The latch clicked shut behind her, and the corridor took her in.

It was darker out here than she expected, lit by a single bulb in a wire cage halfway down the wall, its yellow light falling short of the corners. The runner under her bare feet was old and worn thin in the middle, and she felt every scratch of its wool — the fibers catching at her soles, the floor cold through it where the weave had gone bald. Somewhere behind the wall a pipe knocked, once, and settled. The air held old wood, floor polish, and beneath that the faint sourness of men who had walked this passage a thousand times.

Three of them. She had counted the voices from inside the room and she had been wrong. There were three.

The one by the wall pushed off it with his shoulder, unhurried, like a man rising from a long wait he had rather enjoyed. He was lean and hard, the sleeves of his kurta rolled past the elbow, and his eyes went down her body the way a hand goes over a piece of cloth at the market — thumb and forefinger, testing the weave. He stopped at her feet and came back up.

The one by the window did not move. He stood with his shoulder against the frame, arms crossed, and he was looking at her too, but his eyes did something else — they flinched when they met hers, and slid away to the floor, and came back. His hair was thick and waved and he kept pushing it off his forehead with the back of his wrist. He did not say anything.

The third was behind her.

She had not heard him move, but he was there — she felt him the way you feel a wall you have not yet touched, by the air going close and warm at her back. When she turned her head a fraction, he was a shoulder's width away, and when she shifted her weight to make room, he shifted too, and there was no room to make.

The lean one walked up the corridor. He did not hurry and he did not stop short; he came until she could smell him, and then he came a step more. Tobacco, first — the sweet burnt-cherry of it soaked into his clothes — and under that the animal smell of leather and old sweat. His face was close enough that she could see the small scar through one eyebrow, a pale comma in the dark hair.

"So," he said. His voice was low and flat, and it carried down the corridor and came back off the far wall. "You're what he paid for."

Meera said nothing. Her hands were at her sides and she made them stay there. She had learned one thing in that room and she had learned it well: when they spoke, you did not answer unless the answer was asked for, and even then you kept it small.

His hand came up. She did not flinch — she was proud of that, later, in the small mean hours of the night, that she had not flinched — and his fingers found her braid where it lay over her shoulder. He lifted it, slowly, hand over hand, until he held the whole rope of it gathered in his fist at the base of her neck. Then he weighed it. He actually weighed it, the way a man weighs a sack of grain at the market, tipping his wrist up and letting it settle, feeling the pull of it against her scalp.

Her neck bent with it. She had to tip her chin to keep her eyes on his face.

"Father's taste," he said, to no one, to the corridor, to the other two. "He always did like them small." His thumb moved against the braid, back and forth, a slow stroke that had nothing to do with gentleness. "What's your name."

"Meera." It came out thin. She swallowed and said it again, lower, the way you put a lid on a pot. "Meera."

"Meera." He said it the way you say a word in a language you do not speak, tasting the shape of it and finding nothing in it worth keeping. "How old."

"Nineteen."

Something moved through his face — not a smile, less than a smile, a loosening. "Nineteen," he repeated, and the thumb went on stroking the braid. "Good. He'd have taken you either way. He took the cow off your father for less than that, I know that much."

Behind her, the third one laughed. It was a wet, private sound, and it came from low in his chest, and it was far too close to her ear. She felt his breath move the fine hairs at her temple. She did not turn around. Turning around, she understood without being told, was a thing she was not allowed.

"Be quiet, Veer," the lean one said, without heat, the way you tell a dog to lie down. The laughing stopped. It stopped instantly, like a tap turned off, and that was worse than the laughing had been.

The corridor was quiet. The bulb buzzed in its cage. Down at the far end, past the window, she could hear something — a radio, maybe, or a television, a thin thread of sound from another part of the house, someone else's ordinary evening carrying on while she stood here with a fist in her hair.

"Look at me," he said.

She had not looked away. But she looked harder — she made her eyes do the work, held them up to his face like an offering, and his own eyes were dark and flat and did not give anything back. They were the same eyes as his father's. The same black, the same weight, the same way of resting on you like a hand.

He let go of the braid. It fell back against her collarbone, and the relief of it — the sudden lightness in her neck — was so sharp it was almost a sound in her throat. She kept it in.

"You'll be at dinner," he said. "You'll sit where I put you. You'll eat what's put in front of you and you won't get up until I say." He was already turning away, already done with her, the way a man is done with a tool once he has checked the edge of it. "And you'll keep that hair like that. He likes it like that."

The one behind her had not moved. She could feel the heat of him through her clothes, a solid band of it across her back, and she was suddenly, horribly aware of the other heat — the slow wet trickle high on the inside of her thigh, gone cool now in the corridor air, drying in a thin line that she could feel every inch of. It was on the left. If the third one stood where he stood, if he looked down, if the light caught it, it would be there on her skin like a word written on a wall.

