Vikram had never been pious. He believed in the stories because he needed to, because he had to hope that if there was one place where he belonged it was in some celestial framework. He needed to know he wasn’t some hiccup of fate. But for the first time, he felt a rush of something holy. There was a whiff of the sacred in all this darkness, a pulse that felt new and ancient. When he jumped into the dark and pried the ruby loose, calm had spiraled through him. Maybe he would never be anything more than a thread in the tapestry of fate. But he and Gauri had done something worthy of
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