As soon as they left the identification corridor, the noise changed.
It was no longer the deep sound of the workshop, nor the orderly beat of the verification department. Here Yantra had another voice, denser and more human: footsteps on walkways, doors opening and closing, light carts running along side rails, overlapping announcements, brief laughter, calls from one level to another, the rustle of technical fabrics, the soft bump of tools against belts. The city didn’t seem any less precise, but it was closer to the disorder of people. Or maybe it was just that Anesh, after being scanned by the panels, could finally see bodies again.
Zena walked ahead of him without slowing down. Every now and then she raised her wrist and checked the small red signal that kept pulsing on the device clipped to her suit. She didn’t curse, didn’t even sigh; she kept her hurry inside her stride, and that made her harder to follow than someone openly nervous.
“How much farther?” Anesh asked after a few minutes.
“To what?”
“To the place you need to go.”
“Depends on how well you manage not to stop in front of everything that blinks.”
Anesh would have liked to reply that he didn’t stop in front of everything, but right at that moment he slowed down without realizing it. Above a curved wall, as wide as the front of a house, images of the war were playing. They weren’t battle images. They showed maps, supply lines, vehicles moving across stylized territories, city names changing color, columns of numbers, faces of soldiers arranged in lines too regular. A low voice spoke of the Southern League and the northern front; Anesh caught the names of Theknus and Iridia, then those of Axia and Castalia, pronounced with a different hardness, as if they belonged to a colder material. When Altaluna appeared, the map didn’t color it all the same way. It remained divided by a thin, trembling line that the panel tried to render sharp but never quite managed.
Zena stopped two steps ahead.
“Don’t look at that too much.”
“Why?”
She followed his gaze for a moment, then looked away. “Because it changes every day, but always says the same thing.”
On the big screen, Kemet’s face appeared. It didn’t fill the whole wall; it didn’t need to. It was enough for it to appear for the images around it to seem better arranged. He had a steady smile, built not to look built, and eyes that always seemed to look slightly beyond the person he was talking to, toward a place others hadn’t yet dared to imagine. The caption under his face identified him as the leader of the Southern League. Further down, a phrase scrolled slowly, interrupted by Yantra’s symbol: strength is not defense unless it becomes form.
A group of apprentices stopped for a few seconds in front of the panel. One of them raised his fist, more out of habit than fervor; the others laughed and pushed him away, because shift change waited for no solemnity. Zena started walking again.
Anesh followed her.
“Does he live here?”
“Kemet?” Zena didn’t turn. “When the city needs to know he does, yes.”
“And when it doesn’t?”
“When it doesn’t, some say he’s elsewhere.”
She added nothing else, and the tone in which she said it was enough to discourage further questions.
They got on a moving walkway that ran along the inner side of a tower. From there Anesh saw Yantra open up in depth: overlapping streets, loading courtyards, technical terraces, vertical shafts, bridges connecting different buildings without ever seeking symmetry. The mountain hadn’t been erased; it surfaced everywhere, held back by metal structures, cut into levels, crossed by elevators and tunnels. Yantra wasn’t built on top of Mount Uruk. It seemed to have convinced it to become a city.
As they ascended, the noise of the workshops faded and was replaced by that of inhabited spaces. Smaller doors appeared, softer lights, internal windows behind which tables, shelves, hanging fabrics, cups left near study panels could be seen. Some young people left their quarters still in work suits, others returned with tools in hand, two girls sitting on the floor ate from a shared container and discussed a project projected on the floor. No one seemed truly off duty. Even rest, there, seemed to be preparing something.
Zena left the walkway at the third level and took a narrow ramp. Anesh noticed that from that point on the walls were less polished. Not dirty, but more lived-in. On the side panels there were marks left by hands, small carvings, stickers from technical groups, poorly erased phrases, symbols from last cycle’s teams. A hand-painted stripe ran along the lower edge of the corridor, occasionally interrupted by more recent repairs. It didn’t seem authorized, but no one had removed it.
“You live here?” Anesh asked.
“I sleep here.”
“Isn’t that the same thing?”
Zena passed her code in front of a door.
“Altaluna question.”
The door opened onto a small room, narrower than Anesh expected. Zena entered without inviting him, and he stayed on the threshold until she said, from inside: “Don’t stand there like the corridor is supposed to adopt you.”
Anesh stepped in.
The room was only partly tidy. A low bed was wedged against the wall, with a blanket rolled up at the foot; above, two shelves held tools, pieces of metal, transparent containers, a flexible lamp, three thin books and a small plant with shiny leaves, kept in a pot too heavy for its size. Near the inner window was a workbench with a disassembled panel, copper-colored wires and a series of handwritten notes clipped to sheets. Anesh was surprised to see paper. Amidst everything that could be recorded in Yantra, those sheets seemed almost a weakness.
Zena went straight to a narrow closet and opened it. Inside, hanging vertically, was a dark case.
Anesh understood before she took it.
He said nothing.
