Page 68 of The Surviving Sky
It was never a bad theory, Iravan said quietly in her mind.But I think you’ll find the records of the early architects are right.
Was it true? Had her life’s pursuit simply been a fool’s errand? Ahilya’s cheeks heated in embarrassment, in how flimsy the roots of her research really were. She had always thought there was more there, a reason the non-architects and their histories had been so thoroughly erased, but perhaps those histories had failed to endure because of their inherent irrelevance to survival. Not an active erasure but a quiet one, brought about by their own worthlessness. She stared at the hologram, her stomach dropping in dread. The hologram flickered under her wandering fingers, rearranging itself.
Ahilya blinked.
“Dhruv,” she said softly. “There are gaps in the tracker’s information. Look. What are those?”
“It’s when nothing was charging the tracker,” he replied, distractedly.
“No, see here. Other ashrams were above the elephant-yaksha. Yet somehow, the tracker didn’t charge. Why did that happen?”
Dhruv shrugged. “Itisexperimental. Maybe it died or took time to restart.”
“I don’t think so. There seems to be a pattern.”
The sungineer said nothing, still too taken by his own invention. Ahilya pushed him out of the way and began to rearrange the hologram with her hands. She compared the yaksha’s movement with the length of the earthrage. She ran calculations from Nakshar’s distance. She even moved the image upside-down, hoping for an epiphany, but apart from making her feel foolish, the image did nothing.
This was the worst part of being an archeologist. It was the implicit loneliness of the work, the inability to make anyone else care. Ahilya’s heart ached in dull pain. If only she had Oam with her. The boy had an uncanny knack for seeing patterns. She should never have taken him into the jungle, the architects had been right to fear it; it had only brought her grief that had settled deep and true, and she thought again of the image she had seen only a few hours before, of the jungle laid out in the book, once glorious, nowtreacherous—
Ahilya straightened suddenly, her heart pounding. The image in the book flashed in her head again, and her eyes widened. She extended a hand, pawing the air. There was a method she hadn’t considered at all. How could she have been so blind?
Dhruv set down the tracker and looked over at her.
“There’s a pattern here,” she said, her voice breathless. “All along, we’ve been looking at the yaksha’s trajectory from Nakshar’s perspective in flight.”
“It’s the only way to measureanything—wealways know whereweare. We are our own point of reference.”
“Yes, but what if we looked at it from the jungle’s perspective? Do you have any maps of the jungle?”
“Not really,” Dhruv replied. “The jungle changes all the time, and our lives are in the sky. But the sungineers did divide the planet into latitudes and longitudes to record our landing sites. It’s an archaic method. We don’t use it for anything else.”
“Can you layer that into this image?”
Dhruv pocketed the tracker and fiddled with the glassy screen of the bio-node for several minutes. Then, in a series of waving gestures, he superimposed the jungle’s data onto the hologram floating on the floor. The gaps in the elephant-yaksha’s path blinked and settled.
“Hm,” Dhruv said. “You’re right. These gaps where the tracker was uncharged are too uniform. I wonderif…”
He trailed off and sharpened the image for clarity. He reduced the flight orbits of the ashrams. He dissected the yaksha’s movements so that multiple lines blossomed over the image.
Finally, he stepped back, his eyes wide behind his glasses.
“Bloody rages,” he swore.
The hologram charted the elephant-yaksha’s path all over the jungle planet. Yet all the gaps in the tracker converged on a single point. Each time the elephant-yaksha had traveled to a specific area in the jungle, the tracker had stopped charging despite a trajecting ashram hovering above it.
Ahilya stared at the hologram, her heart pounding in her chest. “Something in the jungle blocked trajection from reaching the tracker,” she breathed. “Somethinginterfered.”
She turned to stare at Dhruv, and she could see her own astonishment and understanding mirrored in his face.
Iravan was right about his theory of interference.
Ahilya was right about her yaksha habitat.
And they had just found proof.
22
IRAVAN
