Page 106 of The Surviving Sky
35
AHILYA
Dhruv and Naila were waiting for her outside her home by the time she arrived. Ahilya tapped at her citizen ring, and the leafy wall unfurled to reveal a doorway. The house had shrunk again since dawn, becoming a mere single chamber. Ahilya watched, her cheeks heating, as Dhruv and Naila took in the small circular table in the center, the bed in the corner, the simple kitchen.
“Bit modest for a Senior Architect, isn’t it?” Dhruv said, sitting on one of the chairs that grew around the table.
Naila pursed her lips at Dhruv’s comment. Ahilya tried to hold her shoulders straight. She busied herself in the kitchen, bringing clay mugs and a jar of water. In her mind, Tariya still sobbed.How could any of us tell you this? What would you understand?A knock sounded on the wall they’d entered through, and Ahilya tapped at her citizen ring again. Iravan strode in, filling the small chamber with his energy.
“Thank you, Ahilya,” he said, “for the use of your apartment.”
She nodded, her throat heavy. Dhruv glanced from her to Iravan. His expression changed, eyes widening in understanding. His mouth dropped open. He stared at Ahilya but she couldn’t meet his gaze. Had everything changed? Did Iravan want to salvage what was left? A few weeks ago, her husband had come to her to reconcile. They went round and round each other, star-crossed, tragic, disastrous. Ahilya’s lips twitched in dark irony.
Iravan sat down at the table, opposite Dhruv. As though that were permission, Naila sat down between them. Ahilya followed more slowly, sitting opposite Naila.
“So,” Iravan said, glancing at each of them in turn. “Our task is to discover why earthrages are getting longer, why lulls are becoming shorter, and how all of this affects trajection. If we discount everything that was an effect of Bharavi’s Ecstasy, what are we left with?”
He gazed at them expectantly. With his considering, rather jaded face, he looked almost like a teacher who knew the answers yet was waiting for his brightest students to arrive at them. Ahilya bit the inside of her cheeks; she had a sudden urge to grin, bordering on hysteria. He seemed so unaffected by what had happened to them, but she knew him too well for that. No matter how composed he looked, Iravan was holding on by a thread, just like she was.
“Well,” she said, trying to mirror his tone, “we know there’s something down there in the jungle that is blocking trajection. So, that’s one thing affecting trajection.”
Naila nodded, but Iravan looked at her curiously. “Will you explain that?”
As best as she could, Ahilya explained what she and Dhruv had discovered in the solar lab, but with every word out of her mouth, Dhruv fidgeted in his chair, shaking his head and wiping his glasses as though wanting to interrupt but trying to be polite.
“—implying,” Ahilya concluded, “it could potentially be interfering with the ashram’s trajection,too—”
“No, I’msorry—Ahilya,no—Itdoesn’t imply that at all,” Dhruv burst out, clearly unable to contain himself any longer.
She glanced at him. “What?”
“I’m saying that everything we discussed in the solar lab is wrong. I don’t know what charged the tracker, afterall—”
“You said it was the trajection from all the ashrams inflight—”
“Yes, but I’ve checked it since, and as it happens, it wasn’ttrajectionthat was charging the tracker. Itwas—itmustbe—awhole different kind of energy,some—someEnergy X.”
Iravan’s face grew very still. “What do you mean?”
Dhruv removed his glasses, wiped them on the edge of his kurta, and placed them back on his nose. “About five years ago, I engineered a transmitter-receiver pair. The transmitter became part of the elephant-yaksha’s tracker, but the receiver stayed in the lab. I thought I was replicating existing sungineeringtechnology—eventhough all expeditionary equipmentisexperimental. But as it turns out, neither the receiver nor the tracker functioned off of trajection.” Dhruv’s plaintive gaze took all of them in. “I don’t know what I invented. I don’t know what it became.”
Naila uttered a soft snort. “Didn’t you run any tests when you created it?”
Dhruv let out an exasperated sigh. “Of course I did. And five years ago, all of it seemed to be working off of trajection. Once Ahilya tagged the elephant-yaksha and Nakshar flew away, I didn’t pay attention to the receiver because I didn’t expect a response from the transmitter. We’d flown too far from the yaksha. When the transmitter began signaling about three weeks ago, I thought it was because we were in range again. But I’ve run multiple tests since then. And neither the transmitter nor the receiver were being charged by trajection. They were being charged, as I said, by some mysterious Energy X.”
Ahilya drew in a sharp breath as something clicked in her mind. “This is why we didn’t sense the signal in the lab for all those years. For five years, we had been flying over the elephant-yaksha and the tracker was charging, but somehow,wedidn’t receive a signal until a few weeks ago because thereceiverwas uncharged. It implies there’s a common link between the events. Something happened five years ago in Nakshar that happened again about three weeks ago. Something that sourced Energy X.”
“Something did,” Naila said, excitedly. “Ecstasy.”
A silence fell over the small table. Ahilya glanced at Iravan. He seemed not to be breathing, his eyes unfocused on a groove in the wood.
“What are you saying?” Dhruv asked, his voice strange.
“Five years before, there was an Ecstatic Architect in Nakshar,” Naila explained. “Senior Architect Manav-ve. And we know Bharavi-ve was in Ecstasy in the last few weeks before we landed. I’ll wager anything that if you look at the times for when the tracker charged, it’ll coincide with when one of them was trajecting in Ecstasy.”
Dhruv’s face became thoughtful. “It would explain why the tracker charged itself right before Nakshar was mangled. Bharavi was in Ecstasy then, too. I just assumed it was malfunctioning.”
“I don’t understand,” Ahilya said, glancing at Iravan. “Isn’t trajection during Ecstasy the same as normal trajection? Just out of control?”
