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Helix 25 — The Captain’s Awakening

The beacon’s pulse cut through the void like a sharpened arrowhead of ancient memory.

Far from Merdhyn’s remote island refuge, deep within the Hold’s bowels of Helix 25, something—someone—stirred.

Inside an unlisted cryo-chamber, the frozen stasis cracked. Veins of light slithered across the pod’s surface like Northern lights dancing on an old age screensaver. Systems whirred, data blipped and streamed in strings of unknown characters. The ship, Synthia, whispered in its infinite omniscience, but the moment was already beyond her control.

A breath. A slow, drawn-out breath.

The cryo-pod released its lock with a soft hiss, and through the dispersing mist, Veranassessee stepped forward— awakened.

She blinked once, twice, as her senses rushed back with the sudden sense of gravity’s return. It was not the disorienting shock of the newly thawed. No—this was a return long overdue. Her mind, trained to absorb and adapt, locked onto the now, cataloging every change, every discrepancy as her mind had remained awake during the whole session —equipoise and open, as a true master of her senses she was.

She was older than when she had first stepped inside. Older, but not old. Age, after all, was a trick of perception, and if anyone had mastered perception, it was her.

But now, crises called. Plural indeed. And she, once more, was called to carry out her divine duty, with skills forged in Earthly battles with mad scientists, genetically modified spiders bent on world domination, and otherworldly crystal skulls thiefs. That was far in her past. Since then, she’d used her skills in the private sector, climbing the ranks as her efficient cold-as-steel talents were recognized at every step. She was the true Captain. She had earned it. That was how Victor Holt fell in love. She hated that people could think it was depotism that gave her the title. If anything, she helped make Victor the man he was.

The ship thrummed beneath her bare feet. A subtle shift in the atmosphere. Something had changed since she last walked these halls, something was off. The ship’s course? Its command structure?

And, most importantly—
Who had sent the signal?

Ellis Marlowe Sr. had moved swiftly for a man his age. It wasn’t that he feared the unknown. It wasn’t even the mystery of the murder that pushed him forward. It was something deeper, more personal.

The moment the solar flare alert had passed, whispers had spread—faint, half-muttered rumors that the Restricted Cryo-Chambers had been breached.

By the time he reached it, the pod was already empty.

The remnants of thawing frost still clung to the edges of the chamber. A faint imprint of a body, long at rest, now gone.

He swore under his breath, then turned to the ship’s log panel,  reaching for a battered postcard. Scribbled on it were cheatcodes. His hands moved with a careful expertise of someone who had spent too many years filing things that others had forgotten. A postman he was, and registers he knew well.

Access Denied.

That wasn’t right. The codes should have given Ellis clearance for everything.

He scowled, adjusting his glasses. It was always the same names, always the same people tied to these inexplicable gaps in knowledge.

The Holts. The Forgelots. The Marlowes.
And now, an unlisted cryopod with no official records.

Ellis exhaled slowly.

She was back. And with her, more history with this ship, like pieces of old broken potteries in an old dig would be unearthed.

He turned, already making his way toward the Murder Board.

Evie needed to see this.

The corridor stretched out before her, familiar in its dimensions yet strange in its silence. She had managed to switch the awkward hospital gown to a non-descript uniform that was hanging in the Hold.

How long have I been gone?

She exhaled. Irrelevant.

Her body moved with the precise economy of someone whose training never dulled. Her every motion were simple yet calculated, and her every breath controlled.

Unlike in the crypod, her mind started to bubbled with long forgotten emotions. It flickered over past decisions, past betrayals.

Victor Holt.

The name of her ex-husband settled into her consciousness. Once her greatest ally, then her most carefully avoided adversary.

And now?

Veranassessee smiled, stretching her limbs as though shrugging off the stiffness of years.

Outside, strange cries and howling in the corridors sounded like a mess was in progress. Who was in charge now? They were clearly doing a shit job.

Now, it was time to reclaim her ship.

She had questions.
And someone had better start providing answers.

Klyutch Base – an Unknown Signal

The flickering green light on the old console pulsed like a heartbeat.

Orrin Holt leaned forward, tapping the screen. A faint signal had appeared on their outdated long-range scanners—coming from the coastline near the Black Sea. He exchanged a glance with Commander Koval, the no-nonsense leader of Klyutch Base.

“That can’t be right,” muttered Janos Varga, Solara’s husband who was managing the coms’ beside him. “We haven’t picked up anything out of the coast in years.”

Koval grunted like an irate bear, then exhaled sharply. “It’s not our priority. We already lost track of the fools we were following at the border. Let them go. If they went south, they’ve got bigger problems.”

Outside, a distant roar sliced through the cold dusk—a deep, guttural sound that rattled the reinforced windows of the command room.

Orrin didn’t flinch. He’d heard it before.

It was the unmistakable cry of a pack of sanglions— лев-кабан lev-kaban as the locals called the monstrous mutated beasts, wild vicious boars as ferocious as rabid lions that roamed Hungary’s wilds— and they were hunting. If the escapees had made their way there, they were as good as dead.

“Can’t waste the fuel chasing ghosts,” Koval grunted.

But Orrin was still watching the blip on the screen. That signal had no right to be there, nothing was left in this region for years.

“Sir,” he said slowly, “I don’t think this is just another lost survivor. This frequency—it’s old. Military-grade. And repeating. Someone wants to be found.”

A beat of silence. Then Koval straightened.

“You better be right Holt. Everyone, gear up.”

Merdhyn – Lazurne Coastal Island — The Signal Tossed into Space

Merdhyn Winstrom wiped the sweat from his brow, his fingers still trembling from the final connection. He’d made a ramshackle workshop out of a crumbling fishing shack on the deserted islet near Lazurne. He wasn’t one to pay too much notice to the mess or anythings so pedestrian —even as the smell of rusted metal and stale rations had started to overpower the one of sea salt and fish guts.

The beacon’s old circuitry had been a nightmare, but the moment the final wire sparked to life, he had known that the old tech had awoken: it worked.

The moment it worked, for the first time in decades, the ancient transponder from the crashed Helix 57 lifeboat had sent a signal into the void.

If someone was still out there, something was bound to hear it… it was a matter of time, but he had the intuition that he may even get an answer back.

Tuppence, the chatty rat had returned on his shoulder to nestle in the folds of his makeshift keffieh, but squeaked in protest as the old man let out a half-crazed, victorious laugh.

“Oh, don’t give me that look, you miserable blighter. We just opened the bloody door.”

Beyond the broken window, the coastline stretched into the grey horizon. But now… he wasn’t alone.

