The department did not look like an enclosed place.
Anesh barely noticed as the vehicle passed under the metal arch and the dawn light disappeared behind him. He had expected a dark workshop, full of smoke, violent noises, hammers, sparks, men shouting orders over the roar of engines. Instead, he found himself inside an immense space, as tall as a gorge carved into the mountain, crossed by walkways, suspended platforms, mechanical arms folded along the walls, and blades of light descending from above without revealing their source.
It was not silent. Silence, in Yantra, seemed not to exist. But every sound had its place. There was the deep breathing of machines in waiting, the rustle of panels opening, the dry ticking of small automatic tools, the controlled rolling of carts, the hiss of compressed air, the regular beat of something being calibrated lower down, perhaps beneath the floor. No noise truly drowned out another. Even chaos, in there, seemed educated.
The mobile workshop advanced slowly along a lane marked by luminous lines. Its large dark wheels left four tracks of dust on the pale floor, immediately sucked away by thin slits that opened as it passed. On the platform, the closed crates vibrated slightly. The folded arms, the hooks, the side supports, and the moving parts of the upper deck were crossed by a series of rapid flashes, as if dozens of invisible eyes were scanning every edge, every joint, every dent.
Anesh remained huddled in his niche, arms around his knees. No one had told him to get off. No one had told him to stay. The city seemed to proceed without needing to address him, and that orderly indifference gave him a strange, almost humiliating feeling. He was not a prisoner, but he was not welcomed either. He was an element to be read.
Above the lane, a sign composed of technical symbols lit up. Some Anesh did not know, others he guessed from context. The vehicle slowed further. A signal descended from above and positioned itself in front of the platform like a small suspended grid.
Autonomous mobile workshop vehicle.
External origin.
Guidance unit: absent.
Repair systems: active.
Directional behavior: unstable.
Cargo: not compliant with city registers.
Organic presence: one.
Secondary organic container: function not identified.
Anesh read the last line twice.
Secondary organic container.
For a moment he didn’t understand. Then he felt the light weight of the basket against his side and tightened his fingers slightly on the strap.
Ku.
For Yantra, Ku was not a presence, nor a sign, nor a question. It was a secondary organic container. There was no contempt in that definition, and perhaps that was what made it harder to bear. The city did not deny what he carried with him. It simply reduced it to a thing whose use needed to be determined.
The luminous grid changed shape.
Incomplete classification.
Manual assisted verification required.
Sending to operational anomalies department.
The lane beneath the wheels shifted to the side. It was not the vehicle that turned: it was the floor that moved it. Anesh felt a slight sliding beneath him, then the mobile workshop was taken by an invisible guide system and transferred toward a more internal area of the department. Other vehicles were stationary on similar platforms, some as small as reconnaissance carts, others enormous, covered in damaged plates and deformed wheels. From one of them, a thin column of steam was rising; around it, three robotic arms worked with slow movements, while two youths checked data on a transparent panel.
Anesh watched those youths. One was perhaps sixteen, no more. He wore a short-sleeved suit, hair shaved on one side, and a series of tools attached to his forearm. The other, younger, was kneeling near an open hub, inserting a probe into a metal cavity with the concentration of someone tuning a delicate instrument. An adult watched them from a few steps away, without intervening.
They did not seem like students, but neither did they seem like adult workers. They were something in between. They were learning inside the world, not before the world.
Anesh kept watching them as his vehicle glided past.
He felt again that pang he had felt upon entering the city. In Altaluna, young people were questioned about the meaning of things long before their use. They learned to recognize the phases of the sky, to keep stories, to distinguish silence from absence, to read the shapes of rocks and stars as if the world were an incomplete text. There were exercises, but they often seemed directed inward. One could spend an entire morning observing the shadow of a stone and then discuss whether time was what changes or what allows change to appear.
Anesh had loved all this. Or at least he had believed he loved it.
There, seeing a girl a little younger than him inserting a probe into a real engine, he wondered if he had spent too much time searching for meanings without touching things enough.
The platform stopped.
In front of the mobile workshop, a wide work area opened, bounded by slender arches and columns of instruments. On the left were mechanical arms folded like insect legs at rest; on the right, a long bench full of modules, sensors, coiled cables, plates, lenses, small black cylinders, wheel parts, metal fibers, and closed containers. Above, suspended in mid-air, a transparent structure displayed a three-dimensional schematic of the vehicle. The image rotated slowly. Some parts were green, others yellow, still others remained gray, as if the system could not complete their reading.
A voice came from an indeterminate point in the workshop. It was not a human voice, but neither did it have the coldness Anesh would have expected from a machine. It was clear, neutral, polite.
“Unregistered autonomous unit. Security check initiated. Organic presence, remain in position until identification is complete.”
Anesh stayed still.
Organic presence.
That was him.
Not Anesh. Not anyone’s son. Not a boy from Altaluna. Not a traveler. Not someone who, after a night of distant light and noise in the earth, had seen an impossible creature arrive at his cave.
Organic presence.
The definition was so poor it was almost comical, but he did not feel like laughing.
A thin arm descended from above and stopped a few palms from his face. At its end was a dark lens, surrounded by small points of light. Anesh resisted the urge to draw back. The lens moved slowly from side to side, then down to his chest, hands, knees, clothes stained with dust, the strap.
When it reached the wicker basket, it stopped.
Anesh held his breath.
The lens remained still longer than necessary. Then a second, smaller arm approached from the left. It did not touch the container, but traced its closed profile, the shape of a small hut, the weave of the fibers. A thin light passed through it from the outside. The wicker lit up for an instant, revealing the irregular pattern of the material, but not what was inside.
