The Surviving Sky, page 40
“I think the dust is trajecting us,” she said, answering her own question. “I think it’s somehow manipulating my senses, trajecting our very bodies.”
It made sense to her. She had been hurt in her orb’s crash, but there were no signs of injury. Her bark cast had broken of its own accord, disappeared into dust, and Ahilya could use her arm again. Iravan must have been hurt too, but his body was unscarred except for the dark welts he had gained in the expedition so many weeks before. Those had become a part of him since their escape from the jungle. There didn’t seem to be an escape now. Had there been an escape for Nakshar? Were Tariya and the boys and Dhruv alive?
“I tried again,” she told Iravan. “To look for a way out. But a hundred steps in, the earthrage appeared again. I think time stands still in this copse, my love, but the earthrage is inches away, outside the dust. I don’t think the dust can fight it for very long. I don’t think we have more time. I haven’t seen a single yaksha. Perhaps they sense this place is deteriorating. Perhaps it’s time for us to leave too.”
Iravan exhaled, unmoving. His dark skin glowed faintly blue-green. Ahilya watched him, unsurprised. He had always been bathed in the light of trajection since she had found him there in the copse. Her sight had merely adjusted to it now.
“Some of Airav’s rudra beads broke today,” she said one time. Necklaces had shattered, the black beads falling to the ground. Ahilya had searched for them but had found none in the strange grass. “I think it’s a sign. Something terrible has happened to the rudra tree. To Nakshar. Something I am to blame for.”
She had condemned them all to death with her decision. You would hold the entire ashram hostage? She had killed Dhruv and Tariya, Kush and Arth. She had killed herself and her child, all the citizens of Nakshar.
“If you were really here,” Ahilya said, stroking Iravan’s hair, “you would tell me I should have stayed back. I’d argue, and we’d fight, but in the dark, you’d tell me you wanted me to be safe, and I’d tell you the same. And you’d shake your head and say there could never be a victor between us, and I would tell you that none of it was ever really a game.”
Iravan’s eyes flickered behind closed lids.
He slept his deep sleep.
“I wonder if this is how we’ll die,” she said, softly, touching his lips. “You were right—our civilization could never live here. If we did, would we even be humans anymore? Perhaps the architecture creates us just as much as we create it. And this—we have had no part in this, surely. This habitat is dying. I only walked fifty steps before I saw the earthrage today.”
Iravan’s fingers curled and moved a fraction.
She watched as he breathed deeply again.
Her guilt had replaced her heart, beating against her chest. She stroked his cheek, ran her hands through his hair.
“We’ve made so many mistakes. But you must know how much I love you. You must see how bad we are for each other. Who else would be here but the two of us? This was always our destiny. We were always each other’s completion, each other’s ruin.”
Iravan swallowed in his sleep. His curled fingers relaxed as he breathed out.
“Maybe we ought to have let go of each other when we had the chance,” she whispered. “Maybe I should never have come here. But maybe that was never possible with us. If you would wake, we could find a way out. Don’t you think you should wake now? Isn’t it time, my love?”
His eyes flickered.
He swallowed again, and then his breathing changed into a rhythm of wakefulness.
Iravan opened his dark, almost-black eyes, full of awareness and purpose, as though he had never really been sleeping. He gazed back at her.
She had known this would happen. Of course she had. Her senses had adapted to his rhythms. She’d spoken, and he had listened.
Iravan pushed himself up to a seat. She moved away, scuttling back, not daring to touch him anymore lest she break the spell.
“Ahilya,” he said, and his voice was clear.
“I’m here,” she breathed.
44
IRAVAN
Iravan filled his gaze with her. She sat inches away but didn’t touch him, although he was sure she had been running her hands through his hair only an instant before.
Afraid, he didn’t make a move either.
Instead, he stared at her before he disappeared, before she did.
He waited on the crossroads of the mountain path; he could see himself standing there in eternal agony. Was this vision another life? Had he lived this already? Was he… he?