A sharp, rhythmic thud-thud-thud in the distance.

Helicopters.

He stepped outside, the biting wind lashing at his face, and watched the dark shapes appear on the horizon—figures moving through the low mist.

Armed. Military-like.

The men from the nearby Klyutch Base had found him.

Merdhyn grinned, utterly unfazed by their weapons or the silent threat in their stance. He lifted his trembling, grease-stained hands and pointed back toward the wreckage of Helix 57 behind him.

“Well then,” he called, voice almost cheerful, “reckon you lot might have the spare parts I need.”

The soldiers hesitated. Their weapons didn’t lower.

Merdhyn, however, was already walking toward them, rambling as if they’d asked him the most natural of questions.

“See, it’s been a right nightmare. Power couplings were fried. Comms were dead. And don’t get me started on the damn heat regulators. But you lot? You might just be the final missing piece.”

Commander Koval stepped forward, assessing the grizzled old man with the gleam of a genuine mad genius in his eyes.

Orrin Holt, however, wasn’t looking at the wreck.

His eyes were on the beacon.

It was still pulsing, but its pulse had changed — something had been answering back.

Helix 25 – Gentle Utopia at Upper Decks

The Upper Decks of Helix 25 were a marvel of well-designed choreography and engineered tranquility. Life here was made effortless, thanks to an artful curation of everyday problems. Climate control ensured the air was always crisp, with just enough variation to keep the body alert, while maintaining a perfect balance of warm and cool, hygrometry, with no crazy seasons or climate change upheaval to disrupt the monotony. Food dispensers served gourmet meals for every individual preferences —decadent feasts perfectly prepared at the push of a button. The Helix cruise starships were designed for leisure, an eternity of comfort — and it had succeeded.

For the average resident, the days blended into one another in an animated swirl of hobbyist pursuits. There were the Arboretum Philosophers, who debated meaningfully over the purpose of existence while sipping floral-infused teas. There were the Artisans, who crafted digital masterpieces that vanished into the ship’s archives as soon as they were complete. There were the Virtual Adventurers, who lived entire lifetimes in fully immersive life-like simulations, all while reclining on plush lounges, connected to their brain chips courtesy of Muck Industries.

And then, there were Sharon, Gloria, and Mavis.

Three old ladies who, by all accounts, should have spent their days knitting and reminiscing about their youth, but instead had taken it upon themselves to make Helix 25 a little more interesting.

“Another marvelous day, ladies,” Sharon declared as she strolled along the gilded walkway of the Grand Atrium, a cavernous space filled with floating lounges and soft ambient music. The ceiling was a perfect replica of a sky—complete with drifting, lazy clouds and the occasional simulated flock of birds. Enough to make you almost forget you were in a closed fully-controlled environment.

Mavis sighed, adjusting her gaudy, glittering shawl. “It’s too marvelous, if you ask me. Bit samey, innit? Not even a good scandal to shake things up.”

Gloria scoffed. “Pah! That’s ‘cause we ain’t lookin’ hard enough. Did you hear about that dreadful business down in the Granary? Dried ‘im up like an apricot, they did. Disgustin’.”

“Dreadful,” Sharon agreed solemnly. “And not a single murder for decades, you know. We were overdue.”

Mavis clutched her pearls. “You make it sound like a good thing.”

Gloria waved a dismissive hand. “I’m just sayin’, bit of drama keeps people from losing their minds. No offense, but how many decades of spa treatments can a person endure before they go barmy?”

They passed a Wellness Lounge, where a row of residents were floating in Zero-G Hydrotherapy Pods, their faces aglow with Rejuvenex™ Anti-Aging Serum. Others lounged under mild UV therapy lamps, soaking up synthetic vitamin D while attendants rubbed nutrient-rich oils into their wrinkle-free skin.

Mavis peered at them. “Y’know, I swear some of ‘em are the same age as when we boarded.”

Gloria sniffed. “Not the same, Mavis. Just better preserved.”

Sharon tapped her lips, thoughtful. “I always wondered why we don’t have crime ‘ere. I mean, back on Earth, it were all fights, robbery, someone goin’ absolutely mental over a parking space—”

Gloria nodded. “It’s ‘cause we ain’t got money, Sha. No money, no stress, see? Everyone gets what they need.”

“Needs? Glo, love, people here have twelve-course meals and private VR vacations to Ancient Rome! I don’t reckon that counts as ‘needs’.”

“Well, it ain’t money, exactly,” Mavis pondered, “but we still ‘ave credits, don’t we?”

They fell into deep philosophical debates —or to say, their version of it.

Currency still existed aboard Helix 25, in a way. Each resident had a personal wealth balance, a digital measure of their social contributions—creative works, mentorship, scientific discovery, or participation in ship maintenance (for those who actually enjoyed labor, an absurd notion to most Upper Deckers). It wasn’t about survival, not like on the Lower Decks or the Hold, but about status. The wealthiest weren’t necessarily the smartest or the strongest, but rather those who best entertained or enriched the community.

Gloria finally waved her hand dismissively. “Point is, they keep us comfortable so we don’t start thinkin’ about things too much. Keep us occupied. Like a ship-sized cruise, but forever.”

Mavis wrinkled her nose. “A bit sinister, when you put it like that.”

“Well, I didn’t say it were sinister, I just said it were clever.” Gloria sniffed. “Anyway, we ain’t the ones who need entertainin’, are we? We’ve got a mystery on our hands.”

Sharon clapped excitedly. “Ooooh yes! A real mystery! Ain’t it thrillin’?”

“A proper one,” Gloria agreed. “With dead bodies an’ secrets an’—”

“—murder,” Mavis finished, breathless.

The three of them sighed in unison, delighted at the prospect.

They continued their stroll past the Grand Casino & Theatre, where a live orchestral simulation played for a well-dressed audience. Past the Astronomer’s Lounge, where youngster were taught to chart the stars that Helix 25 would never reach. Past the Crystal Arcade, where another group of youth of the ship enjoyed their free time on holographic duels and tactical board games.

So much entertainment. So much luxury.

So much designed distraction.

Gloria stopped suddenly, narrowing her eyes. “You ever wonder why we ain’t heard from the Captain in years?”

Sharon and Mavis stopped.

A hush fell over them.

Mavis frowned. “I thought you said the Captain were an idea, not a person.”

“Well, maybe. But if that’s true, who’s actually runnin’ the show?” Gloria folded her arms.

They glanced around, as if expecting an answer from the glowing Synthia panels embedded in every wall.

For the first time in a long while, they felt watched.