The suspended panel changed.
Secondary organic container.
Material: woven plant fiber.
Internal volume: partially shielded.
Content: undetermined.
Function: undetermined.
Risk: undetermined.
A third, smaller signal appeared.
Human operator requested.
Anesh felt the basket vibrate slightly. It was a minimal movement. Perhaps only the machine’s arm had moved the air. Perhaps the vehicle, stopping, had transmitted a final oscillation to the strap. Yet he knew that Ku had moved. Not much. Just enough to say: I am here.
The workshop’s voice resumed.
“Organic presence, state name, origin, and function.”
Anesh opened his mouth, but did not answer immediately. Name was easy. Origin, less so. Function, impossible.
He looked around. No one was watching him directly, yet everything seemed to be waiting for him. The suspended arms, the lights, the panels, the platform, the large schematic of the vehicle rotating above his head. Yantra was not asking who he was. It was asking what he was for.
“Anesh,” he finally said.
The voice waited.
“I come from Altaluna.”
A brief luminous pulse crossed the panel.
“Function?”
Anesh hugged his knees tighter.
He could have lied. Said apprentice. Said messenger. Said passing technician. Said any word that would have recognizable weight in that place. But none came naturally.
“I don’t know.”
The panel remained still for a moment. Then it updated the classification.
Organic presence: Anesh.
Declared origin: Altaluna.
Function: not declared.
Status: pending.
Anesh felt his face grow warm.
It was not full shame, not yet. But it was something close. Seeing his uncertainty turned into data made it harder, more external, almost official. As long as the doubt remained inside him, it could still resemble a mystery. Here, instead, it became an empty box.
An empty box in a city that seemed built to leave none.
The floor made a soft sound. Someone was coming.
Anesh looked up.
From the side walkway, a girl descended with a quick step, without running. She wore a dark work suit, marked by light inserts on the shoulders and technical stitching along the legs. At her belt she carried small, heavy tools, neatly attached; on one side she had a rigid glove, on the other a narrow case from which three flexible probes emerged. Her black, curly hair was poorly tied back, as if she had tried to fix it and then decided it wasn’t worth insisting. Some locks fell across her forehead. On her nose she wore a small dark piercing that caught the light with every movement of her face.
She looked young, but not uncertain.
Anesh immediately understood she was not an adult technician. There was still something unfinished in her gestures, a speed not yet fully tamed, a way of looking at things as if every object could contradict her and she was ready to accept the challenge. But she did not seem like a simple student either. She walked through that department like someone who had already been entrusted with real mistakes.
The girl stopped in front of the platform and looked first at the vehicle, then at the suspended schematic, then at Anesh.
She did not smile.
“A Nerek LG51,” she said. “I thought they only kept those in service in the lower depots.”
Anesh did not know if he should answer.
She took a few steps along the side, without climbing up. She observed the wheels, the closed crates, the platform hooks, the heavy line of the frame.
“Ugly as a mining animal,” she added. “But if you have to bring back something that’s broken in the mud, usually it comes back too.”
Then she finally looked at the boy.
“Are you the undeclared function?”
Anesh would have liked to be offended, but the question was asked with such naturalness that it seemed almost pointless.
“I think so.”
The girl shifted her gaze to the small wicker container tied at his side.
“And that’s the undetermined container.”
Anesh put a hand on the strap.
“Yes.”
She raised an eyebrow slightly, as if that answer was less informative than the bare minimum.
“Great start.”
She stepped closer to the vehicle and placed a hand on the side, not on the spot indicated by the sensors but a little further ahead, near a dark joint. She stayed like that for a few seconds, motionless, fingers spread on the metal. Then she closed her eyes.
Anesh watched her.
All the panels said the problem was elsewhere. The yellow lights marked the rear arms, the guidance modules, a secondary axle under the platform. She, instead, kept her hand on an area the schematic showed as stable.
When she opened her eyes again, she did not look at the data.
She looked at the vehicle.
“It’s run too hard for its age,” she said.
Anesh did not reply.
The girl tilted her head slightly, as if listening to something others could not hear. She ran her fingers over the joint, then down the side, brushing a line of dust trapped between two panels. She gathered it with her thumb and looked at it. It was a pale, almost silvery dust.
The system suspended above them flashed.
Unclassified mineral residue.
The girl smiled slightly, but not at Anesh. She seemed to smile at the system, or against it.
“Of course it’s unclassified,” she murmured.
Then she finally turned to the boy.
“I’m Zena. They assigned me your old beast.”
“It’s not mine.”
“You’re on it.”
“It brought me.”
“Then, until proven otherwise, it’s yours enough to give me work.”
Anesh found no reply.
Zena made a quick gesture with her hand and two small drones detached from the nearest column. They positioned themselves above the vehicle and began to descend slowly, one toward the folded arms, the other toward the large front tires.
“Don’t touch anything,” she said.
Then she looked at the basket.
“And don’t let that move.”
Anesh tightened the strap slightly.
“It doesn’t always depend on me.”
Zena looked at him for the first time with real attention.
It was not a kind look, but neither was it harsh. It was the look of someone who has found a piece that fits no socket and, instead of throwing it away, decides to see if the design is wrong.
“Magnificent,” she said. “An old vehicle, a boy without a function, and a container that doesn’t take orders.”
Anesh felt Ku move again, softly, inside the small closed nest.
Zena said nothing. But she lowered her eyes right to the spot where the wicker had trembled.
It was then that, for the first time since entering Yantra, Anesh felt that the city did not know everything.