“Ten months.” Zeli’s voice trembled. She exchanged the child for the plate of food. “Thank you,” she said. “For everything. This—I’ll repay you one day.”

Nithya touched a hand gently to her colleague’s shoulder. Zeli was barely into womanhood, closer to Carma’s age than her own. “It’s okay. You’re safe now. You can stay here.”

Nithya sat cross-legged on the floor, the baby in her lap. Carma joined them with an old plushie-bot that had frozen into the shape of an elephant when its electronics stopped functioning. The baby ignored the toy in favor of the bowl of rice, which she happily crammed into her mouth with a chubby fist.

The warm weight of the infant settled Nithya’s jangling nerves. As long as they remained in the flat, only her husband’s status remained unknown. Such a strange feeling, this not-knowing. Parts of her mind skittered like untrained bots, unsure of what they should be doing at any given moment. Her lips wanted to shape words to Sita—call Luis—to see her husband’s face, hear his voice. Their last conversation had been so terrible. Have you forgiven me?

Aunty spoke in a low, insistent voice, in Tamil. “At least make a wall to separate them for sleeping.”

Nithya turned the most expressive glare she could muster on her aunt. With power being so precious, she wouldn’t waste a milliwatt on her aunt’s nonsense. Please, God, restore the network so I can send her safely home. Now that Zeli was here, perhaps she could walk Bhairavi Chitthi home the next morning. But what was the condition of Aunty’s flat? Anticipated guilt quashed the idea. She couldn’t leave her mother’s younger sister to the mercy of data blackout.

Carma had happily snuggled up with Zeli’s niece, the two of them fast asleep on Carma’s mattress. They’d given Nithya’s bed to Zeli’s mother. Aunty had the remaining mattress, hers since this started, but she had the nerve to complain while Nithya, Zeli, and her sister would be lying on the bare floor with static cloth under their heads.

“If you don’t like it, you can sleep somewhere else tonight,” Nithya said softly.

Aunty pursed her lips in distaste and then lay down with her back to the others.

Nithya sat at the table with a mug of tea and the printouts of the report.

Zeli slipped into the other chair. “Looks like data. What is it?”

“Someone anonymously sent me all this after seeing my blocked queries. It has some of the information I wanted, and some evidence of unethical test practices, including a fairly damning letter from a bioethics lawyer.”

Zeli raised an eyebrow. “That’s a lot of paper.”