Page 30 of The Enduring Universe (The Rages Trilogy #3)
AHILYA
When she became conscious, it rendered first in the forest like a dream.
She found herself lying on someone’s lap, staring up at the canopy of the vriksh. She shifted, alarmed, but Iravan bent to her. She relaxed—because he looked like her Iravan. He was dressed in his white Senior Architect uniform, the sleeves rolled back, blue-green trajection tattoos on his skin. His near-black eyes were deep pools of concern.
“I’ve been waiting,”
he said softly, relief breaking over his features.
“Oh my love, I have been so worried.”
He helped her sit up, and she stared around her. The vast forest of the vriksh was once again still—as still as it could be with leaves curling and uncurling everywhere as if in an airborne ashram. She could not sense the Virohi anymore, but a presence seemed wrapped around her heart. She looked down to her chest, expecting to see tight bands of roots holding her, but her fingers merely traced over her clothes.
“You are here? In my forest?”
she croaked, her mouth dry.
“I’ve been waiting,”
he repeated sadly.
“Waiting with my Etherium open, hoping you would summon me, and you have.”
There were questions behind these words, she could tell, of how she had summoned him, of what had happened to her, but he did not ask them. How was it that he looked so much like the Iravan she had lost?
“It’s because you have control here,”
he said, answering her as if he could hear the question. His smile was lopsided, wretched.
“Oh my love,”
he whispered, leaning down, and she was surprised to see tears tracking down his cheeks.
“I’m so sorry. I never wanted it to be this way.”
His mouth met hers, and she opened her own, and felt him shudder against him. He tasted of salt, and terror, and regret, but before either of them could deepen the kiss, Ahilya felt the bands across her chest tighten. She pushed away from him, and this time she saw the roots wrapped around her, though Iravan did not seem to notice. She lifted her hands to her eyes and saw not fingers but branches protruding. She stifled her cry, closing her eyes tightly—
A fuzziness of existence where she was turning into the tree.
She screamed for Iravan, for Eskayra, for anyone to hear her—
And awoke with a jerk within the infirmary once more.
She knew instantly where she was. The familiar scents of herbs and ointments climbed up her nose the second she came to herself. She could hear the soft swishing of the pale-white curtains, and when she opened her eyes she saw the rock ceiling with the crisscross patterns, comforting in its familiarity.
She knew where she was, but for a confused instant she could not remember her name. The absurd realization came to her slowly, as if she could see it approaching but could not make sense of it.
From far away, she heard the sounds of people she had never met. It bothered her, but she could not immediately tell why. What did it matter that she didn’t know those sounds? She couldn’t know everybody, after all. That was not humanly possible.
Except I do know them, she thought. I know them, because I am them.
The events under the vriksh came rushing to her. The impaling, the pain, and Iravan’s rescue of her.
She bolted upright, her body trembling, but someone reached out to steady her.
“Slow down,”
the nurse said.
“You need to slow down.”
Her breath still came out too fast, her chest rising and falling too rapidly. She was wearing one of the infirmary’s gowns. How long had she been here?
Wildly, she looked around at her private chamber. It was bare except for the cot she was on, and the nurse who had just spoken. The only light came from the window, and for some reason she knew the chamber had been kept dim because she had asked for it to be so. This is where she lived now. Not in Nakshar, not in an airborne ashram, but here in the jungle, within a medical ward. She pressed a hand to the base of her neck where the tightness had settled, but as she touched the knot it flared, so she dropped her hand and closed her eyes.
One, two, three breaths went by—until her vision adjusted. She opened her eyes again, and the image of the branches across her fingers receded. She saw her dark skin. She stared at the contours of her hand, at the moon-shaped nails.
I am… I am a person, she thought, and a hysterical sound escaped her at how foolish that thought was, yet how necessary.
She looked up at the nurse to see if she was laughing too, but other shapes caught her eyes, hovering behind the nurse. Three people stood waiting by the door. Not Dhruv. Not Naila. And certainly not Iravan, though she could remember the taste of his lips from the half-dream—no, these were councilors of Irshar. Of her ashram.