Ahilya’s long, wavy hair rippled to her waist, undone. Her terra-cotta skin glowed with vitality and health. And those big eyes, beautiful and bottomless, watched him with wariness and intelligence. She wore rudra beads on both her wrists now, several of them; more peeked out from below her kurta, over her neck.
“Is this now?” he whispered at last.
She tilted her head. “Yes,” she said, wonderingly. She sounded like she had known the answer but not the question. “Yes, I think this is now.”
“Are you real?”
“Are you?” she replied.
He seized her and kissed her then. Under her grip, he felt his own solidity. She smelled of jasmines and sandalwood, and as he inhaled, his own lungs expanded, took shape, became.
She kissed him back with an abandon he had never known from her before. Something had happened to her, a silent metamorphosis. She was Ahilya, more herself than ever before, and so, more his; his Ahilya, finally.
They unclothed each other, but it wasn’t in lust; it was in discovery. Their hands wandered everywhere, squeezing every muscle, touching every inch of skin. Iravan watched his fingers run through her hair, watched as they caught in the tangles. A weight of presence, of materiality, descended over him under her touch. It was as though his senses had relearned their purpose; the gravity of this body, his body, had reasserted itself. The two came toward each other together; there was no rush, this was now, as much as anything could be.
When they broke apart, Ahilya was gasping, as was he, both out of breath. That alone seemed so bizarre, so natural, that a strange peace settled inside of Iravan in the recognition of the idea that this was right and as it should be. His forehead touched hers. Her shoulders trembled under his hands.
“Iravan,” Ahilya whispered against his lips. “I think the architecture has been watching us.”
“No,” he said. “Not watching us. Nothing as base as that. This is something… different.”
An urge to laugh grew within him. Ahilya had never been modest, not when it came to their intimacy, and he had hardly been reluctant when the mood took him over. The copse almost resembled the very one they had stripped each other in hastily, right before they’d had their bitter fight.
Perhaps she was thinking of the same thing, the absurdity of returning to a place that looked so much like the one so many months past. Ahilya inhaled deeply. “What do we do now?” Her voice didn’t quiver. She sounded… amused.
Iravan reached for his clothes, but his eyes fell on his skin, registering its color for the first time. He stared at his arms and his legs, down at his chest. In the sparkling dust of this place, he had not noticed before, but his skin glowed with the blue-green light of trajection—of Ecstasy.
Within his first vision, Ahilya stared back at him. She had already put her clothes back on. Her sleeves were rolled back as his had been so often, a more comfortable manner for the rudra beads on her arms.
In his second vision of Ecstasy, Iravan hovered in the darkness of the Deepness. He summoned the Moment, and it appeared, a dewdrop-like globule containing an infinity of stars. Already he could feel comfort in the Deepness as though he had been exploring it his entire life. Had his visions been split without his notice?
“You’ve been glowing all this while,” Ahilya confirmed quietly.
“How long?” he asked, still naked.
She made a sound in her throat, half-disbelief, half-amusement, like his question made no sense. “Since the last time we were together in Nakshar. Do you remember anything?”
“Too much,” he replied. Very slowly, Iravan pulled on his own kurta and trousers. The familiarity of his second vision within the Deepness was almost eerie. “I remember us in Nakshar. The ashram tearing apart. And the… falcon-yaksha. What happened to the ashram?”
She tilted her head, considering her answer. Then, her gaze steady on him, clearly watching for his reaction, she told him about the scorched and shrunken rudra tree, about the deal she had made with Airav, about her flight through the earthrage and the consequences of that action. “They could all be dead by now,” she said softly. “There’s no way to know. Or perhaps Reikshar made it to them in time. I hope it did.”
“They’re not dead,” he said. “I saw them—all of the sister ashrams, struggling. They have only days left. Hours, for some of them.”
