The Surviving Sky, page 1
Contents
Cover
Praise for The Surviving Sky
Title Page
Leave us a Review
Copyright
Dedication
1: Ahilya
2: Ahilya
3: Iravan
4: Ahilya
5: Iravan
6: Iravan
7: Ahilya
8: Iravan
9: Ahilya
10: Ahilya
11: Iravan
12: Ahilya
13: Iravan
14: Ahilya
15: Iravan
16: Ahilya
17: Iravan
18: Ahilya
19: Iravan
20: Iravan
21: Ahilya
22: Iravan
23: Iravan
24: Ahilya
25: Iravan
26: Iravan
27: Iravan
28: Ahilya
29: Ahilya
30: Iravan
31: Ahilya
32: Ahilya
33: Iravan
34: Ahilya
35: Ahilya
36: Iravan
37: Ahilya
38: Ahilya
39: Ahilya
40: Ahilya
41: Ahilya
42: Iravan
43: Ahilya
44: Iravan
45: Ahilya
46: Iravan
47: Iravan
48: Iravan
49: Ahilya
50: Iravan
51: Together
52: Ahilya
Glossary
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also Available from Titan Books
PRAISE FOR THE SURVIVING SKY
“Enthralling and highly imaginative. The Surviving Sky is a richly crafted story set in a fascinating world… I loved the protagonists and their relationship, fraught with tension and secrets, ambition and desire.”
SUE LYNN TAN, BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF DAUGHTER OF THE MOON GODDESS
“The Surviving Sky is a fast-paced, fascinating novel wrapped in philosophy and spirituality. Rao’s debut will dazzle many.”
FANTASY HIVE
“Rao weaves a tale of broken love, redemption, and the Hindu concept of samsara in her magical and mind-bending debut… this heart-pounding cli-fi adventure will leave readers breathless.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY STARRED REVIEW
“This Hindu-inspired sci-fi fantasy is a transcendent debut, full of cosmic magic and set in an exquisitely glorious and treacherous world. Such a daring ecological and metaphysical endeavor is perfect for fans of Wesley Chu and Brandon Sanderson.”
LIBRARY JOURNAL STARRED REVIEW
“Kritika H. Rao crafts an inventive and cerebral debut, reimagining South Asian culture in a wonderfully different world. A story about love, duty, power, as much as it is about fascinating lore and costly magic.”
R. R. VIRDI, BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF THE FIRST BINDING
“Breathtakingly inventive, The Surviving Sky is a twisty, cerebral journey. . . This is a book to get lost in.”
TASHA SURI, AUTHOR OF THE BURNING KINGDOMS TRILOGY
“The Surviving Sky is a high-octane science fantasy with heady, cerebral ideas and a lushly imagined world, whose story centers on a 30s-ish married couple—very unusual for fantasy! There is nothing else out there which is quite like it!”
SUNYI DEAN, AUTHOR OF THE BOOK EATERS
“A reading experience that is incalculably enjoyable, creatively built, thoroughly immersive, and just like a majority of concepts in Hindu philosophy, thought-provoking and incredibly hard to distill.”
FANTASY BOOK CRITIC
“A unique blend of sci-fi futurism, eco-fantasy mystery, and intriguing spirituality. . . truly unlike anything I’ve ever read. Extremely original and thought-provoking… I utterly loved it and couldn’t put it down.”
SHANNON CHAKRABORTY, INTERNATIONALLY BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF THE DAEVABAD TRILOGY.
“Intensely imaginative and heartbreakingly human… Filled with both startling revelations and the intimate portrait of a struggling marriage, this is a story that is hard to put down.”
ANDREA STEWART, AUTHOR OF THE BONE SHARD DAUGHTER
“The Surviving Sky weaves a compelling web of wounded hearts and warped duty… Fall from its floating city’s edge into a storm of emotions!”
MELISSA CARUSO, AUTHOR OF THE OBSIDIAN TOWER
“The Surviving Sky is a prodigious gift best slowly unwrapped. Nakshar is an enigma of a city, as rooted and protective as its people; its stakes feel cosmic yet intimate… Rao has offered us a world like no other.”
SUYI DAVIES OKUNGBOWA, AUTHOR OF SON OF THE STORM
“This wildly imaginative book explores a fracturing world through the deeply painful lens of a fracturing human heart. At times brutal, often beautiful, The Surviving Sky offers a thrilling glimpse into a flawed society scrambling to survive… Don’t miss it!”
LUCY HOLLAND, AUTHOR OF SISTERSONG
“Sentient forests. Flying cities. Lost histories. Power, rivalry, love, and exile. The Surviving Sky is a cornucopia of wonders… Combining the best of Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris and NK Jemisin’s The Broken Earth, The Surviving Sky is an immersive and original epic fantasy.”
GAUTAM BHATIA, AUTHOR OF THE WALL AND THE HORIZON
“The Surviving Sky is utterly creative, a heady and mysterious tapestry of love, duty, and discovery… Add in a slow-burn romance and Rao’s exploration of human drive, desire, and consciousness—and The Surviving Sky is sure to stay with readers long after the final page.”