With those names, more information poured into her brain, like waking from a particularly consuming sleep. She adjusted her pillows carefully.
“What happened?”
she asked, her voice hoarse.
“Do you know who you are?”
the nurse replied quietly.
The light of clarity was pouring into her more rapidly. Ahilya raised her eyes to the nurse. Kamala, that was the healer’s name. The urgency had passed; that’s why Kamala was asking this question now.
“Yes,”
she answered. Her voice came as a croak.
“I am Ahilya. I am a complete being. I am not alone.”
The litany came naturally to her, an expected and learned response to this question.
For a long moment, Kamala watched her, not believing her reply. Ahilya barely believed her own words too.
An eerie sense came over her. She saw herself from behind Kamala’s eyes, but she also saw a memory—Kamala with Oam. Oam wore a nurse’s scrubs, but his braided curls were tied in a knot. They were chatting to each other in Nakshar’s infirmary. Kamala smiled—teasing Oam, asking him why he would go into the jungle on an expedition with this older woman. Jealousy streaks in my eyes, that he would choose her.
Ahilya let the vision drop. Her heart raced as the other woman simply nodded and retreated, and Ahilya forced herself to take three deep breaths like she had been trained to. Slowly, gaining control over herself, she tracked the councilors as they watched the nurse leave and entered her personal ward.
Chaiyya and Basav drew closer to one side of her cot, pulling chairs alongside her. On the other side, Airav stopped his wheelchair, his gaze sad, the same expression he had each time he visited. Ahilya tried to school her expression, not wanting to answer inane questions about her health, but the effort was too much. It was all she could do to raise her eyebrows in the obvious question: What happened?
Chaiyya gave her a long look, sighed, then shook her head.
“You’ve been unconscious for five days,”
she said quietly.
“Your vitals were strong, yet you refused to wake. Do you remember anything?”
“Five days,”
she rasped, swallowing.
“Where is Eskayra?”
“She left this morning,”
Chaiyya said.
“She did not want to, but the new city site needed her. She will be back tonight.”
Ahilya shook her head.
“I—I don’t understand. We were speaking to each other. We were in the council chambers…”
Her eyes widened, and her hands shook. Events returned to her, of running through Irshar, of skidding to a stop in the council chambers, and then in her Etherium, being impaled by the thorns in the forest. Ahilya looked at her hands, expecting to find twigs instead of her fingers, sap instead of blood in her veins.
“It was the vriksh, wasn’t it? I remember its call to me. Wha-what happened? Did I—”
Her voice came out cracked.
“Did I hurt anybody? My sister—is she all right? I remember the ground shaking.”
They had all clearly discussed the phenomenon in the last five days, and Ahilya saw Basav’s repressed terror and anger in the pinch of his mouth. She wondered if he would say anything or let her question hang. Ahilya got the impression that he was trying hard to be civil.
“You didn’t hurt anyone,”
he said, his voice clipped.
“And the citizens, including your sister, are fine. Whatever happened did not impact them for now. But what you did… The vriksh…”
The others did not speak into his silence, and Ahilya shrank under their scrutiny.
“The vriksh was an anomaly to begin with,”
Basav said.
“Even before you used it to anchor the cosmic creatures within the planet. It was the amalgamation of all the fifty core trees of the Conclave, created during a time of great upheaval. Core trees have always been sentient, this much has been apparent to us architects—but the vriksh is more powerful than any single core tree. It, as you said, called to you. It was behind what occurred.”
“Why?”
Ahilya asked. There was something chilling in the way Basav had spoken, like he was trying to hide something horrible behind his academic explanation.
“Tell me,”
Basav replied.
“Do you see the cosmic creatures now?”
“No, not clearly, not since they escaped the ashram. You know this.”
But Ahilya cut herself off, frowning.
