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Anjom series 

Chapter One

Telangana must happen! 

Amaravati, Year of the Reconciliation

From the seventeenth floor of the old Secretariat - a building older than the war, older than the treaty, older than Roy's species had any right to be familiar with - Amaravati looked the way the founders had once promised it would look. White stone in the morning. Pink stone at noon. Gold stone for the half-hour before dusk, when river Krishna threw the city back at itself in a long, lazy mirror. It looked like a capital. It had finally, after everything, become one.

Earth's capital, now. Not Andhra's. Not India's. Earth's. The signs at the maglev station had been rewritten in eleven human languages and four of the seven approved Anjom scripts, and even the rewriting had been an argument. Tirumala had been in the room for that argument, though he was only nineteen at the time and had no business being there. He liked to mention it whenever the cohort needed reminding that he had business everywhere.

The University of Amaravati sat across the river, its towers built deliberately lower than the city's, as a courtesy and as a confession. A premier university now, the brochures said. Co-learning. Bridge-building. Closing the chasm. The brochures did not mention that most of the bridge-building happened underground, in a converted bunker forty meters below the music conservatory, where five students and one Professor were trying - for the third time in a decade - to do something the rest of the planet had