Surviving Sky

Ahilya is an archaeologist in one of the last floating cities, held aloft above a jungle planet by architects. They shape the city's living plant matter through a discipline called trajection, and devastating storms called earthrages tear through the jungle below, kept out only by that power.

Ahilya's husband Iravan is one of the architects, and his whole sense of self is bound up in that ability. Ahilya sees the same power as the foundation of a hierarchy that keeps ordinary people beneath the architect caste. Her fieldwork among the jungle's ruins has become a search for another way to keep a city aloft. When an expedition goes wrong, both careers are put at risk.

Their city then begins to fail and sink toward the storms, and the two of them are forced to work from opposite convictions to save it. What they find inside the city's plant consciousness unsettles the assumptions the whole architect order rests on. It puts as much strain on their marriage as it does on the civilization they are trying to hold up.

This is science fantasy first: a floating city grown rather than built, an alien ecology with a mind of its own. A caste system decides who gets to control that mind, and it runs on ideas and a marriage under pressure more than on momentum. It opens the three-book Rages trilogy.