She didn’t ask him how he knew. She almost looked indifferent to his news. Ahilya had always been stubborn, always been brave—far more than he could be, but she had never been ruthless. All this has remade you, he thought, into something terrible and wonderful at the same time. “You came looking for me,” he said quietly.
“You told me not to leave you.”
“I asked you to stay back.”
“Yes,” Ahilya answered, her gaze on his. “And I chose to ignore that.”
Iravan smiled despite himself.
She pulled one of his sleeves back, her fingers feather-light on his arm. “Your trajection tattoos back in Nakshar… they were different. Not the vines and leaves of normal architects. They looked like… wings. Why did they change?”
Iravan stood there, staring at the glimmers on his dark skin, but he stood at the crossroads to the mountain peak too. And with Ahilya’s question, a deep rumbling grew on the mountain path like the beginnings of an avalanche.
“They’re connected to the yaksha somehow,” he said.
“This whole place is, I imagine,” she replied dryly. “And yet I haven’t seen a single one.”
“They’re here—very close. I don’t think they wish to be seen yet.”
Ahilya’s glance was curious. “You know so much suddenly. Is this because of Ecstasy?”
He swallowed. “Yes. I think so. I have memories now—of a time long before, of lives lived before. And what I know of trajection…” He took a deep breath. “Beyond the Moment lies a place called the Deepness. I can summon the Moment there—almost as though it were a suspended drop of water within a never-space. I know where every star is within the Moment, where every possibility is. I think this intimate knowledge of the Moment… it is a feature of Ecstasy.”
“Then we can never return to Nakshar?”
“No—I don’t think I can.”
Neither his admission of Ecstasy nor the idea of abandoning the ashram seemed to faze Ahilya. She nodded; she had known this already, and his words had been mere confirmation. A deep wellspring of love bubbled within Iravan, filling his heart. In the back of his mind, he remembered Vishwam and Radha and Taruin, all the husbands and wives and partners he had ever had; they flickered like the green dust he stood in. Almost all had been born with the ability to traject. Had any of them been as remarkable as Ahilya?
She didn’t notice his wonder. Instead, her hands continued to pull his sleeves back to study his arms, to where his skin was lightest. “This isn’t like Bharavi’s Ecstasy.”
“They’ve never truly understood Ecstasy in the ashrams. They put an end to Ecstatics before it got too far.”
“But there must be measures. Limits. Some indicators to the power.”
“The most irrefutable indication is if an architect breaks the known and studied limits of trajection.”
“Which are?”
“Innumerable. They’re observations of impossibility, studied and revisited, and thus understood as a tenet. Like changing permissions that are nurtured within core trees. Like being powerful enough to manipulate plants against the combined trajection of the Maze Architects. Like being able to traject a higher being.”
Ahilya nodded, still studying his arm. “That explains how you healed. You must have used Ecstasy on yourself. You trajected yourself, a higher being.”
“Yes. There’s a physical connection between our bodies and trajection. Something that causes the trajection tattoos and residual scars, something that can cause incineration of veins if an architect overdoes it. Chaiyya has been studying this field for years, but I think the true answers lie in Ecstasy. I think that’s how Bharavi healed herself.”
Iravan thought back to what—in the chaos of that terrible night—had not occurred to him. He had swung the branch at Bharavi with enough force to smash her head in, yet not only had she survived, she had been fully in her senses on waking. And before… she must have broken through her own healbranch bracelet and the vows she’d made as a Maze Architect, in order to land Nakshar in the jungle during the earthrage. He himself had recovered from his broken healbranch vow; even with Chaiyya’s intervention, it should have affected him deeply, making him sick after he’d broken it, yet he had felt no consequence from it before he’d arrived at the habitat, as though Ecstasy had given him self-healing as a passive ability.
Ahilya looked thoughtful. “If Bharavi broke these limits, can you?”
Iravan frowned. “I—I don’t know. Why? What do you mean?”