“…Maybe we oughta be careful,” Sharon muttered.

Mavis shivered. “Oh, Glo. What ‘ave you gotten us into this time?”

Gloria straightened her collar. “Dunno yet, love. But ain’t it excitin’?”

“With all the excitment, I almost forgot to tell you about that absolutely ghastly business,” Gloria declared, moments later, at the Moonchies’ Café, swirling her lavender-infused tea. “Watched a documentary this morning. About man-eating lions of Njombe.”

Sharon gasped, clutching her pearls. “Man eating lions?!”

Mavis blinked. “Wait. Man-eating lions, or man eating lions?”

There was a pause.

Gloria narrowed her eyes. “Mavis, why in the name of clotted cream would I be watchin’ a man eating lions?”

Mavis shrugged. “Well, I dunno, do I? Maybe he ran out of elephants.”

Sharon nodded sagely. “Yes, happens all the time in those travel shows.”

Gloria exhaled through her nose. “It’s not a travel show, Sha. And it’s not fiction.”

Mavis scoffed. “You sure? Sounds ridiculous.”

“Not as ridiculous as a man sittin’ down to a plate of roast lion chops,” Gloria shot back.

Mavis tilted her head. “Maybe it’s in a recipe book?”

Gloria slammed her teacup down. “I give up. I absolutely give up.”

Sharon patted her hand. “There, there, Glo. You can always watch somethin’ lighter tomorrow. Maybe a nice documentary about man-eating otters.”

Mavis grinned. “Or man eating otters.”

Gloria inhaled deeply, resisting the urge to upend her tea.

This, this was why Helix 25 had never known war.

No one had the time.

Liz had, in her esteemed opinion, finally cracked the next great literary masterpiece.

It had everything—forbidden romance, ancient mysteries, a dash of gratuitous betrayal, and a protagonist with just the right amount of brooding introspection to make him irresistible to at least two stunningly beautiful, completely unnecessary love interests.

And, of course, there was a ghost. She would have preferred a mummy but it had been edited out one morning she woke up drooling on her work with little recollection of the night.

Unfortunately, none of this mattered because Godfrey, her ever-exasperated editor, was staring at her manuscript with the same enthusiasm he reserved for peanut shells stuck in his teeth.

“This—” he hesitated, massaging his temples, “—this is supposed to be about the Crusades.”

Liz beamed. “It is! Historical and spicy. I expect an award.”

Godfrey set down the pages and reached for his ever-dwindling bowl of peanuts. “Liz, for the love of all that is holy, why is the Templar knight taking off his armor every other page?”

Liz gasped in indignation. “You wouldn’t understand, Godfrey. It’s symbolic. A shedding of the past! A rebirth of the soul!” She made an exaggerated sweeping motion, nearly knocking over her champagne flute.

“Symbolic,” Godfrey repeated flatly, chewing another peanut. “He’s shirtless on page three, in a monastery.”

Finnley, who had been dusting aggressively, made a sharp sniff. “Disgraceful.”

Liz ignored her. “Oh please, Godfrey. You have no vision. Readers love a little intimacy in their historical fiction.”

“The priest,” Godfrey said, voice rising, “is supposed to be celibate. You explicitly wrote that his vow was unbreakable.”

Liz waved a dismissive hand. “Oh, I solved that. He forgets about it momentarily.”

Godfrey choked on a peanut. Finnley paused mid-dust, staring at Liz in horror.

Roberto, who had been watering the hydrangeas outside the window, suddenly leaned in. “Did I hear something about a forgetful priest?”

“Not now, Roberto,” Liz said sharply.

Finnley folded her arms. “And how, pray tell, does one simply forget their sacred vows?”

Liz huffed. “The same way one forgets to clean behind the grandfather clock, I imagine.”

Finnley turned an alarming shade of purple.

Godfrey was still in disbelief. “And you’re telling me,” he said, flipping through the pages in growing horror, “that this man, Brother Edric, the holy warrior, somehow manages to fall in love with—who is this—” he squinted, “—Laetitia von Somethingorother?”

Liz beamed. “Ah, yes. Laetitia! Mysterious, tragic, effortlessly seductive—”

“She’s literally the most obvious spy I’ve ever read,” Godfrey groaned, rubbing his face.

“She is not! She is enigmatic.”

“She has a knife hidden in every scene.”

“A woman should be prepared.”

Godfrey took a deep breath and picked up another sheet. “Oh fantastic. There’s a secret baby now.”

Liz nodded sagely. “Yes. I felt that revelation.”

Finnley snorted. “Roberto also felt something last week, and it turned out to be food poisoning.”

Roberto, still hovering at the window, nodded solemnly. “It was quite moving.”

Godfrey set the papers down in defeat. “Liz. Please. I’m begging you. Just one novel—just one—where the historical accuracy lasts at least until page ten.”

Liz tapped her chin. “You might have a point.”

Godfrey perked up.

Liz snapped her fingers. “I should move the shirtless scene to page two.”

Godfrey’s head hit the table.

Roberto clapped enthusiastically. “Genius! I shall fetch celebratory figs!”

Finnley sighed dramatically, threw down her duster, and walked out of the room muttering about professional disgrace.

Liz grinned, completely unfazed. “You know, Godfrey, I really don’t think you appreciate my artistic sacrifices.”

Godfrey, face still buried in his arms, groaned, “Liz, I think Brother Edric’s celibacy lasted longer than my patience.”

Liz threw a hand to her forehead theatrically. “Then it was simply not meant to be.”

Roberto reappeared, beaming. “I found the figs.”

Godfrey reached for another peanut.

He was going to need a lot more of them.

Earth, Black Sea Coastal Island near Lazurne, Ukraine – The Tinkerer

Cornishman Merdhyn Winstrom had grown accustomed to the silence.

It wasn’t the kind of silence one found in an empty room or a quiet night in Cornwall, but the profound, devouring kind—the silence of a world were life as we knew it had disappeared. A world where its people had moved on without him.

The Black Sea stretched before him, vast and unknowable, still as a dark mirror reflecting a sky that had long since stopped making promises. He stood on the highest point of the islet, atop a jagged rock behind which stood in contrast to the smooth metal of the wreckage.

His wreckage.

That’s how he saw it, maybe the last man standing on Earth.

It had been two years since he stumbled upon the remains of Helix 57 shuttle —or what was left of it. Of all the Helixes cruise ships that were lost, the ones closest to Earth during the Calamity had known the most activity —people trying to leave and escape Earth, while at the same time people in the skies struggling to come back to loved ones. Most of the orbital shuttles didn’t make it during the chaos, and those who did were soon lost to space’s infinity, or Earth’s last embrace.

