Ucchal fiddles behind her desk with a calculator. She pencils spirals on a sticky note she then pastes on the window, to admire how the sun refracts through the paper and causes the graphite to glisten.

"This way," her assistant instructs someone in the hall.

Ucchal straightens the back of her recliner. "Did I have an appointment, Jacqueline?" she calls out.

Yashvi plonks down in the chair across from her.

"Radnya!" Ucchal moves aside a pile of folders. "No—Yashvi."

The girl nods at the floor, her eyes crusty with crying. She wears a baggy sweatshirt and jeans given her by the social workers.

Ucchal brushes crumbs from lunch off her cardigan. "Want a candy?" She gestures at a bowl of mints next to her stapler.

"I recognize you." The girl's eyes come up, and one of them is crimson, bloodshot.

Ucchal clears her throat. "Laksh told me you might."

Yashvi pulls the loose sleeves of the shirt over her hands. "Where is he?"

"Safe in foster care."

"That's not safe. I want to see him."

"We can arrange that. For now let's get oriented."

Yashvi stirs in her seat, her cheeks glowing like small fires in an otherwise pale face. "Prisha . . . is Prisha . . . ?"

Now it is Ucchal's turn to look down. "Let's take a walk."

Yashvi lets the rain spritz her. It steams coolly, tender on her skin. She rolls up her sleeves, her arms sprouting goosebumps. Ucchal leads the way across a pothole-dotted avenue, her hair piled in a bun with many grizzled wisps hanging down.

"Mind your feet," she cautions the girl, and construction rumbles all around, enormous scaffolds looming over them. Skeletons of buildings. Ucchal gestures toward a bus stop. She sits under the shelter only after Yashvi does.

The pair observes as cranes lift massive cement cubes into the air.

"Could we go back to the Labyrinth to get my maths textbook?" Yashvi flaps her droopy sleeves, her hands buried deep within.

"How about we get you a new maths textbook?" Ucchal tries.

"It won't be the same. I want my book." Fresh tears brim in Yashvi's eyes. "I want mine."

"I've chased you for months." Ucchal fishes a tissue out of her purse to wipe the girl's tears. "Radnya. Yashvi. Who else are you?"

Yashvi grimaces. "A woman when I have to be, a girl when I can be, yet neither an adult nor a child."

"Any family?"

"Who knows, anymore?"

Ucchal quietly sighs. "You seem educated."

"I scour trash bins for wisdom. You'd be astonished what proverbs germinate among rats and mold."

The bus arrives and they board it, cleaving to the railings because passengers occupy every seat. Yashvi struggles for balance as the driver revs a groggy, sputtering engine, Delhi moving slowly and then quickly by. Heads bounce, responding to the uneven road.

Ucchal shows her calculator to Yashvi and winks. "Now you can't bewilder me anymore."

Yashvi tries to laugh but can't. Ucchal closes her eyes tightly, her thick gray eyebrows seeming to hide them completely. "A name is so important," she says. "When you don't have one, how can you know who you are?"

"There are a billion ways," lisps Yashvi, a jostling rag doll in the rickety bus. "Yet none of them have to do with what other people call you."

"What is your name, Yashvi?"

"You just said it."

Ucchal reaches into the girls sleeve to take her hand. "What's your name?"

Yashvi watches Ucchal's wrinkles unscrew into her resting face, benign, contemplative. There is something different about this old woman. Something is off about her. She isn't like most people. When she talks, she's actually going somewhere with what she is saying.

"I haven't got a name. I'm . . . I'm . . ." Yashvi's mouth falls shut and twists. ". . . numbers. I'm digits . . . I'm . . . I'm a statistic."

The bus slows again, everyone flinging slightly forward. The breaks wheeze a bit before fizzling to silence.

Yashvi and Ucchal bump their way outside, feeling the chill keener than ever when beyond the warmth of the many bodies inside. A splotch of a sun stains the mountains pink, their shelves of granite bathed in distance, foggier the lower you look. A group of teenagers in a little park kick around a brown sphere that may once have been a soccer ball. A couple kisses in the gazebo. Lilies protrude from cracks in the sidewalk, the dragon conquered by the fairy.

