Prisha the twenty-five-year-old hugs her knees. Her jhumkas, two miniature chandeliers studded with gemstones, sparkle on a nightstand whose paint flakes. The room has no illumination save an aperture the width and height of an envelope.

Introspection creeps in when the moon shines disco-white. Each lunar phase is a cap covering the opening of a well bit by bit, bit . . . by . . . bit.

Yashvi and Prisha share a bed. Sometimes the pair sleeps shoulder to shoulder; sometimes one roommate curls up near the footboard to let the other occupy the upper mattress unperturbed; sometimes this or that series of tosses and turns finds a girl on the floor. Yashvi knows sunrise will have her wearier than she is now, as though night was a time for aging instead of resting.

"Do you believe in God?" She reposes.

The other girl, still sitting, gapes down at her. "Occasionally, I guess."

"Does God believe in us?" Yashvi sees nightmares in her blinks before she has even departed consciousness. "Will you be sleeping soon, Prisha?"

"Soon, Radn—Yashvi."

"Are you in love with anybody?"

"No and neither are you. You're not ready for marriage," Prisha scolds. "Get wisdom first. You have years left to be young."

The girls rustle in their sheets. They will not flee, for they are "broken." "Broken girls learn what wise girls know, that there is nowhere better than the Labyrinth." Here was the first thing Yashvi ever heard Prisha say.

This evening the girls are at one another's sides, a position they assume while conversing. Prisha grips her knees tighter as the minutes perish, but she will not lie down. She bites her fingernails. They make popping sounds under the pressure of her teeth. She asks a question she has asked every night since she first met Yashvi.

"How many so far?"

"I stopped counting." Yashvi rolls over to view the room's wall that sweats condensation. Ants emerge from cracks. She will count everything (the ants, the cracks), but not what Prisha refers to when asking "How many?"

Yashvi returns to lying faceup and imagines her lips kissed gingerly in a fog of pedals. She almost touches herself but doesn't, wouldn't. Once sickened of urges she discovers the word "girl" in her neurons and inquires of its darkness, its holiness, its wrath.

She cannot sleep on her right side, because her ear throbs, a literal sensation of fire there, as though massaged with bhut jolokia seeds. Grazing her fingers over the stitches, she rehearses her new name in her mind the way she has done for the past twelve hours. To think she might introduce herself as "Radnya" by mistake! Such would risk detectives tracking down the Labyrinth.

"Prisha?"

"Uh?"

"You are not twenty-five. You pretend you are so you can buy alcohol. You're my age, and your ID is fake."

Prisha cannot conceal her sneer, her gums showing more than her teeth. She at last lies down. "Here you can be whoever you want. You try. Who do you want to be? You can be a supermodel, a film star, a singer . . ."

"I want to be dead."

"Then you can be dead. And I can be twenty-five."

Crickets chirp.

"My ear," Yashvi snivels, "stings worse than death."

"Let me see," the "twenty-five-year-old" replies.

Yashvi tucks her hair behind her ear.

The door opens and Madam materializes in the moon's alabaster. Roaming has summoned her from fellowship with hoodlums whose dens hold skulls that prophesy to the flowstone, in confidence that mortality is a spiteful creature. Madam calls Prisha's name and Prisha dresses and leaves with her and the door closes, Yashvi abandoned to lie alone.

You have years left to be young.

The door locks and unlocks only from outside. Madam rarely bolts it anymore, however: she deems imprisonment unnecessary, escape being the last thing on the girls' minds.

Yashvi goes at sunup to be seen, wearing a slip she washes daily in a shallow pool. She traverses the Labyrinth's grid, its alleys narrowing the farther she continues through. Flies bombard her visage in search of a way inside. Manholes overflow with urine and feces, the ground so rank that baked clay slabs have been placed over all the filth to form pathways.

Another girl tarries not far, her back to the others. Kajel, they call her, but she won't tell you that. She never speaks. Kajel does not wish to be seen, since she receives the least customers of all the girls, so Madam chastises her to turn away from onlookers when posing in the streets.

Jagan struts over, running a comb through his hair. Yashvi has observed him on her excursions into town to run errands. In the parking lot of his business he is always engaged in some passionate discourse with his clients. He comes to the Labyrinth on weekends, not secretively, but whistling, dressed in a suit and tie.

He is young, handsome, and realizes it, uses it to his advantage, lingering for some time after his paid session has ended, when most customers would sneak off for fear of growing a conscience. He orders Prisha to come to him, she does, and he clamps her shoulder under his chin. His arms entangle her waist, she struggling not to keel over, having been denied the slumber Yashvi now feels guilty for having enjoyed.

Yet Prisha seems most concerned with covering her arms that itch with rashes from The Medicine. Madam gives this drug to girls who cannot eat. It helps them gain weight without needing to be fed. Madam herself takes The Medicine hourly, or so she claims, and there is a rumor that if she does not shave she grows hair all over her face, even her upper cheeks, like a werewolf.

A fan buzzes. Strings of dust, blowing horizontal, cling to the grill. Ucchal has just finished applying foundation while frowning in a mirror, when she discovers another gray in her fringe. She apprehends the silver menace and plucks, wincing.

Her parents did not show age so rapidly. Ucchal realizes her line of work accelerates her dotage. Interviews are most taxing, counseling girls who come to this ancient office, this hole without air-conditioning where the hallways outside creak from interns hustling to and fro.

Trafficking turns up dozens of runaways per day. Survivors are provided healthcare, but their affliction is deeper than their skin. Frequently it is realizing they have been exploited that drives them over the edge. Suicide rates skyrocket among those saved from India's red-light district.

Ucchal enters "Radnya" into a search engine. The computer rasps like an ailing goat. The building overall is rickety and stuffy, with cubicles, rusty pipes, and the constant groan of printers and fax machines.

Ucchal, bathed in the blue glow of her monitor, researches every Radnya who ever existed. The browser overflows with tabs, each a tiny world. No database goes unchecked, no article, no missing person report. An intern finds Ucchal typing furiously, sighs, taps her, and mutters, "You can't rescue every girl."

Ucchal types and types. "Watch me."