This shuttle should have been able to land a few hundred people to safety —Merdhyn couldn’t find much left inside when he’d discovered it, survivors would have been long dispersed looking for food networks and any possible civilisation remnants near the cities. It was left here, a gutted-out orbital shuttle, fractured against the rocky coast, its metal frame corroded by salt air, its systems dead. The beauty of mechanics was that dead wasn’t the same as useless.

And Merdhyn never saw anything as useless.

With slow, methodical care, he adjusted the small receiver strapped to his wrist—a makeshift contraption built from salvaged components, scavenged antennae, and the remains of an old Soviet radio. He tapped the device twice. The static fizzled, cracked. Nothing.

“Still deaf,” he muttered.

Perched at his shoulder, Tuppence chattered at him, a stuborn rodent that attached himself and that Merdhyn had adopted months ago as he was scouting the area. He reached his pocket and gave it a scrap of food off a stale biscuit still wrapped in the shiny foil.

Merdhyn exhaled, rolling his shoulders. He was getting too old for this. Too many years alone, too many hours hunched over corroded circuits, trying to squeeze life from what had already died.

But the shuttle wasn’t dead. After his first check, he was quite sure. Now it was time to get to work.

He stepped inside, ducking beneath an exposed beam, brushing past wiring that had long since lost its insulation. The stale scent of metal and old circuitry greeted him. The interior was a skeletal mess—panels missing, control consoles shattered, displays reduced to nothing but flickering ghosts of their former selves.

Still, he had power.

Not much. Just enough to light a few panels, enough to make him think he wasn’t mad for trying.

As it happened, Merdhyn had a plan: a ridiculous, impossible, brilliant plan.

He would fix it.

The whole thing if he could, but if anything. It would certainly take him months before the shuttle from Helix 57 could go anywhere— that is, in one piece. He could surely start to repair the comms, get a signal out, get something moving, then maybe—just maybe—he could find out if there was anything left out there.

Anything that wasn’t just sea and sky and ghosts.

He ran his fingers along the edge of the console, feeling the warped metal. The ship had crashed hard. It shouldn’t have made it down in one piece, but something had slowed it. Some system had tried to function, even in its dying moments.

That meant something was still alive.

He just had to wake it up.

Tuppence chittered, scurrying onto his shoulder.

Merdhyn chuckled. “Aye, I know. One of these days, I’ll start talking to people instead of rats.”

Tuppence flicked her tail.

He pulled out a battered datapad—one of his few working relics—and tapped the screen. The interface stuttered, but held. He navigated to his schematics, his notes, his carefully built plans.

The transponder array.

If he could get it working, even partially, he might be able to listen.

To hear something—anything—on the waves beyond this rock.

A voice. A signal. A trace of the world that had forgotten him.

Merdhyn exhaled. “Let’s see if we can get you talking again, eh?”

He adjusted his grip, tools clinking at his belt, and got to work.

Epilogue & Prologue

Paris, November 2029 – The Fifth Note Resounds

Tabitha sat by the window at the Sarah Bernhardt Café, letting the murmur of conversations and the occasional purring of the espresso machine settle around her. It was one of the few cafés left in the city where time still moved at a human pace. She stirred her cup absentmindedly. Paris was still Paris, but the world outside had changed in ways her mother’s generation still struggled to grasp.

It wasn’t just the ever-presence of automation and AI making themselves known in subtle ways—screens adjusting to glances, the quiet surveillance woven into everyday life. It wasn’t just the climate shifts, the aircon turned to cold in the midst of November, the summers unpredictable, the air thick with contradictions of progress and collapse of civilization across the Atlantic.

The certainty of impermanence was what defined her generation. BANI world they used to say—Brittle, Anxious, Nonlinear, Incomprehensible. A cold fact: impossible to grasp and impossible to fight. Unlike her mother and her friends, who had spent their lives tethered to a world that no longer existed, she had never known certainty. She was born in the flux.

And yet, this café remained. One of the last to resist full automation, where a human still brought you coffee, where the brass bell above the door still rang, where things still unfolded at a human pace.

The bell above the door rang—the fifth note, as her mother had called it once.

She had never been here before, not in any way that mattered. Yet, she had heard the story. The unlikely reunion five years ago. The night that moved new projects in motion for her mother and her friends.

Tabitha’s fingers traced the worn edges of the notebook in front of her—Lucien’s, then Amei’s, then Darius’s. Pieces of a life written by many hands.

“Some things don’t work the first time. But sometimes, in the ruins of what failed, something else sprouts and takes root.”

And that was what had happened.

The shared housing project they had once dreamed of hadn’t survived—not in its original form. But through their rekindled bond, they had started something else.

 

True Stories of How It Was.

 

It had begun as a quiet defiance—a way to preserve real, human stories in an age of synthetic, permanent ephemerality and ephemeral impermanence, constantly changing memory. They were living in a world where AI’s fabricated histories had overwhelmed all the channels of information, where the past was constantly rewritten, altered, repackaged. Authenticity had become a rare currency.

As she graduated in anthropology few years back, she’d wondered about the validity of history —it was, after all, a construct. The same could be said for literature, art, even science. All of them constructs of the human mind, tenuous grasp of the infinite truth, but once, they used to evolve at such a slow pace that they felt solid, reliable. Ultimately their group was not looking for ultimate truth, that would be arrogant and probably ignorant. Authenticity was what they were looking for. And with it, connections, love, genuineness —unquantifiables by means of science and yet, true and precious beyond measure.

Lucien had first suggested it, tracing the idea from his own frustrations—the way art had become a loop of generated iterations, the human touch increasingly erased. He was in a better place since Matteo had helped him settle his score with Renard and, free of influence, he had found confidence in developing of his own art.

Amei —her mother—, had changed in a way Tabitha couldn’t quite define. Her restlessness had quieted, not through settling down but through accepting impermanence as something other than loss. She had started writing again—not as a career, not to publish, but to preserve stories that had no place in a digitized world. Her quiet strength had always been in preserving connections, and she knew they had to move quickly before real history faded beneath layers of fabricated recollections.

Darius, once skeptical, saw its weight—he had spent years avoiding roots, only to realize that stories were the only thing that made places matter. He was somewhere in Morocco now, leading a sustainable design project, bridging cultures rather than simply passing through them.

Elara had left science. Or at least, science as she had known it. The calculations, the certainty, the constraints of academia, with no escape from the automated “enhanced” digital helpers. Her obsession and curiosities had found attract in something more human, more chaotic. She had thrown herself into reviving old knowledge, forgotten architectures, regenerative landscapes.

