Night in Vayukshi carried a different density.
Light thinned.
The city's deeper rhythms grew more audible to Ira's senses. Not sound, but layered impressions that brushed her awareness as she walked.
Meera slept again, exhaustion finally overtaking fear.
Ira stood alone on the upper span, watching pale light move across distant stone.
The sealed corridor replayed in her mind.
The city's refusal.
The way its response had curved—not around Meera, but around her.
She placed a hand over her heart.
The heaviness answered.
Not as weight.
As orientation.
She had not wanted the city to listen.
She had not wanted to become a point of reference.
But she already was.
Footsteps approached.
Devansh joined her, standing close enough that she felt the altered rhythm in him, subtle and newly personal.
"I can open it," she said quietly.
He turned to her.
"Not yet," she continued. "Not fully. But I can feel where the agreement is set. And I can… lean against it."
"That will cost you," he said.
"Yes."
He watched her face. "More than you expect."
"Yes."
Silence stretched.
Then she looked up at him.
"I can't let the city decide who gets to leave anymore," she said. "Not when it's responding to me."
Devansh studied her.
"The moment you alter that agreement," he said, "you change what this place is."
"I know."
"And what it means to everything bound to it."
"I know."
She did not look away.
"For centuries," he said, "Vayukshi has contained the consequences of a choice. If you open what it has preserved…"
"I don't erase the past," she replied. "I answer it."
The words felt steady in her mouth.
True.
Somewhere beneath them, something deep responded faintly.
Devansh felt it.
So did she.
A subtle reorientation of the city's deeper attention.
He reached out then, not to stop her.
To steady her.
When his hand closed around hers, the contact did not fracture him.
It grounded him.
The heaviness in her chest aligned.
And in that alignment, Ira understood something with quiet clarity.
Opening the path for Meera would be the first time she did not simply change how the city behaved.
It would be the first time she overruled it.