Aarav watched Leo go, then turned to Rajan and Veer.
"Guys," he said, "let's celebrate. We got our first house." He held up the key once, briefly, and pocketed it. "Today we will have a full meal for dinner. But before we go to the North-West Borough — bags first. And wrap them in rugged cloth so they look like regular old bags."
"Okay." Rajan nodded. "Today we definitely celebrate. Bags first."
Veer nodded alongside him with the enthusiasm of someone for whom celebrate and food had arrived in the same sentence.
---
The alley was exactly as they had left it. Narrow, unlit, the kind of gap between buildings that the city had forgotten to have an opinion about. They found the passage entrance without difficulty.
"Veer," Aarav said. "Stay here. Guard the entrance."
Veer positioned himself without complaint.
Aarav and Rajan descended.
The smell hit immediately.
Ugh — what a foul smell. Aarav breathed through his mouth and kept moving. Rajan, a step behind, said nothing, which suggested he was managing the same problem with the same strategy. They moved carefully through the dark, following the route memorised that morning, until they reached the alcove.
The bags were intact.
Aarav exhaled and reached for his.
Then he heard it.
Voices. Low, deliberate, coming from further along the passage. Two figures, partially visible in the dim — both hooded, one giving instruction, one receiving it.
"What do you mean you failed?" The first voice was quiet in the way that made quiet threatening. "You do realize we have paid money for the job. Just kill him — however you can. Poison him, stab him, kill him directly or indirectly. I want him dead. Do you understand?"
"Yes, sir." Flat, subdued. "I promise you. This time I will not fail."
"Good. Now Go."
Aarav had gone very still.
Rajan had gone equally still beside him. Their eyes met in the dark. Rajan's hand moved slowly to his bag and came back holding his gun — grip steady, held low.
Neither of them breathed more than they had to.
The figure who had received the instruction turned and moved away through a separate passage. The other followed a different route. Footsteps faded. The passage went quiet.
Aarav exhaled slowly.
They gathered their bags without speaking and moved back toward the entrance with the careful pace of people who had just been reminded that this city had layers they hadn't seen yet.
---
Veer looked up the moment they emerged.
"What took you two so long?" he said. "Were you making the bags in the sewers?"
"You won't believe what we saw," Aarav said. He told him quickly — two figures, the conversation, the gun Rajan had drawn. Veer's expression moved through amusement, confusion, and settled somewhere in the vicinity of unease.
None of them said it directly. There was no need. They had each arrived at the same quiet recognition — that this world was not simply unfamiliar. It was dangerous in the ordinary sense. The mundane sense. The sense in which murder got discussed in sewers with the calm efficiency of people scheduling a meeting.
Aarav picked up his bag, checked the cloth wrapping, and looked at the others. "Let's find a carriage."
---
They found one quickly on the main road. Eight Drel. Aarav noted it without complaint — fifty-six remaining. The carriage moved through the lamplit streets, the city shifting in register outside the small window as they left the central districts behind. Buildings grew older, closer together. Then the bridge appeared ahead, the Pavani River dark and patient beneath it.
They crossed.
The North-West Borough received them without ceremony. Older stonework, buildings repaired rather than replaced, streets that were clean enough but carried the worn quality of places where people worked hard and didn't have much left over. Laundry hung between windows. Children moved through an alley with the purposeful energy of a game taken very seriously.
The carriage stopped near the market. They climbed out.
"Go to the market," Aarav told Rajan and Veer. "Get food — enough for all three of us. Get mine too. I'll find you after."
Rajan raised an eyebrow. "And you?"
"Walking around. Looking at things." Aarav adjusted his bag strap. "We can't forget our actual goal. Not the house, not the job, not the 64 Drel. Those are immediate problems and we've handled them." He glanced between them. "We need to go home. Back to our own world. And the faster we understand this one, the faster we find a way. So." A small gesture toward the market. "I'll be nearby."
Rajan held his gaze for a moment, then nodded.
Veer had already started moving toward the smell of food.
---
Aarav walked through the market with his bag on one shoulder.
The stalls were modest — vegetables, dried goods, second-hand cloth, a few tools. The kind of market that served people who needed things rather than people who wanted them. He moved without hurrying, eyes taking in prices, names, how vendors spoke to different customers, whether the tone changed depending on how someone was dressed.
He looked up at one point, for no particular reason.
And stopped.
Two moons hung in the night sky. One large and pale, familiar in shape if not in company. Beside it, smaller, a second one — sitting quietly apart, as though it had always been there and saw no reason to explain itself.
Huh. He had known since the first moment that this was another world. Had been operating on that knowledge every day. But knowing it and seeing two moons side by side in an evening sky were entirely different experiences.
Those moons are not magical items, right? The thought arrived with a dry, tired edge. Otherwise I would later find out they are ancient sealed artifacts and someone would ask me to retrieve them. That would be a very exhausting development.
He looked back down at the market and kept walking.
---
He wasn't paying attention when he bumped into her.
A brief collision — shoulder against shoulder. Aarav stepped back immediately.
She was old. Small, dressed in a faded layered gown whose hem had frayed unevenly, rough patches sewn over the worst of the wear. A loose bodice hung awkwardly, tied with mismatched strings knotted too many times. A worn shawl slipped from one shoulder. Her crooked bonnet barely held back the wisps of grey hair escaping in several directions.
"I'm terribly sorry, ma'am," Aarav said, steadying her lightly before letting go. "I didn't see you. Are you okay?"
The old woman looked up at him.