She had seen murmurs of citizens in there before, of Dhruv and Chaiyya, and she’d spoken to Iravan there. She’d seen the weeping, huddled shapes of the cosmic creatures too, though those had disappeared. Now past the leaves of her memories, she glimpsed something in the Etherium. A shadow and a whisper and a thousand tendrils of smoke bleeding into dark echoes. The Virohi were here, except instead of being a single mass of grieving shapes, they had diffused somehow to permeate the tree.
An image came to her in explanation—the cosmic creatures caught inside the vriksh like little seedlings, traveling through osmosis into her mind.
But not just her mind.
All of the citizens’ too.
Her eyes grew wide and she stared at Basav. He saw her comprehension.
“You understand then?”
he said softly.
“I—I—”
Basav’s voice grew cold.
“When you allowed the cosmic creatures into the tree, you gave them access to all of us, architect and non-architect alike. To our knowledge, our memories, everything. To the codes of trajection. They have more knowledge about us than we do, they know what we have forgotten about ourselves. You already know this, don’t you?”
Ahilya remembered that time in Nakshar when she had seen the desires of people spark within the rudra-tree. When she had understood how archival memory was created, and how it was maintained within a core tree. The vriksh’s sentience, its life… these were the lives of people, a living history that had formed within its trunk, and that dictated everyone’s reality within the ashram. All the lives of every citizen on Irshar were inextricably tied to the vriksh. And with the Virohi within the tree, the vriksh was tied to the Virohi too. A choking sound emerged from her throat.
Chaiyya reached forward, concern on her face, but Ahilya pushed her aside. She couldn’t bear to be touched, not when she had been violated so deeply already, not when she had violated others in return. She felt sick.
“We’re calling it overwriting,”
Airav said quietly.
“The Virohi have access to the tree, and they have always seen you as one of them. Now that they have access to us through the tree, through you, they are attempting to take over our consciousnesses. Should they succeed, we will lose ourselves—to be human no longer, but this corrupted version—whatever they wish us to be. Our perception of reality will begin to warp. I’m afraid, Ahilya-ve, that humanity might simply become their vessels.”
“Like me,”
she whispered.
All three councilors nodded. Ahilya shivered. She had been resentful of the others for never knowing how she suffered with the cosmic creatures, but she never wanted this. She could imagine it clearly—each thorn of memory filling her with the citizens’ secrets until she was a nothing but a vessel that held all of them. Then with her at the helm, the Virohi would reach for each of these people in turn, connecting to them through the vriksh. A true hive mind, until each of the citizens became mere marionettes, sheaths of skin and meat holding nothing but the Virohi. The Virohi had split into architects, holding them as a vessel alongside yakshas, but this would be every single person. All of humanity lost to its mind, brief flashes of memory reminding them of who they had once been. It was like the old joke she and Dhruv used to tell each other when discussing their place in Nakshar. What was worse than erasure? An everlasting memory of it. Ahilya thought that she might vomit.
“What triggered this?”
she asked, past the stone in her throat.
“After all these days and weeks, why did the Virohi attempt to overwrite us now?”
“Does it matter?”
Basav said.
“If we know it, perhaps we can prevent it from occurring again.”
“We cannot know it,”
Basav replied, nearly spitting.
“It is likely a natural consequence of things occurring. And it is already too late to prevent it. Now that they are in the tree, the process of overwriting has begun. Perhaps the Virohi needed those last few weeks to evolve and understand their new position before attacking us. Perhaps this was always going to occur right from the time Iravan-ve created Irshar and manipulated all the other core trees, making them open to the Virohi’s infection. We can never know. All we know is the effects that rendered when we all momentarily became you. We became your playthings. For a brief time, we lost ourselves completely, our consciousnesses tossing around inside your own.”
Ahilya’s hands tightened on her covers again. She stared at the fabric, the coarse weave of cotton, the tiny patterns on the cloth. Scattered images came to her, of the vriksh weeping, and Iravan reaching his hands for her. She tried to build a complete picture, but it was as though she was performing archeology on herself. The feeling was so bizarre that the tightness in her neck increased, itching.
