Page 83 of The Surviving Sky
“Don’t be foolish, Kiana,” Bharavi said. “I trajectedthrougha forcefield. Do you really think you’ll be limiting me if you took it away?”
A subtle blue-green glow permeated Airav and Chaiyya; they had entered the pocket Moment. Vines crept up their dark skins in intricate patterns. The grass Bharavi had impossibly trajected within the garden grew into tight, thick creepers and reached toward her, binding her arms to her sides, trapping her legs. She glanced down at her limbs, immobilized.
Then her dark skin lit up like a blue sun, ethereal.
Iravan lifted his hand against the fierce glare. Chaiyya and Airav screamed in agony, flickering like they were malfunctioning. The blue-green light winked out of them.
The plants binding Bharavi burst into tiny fragments, spraying all of them with leaves and twigs.
Chaiyya whimpered, her fingers touching the bloody scratches on her skin. Airav stumbled over to her and put an arm over her shoulders, his eyes terrified.
Bharavi emerged out of her bindings, shaking out her translucent robe.
“Bha,” Iravan whispered. “No.”
She reached and patted his cheek.
“Now,” she said. “Let me show you what Ecstasy truly is.”
27
IRAVAN
Bharavi raised her arms in exultation.
Her skin glowed with the blue-green light of trajection, but so close, Iravan saw what he hadn’t seen before. The tattoos growing on her arms and face didn’t resemble vines anymore. They appeared like delicately carved boulders, too square, too angular. There was an eerie familiarity to them, although he had never seen such a thing before.
He had no more time to wonder.
The next instant, the ceiling split open.
He looked up in confusion and horror. An upward tunnel grew in the ceiling, expanding, extending, revealing the thunderstorm. Great gray clouds billowed in through the hole. The walls of the chamber started to shake. The earth roiled, and Iravan lurched on his feet with a grunt. Gravity pulled at him, and his muscles trembled. The air seemed to push him down. His mouth fell open in disbelief.
This wasn’t possible. The veristem garden was in the ashram’s underbelly. Bharavi was raising it to the roof, ascending part of the architects’ orchard,throughthe temple. To change the architecture socompletely—shehad to be trajecting againstallthe Disc Architects. The damage to the ashram would be incalculable. Iravan imagined he could hear screams all over Nakshar as architecture collapsed, as trees crushed citizens, as Maze Architects scrambled on the Disc in fear.
“Bharavi,” he bellowed. “What are you doing?”
“This is the power that awaits architects, Iravan,” she shouted over the din, her eyes triumphant. “This is who we are.”
The ceiling continued to grow apart until there was no ceiling at all. Gigantic clouds churned above them, gray and thunderous, completely eclipsing the sun. Stabbing rain fell inside the open chamber, and boughs stripped from the redwood tree in the gale, whipping in every direction.
Iravan winced as lightning flashed above his eyes. Distantly, he heard the two Senior Sungineers scream. He forced his eyes open to a squint and saw Chaiyya and Airav pushed to a corner. The two flickered blue-green then dark again, trying and failing to enter the Moment.
“She—knocking—Moment,”Airav cried, the wind whipping his words away.“Knocking—out—”
“Bharavi, release them,” Iravan shouted. “Whatever you’re doing, stop.”
Caught in her Ecstasy, Bharavi didn’t hear him. The storm raged around her. Swollen tentacle-like roots emerged from the floor, flinging boulders and dust everywhere. A thick branch, almost as tall as Iravan, slammed into him, hurling him several feet back. He landed with a painful thud, his vision swimming. The branch rolled off him in the gale, but gasping, Iravan gripped it and rammed it into the earth to totter upright onto his feet, barely maintaining his balance.
Grit entered his mouth. His eyes stung. He gripped the heavy branch with both his hands, trembling, as the squall pushed against him.
Bharavi stood where she was, her head tipped up to the open sky. Her arms raised in embrace. Fury rained down, lashes of lightning crackling over them.
“Bharavi!”
“We are more,” Bharavi called out, her voice terrible and beautiful. “So much more than we know. So much more than we remember. This is what we need to become, Iravan. For all of us, for Nakshar. It’s the only way.”
Iravan crouched down against the thrusting wind. In one corner, Airav shielded Chaiyya, his body flickering in and out, still attempting to enter the Moment. In another corner, Laksiya and Kiana huddled together, their faces drawn down against the gale, their postures terrified.