And Matteo—Matteo had grounded it.

The notebook read: Matteo wasn’t a ghost from our past. He was the missing note, the one we didn’t know we needed. And because of him, we stopped looking backward. We started building something else.

For so long, Matteo had been a ghost of sorts, by his own account, lingering at the edges of their story, the missing note in their unfinished chord. But now, he was fully part of it. His mother had passed, her past history unraveling in ways he had never expected, branching new connections even now. And though he had lost something in that, he had also found something else. Juliette. Or maybe not. The story wasn’t finished.

Tabitha turned the page.

“We were not historians, not preservationists, not even archivists. But we have lived. And as it turned out, that was enough.”

They had begun collecting stories through their networks—not legends, not myths, but true accounts of how it was, from people who still remembered.

A grandfather’s voice recording of a train ride to a city that no longer exists.
Handwritten recipes annotated by generations of hands, each adding something new.
A letter from a protest in 2027, detailing a movement that the history books had since erased.
An old woman’s story of her first love, spoken in a dialect that AI could not translate properly.

It had grown in ways they hadn’t expected. People began sending them recordings, letters, transcripts, photos —handwritten scraps of fading ink. Some were anonymous, others carefully curated with full names and details, like makeshift ramparts against the tide of time.

At first, few had noticed. It was never the goal to make it worlwide movement. But little by little, strange things happened, and more began to listen.

There was something undeniably powerful about genuine human memory when it was raw and unfiltered, when it carried unpolished, raw weight of experience, untouched by apologetic watered down adornments and out-of-place generative hallucinations.

Now, there were exhibitions, readings, archives—entire underground movements dedicated to preserving pre-synthetic history. Their project had become something rare, valuable, almost sacred.

And yet, here in the café, none of that felt urgent.

Tabitha looked up as the server approached. Not Matteo, but someone new.

“Another espresso?”

She hesitated, then nodded. “Yes. And a glass of water, please.”

She glanced at the counter, where Matteo was leaning, speaking to someone, laughing. He had changed, too. No longer just an observer, no longer just the quiet figure who knew too much. Now, he belonged here.

A bell rang softly as the door swung open again.

Tabitha smiled to herself. The fifth note always sounded, in the end.

She turned back to the notebook, the city moving around her, the story still unfolding in more directions than one.

Elara — Nov 2021: The End of Genealogix

The numbers on the screen were almost comical in their smallness. Elara stared at the royalty statement, her lips pressed into a tight line as the cursor blinked on the final transaction: £12.37, marked Genealogix Royalty Deposit. Below it, the stark words: Final Payout.

She leaned back in her chair, pushing her glasses up onto her forehead, and sighed. The end wasn’t a surprise. For years, she’d known her genetic algorithm would be replaced by something faster, smarter, and infinitely more marketable. The AI companies had come, sweeping up data and patents like vultures at a sky burial. Genealogix, her improbable golden goose, had simply been outpaced.

Still, staring at the zero balance in the account felt oddly final, as if a door had quietly closed on a chapter of her life. She glanced toward the window, where the Tuscan hills rolled gently under the late afternoon sun. Most of the renovation work on the farmhouse had been finished, albeit slowly, over the years. There was no urgent financial burden, but the thought of her remaining savings made her stomach tighten all the same.

Elara had stumbled into success with Genealogix, though not without effort. It was one of her many patents—most of them quirky solutions to problems nobody else seemed interested in solving. A self-healing chalkboard coating? Useless. A way to chart audio waveforms onto three-dimensional paper models? Intriguing but commercially barren. Genealogix had been an afterthought at the time, something she tinkered with while traveling through Europe on a teaching fellowship.

When the royalties started rolling in unexpectedly, it had felt like a cosmic joke. “Finally,” she’d muttered to herself as she cashed her first sizeable check, “they like something useless.”

The freedom that money brought was a relief. It allowed her to drop the short-term contracts that tethered her to institutions and pursue science on her own terms. No rigid conventions, no endless grant applications, no academic politics. She’d call it “investigation,” free from the dogma that so often suffocated creativity.

And yet, she was no fool. She’d known Genealogix was a fluke, its lifespan limited.

She clicked away from the bank statement and opened her browser, absently scrolling through her bookmarked social accounts. An old post from Lucien caught her eye—a photograph of a half-finished painting, the colors dark and chaotic. His caption read: “When the labyrinth swallows the light.”

Her brow furrowed. She’d been quietly following Lucien for years, watching his work evolve through fits and starts. It was obvious he was struggling. This post was old, maybe Lucian had stopped updating after the pandemic. She’d sent anonymous payments to buy his paintings more than once, under names that would mean nothing to him —”Darlara Ameilikian” was a bit on the nose, but unlike Amei, Elara loved a good wink.

Her mind wandered to Darius, and her suggesting he looked into 1-euro housing schemes available in Italy. It had been during a long phone call, back when she was scouting options for herself. They still had tense exchanges, and he was smart to avoid any mention of his odd friends, otherwise she’d had hung the phone faster than a mouse chased by a pack of dogs. “You’d thrive in something like that,” she’d told him. “Build it with your own hands. Make it something meaningful.” He’d laughed but had sounded intrigued. She wondered if he’d ever followed up on it.

As for Amei—Elara had sent her a birthday gift earlier that year, a rare fabric she’d stumbled across in a tiny local shop. Amei hadn’t known it was from her, of course. That was Elara’s way. She preferred to keep her gestures quiet, almost random —it was best that way, she was rubbish at remembering the small stuff that mattered so much to people, she wasn’t even sure of Amei’s birthday to be honest; so she preferred to scatter little nods like seeds to the wind.

Her eyes drifted to a framed ticket stub on the bookshelf, a relic from 2007: Eliane Radigue — Naldjorlak II, Aarau Festival (Switzerland). Funny how the most unlikely event had made them into a group of friends. That concert had been a weird and improbable anchor point in their lives, a moment of serendipity that had drawn them toward something more than their own parts.

By that time, they were already good friends with Amei, and she’d agreed to join her to discover the music, although she could tell it was more for the strange appeal of something almost alien in experience, than for the hurdles of travel and logistics. But Elara’s enthusiasm and devil-may-care had won her over, and they were here.

Radigue’s strange sound sculptures, had rippled through the darkened festival scene, wavering and hauntingly delicate, and at the same time slow and deliberate, leading them towards an inevitability. Elara had been mesmerized, sitting alone near the back as Amei had gone for refreshments, when a stranger beside her had leaned over to ask, “What’s that sound? A bell? Or a drone?”

