Voices, before anything else.
Not words Rama could parse — rhythm first, a call-and-response cadence carried on wind moving the wrong way, toward them instead of away. He’d doubled back for Sekar within the hour, their daughter riding his shoulders now, and the three of them had covered the distance to the tree line in near silence, stepping where the leaf litter looked softest, stopping every dozen paces to listen before moving again.
"Stop." Sekar’s hand flat against his chest.
He stopped.
She tilted her head, eyes half-closed, the specific stillness of someone listening past the words for their shape rather than their meaning. The voices carried again — two registers, one low and patient, one younger and quicker, trading something back and forth across the terraced field below. A third voice joined briefly, further off, answered by what might have been laughter.
"Say something," Rama murmured.
"I can’t yet." Her jaw worked. "Give me the pattern again."
The younger voice obliged without knowing it, calling out something that ended on a rising note — a question, unmistakably, whatever the actual words were. Then a longer string of syllables, unhurried, the cadence of someone explaining rather than asking.
Sekar’s eyes opened.
"Sanskrit," she said. "Not Sanskrit exactly. Sanskrit’s bones under something else — vowel shifts I don’t have names for, but the grammatical skeleton’s there. Old Malay, maybe, taking loanwords the way the peninsula always did, before any of it had the shape it eventually settled into." She looked at him, something caught between fear and the specific hunger of a linguist handed a problem she’d thought only existed in dead manuscripts and doctoral footnotes. "I can place the family. I can’t place the year. Could be off by centuries either direction."
"Close enough to try talking to them?"
"Close enough that they’d hear us as foreigners, not demons. That’s not nothing."
They crept the field’s edge rather than crossing it, staying low behind a stand of cane that hid them without hiding the view. Their daughter had gone quiet against Rama’s shoulders, one small hand fisted in his collar, watching everything with the particular alertness of a child who’d learned, in the space of two days, that quiet mattered more than questions.
The fields themselves were the first real evidence — not wild growth, but rice, unmistakably rice, staggered in flooded terraces down the slope with an irrigation channel cut precise as a ruled line along the high edge, feeding each level in turn before spilling to the next. Someone had engineered water to move exactly where they wanted it, across a hillside shaped by hand rather than accident. That took generations, not seasons. A wooden sluice gate, worn smooth at the handle, controlled the flow between two of the lower terraces.
Below the fields, a footpath ran packed hard by feet, branching toward a cluster of structures with steep thatched roofs, raised on posts above the damp ground. Smoke climbed thin and unhurried from two of them. A woman crossed the open space between buildings with a woven basket balanced on her hip, calling something back over her shoulder that drew a laugh from someone Rama couldn’t see. A dog, lean and short-haired, trotted past her without looking up.
Ordinary. That was the thing that unsteadied him more than any of it — the specific, unremarkable ordinariness of people going about an afternoon that had nothing to do with the three of them at all.
"Bronze," Sekar breathed, nodding toward a man crouched near the nearest structure, working something with a hand tool that caught the light in a dull, unpolished flash. "Or early iron. I can’t tell the difference from here, not without seeing the color up close." She didn’t finish the thought out loud. She didn’t need to.
Either way, a number of centuries had just collapsed down to a guess made from tool-color at forty meters, and neither of them wanted to say the number out loud in front of their daughter.
Their daughter shifted, restless, and Rama felt the small intake of breath that preceded a question before it happened.
"Are they going to be nice?" Barely a whisper, right against his ear.
"I don’t know yet," he said. "That’s why we’re being quiet."
"Okay." She pressed her face back into his neck, and he felt her decide, in real time, to trust that answer completely, small fingers relaxing slightly against his collar, and something in his chest tightened at how easily she still did that — how much of her remaining courage was borrowed directly from his own voice staying level.
Sekar had gone still beside him in a different way now — not listening anymore, watching. Her attention had shifted past the village itself, toward the tree line curving around behind it, where the light did something wrong.
"Rama."
He followed her look and understood immediately why her voice had changed.
Nothing was visibly moving. That was exactly the problem — the specific, practiced absence of movement that came from people who knew how to stay still, arranged along the curve of the trees in a pattern too deliberate to be coincidence, too evenly spaced to be villagers minding their own field. Not hunters either. Hunters didn’t position themselves in a line facing inward, toward the settlement, rather than outward toward game.
[Danger: Hostile Presence Detected — Range: Close]
The notification hit at the exact moment his own trained instinct did, the two of them arriving together the way they hadn’t in years — not since the last time actual, physical danger had mattered more than politics or diplomacy or anything institutional had ever required of him. Seven years of dulled reflex woke up all at once, cold and immediate, the way it hadn’t needed to since long before the multiverse crisis ever taught him to think in council votes instead of threat ranges.
"Behind us," he said, already turning, daughter’s weight shifting against his back as his body moved before his mind finished the sentence. "Not the village. Behind—"
Cane rustled, close, in three directions at once.
Sekar’s hand found his arm without looking, a single hard grip that meant I heard it too more precisely than any word could have.
The figures that stepped out weren’t villagers checking a noise in their fields. They came with weapons already raised, already spaced for a formation that assumed resistance before it arrived, eyes fixed on the three strangers crouched at the tree line with the specific, wary attention of people who’d learned exactly what to do when something unfamiliar appeared out of the forest that didn’t belong to their world at all.
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