RECAP: Laksh is the mischievous little boy Yashvi has a desire to look after, like a brother.

While visiting the slums, Ucchal resolves to not look at the children whose wide and wet eyes would singe themselves into her corneas like a blindness. She notices small bones sprinkled throughout the street and prays they belonged to dogs, only dogs.

"How are you feeling?" Detective Ahuja asks.

"I don't know," Ucchal admits.

She sees movement among the refuse, a little boy wandering there and making small sounds in his rummaging, his shirt so large it hangs to his feet. He fills his old plastic bottle with water from a dirty puddle on the ground.

"Have you seen anything scarring, Ucchal?" Detective Ahuja persists with her endless questions.

Ignoring her, Ucchal goes over to the boy and lays a hand on his stone-gray face.

"I only ask because you appear very tired," the detective says. "You know, the kind of tired you don't sleep off. The kind that lives in you forever, a weight five hundred pounds in your brain."

"Do you have clean water to give this child?" Ucchal is trembling.

"If we give him water," replies the detective, "we'd have to give it to all the other kids as well, and no, we don't have water for all of them."

Ucchal limps for her car, throws open the trunk, runs her long fingernail along the plastic wrapping of a 12-pack of Dasani. She takes the boy's crumpled, leaking bottle and gives him a fresh one. He unscrews the cap with almost a reverence, gulps its contents down so hard and heavy that his whole body spasms with each glug of his throat. After he finishes drinking he stares up at Ucchal, tears streaking his dusty, peeling, gray face. Then he trots off with a subtle prance.

"Not that easy, you know?" Ucchal calls after him. "You must pay for that."

He turns with a shaky frown. "I've nothing to pay."

"I highly doubt you have nothing to pay, little sir."

"I haven't, I swear."

Ucchal's fist is on her hip. "You have a name, don't you?"

"No . . . yeah."

"Well, are you going to pay me by telling me your name, or do I have to ring the police?"

The child squints as though trying to remember. "I am Laksh."

Ucchal raises an eyebrow.

"Is it a funny name?" He asks, nervous.

"Not at all, not at all," says Ucchal. "It's a good name."

Laksh decides to smile. "Thank you, ma'am."

Ucchal bends to look at him straight on. "Do me a favor?"

The boy hesitantly nods.

"Be our secret agent." She ruffles his hair and it snows dandruff. "Can you do that?"

"Why?"

"Because we're searching for a bad man."

Laksh chews the lip of his new bottle. "I know a bad man."

"Do you, Laksh?"

"He hurts people and he even hurts my best friend, Yashvi."

"I'm sorry to hear that, Laksh. You're very brave, Laksh."

The boy glares at the strange woman. "You've been talking to all the kids about the man."

"Observant of you, little sir."

"You want to find someone who can get to the bad man."

"That would sure be helpful."

"If I lead you to where he lives, will you stop him from hurting my friend?"

Ucchal shares a glance with the detective before grabbing Laksh's shoulders and shaking them firmly.

"Yes, oh, yes!" shouts Ucchal, causing Laksh to flinch.

Yashvi is convinced she'll grow nearsighted from eye strain by the end of the year, but she doesn't care. Night after night amid the fragile moonbeams slatting through the bars of her and Prisha's window, she reads of numbers: whole numbers, irrational numbers (which, it turns out, are as confusing as their name suggests), natural numbers, integers. She studies until the sun peeks over the Labyrinth's sawtooth cityscape, and Prisha must plead with her to put Mathematics: Class 6 away before Madam enters the chamber.

Yashvi does not speak so much with Prisha anymore. The younger girl spends most of her free time discovering operations and using them to systematize her already advanced, if piecemeal, skill set. She is familiar with most of what she reviews, though she has never gone to school.

Before the goondas kidnapped her, she learned some basic math from her mother Additri who feared her children would grow up without an education. Appalled by the costliness of tuitions, Additri took her own initiatives, doing all she could to stimulate Yashvi's hungry intelligence.

