Arya talked for three hours.
She told Meera about Kishkindha. About the Vanaras — not the mythological creatures humans imagined, not the golden-furred giants of the TV serials, but her actual people. Eleven thousand people who went to work and raised children and worried about school admissions and argued about politics, who happened to also be able to jump twenty feet in the air and happened to have tails they kept carefully tucked away.
She told Meera about the war. About what had been put under the earth. About what would happen if the dam went through.
Meera asked questions. Good questions, sharp questions, the kind that made Arya think harder. She didn't laugh. She didn't run. She pulled out her notebook and wrote things down with the focused look of someone who is building a story in their head in real time.
At the end, she set her pen down.
"The dam story I've been chasing," she said, "has a corruption angle. The contracts were given to a minister's nephew's construction company. No competitive bidding. The environmental impact assessment was faked. I have documents but I can't get any editor to run it because it's just money and paperwork and nobody cares."
She tapped her notebook.
"But if the real story is that the dam will flood the last surviving city of the Vanara people — a living people, a real culture, with eleven thousand actual residents — that is a story that cannot be ignored."
"It will also expose my people," Arya said.
"Yes," Meera said. "Is that okay?"
Arya thought about Elder Deva's scar. About her grandmother's frightened sound. About three thousand years of hiding.
"It has to be," she said. "Because the alternative is worse."