It was Lucien. Their conversation had lasted through the intermission soon joined by Amei, and spilled into a café afterward, where Darius had eventually joined them. They’d formed a bond that night, one that felt strange and tenuous at the time but proved to be resilient, even as the years pulled them apart.

Elara closed the laptop, resting her hand on its warm surface for a moment before standing. She walked to the window, the sun dipping lower over the horizon, casting long shadows across the vineyard. The farmhouse had been a gamble, a piece of the future she wasn’t entirely sure she believed in when she’d bought it. But now, as the light shifted and the hills glowed gold, she felt a quiet satisfaction.

The patent was gone, the money would fade, but she still had this. And perhaps, that was enough.

Matteo — Autumn 2023

The Jardin des Plantes park was quiet, the kind of quiet that settled after a brisk autumn rain. Matteo sat on a weathered wooden bench, watching a golden retriever chase the last of the fallen leaves tumbling across the gravel path. The damp air was carrying scents of the earth welcoming a retreat inside, and taking the time to be alone with his thoughts was something he’d missed.

His phone buzzed with a notification—a news update about the latest film adaptation from a Liz Tattler classic fiction. The name made him smile faintly. Juliette had loved Tattler’s novels, their whimsical characters, and the unflinching and unapologetic observations about life’s quiet mysteries and the unexpected rants about the virtues of cleaning and dustsceawung that propelled the word in the people’s top 100 favourite in the Oxford dictionary for several years consecutively.

“They’re so full of texture,” Juliette once said as she was sprawled on the bed of their tiny Parisian flat, a battered paperback in her hands. “Like you can feel the pages breathe.”

His image of her was still vivid, they’d stayed on good terms and he would still thumb up some of her posts from time to time —but it was only small moments rather than full scenes that used to come back, fragmented pieces of memories really —her dark hair falling messily over her face, her legs crossed in a casual way.

Paris had been a playground for them. For a while, they were caught in a whirlwind of late-night conversations in smoky cafés and lazy Sunday mornings wandering the Seine. They’d spent hours in bookstores, Juliette hunting for first editions and Matteo snapping pictures of the handwritten notes tucked between the pages of used novels.

A year ago, a different park in a different city—Hyde Park, London. She was there, twirling a scarf she’d picked up in Vienna the weekend before, the bright red of it like a ribbon of fire against the soft gray skies. They had been enamored with each other and with the spontaneity of hopping trains to new cities, their weekends folding into one another like pages of a travel journal. London one week, Paris the next, Berlin after that. Each city a postcard snapshot, vibrant and fleeting.

Juliette would tease him about his fascination with the little things—how he would linger too long over a cup of coffee at a café or stop to photograph a tree in the middle of nowhere. “You’re always looking for stories,” she’d said with a laugh, tucking a stray strand of hair behind her ear. “Even when you’re not sure what they mean.”

“Stories are everywhere,” he would reply, snapping a picture of her against the backdrop of the park, her scarf billowing in the wind. She had rolled her eyes but smiled, and in that moment, he had believed her smile was the most perfect thing he’d ever seen.

The break-up came unannounced, but not fully unexpected. There were signs here and there. Her love of the endless whirlwind of life, that was a match for his way of following life’s intents for him. When sometimes life went still during winter, he would also follow, but she wouldn’t. She had insatiable love for a life filled with animation, bursts of colours, sounds. It had been easy to be with her then, her curiosity pulling him along, their shared love of stories giving their time together a weight that felt timeless. It was when Drusilla’s condition worsened, that their rhythms became untangled, no longer synching at every heartbeat. And it was fine. Matteo had made his decision then to leave Paris and bring his mother to Avignon where she could receive the care she needed. Those past two weeks that brought the inevitable conclusion of their separation had left him surprisingly content. Happy for the past moments, and hopeful for the unwritten future.

He could see clearly that Juliette needed her freedom back; and she’d agreed. Regular train rides to Avignon, the weekends spent trying to make the sparse walls of his mother’s room feel like home as she started to forget her son’s girlfriend, and sometimes even her own son.

Last they were in this park together was one of their last shared moments of innocent happiness ; It was a beautiful sunny afternoon —or was it only coloured by memories? They had been sitting in the Jardin des Plantes, sharing a crêpe. Juliette had been scrolling through her phone, stopping at an announcement about an interview with Liz Tattler airing that evening. “You should watch it,” she’d said, her tone light but distant. “Her books are about people like us—drifting, figuring it out.”

He had smiled then, nodding, though he wasn’t sure if he’d meant it. A week later, she told him she was moving back to Lille, closer to her family until she figured out her next step. “It’s not you, Matteo,” she’d said, her eyes soft but resolute. “You need to be here, for her. I need… something else.”

Now, sitting in the park a few weeks later, Matteo pulled his phone from his pocket and opened his gallery. He scrolled through the pictures until he found one from their weekend in London—a black-and-white shot of Julia standing in front of a red telephone booth, her smile sharp and her eyes already focused on the next shooting star to catch.

Julia was right, he thought. People like them—they drifted, but they also found their way, sometimes in unexpected ways. He put on his earpods, listening to the beginning of Liz Tattler’s interview.

Her distinct raspy voice brimming with a cackling energy was already engrossing. Synchy as ever, she was saying:

“Every story begins with something lost, but it’s never about the loss. It’s about what you find because of it.”

Matteo — Winter 2023: The Move

The rumble of the moving truck echoed faintly in the quiet residential street as Matteo leaned against the open door, arms crossed, waiting for the signal to load the boxes. He glanced at the crisp winter sky, a pale gray threatening snow, and then at the house behind him. Its windows were darkened by empty rooms, their once-lived-in warmth replaced by the starkness of transition. The ornate names artistically painted on the mailbox struck him somehow. Amei & Tabitha M.: his clients for the day.

The cold damp of London’s suburbia was making him long even more for the warmth of sunny days. With the past few moves he’s been managing for his company, the tipping had been generous; he could probably plan a spring break in South of France, or maybe make a more permanent move there.

The sound of the doorbell brought him back from his rêverie.

Inside the house, the faint sounds of boxes being taped and last-minute goodbyes carried through the hallways. Matteo had been part of these moves too many times to count now. People always left a little bit of themselves behind—forgotten trinkets, echoes of old conversations, or the faint imprint of a life lived. It was a rhythm he’d come to expect, and he knew his part in it: lift, carry, and disappear into the background.

