipline of an army that had done this so many times it no longer needed to think about the doing — tents raised in perfect rows, cook-fires lit at measured intervals, sentries changing their watch with a silence that felt, to me, more frightening than any amount of noise could have been. Noise meant chaos, and chaos meant a chance. This was not that. This was a machine that had simply finished one piece of its work and moved, without pause, to the next.