Overwriting, she thought—and Basav called it them becoming her, but no, this was about Ahilya becoming the rest of these people. Not the other way around. Did it make any difference?
Pieces of the puzzle appeared and vanished in her head. Iravan, the mirrored chambers, the manner they had spoken in and communicated before—and then what had happened with the vriksh. She had started down this path to be recognized. She had once wanted to be important. Everything she had done had been motivated by it, once upon a time. Archeology, the study of earthrages, her every action, all of it had contained the seed of her pride. She had become entangled in the architects and their lives, in the politics of survival, but who was she really? Just a simple archeologist, with little training for anything else.
Ahilya closed her eyes, and just for an instant she saw not the nightmare she lived in, but a shining moment of the past. Iravan and her lying on their backs, looking up at the sky from one of Nakshar’s terraces, discussing and theorizing arbitrary matters, which neither of them ever could imagine would become real. Very carefully, she smoothed her hands over the covers, knowing that the others were watching her every move.
“All is not lost,”
Airav said softly.
“This incident has given us a warning of what can occur, but while the Virohi are contaminating the tree—and you—like an infection, as long as you keep control over yourself, you will slow their corruption. You will be the necessary barrier between them and us. But if you don’t, if you give in or give up, it is likely that the Virohi will convert us to what they wish. Suffice to say, if they did so we would be erased.”
Ahilya could still feel the thorns under her skin. What Airav said was tantamount to allowing herself to live with such an attack, while holding onto her reality and self. How could he ask her this so callously? Did he not know she was weak?
“I have failed you once already,”
she said softly.
“I have failed you many times.”
“We know,”
Basav said shortly.
“Which is why we have thought of a solution.”
“This is an opportunity,”
Chaiyya said gently.
“Ahilya, you would never have been able to extract the Virohi from the tree. All your attempts so far have failed, and none of us know enough about the Virohi to help you, not with all our records so lost. But if they’re contaminating the core tree and are visible to you there, you can use your control of the vriksh. You can help Iravan destroy them.”
Ahilya recoiled, staring from one to another.
“I wouldn’t know where to begin,”
she said, swallowing.
“I don’t have true control of the tree, and I only see the Virohi in shadows. I don’t know where they are, and if I did, I wouldn’t know how to destroy them.”
“That,”
Basav said.
“is why I am here.”
From his satchel, he removed a thick book. Ahilya had once owned a similar satchel. She had carried it everywhere, but now Basav had taken over that affectation, carrying his most precious possessions with him at all times. No place was safe, after all, not since architecture could change on a whim even for Senior Architects.
She glimpsed other items in the satchel, more books, a few faded pictures of Basav with a woman and children, some documents that looked official. She did not know what they meant, but suddenly she received a glimpse from behind his eyes, as he was presented with honors for the work he did in his ashram. Basav’s younger face shone with pride before withering away into memory. Ahilya shivered as if she had done something wrong by glimpsing this.
In the infirmary, the Senior Architect opened the tome. Upside-down though it was, Ahilya could tell that it was an ancient architect record. The paper was yellow with age, and Basav lifted each page carefully like it was the most delicate child. It was shocking that he had recovered this from the Conclave’s crash. How much other literature had they lost? Ahilya still did not have access to all of the remaining records, though with her corruption, this rejection finally made a perverse kind of sense.
Basav did not offer the book to her. From the way his fingers clutched the pages, Ahilya knew that it pained him to share whatever knowledge it contained with her, with a non-architect.
But Ahilya was no stranger to such architect records. She had seen others of this kind before—books with no words but only beautifully drawn pictures, in colors made out of plant dye and paper of the thinnest bark. Iravan had once brought her something similar as a gift. He had seduced her with the promise of more. She leaned forward and studied the image, though Basav held the book away from her. A tree covered the open page, broad-trunked and healthy. Yet cracks bled on the tree, leaking not sap but blood. Though the tree stood erect, there was pain in the posture, reverberating from its branches in the tightening of the leaves and the clenching of the branches.
