Code. Part Three. Chapter Two

The private jet the Russians had sent was a silver ghost, a scalpel slicing through the sick, faded sky.

Inside, a sterile silence reigned, broken only by the steady drone of the engines — the final lullaby of a dying technology. Ayumi stared out the window at the Istanbul they were leaving below.

The city was drowning in twilight. But this was no ordinary dusk. The lights that should have been scattered across the hills like precious gems failed to ignite. They were… burning out, one after another, as if someone were switching them off manually, weary of the endless hustle. Like embers in a dying bonfire. Occasionally, they would flare up for a moment with an unnaturally bright, feverish intensity, only to extinguish, leaving black, dead voids across the body of the city. She watched the metropolis’s agony the way a physician monitors the encephalogram of a dying brain, where bursts of activity grow increasingly rare until they are replaced by a flat line.

The curious miracle of a decaying world was that its systems died first. At the airport, no one asked questions. The border guard looked at her passport, but not at it. His eyes were vacant. He stamped it with a mechanical, rehearsed motion — an automaton still executing its program, oblivious to the fact that the factory had long since closed. Bureaucracy, that great ritual of order, had dissolved into a meaningless dance of shadows.

Zhukovsky Airport greeted her with silence, like a hollow , echoing concrete mausoleum devoid of announcements, bustle, or people. There was only her, and a single figure standing by the exit. Lyosha.

He looked older. Not by days, but by centuries. His face bore the same frozen, gray fatigue that now masked the entire world.

“You made it,” he said, and it sounded less like a statement of fact and more like astonishment that physical transit through space was still possible.

They walked to the car in silence. The quiet between them hung as dense as that Irish fog. Once inside the cabin, Ayumi broke it. She had to say it — not to justify herself, but to establish the baseline parameters.

“You wanted simple code,” she said, staring straight ahead. Her voice was as flat as a system error log. “I optimized it. I deleted a bulky, redundant module that I deemed to be junk. It appears there was a miscalculation.”

Lyosha slowly turned his head toward her. There was neither anger nor reproach in his eyes. Only a bottomless void.

“Forget it,” he said. “Guilt is a currency that has lost all value. It doesn’t matter now. For the past three days, you are the only person outside of this city I’ve managed to reach.”

“And Vasya?”

“He went north. To his parents in Arkhangelsk. Said if the world is ending, he wants to see white snow. The real stuff. His signal cut out two days ago.”

He stared out the window at the bleak, featureless landscape of the Moscow suburbs, like an old theatrical set someone had forgotten to dismantle after the final curtain.

“Martial law has been declared in Moscow. It’s useless. Soldiers vanish right from the checkpoints, leaving nothing behind but their rifles propped against the barriers. People step out to buy bread and never come back. This isn’t even chaos. Chaos implies things are happening. Here… here things just cease to be.”

He reached into his inside pocket and pulled out a sheet of paper folded into quarters.

“I found him. The ex-husband of Polina Antipova — your author’s granddaughter. Here’s the address. My driver will take you there.”

Ayumi took the paper. It felt real. Rough. Material. A final artifact from a world that could still be touched.

“And you?” she asked.

Lyosha gave a wry smirk. The smile didn’t reach his eyes.

“Don’t worry about me. I’m just… closing out accounts.”

He stepped out of the car without saying goodbye, his figure dissolving into the gray morning haze as though he had never existed at all. Ayumi was left alone in the silence of the luxury vehicle as it carried her into the heart of the labyrinth — to Balashikha, toward the last ghost of a bygone era.

Part Three. Chapter Three →
← Code\Coda
← A Road of a Thousand Years
← Paths
← The River
← The Observer Effect
← The Battle of Bun’ei