H.M. LONG, AUTHOR OF HALL OF SMOKE
“With lush prose, compelling characters, and a wonderfully built world, The Surviving Sky has everything I hope for in a novel. This is a book for anyone who has ever loved and longed for the natural world around them.”
JOSHUA PHILLIP JOHNSON, AUTHOR OF THE FOREVER SEA
“In this brilliant, gorgeous debut, Kritika H. Rao’s The Surviving Sky weaves a kaleidoscopic environmental plot with relationships that feel very real indeed… This is a story unlike any I’ve read before, an epic adventure through fantastic landscapes and heartscapes.”
FRAN WILDE, DOUBLE NEBULA AWARD-WINNING AUTHOR OF UPDRAFT AND RIVERLAND
“Brimming with fascinating lore and dangerous magic, The Surviving Sky is an evocative debut that will sink its roots—and thorns—into your heart.”
CHELSEA ABDULLAH, AUTHOR OF THE STARDUST THIEF
“Immersive, inventive and intense, at once both universal and wholly South Asian, The Surviving Sky is a debut destined to live many lives. Let it grab your heart with its spiked, slithering vines!”
SAMIT BASU, AUTHOR OF THE CITY INSIDE
“The Surviving Sky dares to imagine a boldly unique fantasy world and succeeds in spades. Lush and evocative, this flying jungle city will draw you in, and the characters anchoring the story will keep you reading to the very end.”
ROWENNA MILLER, AUTHOR OF THE UNRAVELED KINGDOM TRILOGY
“The Surviving Sky has some of the most intricate and inventive worldbuilding I’ve ever had the pleasure to lose myself in, coupled with a story that both examines exactly what it means to be human while daring to ask: what if we were more?”
ANNA STEPHENS, AUTHOR OF THE GODBLIND TRILOGY
“The Surviving Sky’s characters struggle passionately to balance communal survival and individual ambition, exposing the private strain on a marriage. Teeming with detailed world-building, this debut is perfect for fans of original science fantasy.”
E.J. BEATON, AUTHOR OF THE COUNCILLOR
“Some books reach right into your brain and give it a good shake, and this expansive science fantasy, with its wildly inventive worldbuilding and characters who feel desperately real, shook mine in the most delicious way. Highly recommended!”
SAM HAWKE, AUTHOR OF THE POISON WARS
“With worldbuilding and magical metaphysics as alive as the emotion on the page, The Surviving Sky devastates and resurges… The protagonists navigate the love and fury of a fraught marriage, class struggles, and layered secrets as thick as the jungle itself.”
ESSA HANSEN, AUTHOR OF NOPHEK GLOSS
“Daringly inventive and uncannily enthralling… While storms and strange ecology shape the world, the characters’ personal cataclysms are grounded in the compelling struggles of the human heart.”
CASS MORRIS, AUTHOR OF FROM UNSEEN FIRE
“Precise, exquisite, and jaw-dropping. The world is rich and alien and wonderfully new, grounded by characters so familiar they ache. I loved every page.”
DAN WELLS, NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR
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The Surviving Sky
Print edition ISBN: 9781803361246
E-book edition ISBN: 9781803361253
Published by Titan Books
A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd.
144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP
www.titanbooks.com
First Titan edition: June 2023
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
© Kritika H. Rao 2023.
Kritika H. Rao asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
For you, wonderful reader, of whom I first began
dreaming when I knew writing books was what I
wanted to do.
1
AHILYA
The bracken didn’t react to Ahilya as it should have. She tried again, drawing her desire for the leaves to part to a single point. “Open. I want to see.”
It was unnatural—eerie almost—how defiant the plants were. It was as if her limbs refused to move despite the command of her mind.
She stood alone on a wide curving terrace of her airborne city, Nakshar. An hour earlier, a dozen citizens had flocked to the promenade, seeking a final look at the open skies before Nakshar landed in the jungle. Ahilya had yearned for solitude, unwilling to conduct her study in front of them, but now she gazed at the empty bark benches, the shady trees, the soft moss floor. Everything looked the same. Then why did the bracken wall behave so differently? It had been waist-high earlier, a mere parapet, but now it towered over her, growing rapidly. Tendrils curled into tight, thorny balls. Branches squeezed together, twisting in intricate lattices. The entire structure hardened as though to deny her. And none of it responded to her desire to see beyond the city.
Ahilya jogged alongside the wall until she found a small gap in the leafy growth. There, below thick clouds within a twilit sky, waited the earth’s surface. She unslung the satchel from her shoulder. Eyes on the gap, she rummaged until she found her telescope, then dropped the bag gently by her feet.
Ahilya pressed the telescope to her face so hard, it pinched her skin. The image focused just in time for her to see another dust explosion. Her breath quickened. There was a pattern to the dust, a shift she had theorized once. For the first time, she was viewing the epicenter of the fading storm. Her hands itched to take her tablet and stylus from the satchel to draw the patterns, but there was no time. The leaves on the city’s wall were morphing too fast, she’d just have to commit the explosion to memory—
Dark green shuttered her vision. Ahilya lowered her telescope and peered through the foliage, but the wall was relentless again. “Come on,” she muttered. “What is wrong with you? Open up a little bit, at least.”