Of course, Yashvi wasn't called Yashvi then.

It is important, says Mathematics: Class 6, to understand your multiplication tables, so that when your teacher asks you to multiply big numbers together like 582 and 263, you will be able to isolate individual digits whose products you have already memorized.

Below this sentence waits a chart with two numbered columns, the first column running horizontally across the page and the second vertically down. Yashvi runs two fingers along each column, tracing numbers one to sixty-four in between.

". . . and two multiplied by two equals four," she lisps, "and four multiplied by four is sixteen, and sixteen multiplied by 2,416"—she's off the page, using her mind—"is 36,656, and 36,656 multiplied by . . ."

She scrubs herself vigorously in the shallow pool under the bridge, determined to wash Sharib's odor off her. Whispering numbers to herself, she feels entirely alien to her surroundings. The other girls make jokes at her expense. They stand behind her and thrust their pelvises at her and endeavor to place tulip petals in her hair without her noticing.

Ruby tries to show Yashvi a frog scooped up from the tall, frizzy grass springing out of cracks in the ancient gravel enveloping the pool. Laksh analyzes Yashvi's scowling philosopher face and asks question after question—but, in a world far away, a world of numbers, she answers none of his inquiries. Dinahika make some frivolous remark about her and when there is no response, they lose interest and mosey away.

Even the customers do not seem to faze Yashvi anymore when they heap their enormous sweaty bodies onto hers.

Seven customers times three customers is twenty-one.

Seven times four is twenty-eight.

Seven times five is thirty-five.

Seven times six is . . .

It always gets more difficult after times five, she has found. But who is she kidding? She can multiply millions together without a tap of a calculator.

The skies have unleashed their soothing rain all week, but the humidity endures. It causes a vast, impregnable stink all through the city. So invasive is the miasma, you could plug your nose and still smell it. Alleys become waterlogged like swamps. Sicknesses increase, as does paranoia. Men and women dread any prolonged human contact, whose hand they shake, whose lips they kiss, whose bed they share.

The humidity seems to intensify personal scents, as well. Madam's girls utilize all the perfumes they can afford with their meager allowances, and some even rub themselves with magnolias. Customers are not so tactful with their own bodily hygiene, however, and Yashvi often struggles not to retch in their presence. Once she vomits into a customer's lap after his bushy armpit hair tickles her nose, and she, mortified at the blunder, expects him to strike her. Yet he only topples over, clucking like a rooster, before seizing her again so that he can pick up where he left off.

There remains no real safeguard against sexual diseases. The contraceptives prevent pregnancy but not infection. Madam, alerted to the threat of HIV (specifically, how it will incapacitate her laborers and, therefore, her profit margins) permits the use of condoms, but only if the girls can convince the customers to be "so inconvenienced." Few things irk Madam's clients—who come to the brothel seeking escape from real-world concerns—more than a little rubber sheath. The indignant, sometimes even violent, backlash the girls typically receive upon entreating safe sex is enough to discourage any and all appeals to this end.

As a result, a handful of girls contract the virus each year. Once infected they are useless to the brothel. Prithviraj puts them out in the street, leaves them to fend for themselves. The virus, ironically enough, is the only way out of Madam's Labyrinth, and yet every Labyrinth girl fears infection, for no brothel will sell a sick girl. No customer wants to pay for tainted sex.

"Do you want to go into the city again?" Prisha appears at Yashvi's side as the girls head for the pool one misty morning.

"You're talking too loud!" Yashvi breathes sharply.

She cannot hide that she would much rather be learning math than freshening up. Why freshen up, anyway, only to be immediately soiled again by today's queue of filthy customers?

"You're grouchy," Prisha goads, sticking out her chin.

They begin undressing at the water's edge.

Prisha says, "What have you been reading about, anyway?"

"Operations."

"Operations? Like surgery?"