“I have been arming myself with knowledge of the trees ever since the creation of the vriksh,”
Basav said slowly, still staring at the book.
Basav led the charge for communing with survivors of the fallen ashrams, attempting to record architect history, trying to hold onto the version of the past he was familiar with. Ahilya had known the tragedy of such an endeavor, but his pain disconcerted her now. The lines on his face, the way his fingers shook. He was barely holding on to sanity, and she wanted to reach out a hand, comfort him despite his abhorrence of her, but Basav looked up to meet Ahilya’s eyes, and she flinched.
She wanted to tell him she wasn’t infiltrating him, not willingly at least, but the words stuck in her throat. She looked back to her covers.
“What I tell you now has been a great secret, even in architect circles,”
Basav said, his voice gravelly, holding onto his fury.
“Understand that I would not share this if there was any other way.”
She nodded once, but Basav did not acknowledge it. Instead, he traced a finger over the image.
“You already know that we excised architects who showed Ecstasy. In your ashram, the councilors used an Examination of Ecstasy, but within the Seven Northern Sisters, suspicion was enough. We did not seek proof that would only be ambiguous, at best.”
Ahilya stared at him. In her mind’s eye, she saw Iravan in a deathcage, his sleeves rolled back, as he faced the Conclave of all the sister-ashrams in a sham trial that was meant to unhinge him. Basav had never wanted Iravan to live. He’d stepped into the deathmaze, opening himself to being trajected into madness, all to prove a point. She had called him a bastard for it, she had railed against him. Even now, she could not help her distaste. Ahilya stirred, wanting to put some distance between them.
Basav’s flat gaze swept across her as if he could hear her judgment.
“We were not so frivolous, gambling with survival,”
he said coldly, his eyes taking in the other two councilors too.
Ahilya watched her own shame and confusion spark across Chaiyya and Airav’s faces. All three of them had once been councilors of Nakshar. She had fought for Ecstasy to become legal, but before her time the other two had been part of the laws to uphold the Examination of Ecstasy. Basav’s unspoken disgust and recrimination was clear—had Nakshar followed instant-excision, humanity would not be in the jungle, facing extinction.
Was that the path she had not taken, then? Would that have prevented all this? His ashram had destroyed lives. His ashram had excised children. We are all wrong in some measure, she thought. What can we do, except work with what we have been given? It should have been a comforting thought, but all Ahilya felt was misery. Was this to be the destiny for their species then? To make mistakes over and over again, to destroy themselves because of hate and arrogance and superfluous power grabs? The Virohi truly are foolish, she thought in morbid irony. To wish to become like us—they have to be mad.
“The codes for excising an Ecstatic Architect were wrought within the core trees of the Seven Northern Sisters,”
Basav continued.
“Your ashram might have drifted from tradition in terrible directions, but even Nakshar kept to this as did every sister ashram. Only Senior Architects of a city knew how to trigger these excision codes. In some ways, it is a similar trajection they orchestrated with the Architects’ Disc when subsuming an offending ashram—excising its core tree into tiny parts, then absorbing the remainder of the ashram into itself. Every ashram had this knowledge.”
Ahilya had a horrifying image of an airborne city sending a thousand tentacle-like roots into another airborne structure, splitting it into fragments and sucking its pieces into itself, while the core tree burst into powder. Even imagined, the violence of it shook her.
It was the danger Nakshar had faced in opposing the Conclave and supporting the claim for Ecstatics to be free. The Conclave’s crash into the jungle had ended the need for such political maneuvering, but once Nakshar’s total erasure had held the city’s councilors at chokepoint. It was the reason Chaiyya had sacrificed Iravan and the other Ecstatics, opening them to excision and paving the path to illegal experimentation on them for powering an Ecstatic battery. How different things would have been had they all simply treated one another as human beings, worthy of respect and care. But we have shown time and again that we are not capable of compassion, Ahilya thought. We do not care for the other. We create the other.
She had been such an outsider once. Now it was the Virohi.
Silent laughter built in her head.
“How is this to help me?”
she asked.
