The glowing line led them out of the verification ward and then turned into a side corridor, narrower than those Anesh had seen when entering the city. Zena walked ahead of him with a brisk pace, barely ever looking back, and every time a door hesitated even for a heartbeat at her code, she tapped two fingers on the panel with a kind of mute impatience, as if even the systems, that day, had decided to waste her time.
The corridor was clean, bright, crossed by thin pipes running overhead like lines of a technical score. Behind some transparent walls, small control rooms could be glimpsed, registration desks, panels with vehicle profiles, route maps, verification shifts, and names scrolling in neat columns. Anesh tried not to stop, but everything seemed to ask to be read. In Yantra, even moving from one place to another seemed to leave a trace.
Zena noticed.
“Don’t look at everything.”
“Why?”
“Because if you look at everything, you slow down. And if you slow down, I’ll be late.”
The sentence could have ended the conversation. Instead, after a few steps, a low light turned on at the side of the corridor and a door slid inward, opening a small semicircular space. It didn’t look like an office. There were no chairs, no tables, no people waiting. Only a platform in the center, a thin arch suspended above it, and three vertical panels, dark, arranged like surfaces of dark water.
Zena stopped at the entrance and closed her eyes for a moment.
“Of course.”
Anesh remained on the threshold.
“Do we have to go in?”
“You have to go in. I have to waste more time.”
The voice from the workshop, or perhaps another identical voice, came from the walls.
“Incomplete temporary association. Unregistered presence without active civic profile. Minimum identification required.”
Zena gestured toward the platform.
“Step up.”
Anesh obeyed.
As soon as he set foot in the center of the space, the panels lit up. They didn’t immediately project his image. First, lines appeared, empty fields, verification symbols. Then his name, already collected in the ward, appeared at the top, written in clear characters.
Anesh.
Below, many lines remained empty.
Zena leaned against the wall with one shoulder. She tried to look merely bored, but Anesh saw that she checked the time on her wrist too often for it to be just boredom.
“Age?” asked the voice.
Anesh hesitated just a moment.
“Seventeen.”
The panel recorded.
Age: 17.
Civil cycle: unverified.
Zena looked up.
“Seventeen and no cycle registered?”
“In Altaluna it doesn’t work like that.”
“In Altaluna nothing works ‘like that.’ That’s one of the things you’re best at.”
She didn’t say it harshly. In fact, there was almost a shadow of a smile in the sentence, but it vanished immediately. A new line flashed on the panel.
“Family origin.”
Anesh looked at the letters, then at Zena. She didn’t help him.
“My mother was from Altaluna.”
The system recorded.
“Father?”
“Theknus.”
For the first time, Zena’s expression truly changed. Not much. Just enough for Anesh to realize that word, spoken by him, hadn’t landed where she expected.
“From where?”
The question hadn’t come from the system. It was hers.
“Ekud.”
Zena pushed off from the wall.
“Ekud.”
Anesh nodded.
She repeated the name softly, like one repeats a place they don’t frequent but know the scent of through others’ stories. “Eastern hills. Wood, fiber, olives, slow hands. The people from Uruk say everything down there is soft. Then they buy the best hinges from them.”
Anesh looked at her, surprised.
“You know Ekud?”
“I know the things that come from Ekud.” She nodded toward one of the panels, where the system had already added an incomplete line. “It’s different.”
“From Yantra?”
Zena almost laughed, but without sound.
“Yantra is built on Mount Uruk. If something doesn’t withstand the wind, it doesn’t last here. To the east, instead, the border with Iridia changes the material even before it changes the people. Wood matters more. The earth matters more. Even when they build machines, they still seem to be touching trees.”
Anesh didn’t reply. He had never heard anyone from Yantra speak like that. Not with affection, perhaps, but not with disdain either. As if Zena knew how to recognize a difference without immediately needing to put it in its place.
The panel recorded with a drier formula.
Father: declared origin Eastern Theknus, Ekud.
Mother: declared origin Altaluna.
Territorial profile: mixed.
The word “mixed” stayed lit a little longer than the others.
Zena saw it.
“The system loves words that sound clean.”
“It’s not clean?”
“Depends on how much dirt is inside.”
Anesh couldn’t tell if she was talking about him, the city, or something she didn’t want to explain. The voice resumed before he could ask.
“Primary education.”
This time Anesh remained silent longer.
Education. The word seemed simple, but inside him it opened places he didn’t know how to arrange: the stone terraces of Altaluna, the maps traced with pale pigments, the sky watched for entire nights, the stories repeated until they changed meaning, the carved signs, the questions adults left hanging on purpose, as if an answer given too soon was a kind of rudeness toward the world.
“I don’t know,” he finally said.
Zena looked down at her wrist.
“That’s the second time you’ve told a machine that. It’s not a good strategy.”
“It’s not a strategy.”
“Exactly.”
