The walk back to Agastya was approximately forty feet.
It took longer than forty feet usually takes, because Malini walked exactly two steps behind Shivay and slightly to the left — the precise position of someone who wanted access to a guide without accepting any implication of closeness with the guide's traveling companion — and the Talatala floor kept changing underneath them, which meant they had to occasionally step sideways at the same moment and nearly collide, and both of them were very focused on not nearly colliding a second time.
Agastya looked up when they arrived.
He looked at Shivay. At Malini. At Shivay again.
"You found something," he said.
"She found me," Shivay said. "Technically."
"He was standing in the path," Malini said.
"There is only one path," Shivay said, for the second time in ten minutes, with the specific energy of someone who is going to keep saying this until it is acknowledged.
"I was running," Malini said, to Agastya, bypassing Shivay entirely with the ease of someone who had decided he was not the relevant person in this conversation. "Between realms. The passage collapsed. I ended here. Talatala."
Agastya looked at her for a long moment.
Not a short moment. A specific, thorough, Agastya moment — the kind that reads something more than the visible information.
"Agni-Putri (Fire Child)," he said.
It was not a question.
Malini blinked. "...What did you call me?"
"An observation," Agastya said. "About the fire in your hair. Sit down. You are shaking slightly from running, which means your energy is disrupted, which means you should eat something before we continue."
She opened her mouth.
Closed it.
Sat down.
The fire sparks in her hair crackled twice — once near her left ear, once near her right — and then settled. As if they had made an opinion and then decided to suspend it for practical reasons.
Shivay sat across from her. There was a specific effort involved in the way he was looking at the Talatala corridor rather than at her, which was the effort of someone who had spent the last five minutes becoming extremely conscious of a certain assessment and was now managing it with what he hoped was undetectable deliberateness.
It was not undetectable.
Agastya noticed. Said nothing.
"How long have you been in Talatala?" Agastya asked Malini, while distributing what appeared to be travel food from his robe with the efficiency of someone who had packed for more than two people.
"Three days, I think," Malini said. "It is difficult to track time here. The light doesn't change."
"The light never changes in Talatala," Agastya said. "It is generated by the illusion-energy itself. Three days without sleep?"
"I slept in the corners where the walls were least interested in me," she said. "There were a few hours here and there."
She said this with such complete matter-of-fact composure that Shivay — who had been carefully not looking at her — looked at her.
She did not appear to have survived three days in a hostile illusion-realm with any visible damage to her composure. Her hair was disordered. Her clothes — something between traveling clothes and something considerably finer, the specific combination of someone who had dressed for one kind of journey and ended up in a different one — had the evidence of several days of lower-realm travel. But her expression had the specific settled quality of someone who had evaluated their situation, determined it was suboptimal, and decided to deal with it.
She caught him looking.
"Yes?" she said.
"Nothing," he said.
"You were staring."
"I was performing an assessment," he said, with the exact inflection she had used twelve minutes ago.
She looked at him with pearl-light eyes that did not warm or cool — they simply received information and filed it.
"How did you get past the demoness?" she asked, with the specific pragmatism of someone who had tried various approaches and wanted to understand the one that worked.
"The three lines break illusions," Shivay said. "When she set an illusion, they burned and I could see through it. Then I used Agaadh-Samhara to consume the remaining illusion-energy in the corridor."
"All of it at once?"
"All of it."
She considered this. "I tried three different—" She stopped.
"Three different what?" Shivay said.
"Nothing." She ate something from the food Agastya had distributed.
Agastya looked at her profile. Then looked back at his own food. A small, compressed event occurred near the corners of his expression that someone watching carefully might have identified as the beginning of a smile, suppressed before it fully formed.
"She tried to fight the demoness," Agastya said, to no one in particular.
Malini looked at him sharply.
"How do you know that?"
"The specific pattern of pink-frost residue on your right sleeve," Agastya said. "You were in contact with Kama-Trisha's illusion-energy at close range. Given that you are uninjured, you either escaped through speed or you applied something that briefly disrupted her. Given the fire in your hair—"
"The fire in my hair is unrelated," Malini said.
"Is it," Agastya said. Not a question.
"Yes."
"And the fact that the pink-frost residue on your sleeve has small burn marks at its edges, as if something warm moved through it—"
"That is a coincidence."
Agastya looked at her for one more long moment.
"Of course," he said.
He stood. "We continue. The realm will compensate for what Shivay consumed — new illusions, different configurations. Moving is better than staying."
He began walking.
