Esh-Faya returned to The Scar as the night was beginning to surrender to the dawn, her face glowing with a business-like purpose. The first thing she did was find Vitl to execute the final part of their escape plan—the return. Vitl had declared that noise in the toilets was an art form, and he would create it.

  Esh hurried to the emergency exit as noises erupted from the corridor where the toilets were located—a crash, a shriek, a splash, a strange gurgle, and to finish it off—a drawn-out "ooooooh!" and a mad wail. The art was being created with inspiration, so much so that even the dispassionate homunculi at the entrance synchronously turned their heads toward it.

  "Did you hear that?" Esh asked, feigning alarm. "There, in the toilets, enemies may have invaded!"

  "Check the sanitary processing sector?" the homunculus clarified.

  "Check it! Urgently!" she confirmed, making her eyes even more wary.

  The iron guards set off toward the source of the cacophonous invasion, and as soon as the door was left unguarded, it opened. A clump of air, like the shimmering haze of hot breath, slipped inside, and the door closed. Ortahn emerged from the vibrating void, shedding his aetheric shell, which dissolved in the air like sugary sweetness in water.

  When they found Vitl hiding in a side niche, his face was a living illustration of the word "agitation," expressing the full gamut of emotions from mortal anxiety to almost indecent delight.

  "What happened?! Did it work? Did it not work? Were you caught? Did you escape?! Did you..." he rattled on, adopting Esh's manner of speech.

  "Yes, we were caught," Ortahn released his accumulated tension with sarcasm. "And thrown into the deepest dungeon of the Chancellery. We're obviously not here."

  "What's our next mad adventure?" Vitl immediately asked.

  The next mad adventure was sleep. Ortahn, feeling the weight of the night pressing on his shoulders, headed for his cell. Esh went in search of Taut, where she had left him, and Vitl, still overflowing with unspent energy, stomped off to the archive.

  Ortahn collapsed onto his bed in his clothes and immediately flew feet-first into a dream. He dreamt that his invisibility was failing, and a crowd was surrounding him and Esh, in which all his acquaintances flickered: Yaron with a foolish smirk, the insolent Samar, Ildara with a somehow visible whip, the Ministeress... And through this ring of horror, Tulila burst through, grabbed him by the shoulders, shook him, and screamed:

  "Ortahn!"

  He opened his eyes. Tulila was shaking him. He closed his eyes.

  "No," her voice sounded right next to his ear. "You can't escape back into a dream, Ortahn. Don't deceive yourself."

  Her living and magical hands wrapped around his entire body and easily sat him up on the bed, while four fingers pried his eyelids open.

  "A prosperous life, Tulila," Ortahn accepted the inevitability of her presence with resignation.

  "And to you, Ortahn," she replied, releasing him. Walking over to the table, she pulled out the chair, assessed its condition with a professional eye, pushed the chair back in, and decided to remain standing, crossing most of her arms. "I'm glad I didn't have to save anyone today."

  "I am sincerely glad for your peaceful morning," Ortahn reported cautiously. He, too, was glad she hadn't had to save anyone today.

  "How is the city?" Tulila got closer to the point of her visit. Her artificial eye narrowed, adjusting its focus. "The traditional nothing new?"

  "So you know?" Ortahn didn't bother to humiliate himself and her with useless denials.

  "Of course, I know. I am the curator of the S.C.A.R. and not a fool. Knowing is my primary (and, it seems, only) job."

  "And what are you going to do with this information?"

  "Absolutely nothing," she assured him. "I consider it your business, not mine or anyone else's. And I will even, if necessary, lie for you, but nothing beyond that." Smirking at his facial reaction, she continued, "I am your teacher, no matter how much you ignore that fact. And you have just passed your first practical lesson in adulthood. Disobedience. I will not interfere, because I want to see how far you can go on your own path. It's far more interesting than leading you on a leash."

  "That... doesn't make much sense," her student expressed his logical assessment.

  "It only makes no sense if you're looking from inside the shell, which you've only just cracked so far," Tulila assured him. "From the outside, everything looks perfectly obvious. You either break it and hatch, or you suffocate inside. Either way, it's your choice."

  Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site.

  His consciousness had not yet fully formed with normal density, or perhaps he was affected by this strange, official encouragement of disobedience, but he asked what would have been wiser to keep silent about:

  "I have the distinct impression that you... don't particularly like the Chancellery."

  "Who likes it, besides the Chancellery itself? And I'm not even sure about it," Tulila answered wearily, leaning against the wall. The tension that appeared on her face aged her by a bad ten years. "Magocratic matriarchy, technological patriarchy (yes, such words exist), fiery anarchy, the Consolidation, bandit feudalism, AI-ocracy, pan-imperialism..." (Ortahn didn't understand half the words, but he heard their weight in her voice.) "I've seen my share of worlds in Arkhonna, Ortahn. I have things to compare it to. You think our politics are bad, unjust, evil? You have no idea how much. Our Ildara is just the Yaron of politics, a generally harmless misunderstanding. The old humanity is still at the center, and their antiquity has not deprived them of strength or cruelty, rather the opposite. The true heart of darkness..." Tulila suddenly shook her head, as if she herself had just woken from a dream. "As a teacher, I decide what information to give and what to hold back. You definitely don't need to know this. I've already said enough to earn punishments for both of us."

