Anjom

1. Three Days West of Anywhere

They hitchhiked west, and the country did not so much pass beneath them as decline, in its polite slow way, to notice they were there. The dirt was the colour of an old brick. The grass was the colour of a brick that had been through a kiln a second time. The sky was the colour the cohort had not, in their adult lives, been able to put a name to, and after the first afternoon none of them tried.

It had been Tirumala's decision. Tirumala had, in the third hour after the crash, looked at Roy's scales catching the late sun, and at Girit's splinted wrist swinging awkwardly at her side, and at Devi's pinched, careful face, and announced that they were not going to walk. He had said it in the tone of a man closing an argument that nobody had yet started.

"Hitch," he said. "There is a road. There are trucks on the road. We are five people beside a road. The arithmetic is simple."

"Five people beside a road," Ketan said, "with a wrist, a face like a fish, and a girl who looks like she has not eaten in a week, will get arrested in any country."

"Not by an Australian truck driver," Tirumala said, with a confidence that was, like most of Tirumala's confidences, both unfounded

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

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Category: Anjom

Sci-fi Novel: Anjom : Book Two : The Morning Run

Book Two

The Morning Run

1. Three Days West of Anywhere

Sci-fi Novel: Anjom : Book One : Telangana must happen!

Anjom series

Chapter One

Amaravati, Year of the Reconciliation