The Worm in Every Heart by Gemma Files Page A

think,” he said, coolly. And pulled the trigger.
    Romesh Singh shut his eyes. There had been a bazaar boy the company had adopted, not long since—silent and tensile with near-starvation, good mainly for scouring pots, packing kits (but only when there was time to watch him do it, for he had never quite gotten over his early habits of casual thievery), and running those few small errands his shaky command of English would allow for. Grammar—stalking restlessly around camp, quietly ablaze with his usual nimbus of potential lunacy, as everyone took care to stay out of his way—had not even seemed to notice his existence, until the child made the understandable mistake of laughing at a whispered joke while still within Grammar’s eyeshot. Without breaking stride, Grammar had swerved to scoop the boy up and carried him into the cooking tent, where he ground him face-first into an open cask of chili powder for some long moments, then dropped him. To stand, watching patiently, as the boy thrashed and huffed awhile at his feet—nose, eyes and throat all swollen shut, the rest a tight, red mask of burns—before suffocating on what later proved to be a flood of his own shocked mucus.
    And he, Romesh Singh, had shut his eyes then as well, so as not to have to see Grammar’s scarlet-coated back draw up all at once like a shaken snake, straightening with pleased arousal at the spectacle of his own cruelty.
    (Thinking:
Oh.
Like a bell.
Oh,
a heart-beat’s sharp-soft squeeze between rib and gut, tolling.
This is so wrong. I am so very wrong to even be here, with him.
)
    Gunshot and thunder blended, signalling the torrent’s arrival. And before this one (now forever nameless) soldier’s corpse had fallen to earth, the rest of Grammar’s company simply broke and ran in the face of Grammar’s insanity—always no more than a reputable quirk, until it had finally turned their way.
    The flayed man gave a laugh, drawing Grammar’s second shot. The pistol jammed; Grammar swore and threw it after them, as the soldiers’ shadows faded like ghosts under a curtain of warm monsoon rain, leaving officer and second-in-command alike behind, entirely at the forest’s mercies.
    Grammar snarled, a tiger’s half-cough.
    â€œCowardly bastards,” he said, in English. Adding, contemptuously: “’Rhakshasa’, am I? Hardly an opinion worth dying over.”
    Romesh Singh, wisely enough, said nothing—his own eyes kept firmly shut—as a long, wet, green moment passed over them, darkening both their scarlet coats to rust.
    Grammar laughed, and let the sheath drop away from his sword, falling point-down. It quivered by one foot, mud-supported, forgotten.
    â€œWell, come then, my shadow,” he told the curtain of underbrush before him (having, without even noticing, slid fluidly back into Urdu.) “Or shall I haste to meet thee? For either way, you will find me as I find myself: Ready.”
    And still Romesh Singh stood, feeling the rain seep down through his clothes and lave his trembling body abruptly to life, every nerve set winking in the gloom like unseen stars above.
    (Thinking only:
But now we are alone at last, thou and I. Together.
)
    They were both wrong, of course. Grammar, all his impressively flaunted rage aside, was nothing near to ready—as Romesh Singh might have told him, had he cared to solicit a second opinion—and neither was alone, with or without the other.
    For I was already here. As I always had been.
    The rain, the mud, the dead and cooling bodies, the silent trees. I was present and accounted for in all of it at once, a speck of me everywhere the eye might care to light, pixilating slowly to fruition. In the very air itself, between every falling raindrop—sub-dust, sub-viri, void-breath on the back of the neck, a shadow on the face of the whole. I spread out around the carcass of the dead former sepoy like a stain, over the