The terrace had not been built for looking.
Anesh realized this as soon as he stepped out behind Zena and felt the air change around his face. There were no seats, no railings designed to keep people lingering, no lights arranged to make the view more beautiful. It was a technical passageway, wide enough for two workers with tools on their shoulders to pass through, protected by a metal railing and a thin net that barely vibrated in the wind. At regular intervals, small control boxes jutted out from the rocky wall, some lit, others dark. A service rail ran along the outer edge and disappeared behind a fold in the mountain.
And yet, from there, you could see almost everything.
Yantra descended below them in levels, terraces, bridges, courtyards, and towers, clinging to Mount Uruk as if rock and metal had found, after a long discussion, a way to support each other. By day, the city must have looked clearer, perhaps even harsher; at that hour, instead, in the now settled darkness of evening, it was made of luminous lines, thin fumes, lit windows, platforms moving slowly, and signals running from one level to another like nerve impulses. It hadn’t stopped working. It had only changed rhythm.
Zena leaned the guitar case against the wall and slipped the strap off her shoulder with a small gesture of relief. For a while, she said nothing. She seemed less irritated than before, or perhaps just more tired. The concert had left her with a kind of residual tension, as if a part of her had remained on stage, in the last note that hadn’t wanted to end. Anesh approached the railing and looked out over the city.
Lower down, far beyond the inhabited levels and artificial slopes, the mountain began to descend toward darker lands. The roads became threads, the towers shrank, the lights thinned out until they blended with small settlements scattered in the distance. Then, after a shadowy zone that Anesh couldn’t measure, there was the sea.
He hadn’t seen it when entering Yantra. The city had absorbed him before he could realize how high he had climbed. Now, instead, the sea appeared distant and almost motionless, a dark surface beneath the lighter sky, crossed by faint reflections that seemed to belong neither to the stars nor the coast. It made no sound, from there. It was too far away. And precisely for that reason, it seemed larger.
Zena reached the railing, but didn’t stand next to him. She stayed a little behind, hands in the pockets of her jacket, gaze turned toward the black line of water.
“I used to see it differently as a child,” she said.
Anesh didn’t answer right away. The sentence didn’t seem to ask anything.
“In Iridia?” he asked after a moment.
Zena barely turned her head toward him. “Who told you?”
“You have your mother’s surname?”
She seemed surprised, but not enough to be offended. “Ardei. Yes. It’s Iridian.”
Then she looked back at the sea.
“My mother used to say that in Yantra, people always look at the sea from too high up. As if it were a surface to measure, a distance to cross, a resource to protect, or a route to control. In Iridia, at least where we lived for a few months each year, you didn’t look at it like that. It came at you before you even decided to observe it. It entered the houses with the salt, in your hair, in the fabrics, in things left out to dry. Even when you couldn’t see it, you felt it. It didn’t have to do anything to take up space.”
Anesh smiled softly.
Zena noticed. “What is it?”
“Nothing.”
“That wasn’t a ‘nothing’ face.”
“It sounded like an Altaluna question.”
She stared at him for a moment, unsure whether to take it as an insult. “I didn’t ask a question.”
“Not yet.”
The wind passed between them, light but cold. Below, from a level of the city, came the distant sound of a load badly hooked and quickly corrected, followed by a metallic voice announcing a procedure. Zena rested her forearms on the railing. The thin net vibrated under the weight.
“What does the sea do?” she said.
The question lingered there, smaller than Anesh would have expected. It didn’t have the tone of a prepared phrase, nor that of a provocation. It seemed almost to have slipped out by mistake, taking advantage of a moment when Zena had let her guard down.
Anesh looked at the sea, then at the city.
“According to Yantra?”
“According to you.”
He fell silent. He could have answered as in Altaluna, opening up the question, shifting it, letting it generate more questions. But with Zena, it didn’t come naturally. She had just played in front of a city that demanded answers without needing to say so, and that question, spoken like that, already seemed exposed enough.
“It moves,” he said.
“A wheel moves too.”
“It breathes.”
“So does a compressor.”
“It wears away the coasts.”
“Machines also wear down what they touch.”
Anesh smiled again, this time without hiding it. “Then I don’t know.”
Zena remained silent for a long time, as if that was the only answer that didn’t bother her.
“In Yantra, something is calmer when you can say what it does,” she said at last. “Not in a stupid way. Not because someone imposes it with a sign. It’s that, if you know what it does, you know how to take care of it, how to use it, how not to let it destroy you. A machine, a bridge, a team, a body. Even a song, maybe.”
