Meera slept afterward. Exhaustion took her down fast and deep, the kind that comes after panic when the body simply gives up. We laid her on one of the stone platforms and covered her with the thin cloth Rehaan had found earlier.
I stayed sitting beside her, my back against the wall, watching her chest rise and fall.
I kept seeing her arm vanish into the wall.
Kept feeling the way the stone had hesitated before becoming solid again.
Devansh stood a short distance away, attention turned inward. I could tell. He wasn't watching the room. He was listening to the city.
"It changed," he said finally.
I didn't pretend not to know what he meant. "Where?"
"Everywhere," he replied. "But subtly. As if a new conditional has been added to its structure."
I rubbed my hands together. They still felt too aware of themselves.
"She didn't force it," I said. "I didn't either. It was like… the city recognized her as something it needed to account for."
"Yes," he said. "And what it accounts for, it must accommodate."
That word sat badly with me.
Rehaan leaned against one of the pillars, arms crossed. "You realize what that means."
I looked at him. "Say it."
"It means the Scribes no longer have to break the city," he said. "They just have to convince it."
Silence spread through the room.
Devansh turned to me. "When she touched that margin, the city did not resist. It reorganized."
My throat tightened. "Around her."
"Around the possibility she represents," he corrected.
I glanced at Meera's sleeping face. She looked younger when she slept. Softer. Like someone who belonged in a normal world.
"What possibility?" I asked.
Devansh's voice was quiet. "That what enters does not have to be contained."
The words hit hard.
Because Vayukshi had been built on containment.
On holding.
On preventing movement.
And Meera had just shown it something else.
"She didn't do anything special," I said.
"That," Rehaan replied, "is what makes it special."
I looked back at the faint scar in the wall.
It was already fading.
The city was smoothing it out.
Learning.
"They're not just building something outside anymore," I whispered. "They're going to start working with what's inside."
Devansh met my gaze.
"Yes."
"And that means," I said, my voice low, "the next thing that comes through won't slip in by mistake."
No one argued.
Somewhere deep beneath us, something shifted with a slow, deliberate sound.
Not damage.
Preparation.
And sitting there beside Meera, listening to the city reorganize itself, I understood something with terrifying clarity.
The first thing that had entered Vayukshi without permission hadn't been the distortion.
It had been us.