Matteo straightened as the door opened and a girl that could have been in her early twenties, but looked like a teenager stepped out, bundled against the cold. She held a steaming mug in one hand and balanced a box awkwardly on her hip with the other.

“That’s the last of it,” she called over her shoulder. “Mum, are you sure you don’t want me to take the notebooks?”

“They’re fine in the car, Tabitha!” A voice—calm and steady, maybe tinged with weariness—floated from inside.

The girl named Tabitha turned to Matteo, offering the box. “This is fragile,” she said, a smile tugging at her lips. “Be nice to it.”

Matteo took the box carefully, glancing at the mug in her hand. “You’re not leaving that behind, are you?” he asked with a faint smile.

Tabitha laughed. “This? No way. That’s my lifeline. The mug stays.”

As Matteo carried the box to the truck, his eyes caught on something inside—a weathered postcard tucked haphazardly between the pages of a journal. The image on the front was striking: a swirling green fairy, dancing above a glass of absinthe. La Fée Verte was scrawled in looping letters across the top.

“Tabitha!” Her mother’s voice carried out to the driveway, and Matteo turned instinctively. She stepped out onto the porch, her scarf wrapped loosely around her neck, her breath visible in the chilly air. Matteo could see the resemblance—the same poise and humor in her gaze, though softened by something older, quieter.

“Put this somewhere, will you” she said, holding up another postcard, this one with a faded image of a winding mountain road.

Tabitha grinned, stepping forward to take it. “Thanks, Mum. That one’s special.” She tucked it into her coat pocket.

“Special how?” her mother asked lightly.

“It’s from Darius,” Tabitha said, her tone almost teasing. “… The one you never want to talk about.” she leaned teasingly. “One of his cryptic postcards —too bad I was too young to really remember him, he must have been fun to be around.”

Matteo’s ears perked at the name, though he kept his head down, settling the box in place. It wasn’t unusual to overhear snippets like this during a move, but something about the unusual name roused his curiosity.

“Why you want to keep those?” Amei asked, tilting her head.

Tabitha shrugged. “They’re kind of… a map, I guess. Of people, not places.”

Amei paused, her expression softening. “He was always good at that,” she murmured, almost to herself.

The conversation lingered in Matteo’s mind as the day went on. By the time the truck was loaded, and he’d helped arrange the last of the boxes in Amei’s new, smaller apartment, the name and the postcard had taken root.

As Matteo stacked the final piece of furniture—a worn bookshelf—against the living room wall, he noticed Amei lingering near a window, her gaze distant.

“It’s different, isn’t it?” she said suddenly, not looking at him.

“Moving?” Matteo asked, unsure if the question was for him.

“Starting over,” she clarified, her voice quieter now. “Feels smaller, even when it’s supposed to be lighter.”

Matteo didn’t reply, sensing she wasn’t looking for an answer. He stepped back, nodding politely as she thanked him and disappeared into the kitchen.

The postcard stuck in his mind for days after. Matteo had heard of absinthe before, of course—its mystique, its history—but something about the way Tabitha had called the postcard a “map of people” resonated.

By the time spring arrived, Matteo was wandering through Avignon, chasing vague curiosities and half-formed questions. When he saw Lucien crouched over his chalk labyrinth, the memory of the postcard rose unbidden.

“Do you know where I can find absinthe?” he asked, the question more instinct than intent.

Lucien’s raised eyebrow and faint smile felt like another piece clicking into place. The connections were there—threads woven in patterns he couldn’t yet see. But for the first time in months, Matteo felt he was back on the right path.

From Decay to Birth: a Map of Paths and Connections

7. Darius’s Encounter (November 2024)

Moments before the reunion with Lucien and his friends, Darius was wandering the bouquinistes along the Seine when he spotted this particular map among a stack of old prints. The design struck him immediately—the spirals, the loops, the faint shimmer of indigo against yellowed paper.

He purchased it without hesitation. As he would examine it more closely, he would notice faint marks along the edges—creases that had come from a vineyard pin, and a smudge of red dust, from Catalonia.

When the bouquiniste had mentioned that the map had come from a traveler passing through, Darius had felt a strange familiarity. It wasn’t the map itself but the echoes of its journey— quiet connections he couldn’t yet place.

 

6. Matteo’s Discovery (near Avignon, Spring 2024)

The office at the edge of the vineyard was a ruin, its beams sagging and its walls cracked. Matteo had wandered in during a quiet afternoon, drawn by the promise of shade and a moment of solitude.

His eyes scanned the room—a rusted typewriter, ledgers crumbling into dust, and a paper pinned to the wall, its edges curling with age. Matteo stepped closer, pulling the pin free and unfolding what turned out to be a map.

Its lines twisted and looped in ways that seemed deliberate yet impossible to follow. Matteo traced one path with his finger, feeling the faint grooves where the ink had sunk into the paper. Something about it unsettled him, though he couldn’t say why.

Days later, while sharing a drink with a traveler at the local inn, Matteo showed him the map.

“It’s beautiful,” the traveler said, running his hand over the faded indigo lines. “But it doesn’t belong here.”

Matteo nodded. “Take it, then. Maybe you’ll figure it out.”

The traveler left with the map that night, and Matteo returned to the vineyard, feeling lighter somehow.

 

5. From Hand to Hand (1995–2024)

By the time Matteo found it in the spring of 2024, the map had long been forgotten, its intricate lines dulled by dust and time.

2012: A vineyard owner near Avignon purchased it at an estate sale, pinning it to the wall of his office without much thought.

2001: A collector in Marseille framed it in her study, claiming it was a lost artifact of a secret cartographer society, though she later sold it when funds ran low.

1997: A scholar in Barcelona traded an old atlas for it, drawn to its artistry but unable to decipher its purpose.

The map had passed through many hands over the previous three decades and each owner puzzling over, and finally adding their own meaning to its lines.

 

4. The Artist (1995)

The mapmaker was a recluse, known only as Almadora to the handful of people who bought her work. Living in a sunlit attic in Girona, she spent her days tracing intricate patterns onto paper, claiming to chart not geography but connections.

“I don’t map what is,” she once told a curious buyer. “I map what could be.”

In 1995, Almadora began work on the labyrinthine map. She used a pale paper from Girona and indigo ink from India, layering lines that seemed to twist and spiral outward endlessly. The map wasn’t signed, nor did it bear any explanations. When it was finished, Almadora sold it to a passing merchant for a handful of coins, its journey into the world beginning quietly, without ceremony.