Zena slung it over her shoulder, then quickly took off the upper part of her suit and let it fall on the bed. Underneath she wore a simple, dark shirt, with no department markings. She put on a light jacket, checked her wrist again, looked for something on the bench, didn’t find it, almost knocked over a container, caught it in time and finally retrieved a small metal pick from under a sheet.
“Don’t touch anything,” she said.
Anesh had just let his gaze wander toward the notes.
“I wasn’t touching.”
“You were thinking of figuring it out.”
He drew back his hand, even though he hadn’t moved it.
On the nearest sheet he saw only a sequence of lines and dots, maybe a musical map, maybe a circuit diagram. He couldn’t tell. There were also isolated words, crossed out and rewritten, but Zena closed the notebook before he could read them.
“Is it music?” he asked.
“It’s an attempt not to show up unprepared.”
“For a concert?”
“For a concert, a test, a conversation with an old machine. Not much difference.”
The guitar case bumped against the doorframe as they left. Zena turned to check she hadn’t scratched it, and in that gesture, more careful than any she’d shown Anesh so far, something about her changed for an instant. She didn’t become sweeter. Just more precise in a different way.
In the corridor, the flow of young people had thickened. Some still wore workshop suits, others had changed clothes, but almost all bore a sign of their department: a band, a hook, a wrist module, a sewn badge, a glove dangling from their belt. Anesh passed a boy holding a small technical drum under his arm and a woman carrying three folding rods. From an open room came a short piece of music, repeated several times, interrupted by a voice correcting the rhythm.
Zena noticed his gaze.
“Don’t make that face. In Yantra, people play music.”
“I didn’t say otherwise.”
“You were thinking it.”
“I just thought I didn’t expect it.”
She gave a half smile without slowing down. “Altalunans always think that if something has a function then it can’t have a soul.”
Anesh could have replied. He could have said that wasn’t what he thought, or that maybe he did think it but not in such a simple way. Instead he looked at the case on her shoulders and let the remark pass. It wasn’t the time to defend Altaluna, or himself.
They crossed a wider gallery, where some panels announced the evening’s events. They weren’t presented as entertainment, not entirely. Each box had a time, a place, an access level and a brief note: end-of-shift decompression, collective listening, rhythmic exercise, precision competition, recreational music. Zena’s name appeared in the last line of a program projected at mid-height, along with two other names.
She passed by the panel without looking at it.
Anesh, instead, read it.
Zena Ardei / electric trio / evening cycle closure.
Below, a smaller phrase read: variations on recognized form.
“Variations on recognized form,” Anesh said.
Zena made a face.
“It’s what I wrote to get it approved.”
“And is that what you’ll play?”
“More or less.”
“More or less how much?”
She shot him a quick glance.
“Enough to start.”
She explained no further, and maybe for that very reason Anesh understood more than he would have from a long answer. In Yantra, music was not lacking. It had spaces, schedules, programs, even carefully crafted phrases to present it. But somewhere, between what was written to get into a program and what actually happened, there had to be a distance Zena knew well.
The city around them kept flowing. From an inner terrace came the smell of warm spices and cooked legumes; from a side ramp, three adults descended with folded military maps under their arms; a child in a small gray suit chased a glowing sphere until a woman called him back without raising her voice. On another screen, much smaller than the one seen before, the map of Altaluna still blinked divided. Anesh saw it only briefly, but it was enough to make him feel a cold pressure in his chest.
Zena noticed, or maybe she slowed down by pure chance.
“Do you have someone there?” she asked.
Anesh didn’t answer right away.
The corridor continued ahead of them, full of people going somewhere.
“I don’t know anymore,” he said.
Zena didn’t say “I’m sorry.” She didn’t ask anything else. She started walking again, but a little less fast.
They finally reached a system of escalators descending to a lower, warmer level. The walls there were lined with dark panels and crossed by ventilation pipes. The sounds blended differently: fewer announcements, more voices; less metal, more footsteps. A luminous sign, not perfectly aligned, marked the venue with a symbol Anesh didn’t recognize: three broken lines converging without touching.
“This it?” he asked.
“Almost.”
Zena adjusted the case on her shoulder and ran a hand through her hair, making it worse instead of better. Then she looked at Anesh, the basket, the dusty clothes, the face still too attentive.
“You sit down when we go in. Don’t disappear. Don’t open anything. Don’t talk to anyone who offers you green things.”
“Green?”
“Brews. Drinks. Social experiments. Doesn’t matter.”
“Does it happen often?”
“With Legu, always.”
“Who’s Legu?”
Zena looked toward the entrance of the venue, where a low light filtered through a half-open door and a bass line, still isolated, tried two notes and then fell silent.
“Someone who listens more than would be comfortable.”
Then she pushed the door open with her shoulder and went in.
Anesh followed her, carrying the small wicker container, the dust of the road, and the ever clearer feeling that Yantra was not a place easy to refuse. It was too alive, too capable, too full of people who truly believed in what they did. And maybe for that very reason, the silence he had felt in the cave, and that now seemed to move quietly beneath the city’s noise, seemed even harder to explain.