*The mountain doesn't warn you. It simply waits.*

  ---

  The wait outside Marie's room had stretched long enough that Suzie had counted every crack in the waiting area ceiling twice. The animals around her had grown restless too — a tabby cat pressing its face against the carrier door, a small dog turning circles in its corner. Even they seemed to sense that time was being wasted.

  Then finally — the click of a lock.

  The door swung open and Marie stepped out, her hair slightly less perfect than it had been going in, her expression carrying the soft, distracted glow of someone whose mind was still half inside that room. In her hand was the blood packet — dark, sealed, small enough to fit in a bag

  Judo appeared in the doorway behind her, leaning against the frame with his arms crossed and that same unbothered smile on his face. He looked like a man who had won an argument without raising his voice.

  Marie held the packet out toward Suzie and said, in a tone that left absolutely no room for negotiation — *"I'm going to the exhibition tonight with Judo. Don't call me. Don't ask me to help. Whatever this is about, handle it yourself."*

  Suzie took the packet from her hand without a word.

  Marie gave her one last look — part concern, part warning, mostly the expression of someone who had already mentally moved on to a different evening

  Suzie stood there for exactly one second, blood packet in hand, and then she left. No thank you. No goodbye.

  There was a mountain to reach. And the clock was already moving.

  ---

  She ran most of the way.

  The east side of the Andie Mountain sat at the far edge of town where the streets slowly gave up being streets and became something older — broken paths, loose gravel, the smell of soil and bark replacing exhaust and concrete. The buildings thinned out. The trees thickened. And there, right at the boundary where city ended and forest began, two figures stood waiting.

  Mrita had her arms crossed and her eyes scanning the path. Gill stood a little apart from her, hands in his pockets, gaze pointed somewhere toward the treeline. They made an odd pair — one restless, one still — but they had clearly been there long enough to have had a conversation.

  And what a conversation it had been.

  *"Tell me about Suzie,"* Mrita had said, somewhere in the middle of the wait, turning to Gill with the casual curiosity

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  Gill blinked. *"I don't know much about her,"* he said honestly. *"We've only been walking companions for two days."*

  *"Two days,"* Mrita repeated, as if cataloguing the information. *"And yet here you are. On a mountain. Looking for a tiger."*

  Gill said nothing to that, which was answer enough.

  Mrita tilted her head. *"Are you interested in her?"*

  The change in Gill's face was immediate and completely beyond his control. The tips of his ears went pink. A warmth crept up from his collar to his cheekbones and settled there, visible and undeniable, the kind of blush that no amount of composure can argue with. He looked at the ground, then at the trees, then briefly — disastrously — at Mrita's knowing expression.

  *"I can't say no,"* he admitted quietly. *"But I'm interested in her. Yes."* He paused, and when he looked up again his eyes were earnest and a little anxious. *"Mrita — please don't tell her. I don't want to spoil what we have. Even if it's only two days old. I don't want to ruin it."*

  Mrita studied him for a moment — read the sincerity in his face, the carefulness of someone who understood that fragile things require gentle handling — and nodded once.

  *"It's a deal,"* she said simply.

  The moment those words landed, they both looked up.

  Suzie had come into view down the path — and the sight of her made Gill's just-composed expression do something complicated all over again.

  She was wearing dark jeans and a khaki jacket, her bag slung over one shoulder with the easy weight of someone who had packed light on purpose. Her stride was quick and certain, eating up the distance between them without rush. She looked, Mrita thought privately, exactly like someone who belonged at the edge of a forest at five in the afternoon.

  *"What's in the bag?"* Mrita called out as Suzie reached them.

  Suzie looked at her with an expression that was almost a question mark — chin slightly tilted, one brow up, as if the answer should have been obvious. *"Snacks,"* she said. *"And a torchlight."*

  Mrita opened her mouth, seemed to decide that was a reasonable answer, and closed it again.

  Suzie glanced at both of them — Mrita, then Gill — and gave a single nod. Ready. The time, by Suzie's internal clock, was exactly five o'clock.

  ---

  They entered the forest from the east gate.

  This was deliberate. The forest department had set traps on the western approaches and stationed their security near the West Gate — the side closer to the city, the side more people foolishly wandered in from. The East Gate connected directly to the deep forest, which meant fewer officials, fewer fences, and considerably more wild. Suzie had known this. She had chosen it on purpose.

  Mrita took the lead.

  The mountain was vast. That was the first thing the forest reminded you of when you stepped inside it — the immediate, humbling sense of scale. The trees here were enormous, their trunks wider than three people standing with arms outstretched, their branches interlocking overhead in a canopy so dense it turned the late afternoon gold into something green and diffused. The path beneath their feet was soft with years of fallen leaves and old bark. Roots rose and dipped across the ground like the backs of buried animals.

  They walked in a loose line — Mrita at the front, reading the forest the way someone reads a familiar book, Suzie just behind her with her torchlight already in her hand though the sky above was still bright, and Gill at the back, his footsteps careful, his eyes moving constantly between the trees.

  And then something happened to the air.

  It was subtle at first — barely noticeable, easy to dismiss. The heavy city weight of exhaust and noise and human density simply fell away, replaced by something clean and vast and indifferent. Cool. Alive. The kind of air that reminded your lungs they were capable of more than they were usually asked to do.

  Mrita inhaled deeply and her shoulders dropped two inches. Gill's jaw unclenched. Even Suzie, who had been running calculations in her head since the clinic, felt something in her chest loosen slightly — like a knot given just enough slack to breathe.

  *"So,"* Mrita said, her voice dropping instinctively to forest volume — not a whisper, but quieter than usual, the way everyone speaks when trees are listening. *"What exactly is the plan if we actually find this tiger, Suzie?"*

  *"I know hypnosis,"* Suzie said, as though this were a standard skill. *"I can control it."*

  Mrita's feet did not stop walking, but her head turned very slowly toward Suzie. *"You can hypnotise a tiger."*

  *"Yes."*

  *"A wild tiger."*

  *"And besides,"* Suzie added, with a slight upward gesture toward Gill behind them, *"Gill is there. He's powerful."*

  Mrita turned to look at Gill, then back at Suzie. *"Who told you that?"*

  *"His own words,"* Suzie said simply.

  Gill smiled — a quiet, private thing — and said nothing. Whether he believed it himself was a different question entirely, but the fact that she had said it, remembered it, carried it with her onto this mountain — that was not a small thing. He kept that smile to himself and kept walking.

  The forest deepened around them. The canopy grew thicker. The light filtering down between branches became cooler, more fragmented, less gold and more silver-grey.

  Mrita kept leading. Suzie kept watching. Gill kept listening.

  None of them knew — could not have known — that fifteen minutes ahead of them, somewhere between the ancient trees and the gathering shadows, something enormous was already moving.

  It was not afraid of them.

  ---