Anesh took the small basket in his hands and held it close to his body, shielding it from the wind. On the side there was an almost invisible little door, crafted from the same weave as the walls. He opened it carefully.
Before pulling his fingers away, he traced the irregularities of the fibers with his thumb: the spots where he had pulled them too tight and those where, out of haste or fatigue, he had left a bit more air through. He had built the basket in the days before departure. Not to keep Ku in, at least that’s not how he tried to think of it, but because a butterfly couldn’t cross roads, dust, wind, and moving vehicles without shelter. And yet, every time he closed the little door, something about the gesture still felt wrong.
Zena stayed by the railing, close enough to see and far enough not to turn the moment into a test. The wind pushed her hair across her face and made one of the metal clasps on the case leaning against the wall vibrate. Yantra resonated below them, bright, layered, distant and very close; but from that part of the city its noise arrived as if through a thick wall, mixed with the cold air from Mount Uruk.
For a few moments, nothing happened.
Inside, Ku was almost invisible. Her closed wings pressed together in a position that didn’t seem like rest, but listening. The tiny body stayed still at the bottom of the basket, where Anesh had placed some dry threads and a piece of light fabric. In the dimness of the wicker, the butterfly looked like a remnant of light caught in something too earthly.
Zena bent down slightly, without bringing her hands closer.
“She’s small,” she said.
Anesh nodded. The remark didn’t bother him. Coming from Zena, after the Nerek, after the panels, after the stage and the terrace, that “small” didn’t sound like a diminishment. It almost felt like a necessary observation, the most careful way not to say anything else.
A gust rose along the mountainside. It carried the scent of damp rock, dust, and cooled metal. Anesh instinctively moved a hand to close the opening, but Zena touched his wrist.
“Wait.”
She didn’t grip him. She just left her hand there until he stopped.
Ku came out.
She landed first on the small woven step in front of the little door and then opened her wings.
The wind should have caught her immediately, pressed her against the mesh or dragged her into the darkness below the terrace. She was too light. Too exposed. Her body had nothing that could resist that current rising from the mountain. Yet Ku lifted off the edge of the basket and stayed in the air.
She didn’t fly like a bird, nor like the insects Anesh had seen in the meadows of Altaluna. She didn’t really move forward. She didn’t flee. She stayed there, just a short distance from the boy’s hands, wings open in an almost motionless tremor, as if the wind passed around her without being able to decide which way to take her.
Zena let go of Anesh’s wrist.
“She shouldn’t be able to do that,” she said.
She didn’t say it loudly. She didn’t say it expecting an answer. It was a phrase that came from her profession before her amazement, one of those sentences in Yantra that precede the need to measure, to check, to repeat the experiment. But this time she didn’t raise the device on her wrist, didn’t call up any sensor, didn’t look for a classification.
Ku remained suspended.
The butterfly’s body was oriented beyond the railing. Zena followed that direction, not because she could tell where Ku was looking, but because her flight kept correcting itself along the same axis.
“It looks like she’s looking that way,” she said.
“What’s over there?”
Zena watched for a moment the few scattered lights along the coast.
“First the low plains. Then the coastal routes. After that, the open sea.”
She hesitated. “And beyond… More or less in that direction is what they call here the Horizon of the Manifold.”
Anesh repeated the name, trying to recall a memory. “I’ve heard of it, but I’ve never understood what it is.”
“It’s a sea area. You can’t see it from here and it has no precise boundary. Sailors notice it because the sound starts to fade.”
“What sound?”
“All of it.” Zena placed her hands on the railing. “The wind keeps moving the sails, the waves hit the hulls, the engines run, compasses, navigation instruments and communications work normally. But those who enter the area gradually stop hearing all of this. And then, at a certain point, there’s only silence left.”
“Silence?”
“Absolute. Some handle it easily, barely notice it. Others suffer a lot: they get restless, lose their sense of time, feel as if even their own body has stopped making noise. Then the area ends and, without any transition, the sound returns. The wind, the sea, the engines. Everything as before.”
“But do they know why it happens?”
“No. There are various theories about the air, the currents, the composition of the water. None explain everything. For scientists, it’s one of the sea’s most stubborn mysteries.”
Ku wavered in a new gust, then regained the same position.
“Why do they call it that?” Anesh asked.
Zena turned her gaze to the sea.
“For most people, it doesn’t mean anything special. They cross that area, hear the sound fade, then return, and see absolutely nothing. Just sea. Ships, drones, scouts and satellites have checked the area many times. There’s absolutely nothing, no hidden land, no construction.”
“So why the name?”
“It comes from some sailors. Those who claim to have seen something.”
“What?”
“An island. They say they landed there and experienced something inexplicable: they perceived everything as distinct, but not separate. Like in a chord where each note remains itself, yet none truly exists alone.”
Anesh stared at the girl.
She continued. “They speak of others, of the trees, the water, even the stones, as if they all belonged to the same presence. Not a single mind erasing individuals. Rather, something that precedes them and holds them together, even as they remain different.”
“Like… a sense of union with everything?”
“Yes. Many things, many lives, many consciousnesses, but a single reality beneath them all.”
“And does this island have a name?”
“Alma.”
“Why?”
“Because, according to them, what they felt didn’t belong to any individual. It was something common to everyone and everything, present even before each became itself.”
Anesh looked back at the sea.
“And do you believe it?”
“I believe that almost everyone crosses the Horizon and sees absolutely nothing. And that some, very few, come back telling of something no instrument has ever verified.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the one we have.”
There was no mockery in her voice, just the way in Yantra fact and story were kept separate.
Anesh looked at Ku. The butterfly moved forward a little, perhaps pushed by a shift in the wind, perhaps by a movement of her wings. Then she stopped again along the same direction.
“It really seems like Ku wants to go there,” Zena said.
Anesh looked at the sea. He didn’t know if Ku was pointing to the Horizon of the Manifold, a spot on the coast, or nothing that could be named. But Yantra was not the end of the journey. Of that, at least, he was starting to be sure.
“I have to go down to the coast,” he said.
Zena exhaled slowly, without showing surprise.
“You don’t just go down to the coast from Yantra.”
“How do you go down?”
She indicated with a nod the lower levels of the city, where some lines of light entered the mountain and didn’t reemerge.
“With convoys, loading shifts and authorizations. Or by using routes not meant for passengers.”
Anesh didn’t immediately ask which of the two options she meant.
Ku began to lose altitude. She wasn’t swept away: she let herself be carried back toward the basket, correcting her flight in small adjustments. She landed in front of the little door and stayed there with her wings open. Anesh brought a hand close without touching her. After a moment Ku closed her wings and entered the shelter.
He waited for her to settle at the bottom, then gently closed the little door and latched it.
When he looked up, Zena was already watching the technical door behind them. The device on her wrist lit up. She glanced at the signal, then turned it off.
“There’s an old service route,” she said. “It goes down the eastern side of the Uruk and reaches a transport line heading to the coast. They use it for materials and maintenance.”
“Can you get me in?”
“I can open the first access.”
“And after?”
Zena bent to pick up the guitar case.
“After that, you’ll have to try not to get on the first vehicle that comes by.”
Anesh looked at the basket.
“So far it’s worked.”
“That’s exactly what worries me.”
She headed toward the door. He followed after one last look at the sea, which from there still seemed nothing but a dark expanse.
“Let’s go,” Zena said.