"No, like multiplying."

"Ah." Prisha's toe touches the surface of the water, and ripples disperse. "Five times five is . . ."

"Twenty-five."

"I knew that, smarty-pants!" Prisha descends into the pool. "Nobody likes you anymore, you know? You always have an ugly look on your face like you're angry."

"I'm thinking, not angry!" Yashvi feels her frown deepen. Her brow seems heavy too. The days since the girls' secret excursion into the city have been full of new mental exercises for her, new thought patterns, new trails of contemplation like veins of silver or glisters of light on a sea of shadows. How unattractive ordinary routines become. The measly, vapid, few-and-far-between pleasures she once drew from the many drudgeries of life seem more and more inaccessible with each passing night she spends thumbing through Mathematics: Grade 6's forbidden pages.

Out of nowhere, Ruby leaps into the air and comes down like a boulder, generating a grand splash that reaches just about everyone in the pool. She lands right before Tiya and the latter receives a noseful of water. A heavyset mother nearby who has not intended to get wet past her waist now stands rigidly in a drenched tunic, her gigantic nipples poking forth. Water has splattered the side of Prisha's face and she complains that her ear is ringing.

Tiya swears at Ruby, calling her a whore. Ruby probably cannot hear this, since she glides underwater, kicking her legs. Yashvi, still on the dry gravel, seems the least affected by the splash, only some glittering droplets on her knees. Palms planted on the edge of the pool, she lowers herself down into the pale water. It's colder than she expected and she yelps when it reaches her bellybutton.

Dinahika's feet come slapping towards the pool and Tiya squeaks, "They'd better not."

Ruby's head emerges with a gasp just as the twins catapult into the air and strike the water one and then the other, two more boulders. Great waves rise and come crashing down on everyone in the pool and even one or two on the dry gravel. Ruby drifts onto her back, floating and cackling. The drenched, heavyset mother flees the pool, tripping nearly every step, scraping her big toes on the coarse ground and mumbling to Lord Shiva. A smirk creeps over Yashvi's face. Prisha seizes with laughter. Samaira and Anvi, bombarded too with the mass soaking, stand by the edge of the pool looking as though they have already been in the water even though they have only just arrived. Some mothers shout rebukes at Dinahika, some laugh along with the girls.

Yashvi asks Prisha, "What about five times six?"

Prisha rolls her eyes, still grasping her stomach and giggling. "Arey! You think I'm stupid?"

"Five times six."

"Thirty."

"Okay." Yashvi buries herself up to her chin in water. "Six times six."

Prisha splashes at her, but the water does not reach. "You're cheating! You have it fresh in your mind!"

"Six times six," Yashvi demands before vanishing beneath the surface of the water.

When she returns for air she finds Prisha counting fingers. "Thirty-six," Prisha answers at last.

Yashvi's lips move without sound except that of her tongue clicking as she mouths the words: "Seven times eight."

Prisha scoffs. "Cruel girl!"

Yashvi dips underwater once more. She counts tiny bubbles that slip out of her nostrils. Sitting with crisscrossed legs on the pool's floor, she peers up at Prisha: all blurry and distorted by the water's surface.

The pop Yashvi hears next sounds a universe away, sounds so quiet and distant and far. But then, she realizes that down here below the water everything has a muffled quality, even the screams that follow the pop. Even Prisha's screams as the blur of her dashes away, away, gone.

Yashvi bursts up from the depths of the pool and slaps the matted veil of hair out of her face. Everyone has gone, not just Prisha. Their feet drum in the distance. Yashvi opens her mouth to cry out to them, but her voice is swallowed by another pop, this one loud in her ears that hear in the naked air that these pops, likely the first pop and definitely the last, are gunshots.

She jets out of the pool and runs and trips and wails—and Prisha catches her and wrestles her into an alley, and the girls duck and huddle together as the gunshots shake the Labyrinth like roars of a Minotaur.