The Serene Invasion by Eric Brown

other way, and soon Kevi Nan will be here! Jump and I will catch you.”
    Peering down in fear, he nodded.
    “I’ll catch you, Prakesh. After three. One... two... three!”
    He launched himself, all flailing arms and legs, and Ana reached out and closed her eyes. He hit her and they rolled across the platform, Ana clinging to him despite the pain. The impact knocked the breath from her lungs, and her elbow throbbed when it struck the ground.
    “Prakesh?”
    “I’m fine, Ana! You caught me!”
    She stood and pulled him to his feet – then yelped in fright as a hand gripped the back of her neck and squeezed.
    She looked up, fearfully, into the fat face of Station Master Jangar, with his vast grey moustache and turban. The Sikh was jabbering to someone at his side, and she recognised the thin, rat-like squeak of Kevi Nan. She attempted to peer around and up, her movement restricted by Jangar’s grip, and managed to see a hand slip a fifty rupee note into the Station Master’s breast pocket.
    Then Kevi Nan gripped her upper arm and half dragged her along the platform. She looked back at Jangar and Prakesh. Her friend had his fist crammed into his mouth, his eyes wide and tearful.
    Ana managed a smile and a quick wave before Prakesh was lost to sight in the surging crowd.
    She struggled, but Kevi Nan just increased the force of his pincer grip and Ana wept in pain. She hopped along as Kevi raced through the crowd towards the station’s exit, holding her breath against his stench. Kevi Nan had only one hand, which he used for eating, and consequently his backside went unwashed. He tried to disguise the smell with rosewater, but for some reason this just made it worse.
    He hauled her from the station and along a busy street, then down a quiet alleyway. From time to time when his crab-like grip seemed to slacken, Ana put in a token struggle – but Kevi Nan’s one hand seemed stronger than two and he just sneered at her feeble attempts to get away.
    At one point as they hurried down the alley, something flashed high overhead, and both Kevi Nan and Ana looked up. She saw a bright glint of light, like sunlight glancing off a pane of glass, but nothing else.
    “Let me go!”
    “And deprive Sanjeev his pleasure, Ana Devi?”
    She was shocked that he knew her name, as if this, along with his grip, was another violation. “Sanjeev-ji has been watching you, Ana, watching you and waiting.”
    What was he talking about, she wondered. Sanjeev was so fat that he hadn’t left his room for years, so how could he have been watching her?
    “I have rupees,” she said. “Twenty rupees. I’ll give them to you if you let me go!”
    Over the years she had managed to save a rupee here and there, and had amassed the grand total of twenty which she had concealed behind a loose stone in the outer wall of the station’s Brahmin restaurant.
    Kevi Nan laughed. “Twenty rupees? Sanjeev will pay me ten times that for your yoni, Ana!”
    Something froze within her. Her yoni... Sanjeev was going to take her properly, this time, draw blood and deprive her of her virginity. She stared ahead, unseeingly, frozen at the thought.
    Kevi Nan dragged her down a rat-infested alleyway, past slums where infants stared out with huge, kohl-black eyes. Some of the kids were older, perhaps her own age, and she hated the quick look of pity in their eyes as she passed.
    They came to a high wall and a green-painted gate. Kevi Nan called out, and the gate opened just enough to allow them to squeeze through. He dragged her along a garden path overhung with a riot of unkempt trees and bushes, towards a familiar house painted as pink as a chunk of barfi. Ana felt her stomach turn as she recalled her first time here, years ago, and what Sanjeev had done to her.
    They passed into the house, across a cool tiled hallway, towards a green double door. Kevi Nan called out, “I have the girl, Sanjeev-ji!” He eased open the door with his right foot and thrust her into the