Home was an atrophied muscle. The path back to Kaladesh was covered over with time the way a road gets reclaimed by weeds, and for a moment, Chandra wondered if she even remembered the way. Before she could take a deep, soothing breath, though, she had arrived.
Chandra stood in the center of a plaza of warm brick, reeling in surreal familiarity. Cardamom and incense, welded copper and gear grease, the musk of passing arborbacks, the tang of bandar fur. There were the familiar traces of aether in the air, fresh and open like sun-soaked linen, but with a prickle of action in it. It was the aether smell that told her, finally, that she was home—the raw potential that curled the clouds in the sky, surged in the hearts of airships, and coursed through the city in thick glass pipes.
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The last day she had been on this world had hung in the past, interrupted and partial. That day had resumed, except everything looked busier and—taller. Wasn't visiting your childhood home supposed to make you feel bigger?
People swept past her in a customary Kaladeshi hurry. The melody of their voices jolted her. She heard morsels of conversation that could have come right from her own family home—eager predictions about some famous inventor in the Fair, gruff opinions on the merits of this or that airship design, clipped exchanges about onrushing deadlines.
Chandra grabbed her own elbows. She longed to curl up in her childhood hammock, suspended from the walkways of the old mine from before the aether boom, above the machine shop where her parents hunched over some new invention. She wanted to hang there, listening to their voices, as they shaped metal. She longed to just go home, except she was home and it wasn't her home anymore, and she wasn't eleven anymore and she would never have her mother wrap her arms around her—
She growled and stamped her foot. She doused her hands on her thighs and wiped an eye. No.
Somewhere in this crowd was the renegade she sought, the inventor who was in danger—and the rest of the Gatewatch didn't care. Her family had worked against the Consulate when she was growing up, dodging patrols to supply aether to brilliant inventors. She didn't know why this person was so important to her, or why this mission had been the thing to draw her back to Kaladesh. She just knew she needed to find this inventor, and soon.
Ghirapur thrived all around her, a city of thousands of faces. She didn't even know what this renegade might look like. Chandra felt a splinter of that familiar feeling—the feeling of having gotten herself into something without any plan of how to get back out. She felt a tiny urge to about-face back to Ravnica.
A pair of Consulate lawkeepers glanced at her, evaluated her, and moved on—and the reassuring spike of defiance chased away her urge to flee. She instinctively hid a reflexively-made fist, and grabbed a handful of a nearby banner. She put her foot up onto a decorated copper strut, yanked on a hanging Consulate flag, and hauled herself up onto the balcony of the level above.
As she climbed, the city spread out before her. Vehicles and people surged through the streets, gathering for the Inventors' Fair. Glassed-in rooftop gardens rotated, facing the sun's arc. At the city's center, an enormous single spire reached high into the sky, aether-driven airships orbiting it like moths. She wondered if she could ever explain the tangled emotional knot that was Kaladesh, for her. But even if she had a friend here, someone who could understand, she could still never explain—
