The Elder Council met in the great hall — the oldest building in Kishkindha, its ceiling held up by columns carved with the faces of ancestors whose names most of the younger generation couldn't recite anymore.
Eleven elders. Most of them old enough to have grandchildren in human cities.
Elder Bahu presented the facts. Short, clear, brutal.
The dam. The timeline. The seal. What would happen.
Then the arguing started.
Elder Deva — second oldest, former military chief, a scar running from his left eye to his jaw — stood up immediately. "We move. We have moved before. We rebuild. We hide again."
"We moved three times in the last century," said Elder Priya, who was also head of the city's school. "Where do we move to? There is no forest left that is deep enough."
"We reveal ourselves," said a young voice.
Everyone looked.
Arya was standing at the back of the hall. She was not a council member. She was twenty-four years old. She had no official standing here at all.
"You are not —" Elder Deva began.
"She has the Blood Memory," Bahu said quietly.
That stopped the room.
Blood Memory was rare. Vanara bloodlines carried old knowledge encoded in their cells, like a hard drive from three thousand years ago — but most people could never access it. The walls in the eastern quarter only responded to those rare individuals whose bloodline ran close enough to the original Kishkindha builders.
Blood Memory meant Arya was not nobody.
"Go on," Bahu said to her.
Arya stepped forward.
"We reveal ourselves to the right humans," she said. "Not everyone. We don't go on TV. But there is one human who can help us stop this dam legally — who has been fighting this same dam for two years. I went to college with her."
"A human who knows about the dam?" Elder Priya asked.
"A journalist," Arya said. "Her name is Meera. She's been covering the corruption behind the dam contracts for eighteen months. She has evidence. She just needs a reason big enough that people will actually listen."
"And you would tell her the truth?" Deva asked. His voice was dangerous. "You would expose our people to —"
"I would tell her what she needs to know," Arya said. "Not more. Not less. I would trust her. And I would ask her to trust me."
Deva sat down.
Bahu looked at Arya for a long moment.
"There is one more problem," he said. "Even if the dam is stopped legally — and that is not certain — it will only delay things. The Adhama is already beginning to stir. The Blood Memory responding to you means it is reaching upward. It is sensing the weakness in the seal."
"Then we need to do both things at the same time," Arya said. "Stop the dam. And re-seal what is below."
"To re-seal it," Bahu said, "someone with Blood Memory must go down."
Silence.
"Down where?" Arya asked, though she already felt the answer somewhere in her chest.
"Beneath the city," Bahu said. "Beneath everything."
