Page 125 of The Surviving Sky
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AHILYA
At first, she couldn’t see anything through the haze of sparkling green dust. She was surely breathing the dust in, but the air smelled fresh, clean, almost too cool for comfort, as though the humidity of the jungle and the dirt from the earthrage could not affect this place. Yet even as she thought this, the temperature grew warmer. The goosepimples on her arms receded. Ahilya swallowed, her mouth dry, as this realization hit her.
She stopped a few feet away from the remains of the orb. Behind her, the bone-white sungineering battery glinted in the green light. She didn’t want to leave itbehind—thislast remnant of Nakshar, ofDhruv—but it was useless to her; she couldn’t do anything with it.
Despite that, moving away was difficult.
With every step she took, Ahilya glanced back.
Soon, she couldn’t see anything but the glittering green dust. Swallowing the lump in her throat, she stretched her hands forward, blindly.
Ten feet in, the dust vanished.
It didn’t dissipate slowly; itvanished.
And Ahilya stared.
Her mind couldn’t comprehend what she was looking at. Her knees buckled and she staggered to the ground, staring up. She supposed it was architecture, but it was nothing like she had ever seen, everimagined.
Shafts of blue-green light shone and glittered in every direction, like angled and reflected rays of trajection, except it wasn’tlight—thoseshafts wereplants. The shafts undulated and changed even as she watched, perhapsbecauseshe watched. She caught a flicker of leaf; she blinked, and it was gone, returned to being a part ofthe…structure. Out of the corner of her eyes she glimpsed a woody stem, but it rippled as she whipped her head around, and it was mesmerizing light again.
The light waswatchingher, just as she was watching it.
And then the blue-green light coalesced.
The shafts glinted to resemble pillars.
Ahilya’s breath came out in short bursts. Her hand clutched at the ground; it felt like solid earth, like grass, but she looked and the ground shimmered like a pool of green water. Her senses contradicted one other, touch different from sight different from smell, and she smelled suddenly the scents ofNakshar, lush moss and healbranch and the rudra tree.
Ahilya closed her eyes, hyperventilating.
How could plants be imbued with trajection light? Plants weren’t architects; they weren’t complex beings. Her hands came up to grip her tracker locket. Slowly, very slowly, she opened her eyes. She focused on the tracker locket and nothing else. Her mind lurched back to what she had come to do, toIravan.
The red dot had disappeared.
The chiming had stopped.
She had noticed it before, but her mind registered the implication only now. Her heart skipped a beat. Why wasn’t the tracker working? Had Energy X stopped? Or maybe it was this place? But there was only one area in the jungle where any sungineering signal died, only one area which the earthrages could not touch.
The yaksha habitat.
Her entire body trembled, releasing her terror, as her mind wrapped around this realization. Never could she have imagined the habitat to look likethis—whateverthiswas. How had her orb landed there? How had she been so lucky?
She closed her eyes and she could hear all of their voices: Dhruv telling her she was selfish; Tariya asking her to stop with her childish pursuits; Iravan telling her so long before how no such thing as a yaksha habitat existed. Under her knees, the ground felt solid, like earth, but when she glanced at it, it shimmered again.
Ahilya took a deep breath and placed her palm on the glassy ground.Get up, she thought.You’re an archeologist. Do your job. Trembling, she pushed herself to her feet and stood up.
Her hand fumbled at her satchel to reach for her solarnote and sketch what she saw, but she stopped before she could unlatch her bag. Her other arm was in a cast. Besides, the solarnote would not work. No sungineering equipment would. She would have to commit it tomemory—
Incongruous hysterical laughter bubbled out of her.
She didn’t need to commit it to memory. She wasn’t going back. The only way was forward.
Ahilya took another step, and the glassy ground under her coalesced into a circle and began to rise. “No,” she gasped, the beginning of vertigo gripping her, and the circle stopped. It lowered and shimmered. Almost, she thought, the ground wasconsideringher.
Then slowly, tentatively, in the manner of doing something new, the ground converted into a gentle ascending staircase, each step as large as a field.
