Saltwater filled her lungs before she woke.
Amaya bolted upright in bed, coughing violently, her sheets soaked through with seawater that shouldn't exist. The taste of brine lingered on her tongue, the phantom pressure of a pilot's yoke still gripping her palms.
The dream clung to her like a second skin.
She'd been inside the Pushpak Vimana—felt the hum of its crystalline engines vibrating in her bones as she wove between storm clouds. Below her, Lanka's golden towers shimmered like a mirage. And the chanting—that same mantra from her first vision, spilling from her lips in a language her waking self didn't know:
"Agni patha vimānasya, jvalanti nabhasi sthithāh!"
(The fiery paths of the sky-chariot blaze through heaven!)
Amaya scrambled for her notebook. Her hands moved on their own, sketching schematics she'd never studied—thrust vectoring crystals, plasma conduits, a navigation array aligned to star patterns forgotten for millennia.
The last sketch made her blood freeze.
A control panel, labeled in neat Sanskrit: "Soul-Anchor Interface."
Galle Harbor, 8:12 AM
The ocean smelled wrong.
Not the usual salt-and-fish stink, but something metallic, like blood or lightning. Fishermen clustered at the docks, murmuring about missing buoys and sonar ghosts. Amaya clutched Professor Dhar's map inside her raincoat, its edges writhing against her ribs as if trying to crawl toward the water.
"First rule of marine archaeology," said a voice behind her. "The sea always keeps its trophies."
Arin leaned against a rusted anchor, his wetsuit unzipped to reveal a tattoo across his collarbone—an exact match to the Soul-Anchor symbol from her sketch. When he caught her staring, he yanked the fabric up, but not before she saw the scar beneath it: a jagged thing, like something had burrowed out of his chest.
"You're the one they sent the ticket to." His gaze flicked to her dripping hair. "You've been dreaming of it too."
Not a question.
The Dive Shack, Noon
Arin spread a nautical chart over the counter, weighting its corners with dive knives. "The Brotherhood sabotaged three expeditions already. They plant evidence, bribe officials—hell, they sank a research vessel last monsoon." His finger tapped a red X near the sonar anomaly. "But they can't fake that."
Amaya's map squirmed in her pocket. She hesitated, then laid it beside his chart. The two surfaces rippled, then fused together, inked coastlines dissolving into the vellum as new contours emerged—a perfect overlay of modern Galle and ancient Lanka.
Arin's breath caught. "You really are her." He traced a glowing sigil over the dive site. "The last Keeper of the Vimana."
Outside, thunder growled. The shack's single lightbulb burst in a shower of sparks.
In the sudden dark, Amaya's reflection in the knife's blade winked at her.
The Guesthouse, Midnight
The envelope on her pillow bore no postmark, no stamp—just a single silver key and a note in that same molten script:
"The lock is underwater. The door is in your mind."
Beneath it, a newspaper clipping:
"Local Diver Missing After Night Dive at Temple Reef."
The photo showed a younger Arin, smiling beside a coral-encrusted obelisk carved with ten faces.
Asurya's faces.
Amaya reached for the key—and the moment her fingers closed around it, the room lurched. Walls dissolved into rushing water. Pressure crushed her ribs. Somewhere in the roaring dark, a voice that wasn't hers screamed:
"THEY'RE ALREADY INSIDE!"