Anesh opened the small wicker container with both hands, as if the gesture required more strength than it actually did.
He didn’t lift the lid right away. First, he traced the edge, following the irregularities of the weave with his thumb, the spots where the fibers had been pulled too tight and those where, out of haste or fatigue, he had left a wider gap for air. He had made the basket himself, in the days before departure. Not to imprison Ku—at least, that’s not how he tried to think of it—but because a butterfly doesn’t cross roads, dust, wind, abandoned vehicles, and cities of metal without shelter. And yet, every time he closed it, a part of him felt he had betrayed something of its fragility.
Zena didn’t speak. She stayed by the railing, close enough to see, far enough not to turn the moment into a test. The terrace wind moved her hair around her face and made the metal parts of the case resting a little behind her vibrate softly. Yantra continued below them, bright, layered, distant and very close; but from that part of the city its noise arrived as if through a thick wall, mingled with the cold air from Mount Uruk.
Anesh lifted the lid.
For an instant, nothing happened.
Inside, Ku was almost invisible. Her closed wings pressed together with a precision that seemed less like rest and more like listening. The tiny body lay still at the bottom of the basket, where Anesh had placed some dry threads and a fragment of light cloth. In the dimness of the wicker, the butterfly seemed less an animal than a remnant of light caught in something too earthly.
Zena leaned in slightly, without moving her hands closer.
“She’s small,” she said.
Anesh nodded. The remark didn’t bother him. Coming from Zena, after the Nerek, after the panels, after the stage and the terrace, that “small” didn’t feel like a diminishment. It seemed almost a necessary observation, the most cautious way not to say more.
Ku moved her wings just once.
The movement was so slight the wind should have erased it. Instead, Anesh saw it, and so did Zena, because her breath changed just a little. The butterfly slowly rose toward the inner rim of the basket, not with the uncertain flight of insects drawn to light, but with a kind of fragile determination, made of tiny pauses and starts. When she reached the edge, she stopped.
The wind picked up.
The terrace mesh vibrated more strongly. A gust climbed up the side of Mount Uruk, bringing with it the scent of cold rock, metal, dust, and something more distant—perhaps sea moisture or just the longing to feel it. Instinctively, Anesh moved to cover the basket with his hand, but Zena grabbed his wrist.
She didn’t squeeze. She just stopped him.
“Wait.”
Anesh looked at her. She didn’t take her eyes off Ku.
The butterfly opened her wings.
The wind should have caught her immediately, slammed her against the mesh or dragged her into the darkness below the terrace. She was too light. Too exposed. Her body had nothing that could resist the current rising from the mountain. And yet Ku detached from the edge of the basket and remained in the air.
She didn’t fly like a bird, nor like the insects Anesh had seen in the meadows of Altaluna. She didn’t really move forward. She didn’t flee. She stayed there, just out of reach of the boy’s hands, wings open in an almost motionless tremor, as if the wind passed around her without being able to decide which way to take her.
Zena slowly released Anesh’s wrist.
“She shouldn’t be able to do that,” she said.
She didn’t say it loudly. She didn’t say it expecting an answer. It was a phrase that came from her profession before her astonishment, one of those sentences in Yantra that precede the need to measure, to check, to repeat the experiment. But this time she didn’t raise the device on her wrist, didn’t call for any sensor, didn’t seek a classification.
Ku remained suspended.
Anesh felt his chest tighten. It was the same stillness as in the cave, and yet not the same. There, Ku stood before the horizon of stones and woods, with the world still hidden beyond the threshold. Here was Yantra below them, the mountain, the distant coast, the sea; and yet the butterfly didn’t seem to look at any of these things separately. She was facing a point the eyes couldn’t isolate, a direction that crossed the darkness beyond the city and continued, invisible, over the water.
“It’s the same,” Anesh murmured.
“The same as in the cave?”
He nodded, unable to take his eyes off Ku.
Zena followed the line of his gaze. She looked at the sea, then farther, where there was nothing to see. Only the night, the dark surface of the water, a few coastal lights, and a distance too vast for any city, no matter how tall, to truly command it.
“That way,” she said.
Anesh couldn’t tell if it was a question or an answer.
“What’s there?”
Zena stayed silent. The wind slipped into her jacket, puffing it out slightly, then died down again. Ku didn’t move. Her wings kept trembling, but her body stayed still, pointed toward the same invisible area.
“The coast, first,” Zena said. “Then the low routes. Then open sea.”
“And after that?”
She tilted her head slightly, as if deciding how much of what she knew belonged to records and how much to stories.
“Somewhere in that direction, the Horizon of the Multiple begins.”
Anesh repeated the name to himself before saying it aloud. It didn’t seem new, but not because he had heard it before. It was one of those words that seem to arrive late, as if something in them had been awaited for a long time.
“What is it?”
Zena rested her hands on the railing. “A stretch of sea that sailors avoid when they can. Not because there are rocks, storms, or impossible currents. At least, not always. It’s the silence that makes them turn back.”
“The silence?”
“So they say.” She paused briefly. “Or so my mother said, when she wanted to scare me enough to keep me from going too far out into the water. But it’s not just an Iridian story. There are records, readings, log reports. At a certain point, the sound changes. Then it disappears. The wind continues, but you don’t hear it the same way. The waves move, but the sea seems to have no voice. The instruments stay on and say you’re still there, yet everyone who’s been there tells the same story: of having crossed a place where the world stopped responding.”