The panel waited.
“I studied maps,” Anesh said. “Sky. Signs. Stories. Relationships between things.”
Zena looked at him.
“Relationships between things.”
“Yes.”
“That’s very Altaluna.”
“I know.”
“It wasn’t a compliment.”
“I know.”
This time she really smiled, but it was a brief, almost involuntary smile. Then she approached the panel and entered a manual correction. Her fingers moved quickly over the dark surface.
Declared education: symbolic and cartographic observation.
The system accepted the formula with a faint flash.
Anesh read the line. It seemed to him both ridiculous and not entirely false. There was something of him in those words, but dried out, stripped of the cold of the nights, the smell of stone, the fear that had settled after the war, the silence of the cave. It was like looking at his own shadow projected on a smooth wall: recognizable, but unable to breathe.
“Is that what I am?” he asked.
Zena didn’t answer immediately. Maybe because she was in a hurry. Maybe because the question bothered her more than she wanted to show.
“It’s enough to get you out of this room.”
New lines appeared on the panel.
Operational skills: not declared.
Affiliation: absent.
Civic tutor: absent.
Temporary function: associated with verification Nerek LG51.
Zena stepped forward before the system could complete the screen, as if she wanted to stop it from adding anything else. But the side panel lit up anyway, and for an instant Anesh saw a second profile open next to his.
Zena Ardei.
Age: 18.
Cycle: last.
Area: advanced mechatronic diagnostics.
Validated interventions: 43.
Recorded procedural deviations: 7.
Tutor notes: tendency toward perceptive evaluation not always documented.
Zena ran a hand over the panel and darkened it.
“You don’t need that.”
Anesh lowered his eyes, as if he’d been caught reading a private letter.
“Sorry.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
But it did matter. Not in the way of a revealed secret; more like a window left open by mistake. Anesh had seen just a few lines, yet those lines lingered. Zena’s profile was full: age, cycle, area, interventions, deviations, notes. Even what escaped her had been counted.
His, instead, seemed made of holes.
The voice concluded the procedure.
“Temporary association completed. Movement allowed on authorized routes with operator Zena Ardei. Dynamic verification of the vehicle suspended until cooling is complete.”
The door behind them opened.
Zena left immediately, without waiting for Anesh to step down from the platform. When he caught up with her in the corridor, she was already walking again.
“Now listen to me,” she said. “Don’t wander off, don’t open the container, don’t answer the panels, don’t follow side lights, don’t touch anything that blinks, and don’t make that face.”
“What face?”
“The face of someone searching for the deeper meaning of a corridor.”
Anesh couldn’t help but smile.
“And where are you going?”
“Where I was already going before a half-asleep Nerek decided to vomit a boy without a profile into my shift.”
“He didn’t vomit me.”
“You’re right. He deposited you. Much more elegant.”
They crossed an internal walkway overlooking a technical courtyard. Below them, some apprentices were pushing battery modules toward a charging bench; farther on, a woman in a gray suit was explaining to two boys how to isolate a joint without blocking the whole system. No one seemed still, but no one seemed truly in a hurry. Only Zena walked as if time, that day, had taken something of hers.
“You have an appointment,” Anesh said.
“Yes.”
“For work?”
“Not everything that matters is work.”
The sentence came out faster than expected. Zena noticed and immediately changed her tone.
“I have to stop by my quarters. Then to the venue.”
“What venue?”
“A place where tonight I’m supposed to play, if you, the Nerek, and your little basket give me permission.”
Anesh almost stopped.
Zena took three more steps before turning.
“What is it?”
“You play?”
She looked at him as if the question were slightly offensive.
“Yes.”
“What?”
“Guitar.”
The wicker basket tapped softly against Anesh’s side. Or maybe it was just his step, catching up.
Zena noticed the movement, but by now she was in a hurry again.
“Don’t make that face for the guitar either.”
“I don’t know what face I’m making.”
“An Altaluna face.”
“Is that an insult?”
“Not yet.”
She started walking again, and Anesh followed. Ahead of them, the corridor opened toward more populated levels of the city, where the noise of the workshops began to mix with other sounds: voices, footsteps, doors, carts, the call of a cafeteria, a sudden laugh, a distant announcement naming sectors and times. Yantra no longer seemed just a machine. It had corridors where someone argued with time, places where tools were left, rooms where a girl kept a guitar, and maybe even questions the panels couldn’t read fast enough.
Anesh walked behind Zena without saying anything else.
On the small provisional profile the system had just created for him, somewhere, perhaps a temporary function linked to the Nerek LG51 was still flashing. But he no longer saw it. He saw Zena’s back ahead of him, her quick step, the curly hair escaping its tie, the wrist that sometimes lit up red.
And, beneath the city’s noise, he felt the basket at his side remain quiet, as if Ku, for the moment, had agreed to cross Yantra with them.