“And the sea?”
She looked at the dark line in the distance. “The sea ruins the sentence.”
Anesh didn’t comment. The small wicker container was quiet against his side. After the club, after the music, that quiet seemed denser than before, as if Ku were listening to something coming from very far away.
Zena moved away from the railing and sat on the low edge of a technical box, pulling the guitar case closer to her with a foot. The gesture brought Anesh’s gaze back to the instrument.
“Have you been playing long?” he asked.
“Long enough to know when I haven’t practiced enough.”
“It didn’t seem like it.”
“From below, many things don’t seem as they are.”
“I was close enough.”
“You were new enough.”
Anesh lowered his eyes and smiled. The guitar case was worn in some places, especially near the handle. It wasn’t as old as the one his father had built for him, but it didn’t look like an object kept only out of duty either. The surface bore small marks, repairs, scratches, removed stickers. An instrument traveling inside a precise city still ended up collecting disorder.
Zena looked at him.
“You have that face again.”
“Which one?”
“The one of someone who knows something and is deciding whether to hide it badly.”
Anesh would have liked to say it wasn’t true. Then he thought of the stage, of Zena’s guitar, of the way the bassist had followed a direction he might not have entirely chosen, and suddenly felt ridiculous. Not because he had played too, but because saying it now seemed to turn something of his into a comparison he couldn’t withstand.
“I used to play a bit,” he said.
Zena didn’t answer right away.
“Guitar?”
Anesh nodded.
She observed him with a different attention than in the workshop. There, she looked for faults, delays, instability. Now she seemed to be searching for the exact point where he had tried to make himself smaller.
“A bit how much?”
“Not much.”
“‘Not much’ is a measure used by those who don’t want to be measured.”
“Or by those who have just listened to someone play much better.”
Zena looked away first. She didn’t blush, didn’t really smile, but the wind moved her hair across her face and for a moment she seemed younger than the confidence with which she had crossed the workshop.
“Where did you learn?” she asked.
Anesh leaned on the railing with both hands. The metal was cold. He looked at the city, then the sea, then an intermediate point where Yantra’s lights no longer reached and the coast hadn’t yet begun.
“From my father.”
Zena didn’t ask questions. Maybe that was what allowed him to continue.
“He was from Ekud. Not from here. From the area to the east, where the hills are lower. He used to say that the wood from those parts didn’t grow better, just more willing to listen.”
“Is that a craftsman’s saying or an Altaluna one?”
“His.”
Zena accepted the correction without comment.
“When I turned twelve, he gave me a guitar. He had built it in secret. It wasn’t perfect. Or maybe it was, in the way things made for a specific person can be. There were places where the wood hadn’t wanted to follow the shape completely, and he had left them like that, only corrected enough for the instrument to hold. He put it in my hands as if handing over something very fragile, but didn’t speak right away. He waited for me to look at it. Then he said: ‘It doesn’t matter if you become someone. What matters is that you never stop listening to yourself.‘”
The words, once spoken, seemed to change the air on the terrace more than Anesh had expected. They hadn’t been solemn when his father said them. Or maybe he, at twelve, hadn’t been able to feel their solemnity. They had seemed good words, a bit strange, perhaps too big for a gift. Now, spoken above Yantra, in front of the distant sea, next to a girl who lived in a city where everything was called to become a profile, they seemed to come from a time that hadn’t yet finished reaching him.
Zena didn’t say it was beautiful. She didn’t say she understood. She just looked at her own guitar case, then at that distant line of sea that did nothing, at least nothing that could be measured from there.
“And where is it now?” she asked.
Anesh felt the question coming even before he wanted to answer it.
“I left it.”
Zena turned to him.
“You left it?”
“In the cave.”
“What cave?”
The wind slipped under Anesh’s jacket. Somewhere below them, the city kept moving, but the terrace seemed to have stepped a little away from its rhythm. The wicker basket remained still. Anesh rested a hand on it, not to stop it from moving, but to feel that it was there.
“It’s a long story.”
Zena looked at the device on her wrist. The red light was still present, but less urgent than before. Or maybe she was just looking at it with less obedience.
“The Nerek is still cooling down,” she said.
Anesh didn’t immediately understand whether it was technical information or permission.
She sat back down on the box, with the guitar resting beside her knee. She didn’t invite him to speak. There was no need.
Anesh looked at the sea one more time.
Then he began with the cave.