Unknown 9 by Layton Green (each kindness read aloud txt) 📕

Startled by her voice, he sat up on the hard dirt floor of Mani’s hideaway and leaned in close to read the text Andie had just received on Zawadi’s phone—from Zawadi’s own number.

I will work on the Star Phone. Go to Anandamitra Guesthouse in Rajendrapur and wait until you hear from me. Safe haven. The owner can help Cal.

“What does that mean?” he said, slapping at a mosquito. “Work on the Star Phone? Help me how?”

Shouts and barking dogs created a constant racket from the slum. Mani had stepped out again, this time for water.

“No idea,” she said, excited by the message but unwilling to let her hopes get too high. “If it’s really a safe haven . . .”

“Where is it?” he asked, but Andie was already searching on the phone. She found no mention of Anandamitra Guesthouse, but Rajendrapur was a village less than thirty miles from Kolkata.

“It’s probably a good thing we can’t find the safe haven on the map,” he said.

“Good point,” Andie replied, chewing on a nail, certain only that they needed to leave the slum. “But how do we get there?”

They didn’t like the idea of walking out of the slum, and no way in hell was Andie going back in that sewer. But Mani came through for them again. He found a driver, a young man from the slum who barely looked old enough to buy beer. Andie had offered to pay him a hundred dollars and a full tank of gas for the trip. The kid couldn’t believe his luck.

Deep into the night, Mani smuggled Cal and Andie to the edge of the slum, out of sight behind a mound of garbage, where the driver met them in a white Maruti Zen hatchback held together by spit and duct tape. The vehicle was missing three hubcaps, a rear fender, seat belts, a radio, headrests, and the front passenger floor. The upholstery resembled cheesecloth, and the ceiling sagged so far down it brushed against their heads. The driver had to jump-start the car with a friend, and when the engine came to life, it rattled as if it had a dozen loose parts.

Parting with Mani was emotional for Andie. She hated to leave him alone in his crude shelter, struggling in that horrific slum without a family, covered in scabs and boils, and probably riddled with a host of diseases from the unsanitary conditions, facing the simple task of survival every single day.

It wasn’t fair.

It wasn’t right.

There had to be a better way.

She gave Mani all her remaining rupees and promised to send back more with the driver once they stopped at an ATM. Then she gave the boy a hug, disease and ravaged skin be damned, which put a smile on his face she would never forget. Cal leaned down to solemnly shake his hand, and she was touched by the kindness in Cal’s eyes.

Two hours later, Andie and Cal found themselves hunched in the back seat of the Maruti with the road flying along beneath them, visible through a rusted-out hole at Andie’s feet.

While driving through the sprawl of Kolkata—a ninety-minute white-knuckle odyssey of honking horns, cars driving without headlights, fear of their engine stalling, and a thousand other insane moments—they decided it was safer for Cal to stay low. The Ascendants, if they were still searching for them, would be on the lookout for two people. Andie’s sari and dark wig blended better than Cal’s disguise, so he laid his head in her lap and promptly fell asleep. One of her arms was draped across his chest, and she had a chuckle thinking it might have been a tender moment if they weren’t both filthy and reeking from the journey through the sewers, and Cal wasn’t snoring, and they weren’t riding in the back seat of a junk pile on wheels that smelled like three-day-old curry. He was also starting to drool on her arm.

After they escaped the city limits and the traffic began to thin, the danger quotient lessened. She breathed a sigh of relief and let him continue sleeping. She, too, was exhausted, but someone needed to stay awake. She’d been dreaming of a hot shower and a soft mattress, but at this point, she’d take a garden hose and a sleeping bag.

The countryside outside Kolkata was so dark she couldn’t make out much besides the strip of worn pavement illuminated by the Maruti’s single headlight. Due to the traffic in the city, the poor condition of the road, the three attempts to find a working ATM, and the slow speed at which they were traveling to preserve the fragile car, the journey took much longer than expected. By the time they drove into the village alongside the colorful roadside murti shrines, the morning light teased the sky with whorls of pink and yellow.

The placid village was a shock after the smog-drenched bustle of Kolkata. Rajendrapur was little more than a collection of mud huts with thatched roofs, dotted around ponds and farmland. The heaviness in Andie’s soul lifted as she gazed upon pastoral rice paddies and mustard fields, mango groves and vegetable gardens, children chasing ducks around a pond, and villagers collecting morning eggs from the chicken coops.

A villager their driver queried for directions to the Anandamitra Guesthouse pointed the way to a single-lane dirt road twisting through dense jungle. Three miles later, a wooden sign guided them down an even rougher road. After jostling over crater-size potholes for another half mile, they emerged into a clearing with a thatch-roofed pagoda surrounded by lush gardens. A trio of bungalows on stilts stood among the coconut trees lining the perimeter of the property.

Andie and Cal stepped out of the car, shielding their eyes from the sun, surrounded by clean air and birdsong and the sweet perfume of the foliage. As they started down a cobblestone path that wound to the pagoda, a tall, svelte Indian woman stepped out to