Basav looked at her, frowning at her tone.
“If you had found a way to extract the Virohi, we would be having a different conversation,”
he said.
“Iravan-ve knows the codes of excision, and I would simply have had you contain the infection within a single part of the vriksh, and hand it over to him to excise. But he cannot control the Etherium like you can, so you are our only option. You will have to perform the excision.”
He turned to another page. Then, reluctance in every inch of his movements, Basav handed Ahilya the book.
The second sketch was beautiful and horrifying. Two architects of indeterminate gender faced each other under the boughs of a massive, leafy core tree. Circles of radiance emanated from each of their bodies, but one was on their knees—clearly an Ecstatic—whereas the other stood glowing blue-green, clearly a Senior Architect. Stars wheeled overhead connected through constellation lines—a representation of the Moment, Ahilya knew. Jagged shards of lightning flung down from the stars, powered by the looming Senior Architect’s trajection.
Ahilya flipped a page, her heart racing. The Ecstatic Architect’s face was thrown back in a scream. The circles of radiance around their body diminished, as she continued to flip the pages, becoming smaller and smaller, until the architect was no longer within the boughs of the tree. The last image showed the Ecstatic Architect prone on the floor. Discarded. Alone. Excised.
She raised her eyes to the other councilors. Each one of them had once committed such an act.
“Excision,”
she breathed.
“When you excised an architect, you did not simply cut them from their yakshas. No—you didn’t know of the yakshas. You cut them away from their ashram’s core tree. From the codes of trajection. Am I right?”
Basav’s silence was answer enough.
Ahilya felt nauseated.
Iravan had always been tight-lipped about excision. He’d told her excision cut an architect away from their power, but how could architects do so without trajecting each other? Architects were forbidden from trajecting people or their core trees—each of those actions was a sign of sure Ecstasy. So they trajected the ashram instead, withdrawing permissions until the Ecstatic was unrecognizable by the city as a citizen. The tree was coded to protect architects over non-architects, but if they took away the tree’s ability to recognize the Ecstatic as a citizen, as a person or a human being, the core tree would become compliant. And instead of a Senior Architect conducting excision, the core tree would attack the Ecstatic.
Ahilya imagined it—a core tree, with all its power, sloughing away at an Ecstatic’s consciousness, seeing their life as a contaminant to the ashram, much like a forbidden jungle plant. Once, Nakshar had chosen not to recognize ordinary citizens as part of the ashram during the Conclave. Ahilya had taken Chaiyya’s borrowed rudra bead and changed the permissions, protecting her sister and the rest of the non-architects, unwilling to sacrifice them for the council’s politics.
But the council had always done such calculations, even unto their own. Each time they’d sent an architect to be excised, they had stripped away that architect’s humanity.
Perhaps the Ecstatic had withered away, their power leaking with their consciousness, until nothing else remained. Perhaps their loss of self came not from their inability to traject, but because they had been cut off from their society. That is what had happened to Manav. To Maiya, who Iravan had shown her in Nakshar’s sanctum, and to all those who had been found guilty of the power for thousands of years. They lost their ability to traject because of the loss of their mind. Hadn’t Iravan told her often that in order to traject, one had to hold onto their own consciousness, their own will. Tied in a thousand ways to a core tree, with memory and consciousness fed to it through every act, the separation from a tree would be devastating to an Ecstatic Architect. Ahilya stared at the picture in the book and imagined the total obliteration of a person, performed in concerted cruelty, all because they were different.
No wonder there was such hate and fear of excision in architect circles. When Iravan had told her long ago that Ecstatics would not be recognized as humans by other councils in the Conclave, he had not spoken out of simple fear. He’d understood the mechanics of it, of the fate that awaited each Ecstatic. This is why he and Bharavi had made a pact. Why the ashrams had preserved their excised architects within a secret sanctum, away from the rest of their society. Why they kept the truth about what happened to an excised architect such a mystery, even going as far as to make architects have children before revealing its secret to their spouses. All citizens revered their core tree, architects more than others. These were actions borne of guilt—each lie piling atop the other until all of it crashed to the jungle.