 

3. The Ink (1990s)

The ink came from a different path altogether. Indigo plants, or aviri, grown on Kongarapattu, were harvested, fermented, and dried into cakes of pigment. The process was ancient, perfected over centuries, and the resulting hue was so rich it seemed to vibrate with unexplored depth.

From the harbour of Pondicherry, this particular batch of indigo made its way to an artisan in Girona, who mixed it with oils and resins to create a striking ink. Its journey intersected with Amei’s much later, when remnants of the same batch were used to dye textiles she would work with as a designer. But in the mid-1990s, it served a singular purpose: to bring a recluse artist’s vision to life.

 

2. The Paper (1980)

The tree bore laughter and countless other sounds of nature and passer-by’s arguments for years, a sturdy presence, unwavering in a sea of shifting lives. Even after the farmhouse was sold, long after the sisters had grown apart, the tree remained. But time is merciless, even to the strongest roots.

By 1979, battered by storms and neglect, the great tree cracked and fell, its once-proud form reduced to timber for a nearby mill.

The tree’s journey didn’t end in the mill; it transformed. Its wood was stripped, pulped, and pressed into paper. Some sheets were coarse and rough, destined for everyday use. But a few, including one particularly smooth and pale sheet, were set aside as high-quality stock for specialized buyers.

This sheet traveled south to Catalonia, where it sat in a shop in Girona for years, its surface untouched but full of potential. By the time the artist found it in the mid-1990s, it had already begun to yellow at the edges, carrying the faint scent of age.

 

1. The Seed (1950s)

It began in a forgotten corner of Kent, where a seed took root beneath a patch of open sky. The tree grew tall and sprawling over decades, its branches a canopy for birds and children alike. By 1961, it had become the centerpiece of the small farmhouse where two young sisters, Vanessa and Elara, played beneath its shade.

“Elara, you’re too slow!” Vanessa called, her voice sharp with mock impatience. Elara, only six years old, trailed behind, clutching a wooden stick she used to scratch shapes into the dirt. “I’m making a map!” she announced, her curls bouncing as she ran to catch up.

Vanessa rolled her eyes, already halfway up the tree’s lowest branch. “You and your maps. You think you’re going somewhere?”

Sat. Nov. 30, 2024 5:55am — Matteo’s morning

Matteo’s mornings began the same way, no matter the city, no matter the season. A pot of strong coffee brewed slowly on the stove, filling his small apartment with its familiar, sense-sharpening scent. Outside, Paris was waking up, its streets already alive with the sound of delivery trucks and the murmurs of shopkeepers rolling open shutters.

He sipped his coffee by the window, gazing down at the cobblestones glistening from last night’s rain. The new brass sign above the Sarah Bernhardt Café caught the morning light, its sheen too pristine, too new. He’d started the server job there less than a week ago, stepping into a rhythm he already knew instinctively, though he wasn’t sure why.

Matteo had always been good at fitting in. Jobs like this were placeholders—ways to blend into the scenery while he waited for whatever it was that kept pulling him forward. The café had reopened just days ago after months of being closed for renovations, but to Matteo, it felt like it had always been waiting for him.

He set his coffee mug on the counter, reaching absently for the notebook he kept nearby. The act was automatic, as natural as breathing. Flipping open to a blank page, Matteo wrote down four names without hesitation:

Lucien. Elara. Darius. Amei.

He stared at the list, his pen hovering over the page. He didn’t know why he wrote it. The names had come unbidden, as though they were whispered into his ear from somewhere just beyond his reach. He ran his thumb along the edge of the page, feeling the faint indentation of his handwriting.

The strangest part wasn’t the names— it was the certainty that he’d see them that day.

Matteo glanced at the clock. He still had time before his shift. He grabbed his jacket, tucked the notebook into the inside pocket, and stepped out into the cool Parisian air.

Matteo’s feet carried him to a side street near the Seine, one he hadn’t consciously decided to visit. The narrow alley smelled of damp stone and dogs piss. Halfway down the alley, he stopped in front of a small shop he hadn’t noticed before. The sign above the door was worn, its painted letters faded: Les Reliques. The display in the window was an eclectic mix—a chessboard missing pieces, a cracked mirror, a wooden kaleidoscope—but Matteo’s attention was drawn to a brass bell sitting alone on a velvet cloth.

The door creaked as he stepped inside, the distinctive scent of freshly burnt papier d’Arménie and old dust enveloping him. A woman emerged from the back, wiry and pale, with sharp eyes that seemed to size Matteo up in an instant.

“You’ve never come inside,” she said, her voice soft but certain.

“I’ve never had a reason to,” Matteo replied, though even as he spoke, the door closed shut the outside sounds.

“Today, you might,” the woman said, stepping forward. “Looking for something specific?”

“Not exactly,” Matteo replied. His gaze shifted back to the bell, its smooth surface gleaming faintly in the dim light.

“Ah.” The shopkeeper followed his eyes and smiled faintly. “You’re drawn to it. Not uncommon.”

“What’s uncommon about a bell?”

The woman chuckled. “It’s not the bell itself. It’s what it represents. It calls attention to what already exists—patterns you might not notice otherwise.”

Matteo frowned, stepping closer. The bell was unremarkable, small enough to fit in the palm of his hand, with a simple handle and no visible markings.

“How much?”

“For you?” The shopkeeper tilted his head. “A trade.”

Matteo raised an eyebrow. “A trade for what?”

“Your time,” the woman said cryptically, before waving her hand. “But don’t worry. You’ve already paid it.”

It didn’t make sense, but then again, it didn’t need to. Matteo handed over a few coins anyway, and the woman wrapped the bell in a square of linen.

Back on the street, Matteo slipped the bell into his pocket, its weight unfamiliar but strangely comforting. The list in his notebook felt heavier now, as though connected to the bell in a way he couldn’t quite articulate.

Walking back toward the café, Matteo’s mind wandered. The names. The bell. The shopkeeper’s words about patterns. They felt like pieces of something larger, though the shape of it remained elusive.

 

The day had begun to align itself, its pieces sliding into place. Matteo stepped inside, the familiar hum of the café greeting him like an old friend. He stowed his coat, slipped the bell into his bag, and picked up a tray.

Later that day, he noticed a figure standing by the window, suitcase in hand. Lucien. Matteo didn’t know how he recognized him, but the instant he saw the man’s rain-damp curls and paint-streaked scarf, he knew.

By the time Lucien settled into his seat, Matteo was already moving toward him, notebook in hand, his practiced smile masking the faint hum of inevitability coursing through him.

He didn’t need to check the list. He knew the others would come. And when they did, he’d be ready. Or so he hoped.