Anesh looked at Ku. The butterfly was still suspended in the wind, fragile and impossible, like a question held open by a force neither of them could name.
“And beyond?”
Zena didn’t answer right away.
Somewhere below them, Yantra made a long sound, perhaps a level change signal or the departure of a heavy load. It came muffled, almost swallowed by the rock. For an instant, it seemed even the city had lowered its voice to listen for the name about to be spoken.
“Alma,” Zena said.
The word was small. It didn’t have the weight of a revelation. It didn’t open the sky, didn’t make Ku tremble, didn’t change the direction of the wind. Precisely for that reason, it remained suspended with even more force.
“Is it an island?” Anesh asked.
“Depends on who tells it.” Zena ran a hand through her hair, moving it from her face. “For some, yes. An island beyond the Horizon of the Multiple. For others, it’s a navigation error repeated often enough to seem like a place. For others still, it’s a cover: a word placed over something people don’t want to name. Military installations, experiments, old bases, superstitions useful for keeping the curious away. Yantra’s records don’t treat it as a destination. They treat it as a possibility without outcome.”
“Has anyone looked for it?”
“Many.” Zena looked toward the sea. “They reached the silence. Some crossed it. They came back saying they found nothing.”
“All of them?”
“All those who came back.”
Anesh felt the phrase settle between them with a chill different from the wind.
Ku trembled slightly, but didn’t change position. Her stillness was starting to seem more exhausting than flight. He didn’t know how long a butterfly could last like that. He didn’t even know if that question made sense anymore. He slowly raised a hand, not to take her, but to give her the chance to return to the basket. Ku didn’t move.
“You can’t see it,” Zena said.
“Alma?”
“Not even the Horizon. From here you only see the sea. The rest is direction, not landscape.”
Anesh thought of the cave. Of the mornings when Ku stayed still outside the entrance, pointed toward a distance he couldn’t yet distinguish. Even then, he didn’t see the road. He saw a butterfly looking at something that, for him, was only air.
“Maybe it’s always been like this,” he said.
Zena looked at him.
“What?”
“Maybe I wasn’t supposed to see the place. Just stop staying where I was.”
She didn’t comment. This time she didn’t call him an Altalunar, didn’t reduce the phrase to a kind of vagueness useful for teasing him. She stayed silent, eyes on the invisible sea beyond the coast. Maybe she was thinking of her mother, or the question that had just come out of her by the water. Maybe of the concert, of the last piece left open longer than it should have been. Or maybe she was just searching, inside herself, for the point where doubt began to resemble a direction.
Ku moved.
She didn’t return to the basket right away. She made a small advance in the air, almost nothing, yet visible. Then she stopped again, still facing the sea. Her wings, seen against the darkness, seemed thinner than the light that touched them.
Anesh didn’t have a vision, nor a certainty. He didn’t hear a voice. He didn’t understand what Alma was, nor why a butterfly that had come to his cave after the light of Kangen should now orient herself toward a place sailors named with unease and records treated as an error. He didn’t even know if Ku was pointing to the island or the silence before the island.
But the journey changed shape.
Until that moment, he had followed. From that moment, without knowing better, he began to go.
“I have to go down to the coast,” he said.
Zena looked at him as if she had expected that phrase and at the same time hoped it wouldn’t come so soon.
“You don’t just go down to the coast from Yantra.”
“How do you go down?”
She made a small gesture toward the lower levels of the city, where some lines of light disappeared into the mountain and didn’t reemerge. “With authorizations, loading shifts, convoys, roads that aren’t meant for someone who suddenly decides to look for an island that might not exist.”
Anesh didn’t reply.
Ku, slowly, let the wind carry her back a few spans. She didn’t seem to yield to the current; she seemed to allow it to accompany her. She landed on the edge of the basket with an almost tired lightness. Anesh didn’t touch her. He waited. After a while, the butterfly closed her wings and went down inside.
Only then did he put the lid back on.
When he looked up, Zena was already looking toward the door they had come out of. The device on her wrist flashed again, but she turned it off without reading it.
“There’s an old technical route,” she said.
Anesh waited.
“It’s not for passengers. It goes down the eastern side of Mount Uruk to a service line toward the coast. They use it for cargo, maintenance, things the city prefers to move without crossing the public levels.”
“Can you get in?”
Zena didn’t answer right away. She looked at the door, then at the basket, then at the sea. In that brief silence, Anesh understood the answer was yes, and that precisely for that reason, it wasn’t simple.
“I can open the first access,” she finally said.
“And after that?”
“After that, you’ll have to manage better than you have so far.”
The phrase should have sounded harsh. It didn’t. Or maybe Anesh, by now, had started to recognize the way Zena let something pass without offering it openly.
The terrace remained for a few more moments in the wind. Below, Yantra kept working. Ahead, the sea did nothing that could be seen from there. And yet, between the city and the darkness of the water, a direction had formed without becoming an explanation.
Zena picked up the guitar case.
“Let’s go,” she said.
Anesh made sure the basket was closed, then followed her toward the technical door. As they re-entered the city, it seemed to him he was carrying with him less an answer than a fixed point in the wind, fragile as open wings and, for now, impossible to move.