“The warning in Balan’s email! Something’s going to happen here, now.” She stepped to a kiosk and bought a prepaid mobile. When it was activated, she called all of Middleton’s numbers—even his landlines—and sent text messages and emails.

After finishing, she slipped the phone away and wheeled Charley out the door. “If your father can get to any phone or computer, he’ll find out where we are and why.”

“If he’s alive,” Charley muttered.

“Stop it,” Tesla said, though not unkindly. “He’s fine. I know he is. He might even be here. If he knows about the Village.”

“The two of you are fools.”

“What?”

Charley cocked her gaze upward enough to briefly meet Tesla’s stare. “Why bother saving the world if you can’t enjoy it?”

“Charley, please . . . ”

“No, whatever it is the two of you share, I want you to know I’m fine with it. I’m honestly not sure you have any better idea how to define it than I do. But you need to make sense of it, for your own sakes.”

“Thank you.”

The doors slid open mechanically and Tesla wheeled Charley into the steaming air. It assaulted her skin like a blast furnace, seeming to instantly melt the make-up that had already turned her face into a Halloween mask. Tesla eased the chair up to the curb and raised a hand to hail a taxi.

Almost instantly, a grime-encrusted white sedan screeched forward, cutting off another cab in the queue. A fierce exchange of explosive Hindi shot back and forth and the winning cab, the sedan, pulled up in front of the women. Tesla busied herself with helping the costumed Charley out of the chair and helping her into the backseat. Leaving the airline-issued wheelchair by the curb, she walked around and climbed in the taxi’s driver side.

“What is your destination?” the ancient turbaned driver asked in awkward English. His massively wrinkled face glanced at them in the grimy rearview mirror.

“Take us to the Baglihar dam,” Tesla said.

Archer still had not heard from Jana and was fearing the worst even before word reached him that she was apparently en route to the United States—at least her cell phone was. He wondered if this was some form of cosmic punishment, that taking the life of his father had sentenced him to a life in isolation without the distractions of love and romance. No matter. He was young enough to enjoy the fruits of his labors and eventual power that would come once his work at the dam was done.