  She patted him on the shoulder with her living hand, looked him in the eyes with uncharacteristic seriousness, and said, "Live, my student. And while you live—think," and left the cell, as always leaving behind the heavy burden of new questions.

  From then on, the nights became longer than the days. The trips to the library became part of their schedule, with the only difference being that this routine could end in exposure and torture. Vitl perfected the art of "toilet incidents," generating sounds of a struggle with an invisible opponent one day, and gas explosions the next, invariably distracting the homunculi. Yaron became more persistent, but the "Wild Roses" deterred him with their numbers.

  The Librarian would meet them in the lower hall, and every night his anxious squeak sounded like an apology for the lack of progress.

  "Intellectual voids can be more stubborn than one would like," he would mutter, looking reproachfully at the shelves as if they were disobedient students.

  During this time, they even learned his name—Onyx. It was most likely a self-proclaimed name, but such advanced models often glitched and hallucinated in the strangest ways. Ortahn, unexpectedly to himself, grew attached to this little red creature with its titanic but futile efforts and tiny body. Onyx conscientiously compiled selections in all conceivable and inconceivable forms: from modern sorcery monthlies to ancient tomes on the traditions of the pre-aetheric era. Thanks to him, the Sentinels now just slid lazily past them, their blue sensors not reacting to the two "night workers."

  "It's a good thing your plan with the list worked," Esh whispered to the Librarian one time as they slipped between the Sentinels.

  "Otherwise, the library would have lost its most diligent readers," Onyx replied, and an almost human sadness sounded in his voice.

  They read, almost without talking, immersed in a silence broken only by the rustle of pages. Esh read as she breathed—swiftly and greedily, while Ortahn conducted his own quiet hunt—searching for invisible patterns, making laconic notes in his friend's now-free notebook. But the result was unchanged—its majestic and humiliating absence.

  On one night, the search dragged on for an especially long time. Leaving the library, they both felt drained, not by physical exertion, but by the intellectual emptiness. The sky above the canton was painted in dirty, leaden tones, heralding the dawn, and a cold wind drove pale, homeless wisps of fog through the streets.

  "I wonder what Vitl will arrange today? An earthquake? A flood? A Virion invasion?" Esh joked hopelessly.

  "We need to catch our breath. Just stop being reading-homunculi for an hour. Come on," Ortahn said.

  He used geomorphy again, but not for escape, but to give a gift of peace. The stone carried them upward until it brought them out onto a flat roof between the towers of the district, where a cold morning wind was blowing. Ortahn dropped the cloak of invisibility and sat down on the overgrown moss. Esh sat next to him on the edge, dangling her legs.

  For a while, they were silent, listening as the city below slowly began to wake up. From this height, a different world was revealed: not the patrols of homunculi and the shabby gloom of The Scar, but the land, cut by multicolored squares of plants and the silvery ribbon of a river, and one of the lower, one-story towns, crowned with just a single, modest tower. Only in the center of the canton (like a reproach or a reminder) stood the black tower of the Chancellery, with a roof resembling a pointed hat. There was a serene geography, a stilled city, and the two of them, floating above it all in the advancing light.

  "Everything looks much worse from below," Ortahn said, settling more comfortably beside her and also dangling his legs into the abyss.

  "Normal people would phrase that as: 'Everything looks better from above'," Esh responded without turning her head.

  "People are unsurpassed optimists. Or liars of the same capacity. But the meaning is the same."

  "If the content is identical, then the form defines everything."

  The wind caught their words and carried them away, and they decided once more to summon silence and watch as the first ray of Solara cut through the fog. Esh, exhausted by the night's vigil, dozed off, her head falling limply onto his shoulder. He carefully took her hand in his so she wouldn't fall. But he would have taken it even if they were in the center of the platform. Their fingers intertwined on their own, easily and naturally, as if they had always known the way to each other. He didn't look at her, continuing to watch as the starlight spread across the rooftops, and it suddenly seemed to him that he was seeing his native city for the first time.

  "Love..." Esh whispered through her drowsiness. "It has no formulas..."

  "And that's a good thing," Ortahn replied.

  The moment was so quiet and full that even the aether around them, it seemed, began to weave itself into a complex, arching pattern and took on a light pink hue, unconsciously submitting to his will.

  "You know," Esh murmured, still fighting sleep. "I like that you're so... steady."

  Ortahn smiled almost imperceptibly, feeling Esh's warmth, and squeezed her fingers tighter.

  "And I like that you're a variable constant."