The eye did not blink. It simply held them, pale and vast and utterly without warmth, an attention so enormous that Rama felt it pressing against the inside of his skull like water pressing against a dam, patient in exactly the way Bayu had described and infinitely worse experienced directly than described secondhand. Up close, the eye's surface carried faint, slow-moving currents beneath its film, something like clouds crossing a pale sky, and Rama understood with sudden, sick clarity that he was looking at something old enough to have stopped measuring time the way people did.
"Move," he said to Sekar, low and urgent, already pulling her backward by the arm. "Now, slowly, don't run yet."