She pressed her thighs together, just slightly, just enough, and the wetness moved and smeared and did not go anywhere.

"Arjun."

The one by the window had spoken. His voice was different from the first one's — lower, softer, and it did not carry; it came only as far as it needed to. He had straightened off the window frame and he was standing with his hands loose at his sides, and he was looking at his brother and not at her, which she understood, somehow, was a kindness.

"What."

"Father said dinner." A pause. "He didn't say the corridor."

The lean one — Arjun — turned and looked at his brother for a long moment. The corridor held its breath. The bulb buzzed. Down the hall the thin thread of the television went on and on.

"He didn't," Arjun said at last, and there was something in it that was almost amused and almost dangerous and neither one all the way. "He didn't say the corridor." He looked back at Meera, and his eyes did the slow trip down her body once more, unhurried, and came up. "But he brought her home for us to see. So we're seeing her."

"We've seen her."

"Have we." Arjun's mouth did the thing that was not a smile again. "Stand there, then, if you're so careful. Stand at the window and look out of it. I'll do the looking."

Rohan did not answer. He did not go back to the window, either. He stood where he was, in the middle of the corridor, his big steady hands hanging at his sides, and he looked at the floor between his own feet, and he stayed.

Behind her, the third one — Veer — took a single step. It was not a large step. It was the kind of step a man takes when he wants to be felt and not heard, and she felt it — the whole long wall of him arriving at her back, until there was no air between them at all, until the back of her shirt was pressed flat against the front of his and she could feel the shape of his chest through both layers of cloth, the rise of his ribs, the beat of him, faster than it should have been for a man just standing in a corridor.

His hand came up and landed on the wall beside her head. Not touching her. Close enough that she could see the fine black hairs on the back of it, close enough that if she turned her head a finger's width the knuckle would find her cheek. He was not holding her. He did not have to. He had made a cage out of the corridor and himself, and she was inside it, and they both knew it.

His breath was at the side of her neck. It was warm and it came and went and it did not stop, and there was nothing in the world she could do about it except stand very still and let it happen.

She thought, absurdly, of her mother's kitchen — of the way the flour settled in the tin when you tapped it, the way the lid fitted, the way everything had a place and a way of being and you did not have to be told. She thought of the blue door at the end of this corridor, which was supposed to be hers, which was somewhere past the window and the television noise and these three men. She thought of it the way you think of water when your throat is closed.

"Look at her," Arjun said, and he was talking to his brother now, to Rohan, but he was looking at her. "Look at her face. She's already learning." He came half a step closer and stopped, and his hand came up again — not to the braid this time, but to her chin, two fingers and a thumb, tilting her face up and turning it a little, left, right, the way you turn a fruit in the market light to find the bruise. "There it is. That's the face they all get. By the second week she'll be glad of it. They always are."

His thumb pressed, once, into the soft place under her jaw, and let go.

"Come on," he said, and he was already walking, down the corridor, past the window, past his brother, into the deeper part of the house where the light was warmer and the smell was food. "She has to eat. He wants her at the table."

Rohan waited. He let his brother get three paces down the corridor, and then he looked up — at her, once, quickly, the way you look at something you are not supposed to look at — and then he followed. His footsteps were heavy on the runner, and they went away, and the corridor got bigger.

Veer did not move.

She stood with her back to him and her eyes on the corridor and the two receding shapes of his brothers, and she waited, and he did not move, and the bulb buzzed, and the television went on and on at the far end of the house, and still he did not move.

Then his hand left the wall. She heard the small dry sound of his knuckles dragging on the plaster, and the air at her back came loose and cool, and his footsteps went past her — slow, unhurried, deliberately slow, so that she had to stand in the runner and watch him walk by, close enough to touch, and not touch him.

He did not look at her as he passed. That was the thing that stayed with her. He walked by with his eyes on the end of the corridor, his jaw set, his hands loose, as if she were not there at all — and as he went by, his shoulder brushed hers. It was a small brush. It could have been nothing. It could have been an accident in a narrow corridor, the way shoulders brush.

It was not an accident. She knew it was not an accident the way she knew the wetness on her thigh was not going to dry before dinner. She knew it in her spine, which had gone cold, and in her hands, which had found each other and were holding on.

He walked on down the corridor after his brothers, and he did not look back, and she stood alone in the runner with the yellow light on her and the smell of the closed room behind her, and she breathed — once, deep, the first full breath she had taken since the latch clicked — and then she followed them, because there was nowhere else in the world to go.

The blue door was behind her, past the window, at the end of the corridor. She did not look at it. She kept her eyes on the three backs in front of her, on the way the light went warm and gold at the end of the passage, on the smell of food and the sound of the television getting louder with every step, and she walked toward it with her braid still loose where Arjun had dropped it and her thigh still wet where his father had left her, and she did not look back at the blue door, and she did not look back at the room she had come out of.

She would find it later. She would have to.