Page 22 of The Surviving Sky
“Talk to me,” he blurted, his hand on her arm.
“What?” Distracted by the tracker, she brushed his hand away and kept moving.
“Tell me about the arrangements inside Nakshar. Can you hear the flight alarm past the briar wall?”
Ahilya gave him a quizzical glance, then returned to her tracker. “We’ve just landed, Iravan. It hasn’t even been two hours. It’ll be days, weeks, before we need to fly.”
“Please, Ahilya, just tell me.” Iravan was very aware of how there was nothing out there to protect them if his trajection failed, no other architect and no temple. The realization was chilling. “Can you hear the alarm from the ashram?”
Ahilya waggled her hand at him. “When the alarm goes off inside Nakshar for citizens to prepare for flight, it chimes through the citizen ring, just like it would if I was in the city. I’ve used it all the hundred times I’ve been on an expedition. I never wander too far from Nakshar, and we always return with hours to spare.”
“And you’ve checked your ring? It’ll work, no problem?”
“It’ll work as long as you keep trajecting,” she said dryly.
Her words gave Iravan no comfort. The jungle plants didn’t like his trajection. His constellation lines quivered like spider webs in a storm. Any moment now, he expected the plants to force his Two Visions to merge. Could evolution change the innate consciousness of a species? Was the behavior of the jungle plants somehow affecting their counterparts in Nakshar? Was that why it had been so hard to traject during the last earthrage? He was so preoccupied that he bumped into Oam, who brusquely pushed him away.
The archeologists had stopped. A gigantic gray tree trunk lay in their path, the bark pebbled and rough. Iravan flew within the Moment to look for its star, but he couldn’t see it; an oddity in the birthing jungle, for the plant to be invisible in any of its possibilities. There was only one reason for that.
“We’ll have to go around,” he said. “Whatever tree this is, it’s dead. Fully, irreversibly dead. I can’t traject it.”
Ahilya stared at him, a dazed expression on her face. “This isn’t a tree.”
Oam’s mouth fell open.
Iravan frowned and straightened. He turned back to the gray trunk. Ahilya left his side, reaching forward, pushing aside low branches, trying to create a clearing. Iravan trajected, sweat soaking his kurta, and the branches retracted. Vines and creepers scaled back. A shower of leaves fell on them.
And then through the gaps in the leaves, he glimpsed black bumps, gnarled like a boulder, and farther up, something blinked, a gleaming eye.
Iravan stumbled back. A yaksha. He was looking at a yaksha.
His mind reeled. Moisture coated his palms. All of the times while Nakshar had been in flight, he had glimpsed the aerial incarnations of the creatures from afar, flying like gigantic specks in the distance. He had never seen one so close.
The elephant-yaksha’s size defied all reason. It rose at least twenty feet tall, its broad bony forehead like a small hill. Spiky ridges of vertebrae rolled down its gigantic back. The yaksha trumpeted, a shrieking, bloodcurdling sound that shook the trees and set Iravan’s heart thumping. The creature moved its head, and Iravan saw two thick tusks curved on either side of its trunk, their edges sharp and lethal. Vines tightened on the tusks, but as the creature moved, the plants broke away and dropped to the jungle floor like writhing snakes. And Iravan saw, circled around one of the tusks, an identical locket to what Ahilya wore.
Yakshas were known to be placid, but to go seeking themout…Iravan couldn’t wrap his mind around it. His shallow breath resonated in his ears. His trajection wavered. A stray thought came to him, that perhaps he should have fought the council harder, to give the expedition a chance, to giveAhilyaa chance.
He glanced at her, seeing her clearly for the first time in a long time. Ahilya’s eyes were trained on the elephant-yaksha. She was radiant, an amazing woman full of sheer guts and stubborn courage, a delighted laugh escaping her. Fearlessly, she pushed through the weeds, leaving Iravan humbled in her wake.
7
AHILYA
Ahilya laughed out loud. She felt dizzy. It was difficult to catch her breath.
Hello, old friend, she thought, but in the back of her archeologist mind, she was already recording her encounter for posterity.
Despite the passage of years and the numerous earthrages, the elephant-yaksha has hardly changed. The tusks have acquired more curls, but the animal is no larger than it was. Importantly, it shows no signs of injury, suggesting it must have had shelter during the many earthrages since it was last observed.
Her hands shook as she collapsed her hiking equipment. The yaksha’s robust health, the lack of change in itssize—thishere was proof enough to build her hypotheses. All she had to do was take careful measurements, and she’d have a true chance at being nominated to the council seat. Ahilya squirmed in excitement, and the rope underneath her kurta chafed her bare skin. In those moments she had disappeared from Iravan and Oam’s view, she had taken a terrible risk to find spiralweed for Dhruv, but the sungineer would no longer be their best chance for changing the circumstances of the city.Ahilyacould understand survival in the jungle.Shecould be their hope. Her hand clutched and released her satchel in nervousness.
Next to her, Oam whooped, a sound edged with hysteria. “This is incredible,” he said. “This is incredible!”
She grinned. “They take your breath away, don’t they?”
“They’re monstrous! How did you ever do this? It’s incredible.You’reincredible.”
The elephant-yaksha exhaled, the vibrations shaking the surrounding trees. It moved, its gigantic feet eating the distance. Ahilya pushed the implications of finding the yaksha away from her mind. She started to jog, fumbling in her satchel, retrieving pieces of her sungineering equipment, handing Oam her solarnote.
