Dr. Gupta signed the certificate before lunch — cardiac arrest, natural causes, advanced age — the same lazy stamp he'd put on half the deaths in this district over the years, and would have been the end of it if Meera hadn't asked, out of nothing more than professional habit, to see the body herself before the cremation.

"Look at the cut," she said, when Aditi and Dev arrived at the hospital that evening. She'd photographed it already, close enough to see what Gupta hadn't bothered to check. "This isn't decomposition. This isn't animals. Someone used something sharp and precise, and they did it after he'd already stopped breathing, not before."

"After," Dev repeated.

"After. There's no blood pooling at the wound site the way there would be if his heart had still been beating." Meera set the photograph down. "Whoever's doing this doesn't hurt people to kill them. He kills them first, quietly, and then he takes what he came for. The taking isn't the murder. It's something else. A ritual, or a receipt."

Aditi thought of the note from months ago, the dropped e's, the careful Sanskritized Hindi. I am not the darkness. I am the light that burns it.

"He's escalating," she said. "The others were strangers to us, mostly. People we had to go looking for the story behind. This one — everyone in town knew Kashinath. He ran the temple my whole life. This isn't hidden the way the others were. He wants this one noticed."

"Or he's telling someone something," Dev said, "and the town noticing is just the cost of the message getting through."

They went through Kashinath's small room behind the temple that night, an old man's whole life reduced to a cot, a shelf of scripture, and a tin trunk that hadn't been opened, from the dust on its latch, in years. Inside it, beneath folded ceremonial cloth, was a diary — decades of entries in a shaking, elderly hand, mostly about temple accounts and festival schedules, until the entries thinned out around a date fifteen years back and became something else entirely.

I performed the rite because they asked me to. I did not know what the crowd would do after. I have told myself this for fifteen years and I no longer believe it protects me from anything.

Aditi read it twice. Then a third time, more slowly, because some part of her had already guessed what she'd find before she found it and wanted, badly, to be wrong.

"Fifteen years," she said quietly. "Same as the story the constable's widow wouldn't finish telling us."

Dev looked over her shoulder at the page. "A rite. An exorcism, maybe."

"For a woman the whole town decided was a witch." Aditi's hand had gone very still on the page, the way it did now whenever she was working hard not to let it shake. "Dev. I need to show you something. I should have shown you the day I found it."

She took the folded photograph out of her shirt pocket at last, the crease gone soft from three days of carrying it everywhere, and set it on the diary between them.

"Her name is Savitri," she said. "I found this in my uncle's house. On the back, in his handwriting, it just says Savitri. Before."

Something in Dev's jaw tightened as he studied the photograph, at the young woman mid-laugh in a courtyard fifteen years gone, and then at Aditi, and he did not say the thing that both of them were already, silently, standing much too close to.