Malini fell into step with the efficiency of someone who was accustomed to adjusting to new guides. Shivay fell into step on the other side. The corridor shifted — grass to stone to something that was neither — and all three of them adjusted without comment, which was, in its own way, a small statement about who each of them was.
They were perhaps fifteen minutes deeper into Talatala when the realm tried again.
A new illusion — the Realm's compensation for the one Shivay had consumed. This one was subtler, which was the specific quality of Talatala's intelligence: it learned. The first set had been aimed at the individual. This one was aimed at the space between people — the specific vulnerability of a group that had not yet established complete trust.
Shivay saw Agastya turn left.
He followed.
Malini went right.
By the time Shivay realized the corridor had split — the specific split of an illusion that shows each person a continuation of the path they expect to see — Malini was gone.
"Agastya-ji—"
"I see it," Agastya said. "The realm split us from her."
"Is she—"
"She has been navigating this realm alone for three days," Agastya said, with a calm that was not unconcerned but was accurately calibrated. "She has survived this long through something she claims is irrelevant but demonstrably is not. She will manage for the time it takes us to find her."
Shivay looked at the corridor where Malini had been.
Something in his chest — not the Agaadh, not precisely, but adjacent to it, in the specifically human territory that the Agaadh surrounded without entirely occupying — did something it had not done since Deva's grave.
"We should find her faster," he said.
"Yes," Agastya agreed. "We should."
He walked forward with slightly more intention.
They found her seven minutes later at the intersection of two corridors that had no business intersecting, standing with her back to a wall and her arms crossed, glaring at a pink-frost illusion with the specific expression of someone who has assessed a problem and found it beneath their tolerance for nonsense.
She was talking to it.
"I can see the edge where you end and the real wall begins," she was saying, to the illusion, conversationally. "There. That line. You did not close the gap properly. If you are going to construct an illusion of a blocked corridor you should make the stone match at the join."
The illusion — which appeared to be showing a wall with no exit — flickered.
"The texture is wrong as well," Malini said. "The real stone here has a specific horizontal grain. Yours runs vertical. This is sloppy."
The illusion flickered again. With what Shivay could only interpret as offense.
"You are criticizing an illusion," Shivay said, from behind her.
She turned.
Something crossed her face — briefly, quickly, the specific crossing of an expression that had started as relief and immediately been redirected into its more defensible neighbor.
"I was occupying myself," she said. "While waiting."
"Waiting for—"
"You to find me." She said it entirely without inflection. Not softly. Not pointedly. Simply as a fact that she had assessed and found accurate and saw no reason to obscure. "You were going to find me. It was the logical next action."
Shivay looked at her.
The pearl-light eyes were steady and did not ask anything of him.
"The illusion texture," he said. "The grain direction. How did you notice that?"
"I notice things," she said.
"She reads walls," Agastya said, from behind them. "Probably the inscriptions on the Talatala stone — the demon architect Maya left records throughout this realm. You have been translating them."
The specific quality with which Malini went briefly, entirely still was the quality of someone whose cover has been removed by someone who noticed more than they showed they were noticing.
She looked at Agastya.
"Old man," she said.
"Agni-Putri," he said.
"Stop calling me that."
"When it stops being accurate," Agastya said pleasantly, "I will."
The fire sparks crackled. She looked at them with the compressed expression of someone managing something they would prefer to not be managing.
"The exit," she said. "Is two corridors east and one down. The inscriptions indicate it."
"Two corridors east and one down," Agastya confirmed. "Yes."
She looked at him. "You already knew."
"Yes."
"Then why—"
"Because knowing is not the same as demonstrating," Agastya said. "You needed to demonstrate it to yourself as much as to us. Walk. The Maya-Neth (the cult illusionist from the Kaal-Dooth Sangh — the Death Messenger Society) will be at the exit, which is the other reason I have not moved quickly toward it."
"What is Maya-Neth?" Malini asked.
"Your next problem," Agastya said.
He walked.
After a moment, Malini walked with him — one half step back and slightly right, which was the specific position she had adopted for Agastya and which was noticeably different from the exact-two-steps-behind position she held in relation to Shivay.
Shivay noticed this.
He noticed it in the way you notice things that you have not yet decided what to do with, which meant he noticed it completely and then walked as if he had not.
The fire sparks in Malini's hair caught the Talatala light and glowed — small, warm, honest, entirely unlike the pink frost of Indrajala's designed warmth.
Real, he thought. Definitively, completely, no-reservations real.
He kept walking.
CHAPTER 15 — END
Next — Chapter 16: "The Trouble With Three"