Her eyes found his face — and something shifted in them. Not recognition exactly. The expression of a person who had been searching for something and had just found it somewhere unexpected.
She spoke.
"Di Deva moguriate sen."
Aarav blinked. The Magic Translator registered nothing. The words arrived as pure sound, carrying the shape of meaning without the meaning itself.
"Di Deva moguriate sen."
Umm — what? Excuse me, ma'am?
She said it again. And again. The same phrase, the same cadence, each repetition slightly louder than the last. Her eyes stayed fixed on him with an intensity that had nothing casual about it.
She might be mentally ill. Aarav took a careful step back. She's definitely not in a right state of mind. Why does every problem find me? Am I too attractive?
Without warning, she snapped.
A shrill scream tore from her throat. Her finger shot out pointing directly at him, trembling. Her other hand went to her own hair, scratching frantically, her bonnet tilting sideways. The phrase came louder now — the same three words, over and over, rising above the noise of the market until the stalls nearby had gone quiet and heads were turning.
Two men pushed through and reached her from behind — grabbed her by the shoulders, spoke in low firm voices, weathered her resistance until she finally stilled.
One of them looked at Aarav. "Sorry, sir. She's not in a right state of mind. She keeps saying strange things. Don't worry about it." A brief pause. "You should probably go now."
The man's eyes dropped briefly to Aarav's neck — to the Magic Translator — and his expression shifted into something practical. "Are you perhaps a refugee? We provide discounts to refugees. Come by our store when you have time."
"Ah, yes, yes. Sure," Aarav said, with the tone of someone who had already mentally left the conversation.
He turned and walked out of the crowd.
He found a quieter spot at the edge of the road and stopped. Took a slow breath. The market continued behind him — ordinary, unbothered, the brief commotion already forgotten by most of the people who had witnessed it.
He looked back at it for a moment. Opened his mouth slightly, as though something had occurred to him worth saying.
Then closed it.
A few minutes later Rajan and Veer appeared from between the stalls, each carrying wrapped portions.
"Here's yours." Rajan held it out. "Eating now or after we reach the apartment?"
"Yeah, I'm gonna—"
"Aarav, Aarav." Veer stepped forward, barely containing himself. "You won't believe what we found. There was actually rice — and this bread that looked exactly like dosa. And there was pie, and actual cheese. I want to try all of it. All of it."
What a kid.
"You'll need a good amount of money for that," Aarav said.
"I'll eat after we reach the apartment." He pocketed his portion. "For now we should move."
Rajan studied him for a moment. "Did something happen?"
"No. I'm just tired."
He said it easily and left it there. The old woman, the phrase she had repeated, the way her eyes had fixed on him — he folded it away somewhere quiet. Nothing useful could be done with it tonight.
They started walking towards the Rust Street.
---
The North-West Borough did not improve on closer inspection. The market had given the illusion of activity and life — stalls lit, people moving, commerce happening. Away from it, the borough revealed its actual character without apology.
The streets were narrow. Not the charming kind of narrow that old cities sometimes managed, where the closeness felt intentional and the stones underfoot had been worn smooth by centuries of deliberate use. This was the narrow of buildings that had been built too close together by people who needed shelter more than they needed space, and had never had the money or the reason to fix it afterward. The road surface was uneven — cobblestones missing in places, replaced by packed earth that turned to mud at the edges where the drainage wasn't working properly, which appeared to be most places.
The lamplight helped less than it should have. The posts were spaced too far apart for the light to carry between them, leaving long stretches of shadow between one orange pool and the next. In those gaps, the buildings pressed close on either side — four and five stories of darkened brick, the mortar crumbling in long irregular lines, window frames warped and unpainted, shutters hanging at angles that suggested the hinges had given up some time ago and nobody had gotten around to caring. Laundry still hung between some of the upper windows, forgotten or simply left — shapes of cloth moving faintly in the night air.
Everything here had been used for a long time. The walls, the roads, the buildings — all of it carried the particular texture of things that had not been replaced because replacement cost money, and money had always been needed for something more urgent. It wasn't ruin. It was just the accumulated weight of a place where nothing ever got quite far enough ahead of itself to rest.
Aarav looked at it as he walked and said nothing.
He missed Google Maps with a sudden, specific intensity that surprised him slightly. In Kolkata, in any city he had ever navigated, the answer to not knowing where you were going was a phone and thirty seconds. A blue dot, a line, a voice telling you to turn left in fifty metres. Clean, immediate, requiring nothing from anyone.
Here he had a card with an address written on it and the vague instruction that Rust Street was north-east of the market.
"Excuse me," he said, stopping a man who was passing in the other direction with a coat pulled around him against the night air. "Rust Street — which way?"
The man pointed without breaking stride. Didn't look up. Just pointed and kept walking.
Useful enough. They turned.
The new road was slightly wider but no better maintained. A dog sat in a doorway on the left, watching them pass with the disinterest of an animal that had seen enough strangers to stop finding them interesting. A window on the upper floor of a building ahead glowed faintly — candlelight shifting behind dirty glass, someone awake inside, going about whatever private business people conducted at this hour. From somewhere further along, the sound of a door closing, then footsteps fading away.
They turned again at an intersection where one of the lampposts had gone dark — the flame out, the post standing uselessly in the shadow it was supposed to dispel. Aarav checked the card. Rajan looked over his shoulder at it.
"Should be the next road," Rajan said.
"Should be," Aarav agreed.
It was. A sign mounted crookedly on the corner building — RUST STREET.