Page 91 of The Surviving Sky
“You won’t do it for your wife? For yourchildren?”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I know you care for them.”
“They’re my family, too.”
“Yes, butbalance…I’m not sure it’s desirable. I’m sorry, Iravan. You’re in for a rough time. You’ll try to fightit—Iknow you will. But sooner or later, you’ll give in. You’ll see there’s no fight at all. You are on your way and there’s no going back. And let’s faceit—youandAhilya—”
“You know nothing about me and Ahilya,” he snarled.
She just shook her head, reminding him of her old self, gentle and exasperated with him.
“We are nothing like you and Tariya,” he repeated. “I told you that when we landed.”
Bharavi shook her arms out and stood up, appearing tired of the conversation. Iravan sat on his bench, his chest heaving, trying to control his breathing. He watched her as she circled her glass cage, tapping at one narrow pane after another. Her skin grew brighter, the blue-green light beams ricocheting off the panes and the polished stone slab.
“The deathcage will hold,” he repeated warily. “You can’t traject your way out. You know that.”
“We shall see.”
“It has held Ecstatics before, Bha.”
“Not me. My powersare…untested. I don’t know the limits of Ecstasy yet. No one does.”
Iravan fell silent, watching as she circled the cage. His heart began to thud in his chest, but it was a low beat; he had exhausted his energy already on this day.
“If I let you out,” he said, at last, “what will you do?”
Bharavi whipped around from her corner, her eyes on him. “The truth?”
“The truth.”
She raised both her hands. “I’ll release the architects from the bindings of the ashram. Everything we’ve builtis…wrong. We need to start anew. Isn’t that what you want, too? I know you’re tired.”
Iravan watched her. His hands were cold in the night air, his face still. A bone-deep fatigue weighed him down. Without getting off his bench, he leaned forward to the closest glass pane and unlocked it. The glass retracted with awhisk.
Bharavi watched from her corner, making no sudden moves, but her skinexplodedwith light so Iravan could discern no shapes, no patterns. His eyes watered, but he flicked open the deathbox from his pocket and tossed the spiralweed inside the glass cage.
The spiralweed engorged in a blink as he’d known it would.
Bharavi uttered a howl of rage and agony, but before she could move, Iravan locked the cage again. The glass pane shot back down, severing several whips of spiralweed vines that fell on his side of the deathcage. The dismembered vines crawled toward him like worms, but he sat in layers of nearly a hundred deathchambers and did not traject. The vines grew brown, withering away into dust before they could reach him.
Iravan closed his eyes and buried his head in his hands.
The sounds coming from inside the cage were terrifying.
They went on and on, the thrashing and whipping, Bharavi’s enraged screams, her calls asking him to release her,Iravan, IRAVAN!And then they changed, into whimpers, into gurgles. The spiralweed was strangling her like it had tried to strangle him in the library, like he’d known it would.
Iravan rocked himself back and forth, not looking up, trapped in this eternal hell.
He did not know if he was crying again.
The sounds of Bharavi dying consumed his mind; every other memory, every thought, vanished; nothing existed except for this horror. He choked, barely able to breathe, this was a nightmare, this was eternal punishment.
It took him a long time to realize the garden was still again.
Very slowly, as though in a dream, he looked back up. The deathcage was dark. A small leaf vibrated on the stone floor, barely visible. The spiralweed had become innocuous again, satiated. It fluttered limply, unable to move.
Bharavi lay slumped in the corner by one of the glass panes.
