Page 4 of The Surviving Sky
“How are you doingthis—”she began.
The nest jerked. Ahilya’s knees buckled.
“Sorry,” Naila panted, steadying her. “Rougher than I intended. Trajecting is harder outside the temple, this close to the landing.”
“I suppose you could have brought me with you without waiting for my permission, and I wouldn’t have known,” Ahilya said reluctantly.
Naila threw her another amused look. “Architects aren’t tyrants. This way.”
Her fingers twitched, a waving gesture. The leaves in front of them separated to reveal a small courtyard. They stepped through and new bark closed behind them.
In the distance, vast tree trunks collapsed as though crushed by a giant hand. Foliage folded into itself, then tightened into stony bark. What had once been apartment complexes intrees—schoolsand playgrounds andhomes—allchanged as Nakshar coiled in on itself. When Ahilya glanced behind, bark chased her footsteps. Small florets became hard seeds. Supple ferns developed rough calluses. Needles and cones grew where a moment earlier there had been languorous sprays. The courtyard morphed in front of her eyes.
She had no idea where she was. Nakshar’s architecture was called a maze for a reason. Even in ordinary flight, everything except for the city’s fixed landmarks grew and changed. A path was provided for citizens by the trajection coursing through theplants—exceptAhilya no longer had any influence over the architecture. She hurried after Naila’s blue-green light. It was one thing to be cocooned on a terrace that would become the best entry point to the jungle; entirely another to be encased within an unknown layer of the city. Sweat coated her upper lip at the thought of how little power she had.
She had lost measure of how much distance they’d covered when they reached another wall and Naila’s iridescence flared again. The wooden wall transformed into a doorway. They stepped into a narrow, shadowy passageway. Bark closed behind them.
Naila slowed, her breath releasing in a huff. The Junior Architect grinned and gestured for Ahilya to precede her.
First came the scent: the rich, heady smell of moist earth. Then the lilting sounds of excitement and laughter. Tiny sungineering glowglobes, like stars trapped in plants, emerged from the foliage to guide Ahilya’s way as she strode farther in. Ahilya squinted as her eyes adjusted to the swelling brightness.
A narrow archway beckoned at the end of the passageway, from where tiny white buds hung down in curtains. Ahilya’s breath caught in her throat. Jasmine was her favorite. Could that be Iravan’s doing somehow? But no, not after the way they had left things the last time together, not if his punishing silence were any indication of his feelings. She was being foolish.
For a long moment, Ahilya hesitated, staring at the jasmine. Her heart hammered in her chest; she recalled his expression, how he’d walked away from her, how angry he’d been. All the dread and outrage and confused love she had nursed for seven long months bubbled within her.
Ahilya took a deep breath, parted the fronds, and stepped into the light.
2
AHILYA
She emerged onto a crowded narrow balcony, its wooden railing visible beyond congregating bodies. Most citizens were standing, but interspersed were healbranch chairs, specially made for those who needed them. Behind Ahilya, the archway transformed into bark in a telltale creak. Naila had deposited her in a gallery full of familiar faces, but hardly anyone noticed Ahilya’s arrival. The Junior Architect had disappeared, likely to fulfill her role in the landing. Ahilya began to pick her way through the crowd, murmuring greetings to the families of other architects. Vihanan waved at her, a man with alluvial dark skin like Iravan’s, indigenous to the city of Yeikshar. Reniya smiled, her toddler clutching her saree with a chubby fist. The woman’s eyes ran down Ahilya’s clothing, then grew wide.
They were dressed in their finest kurtas and sarees, no doubt in anticipation of greeting their architect spouses who had been on shift in the temple. Ahilya’s attire, a harness over a kurta and tapered trousers, stuck out like a weed in a tulip field. With a headlamp perched over her hair, and a compass around her wrist instead of bangles, she was more suited to an expedition in the jungle than a long-awaited landing. Ahilya pasted a smile on her face, avoided their gazes, and wove her way through the crowd. Most of them had grown up in Nakshar with her, but over the years all had devolved into mere acquaintances. Her own fault, of course; her pursuits had made her an oddity. Ahilya swallowed her rising shame and averted her eyes to the rest of the temple, visible through the gaps in the bodies.
The temple was oval-shaped, with fifty balconies circling from the floor to the ceiling, each full of chattering citizens. At the very center rose the rudra tree. The trunk mushroomed as wide as twenty people standing shoulder to shoulder. Countless aerial roots, like slender branches, hung down to the floor. Iravan had often remarked on how Nakshar’s core tree was worth years of study, and for a moment, Ahilya agreed. Ethereal blue-green light flickered and gleamed in the top stories, making the tree appear mystical.
She squeezed through the crowd until she found her sister Tariya fidgeting on her chair, right by the gnarled railing of the gallery.
“Finally!” Tariya said. “Where have you been?”
Ahilya’s older sister was shorter than her and beautiful. Her raven-black hair tumbled down her shoulders in glossy curls. Her skin, though the same brown as Ahilya’s, seemed to glow. Her big kohl-lined eyes were shining with happiness. Tariya shifted restlessly on her seat, her baby asleep in her arms. “Here, hold him,” she said.
Ahilya found Arth thrust toward her. Her nephew’s weight was awkward; she squirmed, trying to ease the position, shifting her elbow, then her shoulders.
“I can take him,” a soft voice said. Tariya’s older son Kush edged through the press, gathered Arth, then returned to where the other children stood together in a rumble of noise.
Tariya called out a caution, then glanced up at Ahilya. “What took you?” she asked. “Can you believe it? The ashram is finally landing.” She straightened the pleats of her saree around her waist and readjusted the bindi on her forehead.
Nakshar, maze,city—therewere many words to describe the airborne structure in which they lived, but none was as pretentious asashram. The term meant a hermitage, but the architects had appropriated it to implymore—thecity’s community, its people, a shared sense of purpose. Ahilya had once found it charming, but over the years it had become just another architect manipulation. She had stopped using the term altogether, her arguments with Tariya about it another point of difference between them. Yet Tariya looked so radiant this evening, her happiness rare and precious. Now was not the time to correct her.
“You look lovely as ever,” Ahilya said instead, smiling. “Bharavi won’t be able to keep her eyes off you.”
“She had better not. I’ve something in mind for the two of us to do every day, for as long as this lull lasts.” Tariya finished adjusting her saree and reached up to give Ahilya a hug but stopped as though only now noticing her. Her sister groaned, and unfastened Ahilya’s wrist-compass, uncaring of the fragility of the instrument. “Really, Ahilya. Does Iravan like you looking like this?”
Ahilya caught Tariya’s hands before she could do more damage. “I like me looking like this.”
“But don’t you know what landing means?”
