Zena walked ahead of him without slowing down. Every so often she raised her wrist and checked the small red signal that kept pulsing on the device attached to her suit. She didn’t curse, she didn’t even sigh.
“How much farther?” Anesh asked after a few minutes.
“To what?”
“To the place you need to go.”
“It depends on how much you can avoid stopping in front of everything that blinks.”
Anesh would have liked to reply that he didn’t stop in front of everything, but just then 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 about the Southern League and the northern front; Anesh caught the names Theknus and Iridia, then 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 line, which 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, the face of Adru Kemet appeared. It didn’t fill the whole wall; it didn’t need to. It was enough for him to appear for the images around to seem to arrange themselves better. He had a steady smile, crafted to not seem crafted, and eyes that always seemed to look just slightly past the person he was speaking to, toward a place others hadn’t yet dared to imagine. The caption below his face identified him as the leader of the Southern League. Further down, a phrase scrolled slowly, interspersed with the symbol of Yantra: 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 the 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 didn’t add anything else, and the tone she used 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 ducts, 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 could be seen tables, shelves, hanging fabrics, cups left near study panels. 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 of teams from the last cycle. 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.
“Do 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 had 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, metal pieces, 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 the surface. Anesh was surprised to see paper. Amidst everything in Yantra that could be recorded, 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 glanced toward the notes.
“I wasn’t touching.”
“You were thinking of figuring it out.”
He pulled his hand back, 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 the attempt not to be unprepared.”
“For a concert?”
“For a concert, a test, a conversation with an old machine. Doesn’t make 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 grown thicker. Some still wore workshop suits, others had changed clothes, but almost all bore some sign of their department: a band, a hook, a wrist module, a sewn-on badge, a glove dangling from their belt. Anesh passed a boy carrying a small technical drum under his arm and a woman transporting 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 was just thinking I didn’t expect it.”
She gave a half smile without slowing down. “Altalunans always think that if something has a function, 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 so simply. Instead, he looked at the case on her back and let the remark pass. It wasn’t the time to defend Altaluna, nor 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 walked past the panel without looking at it.
Anesh, instead, read it.
Zena Ardei Trio / evening cycle closing.
Below, a smaller phrase read: variations on recognized form.
“Variations on recognized form,” Anesh said.
Zena made a face.
“That’s what I wrote to get it approved.”
“And what will you play?”
“More or less.”
“More or less how much?”
She shot him a quick glance.
“Enough to start.”
She didn’t explain further, and perhaps 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 worded 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 that 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 perhaps 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 quickly.
They finally reached a system of escalators descending to a lower, warmer level. The walls there were covered 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.
“Is 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 that 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 easily refused. It was too alive, too capable, too full of people who truly believed in what they were doing. And perhaps for that very reason, the silence he had felt in the cave, and which now seemed to move quietly beneath the city’s noise, seemed even harder to explain.