For a while, I couldn't tell where my body ended.
The stone beneath my knees felt too far away. Devansh's hands on my shoulders felt like they were reaching me from another room. Every breath came shallow, scraping, as if my lungs were learning a new way to work.
Inside my chest, something pressed back.
It wasn't pain.
It wasn't emotion.
It was… density.
A presence that didn't rise or fall the way feelings did. It didn't blur or spread. It stayed exactly where it was, like a thumb pressed into soft ground and left there.
"Ira," Devansh said.
His voice cut through the haze first. Not loud. Steady. Anchored.
I focused on it. Let it pull me back into myself.
My hands were clenched in my clothes. I hadn't realized. My fingers ached when I forced them open.
"I can breathe," I said hoarsely. "I just… need a second."
Devansh didn't move his hands away. He shifted closer, one knee touching the floor beside mine, his presence firm and near. The closeness grounded me more than anything else. I could feel the warmth of him through the thin air. I could feel that he was real.
The city's hum had returned, but it sounded different now. Uneven. Like something with a pulse that hadn't found its rhythm again.
Meera was standing a few steps away, staring at the place where the wall had begun to change earlier. Her face looked empty. Not calm. Blank.
"It's gone," she said quietly.
I looked up at her. "What is?"
"The thing," she replied. "The spaces. The thin places. I can't see them anymore."
A cold thread slid through my chest.
Devansh turned his head slightly. "What do you see?"
She blinked, as if trying to force her eyes to adjust. "Stone. Just stone."
She looked at me then. Really looked.
"And you," she added.
Something in her voice made my stomach tighten.
"What about me?" I asked.
Her brows pulled together. "You're… louder."
I didn't understand the word until my chest reacted.
The heaviness inside me stirred, and with it, that dense, unfamiliar pressure.
I sucked in a sharp breath.
Devansh felt it. I saw it in the way his shoulders tightened, in the way his gaze snapped back to my face.
"What is it?" he asked.
I pressed a hand over my heart.
"It's still here," I whispered. "Whatever I pulled away from her… it didn't dissolve. It didn't leave."
I closed my eyes.
Turned inward.
And finally allowed myself to register it.
The heaviness I had always known moved like weather. It swelled. It thinned. It answered.
This didn't.
It sat.
A fixed point inside my awareness that didn't respond to feeling, only to proximity. When my breath deepened, it didn't soften. When fear rose, it didn't change.
It existed the way an object exists.
And my body knew that was wrong.
My breathing quickened.
Devansh's hand slid from my shoulder to my upper back, firm, deliberate. "Look at me," he said.
I opened my eyes.
He was close enough now that I could see the faint lines near his eyes, the way his focus narrowed when he was tracking something dangerous.
"Stay here," he said quietly. "Tell me what it's doing."
I swallowed. "It's… aligning."
"With what?"
"With the city," I said. "With you. With her. With movement. It's not active. It's… learning how to remain."
The words made my skin prickle.
Devansh's jaw tightened.
Meera spoke again. "Ira… when I look at you, the place where the thing was feels empty. But you don't."
Her voice trembled. "You feel like where it went."
The room seemed to shrink.
Rehaan cursed softly somewhere behind us, but I barely heard him.
Devansh's gaze didn't leave my face. "Can you move?" he asked.
I nodded, though I wasn't sure.
He didn't pull me up.
He shifted closer and slid one arm around my back, guiding me until I was sitting against him instead of the wall. My shoulder rested against his chest. The contact was instinctive. Human. I let myself lean into it.
His heartbeat was steady.
Mine wasn't.
The difference mattered.
For a moment, neither of us spoke.
I focused on that heartbeat.
On the way his arm held me there without tension, without hesitation.
The pressure inside my chest reacted faintly, as if it had encountered something it had not been designed to interpret.
That scared me.
And steadied me.
At the same time.
"They'll feel it," I said quietly.
"Who?" Meera asked.
"The Scribes," I replied. "They were building something. And it just disappeared."
Devansh exhaled slowly. "Which means they will start searching for where it resolved."
A distant vibration moved through the city, so deep it barely reached sound. The stone beneath us answered with a subtle, delayed shiver.
A response.
Somewhere very far away, I felt it like a pressure change in my inner ear.
"They're recalibrating," I whispered. "They don't understand what happened yet. But they will."
My fingers tightened in Devansh's sleeve.
"And when they do," I continued, "they won't look for a construct. They'll look for a carrier."
Silence pressed in.
Meera sank slowly onto the stone platform across from us. "I can't feel the city the way I could," she said. "It's… quiet again."
I looked at her.
A strange mix of relief and guilt moved through me.
"Does that mean I'm normal again?" she asked.
The question cut deeper than any fear.
I didn't know the answer.
Devansh shifted slightly, angling his body more toward mine, as though he were shielding me from the space around us.
"The change has relocated," he said.
"Into me," I whispered.
His arm tightened.
Just a little.
Not enough to hurt.
Enough to anchor.
For the first time since I had entered Vayukshi, I felt something unmistakably human rise above the heaviness.
The need to be held.
Not protected.
Held.
"I didn't do this to be brave," I said quietly. "I did it because I couldn't let it choose her."
Devansh's voice was low, close to my ear. "That is not the absence of fear. That is direction."
I turned my head slightly. Our faces were close now. Too close for abstraction. Too close for distance.
"There's something inside me that doesn't belong to this place," I said. "And I don't know what it will become."
His gaze softened in a way that made my chest ache. "Then it will not become it alone."
The words landed gently.
He lifted one hand and brushed his fingers against my temple, not to check, not to examine, but to steady a loose strand of hair that had fallen across my face.
The touch was simple.
Careful.
And it undid something in me far more than the fear had.
For a moment, the city faded.
The pressure remained.
The danger remained.
But so did his presence.
Warm.
Certain.
Close.
"I don't feel empty anymore," I whispered.
His thumb stilled near my cheek.
"Neither do I," he said.
Somewhere deep in Vayukshi, the city shifted again, responding not to threat, but to proximity.
And far beyond it, something vast and ordered turned its attention toward a point it had not expected to find.
Inside me.
The clock had started.