"I'm multiplication . . ." Yashvi continues, struggling to recognize her own voice as it speaks words it has never before spoken. "I'm . . . division . . . I'm . . . subtraction and square root and . . . I'm integers, parabolas, and . . ."

She stops walking. "Jivika."

Ucchal stops too. "You're Jivika."

"Yes," says Jivika.

The mild rain drips its last, ripples a final puddle. Jivika yawns, stretches, a sudden gust fluttering her baggy shirt like a kite on her arms.

The doctor invites her and Ucchal into his office. He scrutinizes his clipboard. Jivika's eyes follow his as she tries to gauge what he could be working out, mulling over.

"Prisha's collarbone was like this." He places his left hand horizontally against the base of the fingers of his right hand, his right hand tilted back at a forty-five degree angle. "When they found her she had a collapsed lung, a shrunken kidney, a—"

"We may skip the details," Ucchal interrupts him.

"Of course." The doctor scribbles on his clipboard. "Follow me, please."

He takes Jivika and Ucchal through a series of hallways and into a small room with a curtain drawn in front of a bed.

"Visitors." He tugs the veil tactfully aside.

Prisha lies on the thin mattress, her arm in a sling. Upon closer inspection, Jivika notices something not right about Prisha's arm, something that goes beyond a mere fracture. Jivika inches nearer, gripping the smooth rail at the side of the bed. She concentrates and sees what is not right.

Prisha has no left forearm anymore. Her elbow connects to nothing but a stump wrapped in white.

Beep, beep, beep, the heart monitor sings above her. A full minute passes, and Jivika still gawks at that knob where tendons, muscles, and flesh once tensed and flexed.

"Do you know who I am?" Prisha's lips peel apart.

"Of course I do," says Jivika. "Only yesterday we were together, running for the city. How could I forget?"

"Who am I then?"

Jivika studies Prisha's expressions. "You're my best friend."

"Yashvi?"

"Yes."

"Yashvi."

"It's me, Prisha."

"Who's Prisha?"

Jivika curls her tongue and tries to not weep. "Your name."

Prisha opens the only hand she still has and stares into its palm: lined with scars from the razorblade. "My name is Idris, though, not Prisha."

Jivika smooths the sweat-matted bangs out of her friend's face.

"Idris is a beautiful name," Jivika says.

"What's yours, your true name?" asks Idris.

And Jivika answers.

"Jivika means 'source of life,' " says Ucchal, swaying awkwardly near them.

Idris winces. "My head hurts."

"I think you're in shock." Jivika gazes at the heart monitor beeping, beeping, beeping over the bed. "Are you okay, Idris?"

"No."

Jivika swallows. "Will you be okay tomorrow, or the next day?"

"No."

"So they broke you."

Idris clenches her jaw, then smiles wearily up at her. "No."

Jivika smiles too and starts to wander away from the bed. Glancing back, she sees Ucchal still standing there all wrinkled and poised and attentive.

And Jivika smiles once more at the woman who was just a little different, who had been just a little odd in just the right manner, at just the right time, and in just the right place. Then, with that one concluding smile, Jivika turns back toward the door that the doctor closed when he exited.

"If God has hands," she says, "we are the fingers."

Ucchal rubs the girl's shoulder. "Fumbling with matches in the dark."

Jivika concentrates on the portal to the universe in front of her. "When you can't find light, be it."

Her fingers close around the doorknob.

"Can I go anywhere?"

"You don't even have to ask," says Ucchal. "I'll keep close in case you need me."

So Jivika steps out into one hallway, follows it into another.

She is used to mazes. It takes a while to get out of them. Sometimes you can't on your own. But if they have a beginning, they have an end.

An end. The opposite of infinity. The opposite of her.

Source of life.

Soon she's in the biting wind, walking with wonder in the shadows of a city she knows and doesn't.

T H E   E N D