“This place—” Ahilya waved a hand and displaced some of the green dust that had crept along the copse. “It’s falling apart, the dust diminishing, but surely, it responds to the trajection of the yakshas. If Ecstatic trajection is the same as theirs, and I think it is, then maybe you can traject here somehow—”
“I wouldn’t know how.”
“It can’t be very different from trajection itself. Maybe the principles are the same?”
“Or maybe they’re completely different. After all, trajection is not the same as Energy X. Dhruv said they have different energy signatures.”
“We’ll never know until you try, right?”
“I—Ahilya—” Iravan grabbed her hands and bent over them as though in prayer. “I’m scared,” he admitted softly.
She lifted his chin so he met her eyes. “Why? There’s no architecture here to destroy with Ecstasy. It’s the perfect place to try.”
He hesitated. Poised at the crossroads of the mountain path, he knew any decision now would propel him in one direction or another. He could see clearly, what his journey would look like on either path. Ahilya on the first path, a life no matter how short, rich with experiences and emotion; and after death, many more lives.
But on the other path, answers.
Once he took a step, it would be irreversible.
This time, the fork would not reappear.
“It’s not about the destruction,” he said, swallowing. “I think this path of Ecstasy will—Ahilya, I think it’ll change us—you and me—in some way. There won’t be any going back.”
She drew back at that. “Then we stay here in this copse. We wait until it vanishes. We stay together until we’re reborn.”
He stared at her. “You would do that? For me?”
“Not for you. For me.” She smiled slightly, a sardonic smile, like in a private joke. “But is that what you want?”
Iravan imagined it, a life lived in the thicket, waiting for death. Could he do that? Could he embrace fate so easily while the ashrams fell and their own destruction was inevitable? His eyes returned to hers, beautiful, amazing, challenging Ahilya. “No,” he admitted at last. “It’s not what I want.”
She smiled; she had known this, of course.
Iravan sighed. “All right. Let me try.”
Ahilya moved away, gathering everything that had been scattered around the copse, the sungineering equipment, the solarnote, an identical tracker locket to the one around his neck. She stuffed all of it into her satchel, then approached him, holding two ends of the rope. She began to tie one end around his waist. “Just to be safe,” she muttered.
Iravan watched her, saying nothing. He examined his overlapping visions. Like with trajection, in the first he saw Ahilya as he would normally, winding the rope around her waist, tightening the knots with deft fingers. In his second vision he saw the now-familiar dark of an Ecstatic’s Deepness.
And yet—
He realized—
He was on the crossroads on the mountain path in neither of those visions.
There were three visions.
There was a third place like a constant backdrop to the other two.
In this third place, he had seen the maze of his own consciousness. Here, he had watched from behind the falcon-yaksha’s eyes; he had seen his own consciousness; he had lived and died a thousand times; more. This… vastness, this… this Etherium—it existed beyond the Moment and the Deepness, glimmering and burning behind his brows. Suddenly, Iravan could separate all the times he had been taken over by it. All those weeks before, when he had fought the magnaroot in the jungle during the earthrage, he had seen the Moment not as a motionless reality but a raging storm. In the library, when he’d nearly died—he’d floated in a never-space and watched Nakshar, watched the earthrage, and seen beyond it to a terrifying vision of a shattering being. Right before the attack on the ashram, when he had seen the falcon-yaksha, when he had become it—
All that had occurred within the third vision of the Etherium.
Standing there in the surreal copse, Iravan trembled from head to toe. The truth of this knowledge slammed into him. On the mountain, he saw himself lift a foot and set it down on the path toward clarity.
The shock of it sent a chill through his spine.
The first path disappeared, taking away the promise of Ahilya and all his unlived lives.
He gasped—this was a path to death, then, ultimate, irreversible death; no more lives in the future, now truly a final end.
Unaware of the choice he had made, Ahilya finished tying the rope around him. She coiled the other end around herself so they could move but not separate.
