They re-entered through a different door than the one they had exited.
Zena didn’t explain why. She entered the code into the panel, waited for the light to change from amber to white, then pushed with her shoulder before the door had even finished opening. The corridor beyond the terrace was narrower, less lit, crossed by bare pipes and cables fixed directly to the rock of Mount Uruk. There were no signs for the public, no maps, no colored lines on the floor. Only small numbers engraved on the plates, technical arrows, maintenance symbols, and, every now and then, old faded labels that seemed to have survived more out of inertia than necessity.
Anesh followed her without speaking. The wicker basket was quiet against his side again, but that quiet no longer felt like rest. After seeing Ku suspended in the wind, every small jolt of the container seemed different, as if the fragility of what he was carrying had become more evident precisely at the moment it had stopped behaving like something fragile. More than once he felt the urge to lift the lid and check that it was still there, but he didn’t. Ahead of him, Zena walked quickly, the guitar case on her shoulders and a hand near her wrist device, ready to silence notifications before they even appeared.
The first stretch was uphill. Then the corridor bent into the mountain and began to descend.
There, Yantra shed its skin. The smooth surfaces of the upper levels gave way to older walls, where the metal didn’t completely cover the stone but followed it, adapting to its bulges and cracks. Some lights had been replaced with newer, colder models; others still kept a tired, uneven yellow, making the shadows between the pipes seem deeper. The city’s noise reached them muffled, occasionally broken by distant bangs, cargo sliding, vibrations rising from below like the breath of a machine asleep beneath another machine.
“This isn’t an area that’s used often?” Anesh asked.
“It’s used when needed.”
The answer was typical of Zena, dry enough to close the question without being truly rude. But after a few steps she added, “The new routes run further west. They’re faster, more controlled, more presentable. This one remains for heavy goods, side maintenance, certain descents no one wants to show on the visitor programs.”
“Why?”
Zena brushed her hand along a metal handrail marked by old scratches. “Because it still works.”
Anesh smiled faintly. He didn’t know if it was an explanation or a confession.
They went down a long ramp, then crossed a landing where two doors were sealed with black stripes. On one of them was the symbol of the Austral League, old and worn; below, a more recent sign indicated access suspended for military transfers. Zena walked past without turning. Anesh saw his own reflection distorted in a dull panel: dusty clothes, tired face, the basket at his side, Zena’s figure a little ahead, cut by the yellow light. For a moment he thought of the screen of his provisional profile and the number of empty lines that remained. There, in front of the panel, those lines had seemed like a lack. In that corridor, instead, they almost seemed like space.
They reached a passage closed by two vertical doors. Above, there was no sign, only an almost erased technical code and an unlit light. Zena stopped, leaned the guitar case against the wall, and stretched the shoulder she had carried it on. Then she entered the code.
The panel didn’t react.
Zena waited.
She entered it again.
A low sound came from the wall, not of refusal, more of effort. The light above the passage flickered, turned amber, went out, then lit up again. Zena placed two fingers on the edge of the panel, not on the reading point but just below, where the metal plate was more worn. She stayed like that for a few seconds.
“Come on,” she murmured.
The passage opened.
Not all the way. First a sliver of darkness, then a wider space, enough for them to pass through. From inside came cold air, different from that of the terrace: not high, windy air, but deep air, long kept in tunnels where the sun never entered. It carried the smell of old iron, damp dust, and wet stone.
Anesh stepped inside.
The room beyond the passage was large, but almost empty. In the center ran two wide rails, spaced farther apart than he had ever seen on a passenger line. On the sides were low platforms, safety chains, folded cargo hooks, metal cabinets, and a series of lights arranged along a descent that disappeared into the mountain. The track didn’t drop steeply; it sloped decisively, as if someone, long ago, had wanted to convince Mount Uruk to let itself be crossed without breaking it.
At the far end of the room, stopped on a side rail, was a small service module. It wasn’t meant to be comfortable. It had narrow seats fixed to the walls, a tool compartment, two sliding doors, a manual panel, and an exterior marked by dents. Zena reached it, opened the control panel, and studied the few lights that were on.
“It’ll go down to the lower station,” she said. “It’s not the coast, but service lines leave from there. If you find a ride east, you can reach the shoreline before dawn.”
“And from there?”
“From there the real problem begins.”
Anesh looked at the module, then at the descent beyond the rails. He didn’t feel fear right away. First came a kind of disbelief, as if everything that had happened since morning was still reversible up to that moment, and only now was the city offering him a path concrete enough to make the journey real. Behind him were the Nerek LG51 cooling down, the provisional profile, the concert, Legu, the terrace, the sea seen from afar. Ahead, a technical tunnel that promised nothing.
