It listed her Rasi (Simha—Leo), her Nakshatra (Magha), the positions of grahas she had never believed in. And then, at the bottom, a separate box:

The fading Karnataka sun bled orange through the window of Anjali’s San Francisco apartment. She stared at the binary hum of her laptop, but her mind was 8,000 miles away, in her mother’s kitchen in Vijayawada. The chai was getting cold. Again.

Anjali snorted. “Marked by fire.” Ryan was a volunteer firefighter on weekends. A coincidence. A silly, algorithmic coincidence.

Anjali’s hands trembled. She didn’t believe in fate. She believed in probability, in the randomness of the cosmos. But the phone rang before she could dial. It was her mother, voice thin and wet.

Anjali looked at Ryan. His hair, in the evening light, was a deep, dark auburn. A western fire.