“Nakshar’s plants won’t respond to non-architects anymore,” an amused voice called out.
Ahilya spun around.
Naila stepped off an ascending wooden pedestal that had emerged from a hole in the floor. She was dressed in her architect’s uniform: an embroidered green kurta reaching her knees, flared over narrow, pleated trousers. Her long translucent robe wafted in the breeze. Thick black beads looped around Naila’s neck; more beads—bracelets and rings—clinked around her wrists and fingers, held together by thin glassy optical fibers. The Junior Architect was perhaps twenty-five, nearly a decade younger than Ahilya, but the rudra beads indicated more responsibility for their flying city than Ahilya would ever be granted. All Ahilya owned was her obligatory citizen ring.
“Ordinary citizens no longer have any control over the architecture,” Naila repeated, striding forward.
Ahilya forced a smile. “Great, you’re here. I think I saw something—this incredible pattern of dust that might reveal the source of the instability down there. Will you open the wall for me? I want to sketch it.”
“You want to draw… dust?”
“I want to draw dust during landing,” Ahilya corrected. “It’s the best way to understand earthrages.”
“Oh, I can explain those to you,” Naila said, flicking a lock of dark hair behind her. “They’re cataclysmic storms—”
“Yes, thank you. I’m trying to understand why they happen at all.”
“Because of a disruption of consciousness—”
“No, I meant, why did earthrages begin in the first place—”
“They’ve been around as long as we have—”
“How did—”
“Really, Ahilya,” the Junior Architect said, sniffing. “These questions have already been answered. And these dust patterns you want to draw—the architects have studied those for years.”
Ahilya turned back to the wall. She had asked the architects for their drawings, but they had summarily rejected her requests, citing their records as privileged architect information, a slap on the face she had never received before. “Right. Fine. Thanks for that,” she said. “Could you open this, please? I might still be able to get a few rough sketches.”
“I can’t—”
“Sure you can. You’re an architect, aren’t you? The plants literally shift at your behest.”
Naila gave her an unimpressed look. “That’s very reductive. How can you be married to a Senior Architect and not know the intricacies of trajection?”
“We try not to talk about it, lest we begin arguing about how we see the world,” Ahilya said. Her voice remained mild. The workings of plant manipulation had always been too esoteric for her, but the truth was that ever since her husband had been promoted to the council, the two had stopped talking about each other’s pursuits altogether. Her fingers scrabbled at the leaves. “Please. You don’t have to open it all—just enough for me to see.”
“I can’t,” Naila said, exasperated, as though dealing with a child. “Now that there’s finally another lull in the earthrages, and now that we’re finally landing, the temple architects have enforced higher limits on the architecture. That’s why non-architects don’t have any control—”
“But you’re—”
“Yes, I know, but I’m a Junior Architect. Anything that doesn’t align with the temple’s guidance is almost impossible to do, especially by me. And they’re closing the city. Look around you. I’d be trying to fly against a windstream.”
Ahilya released her hold on the wall. Loose leaves glided down onto the moss floor—but the floor wasn’t moss anymore; it was transforming into bark. The benches and trees were gone. From all sides, thorny bushes rushed toward them, eating the curve of the terrace in their hungry approach. Even the bracken wall had extended, entrapping the terrace in a dome. Leaves and stems crisscrossed in a hundred different layers as the foliage tightened. Darkness would fall in seconds.
Ahilya’s brows furrowed. Nakshar had always been a flat city flying in the sky. Its architect-formed hills, with massive trees that housed the library and schools and homes, usually spanned acres. Checkered fields grew on the edges, and rainwater was harvested in rocky pools and waterfalls. She had never heard of the architecture changing so completely.
“Relax,” Naila said. “The council will release permissions beyond the temple again as soon as we land. Non-architects will be able to mold the architecture, and this part of the terrace will transform into an entry point close to the jungle. Shouldn’t affect your expedition.”
Ahilya frowned and stepped away from the wall, the dust patterns she’d wanted to study forgotten. There was something in Naila’s casual words, a message she did not understand. She glanced at the unresponsive architecture, studied Naila’s insouciant stance, thought about the easy assurances. A prickle of worry climbed the back of her neck.
She had lived in Nakshar all her life, but matters in the city had been changing recently. Hardly anyone paid attention, but Ahilya had kept track. First, it had been the suppression of the architects’ records. Then the fight to get her expedition approved. Now this? Control was being taken away from the citizens slowly and subtly, one way or another; a dangerous pattern.
The weight of this realization grew, pressing her shoulders down. In the end, wasn’t that what life in the flying cities was really about? The lack of autonomy she and others like her had over their own lives? Ahilya’s expedition, her dealings with Dhruv, the vacant council seat she was eyeing—everything she had done all her life was to balance this inequity, but things were coming to a head now. She could feel it.