Zena worked on the panel without asking for his help. She entered the code, cleared a warning, let another appear, then turned it off with a gesture slower than necessary. An internal light came on in the module. The doors opened with a rough sound.
“You have a few minutes before the line closes again,” she said.
Anesh didn’t enter right away.
Zena noticed, but didn’t push him. She stayed next to the panel, the guitar case back on her shoulders, and for the first time since he’d met her, she didn’t seem in a hurry to fill the silence with something useful. Her face was lit by a side light, too low to make her look confident, too cold to make her look fragile. You could still see the girl from the workshop, the one who had stopped a drone with a gesture, corrected a diagnosis, and argued with a machine like with a stubborn colleague. But there was something else, too, something left from the terrace and maybe already present before, when she had kept the last note of the concert open longer than necessary.
“I don’t know what you’ll find,” she finally said.
Anesh waited.
“Maybe nothing. Maybe you’ll reach that silence, and the silence will do what it always does with those who try to cross it: it won’t answer.”
There was no harshness in her voice. Not even encouragement. She seemed to choose her words one at a time, not to make them prettier, but to keep them from sounding more certain than she was.
“And you think I’ll come back.”
Zena looked at the open module. “I think many come back.”
“It’s not the same thing.”
“No.”
The tunnel sent a breath of colder air. The lights along the descent turned on one after another, not all the way down, just enough to show the start of the track. The rest remained dark. From somewhere far away came the dull sound of a coupling being released.
Zena lowered her gaze to the basket.
“Earlier, on the terrace, when she stayed still in the wind…” She stopped, as if the sentence had taken too exposed a path. She picked it up from another point. “I don’t have a measure for that thing.”
Anesh placed a hand on the wicker, without gripping it.
“Me neither.”
“It shows.”
It could have sounded like a joke, but it wasn’t entirely. Zena looked up at him.
“Maybe that’s what bothers me.”
“That I can’t measure it?”
“That you can’t measure it and you’re going anyway.”
Anesh didn’t reply. Not because he understood, but because the sentence didn’t ask for defense. At another time, said by her, it would have sounded like a reproach. There, in front of the old service module, it sounded almost like something Zena was saying to a part of herself long before she was saying it to him.
The panel emitted two short signals.
“You have to get in,” she said.
Anesh took a step toward the module, then stopped on the threshold. The floor inside was already vibrating, a low vibration rising from the rails. He turned. Zena was still next to the control panel, one hand resting on the metal plate, the guitar case at her side.
“And the Nerek?”
She seemed almost relieved by the concreteness of the question.
“They’ll release it after the dynamic test. Or they’ll keep it for further checks. In either case, I don’t think it will miss you.”
Anesh smiled slightly.
“And your profile?”
Zena looked at him with a more serious expression.
“My profile is used to putting up with me.”
This time she smiled too, but tiredly, briefly, quickly withdrawn.
The module gave another signal.
Anesh climbed in.
Inside, the seat was hard and cold. The walls bore scratches, engraved numbers, old cargo marks. Through the opening, Zena already seemed farther away than just a few steps. The door began to move, then stopped halfway, waiting for a final confirmation from the panel.
Zena didn’t give it right away.
“Anesh.”
He looked up.
She seemed to search for a more fitting phrase, then gave up.
“Don’t lose the basket.”
It was a practical thing, almost brusque, and precisely for that reason it reached him more closely than a wish.
Anesh nodded.
“And you, don’t be too late for the rest of your evening.”
“It’s already ruined.”
“It didn’t seem so.”
Zena lowered her eyes for a moment. When she looked up again, something from the concert passed over her face once more, but without music.
“Go,” she said. “Before this door changes its mind.”
She entered the confirmation.
The doors closed.
For a few seconds Anesh could still see her figure through the narrow glass: Zena standing in the technical room, the guitar on her shoulders, her hair moved by the tunnel’s air, one hand still near the panel. Then the module moved, first slowly, then with more determination. The room began to slip away. The light around Zena shrank to a shape, then a color, then nothing.
The old route began its descent.
Anesh placed his hand on the wicker basket. Ku didn’t move. Outside the module, the tunnel lights passed one after another, always the same and always deeper. At each joint, the floor vibrated under his feet and the sound of the city fell a little further behind.
He didn’t know where he would find a boat, nor who would agree to take him toward a place that perhaps didn’t exist. He didn’t know if Alma was an island, a mistake, a name placed over a secret, or simply the way sailors called what they hadn’t managed to cross. He didn’t even know if Ku, closed again in her little shelter, was still looking in that direction.
But the cave was behind him. Yantra, now, as well.
The descent continued into the darkness of Mount Uruk, toward the coast.