Did the others really expect her to do this to the Virohi?
The heartpoison bracelet around her wrist prickled in premonition. Ahilya pushed the book back into Basav’s hands.
“I am not an architect,”
she said, her throat thick.
“I cannot excise using constellation lines.”
“The constellation lines are secondary,”
Basav replied, scowling.
“You do not need them. You are connected to the vriksh. It is a matter of will, and a simple technique of visualization—an act of severance. Call the Virohi to you. Convince them to stay with you, close enough to feel them. Then sever them from the vriksh, cutting them away from everything. Then, we can finally be rid of the cosmic creatures.”
“No,”
Ahilya said.
“Please, don’t do this. You know how cruel it is. You’ve seen what happens to excised architects.”
Basav frowned at her.
“Are you refusing the council? Are you placing these creatures above humanity itself, even after what I told you about overwriting?”
Ahilya shook her head, backpedaling. “No,”
she said hurriedly.
“No, I just meant I—I won’t be able to do this—you expect too much of me—I can’t—I don’t have that kind of control—”
“Try it,”
Chaiyya urged.
“Try to call them, right now. You already know how. Let’s find out here and now.”
She could not say no. Even as Chaiyya commanded her, the fuzzy darkness of the Virohi hummed in Ahilya’s mind, and she imagined the cosmic creatures like the singular entity she had seen before. Particles flaked to her, forming a body in her own shape. The Virohi swarmed in front of her, huddling again, their fuzzed dark head buried into their hands, sobbing. She imagined an axe. It appeared in her hands, a sharp thing made of wood and mistakes.
Ahilya knew this was not real, that this was a visualization—but the Etherium was a realm of personal perceptions. Compelled by the looks of the councilors, she approached the shadow-figure, and caught by her will, or perhaps simply trusting her, the Virohi did not move. Their body jerked in silent shudders, their cries silent yet echoing in the Etherium, as she placed the blade by their neck.
Ahilya felt its cold glint on her skin.
The axe dropped from her hands, disappearing. Her mind blanked in terror. She backed away, and the fuzzy form of the Virohi disappeared, back into a buzzing hive that flitted away into the forest.
In the infirmary, she clutched her head in a posture eerily reminiscent of the Virohi themselves, breathing hard. The others stared at her.
Genocide, again. Was she going mad? How was it possible that only she could think such a thing abominable? Were they right after all—was it always a question of us or them? Perhaps it was the natural law of life, predator or prey, the only way to survive. But she had lived with the consequences of that thinking all her life. Architects had chosen to erase non-architects in similar calculations. They’d chosen to other their own. When you considered a sentient race as disposable prey, where did that leave you?
“Would that not hurt us too?”
she asked.
“If the Virohi have already become a part of us, destroying them would destroy parts of us all.”
“What choice do we have?”
Basav said.
“We cannot let the entire plant die for want of saving a branch. We will have to prune. That is what it means to be a councilor. Architects have always known this.”
“Perhaps such pruning will take parts of ourselves away,”
Airav said.
“But it will be worth it. You know what we are up against.”
“This is the same thing the Virohi thought,”
Ahilya said.
“When they split in the first place, they thought they would be all right, despite losing parts of themselves. Now you would do that too—lose what you have by destroying the Virohi.”
“We must strike first, before the Virohi evolve and strike us,”
Basav retorted.
“You think we came to this decision easily? We understand that we might experience some loss. Perhaps in cutting them away, you will take away crucial memories of our lives.”
His hands tightened over the books, and she thought of the loss he had already experienced.
“We have no choice,”
Basav said again.
“This is the only way.”
Ahilya shook her head, trying to deny him. Basav had described excision as similar to subsummation, but the architects understood subsummation as erasure—that was how they had attacked and overtaken offending ashrams.
