Rama went through the gate first, alone, over Surya's immediate and vocal objection. "If something in there wanted a fight," Rama told him, "it would have had one from the twenty men standing outside already. Let me look before you commit anyone else."
The compound inside matched the silence from without in every unsettling detail. Cook fires sat cold in their pits, some still holding the shape of logs that had burned down to ash without anyone stirring or feeding them further. A wooden bowl lay overturned in the dirt near the mess hall, its contents long since dried into a dark crust that insects should have found days ago and apparently hadn't. Laundry hung on lines strung between two barracks, stiff and undisturbed, as though whoever had hung it out to dry had simply walked away mid-task and never come back to collect it.