Ahilya had seen subsummation occur. She had seen what absorbing the falcon-yaksha had done to Iravan. It had not erased the falcon; the yaksha had merely become a part of Iravan, indistinguishable from her husband, bleeding its rage and memory into him. What if that occurred with the Virohi too? Humanity would still look and feel human-like, but echoes of the Virohi would remain within them. None of them would be as they were, and the Virohi would be destroyed fruitlessly. Even if she excised the cosmic creatures, what remained of humanity’s survivors would be human no longer. Such an act, in and of itself, would be human no longer.
The council of Irshar would not see it this way, but such a thing would be a kind of overwriting too. There would be no return from such violence, and it would hurt the citizens as well, a corruption worse than the one she endured for it would be more subtle. She had once thought to strike in violence at architects too. Look where she was now, operating just like them.
If she did this, which of her memories would die? Ahilya saw herself separated from the knowledge of Tariya or Bharavi or Iravan, even the pain she had felt at their hands and through their actions. Would she trade it? If bad memories were all she had of them, those was still hers to keep. She was an archeologist, yet here they were asking her to cut away—erase—part of their history. Who would they become?
But perhaps this is what we need, she thought. To become something else. Someone else. It was a dangerous thought, and she shook her head, unable to articulate all this to the councilors.
“I don’t think the Virohi were overwriting us simply because they could,”
she said desperately.
“I think they were attempting to flee something.”
The three of them studied her with mixed expressions of pity and disbelief.
“It doesn’t matter—”
Basav began.
“It does,”
she said.
“It really does. Iravan’s war on them—the bomb he exploded—hurt them, and they’ve changed since then. They’ve evolved in ways we are not acknowledging while they became part of the tree. I saw them grieving, weeping, and I think it is worthwhile to examine why.”
Without waiting for them to reply, Ahilya threw the covers off her, and staggered to her feet. For a second, she swayed, unsteady, but before any of the others could reach her, she took a few wobbly steps forward, reaching for her clothes, shedding the gown she had been given.
Airav and Basav averted their gazes, but Chaiyya stared at Ahilya, eyebrows raised.
Ahilya’s mind raced, a sick feeling spreading through her, making her want to vomit. She had vowed to Iravan she would tell him everything she learned of the Virohi, including any means to destroy them. That she had been looking for ways to save them was secondary; with what the council had told her now, she was duty bound to share this. Already she could feel the heartpoison bracelet tightening around her wrist. It could tell that some part of her wanted to hide this news, and it was warning her of the consequences of doing so.
But even if the council did not see subsummation this way, Iravan would. Surely he would? The memory of him waiting for her within the Etherium sparked in her mind. He’d said she’d summoned him there as always, but if so it had been unconsciously done. Even if she had, he had stayed—not shielding himself. He had attempted to save her from the overwriting, perhaps against the wishes of his capital desire.
He was once a reasonable man, and he had experienced subsummation. He had accused her of corruption, but his corruption by the falcon-yaksha’s hate had undone him. She had kept faith in his return to her, despite Eskayra’s proposition, despite the way things had been between her and him for the last many months. That kiss in the Etherium had shown her she’d been right to do so. She still had a chance to convince him of her point of view. She had to do it now. Before any of the others could speak to him.
Ahilya finished dressing, and moved toward the door. If she could get to him, to him, past the falcon and his past lives and his capital desire, there was still a chance to prevent genocide. Speed made her movements clumsy, and she banged into the edge of her cot.
She stopped as Basav rose to block her way, a scowl on his face, his hands shaking with emotion.
“You have already done enough damage with your sympathies for these creatures,”
he snarled softly.
“You are to obey the council’s wishes in this. Do you understand me?”
Iravan had demurred to his capital desire in the Etherium, when she had been attacked. He had saved the cosmic creatures because it meant saving her. She had to believe that meant something. Ahilya stared at Basav, her pulse racing.
“Let me pass, please,”
she said quietly.
Basav stepped out of her way. Ahilya walked past him, but his soft words came to her nonetheless.
“Do the right thing, Ahilya-ve,”
he said, the suffix an invective in his mouth.
“Enough lives have been lost because of you and your husband.”