Code. Prologue

She came by a road that was no longer there, descending from a mountain pass that had merged with the extinguished sky.

On the soles of her boots was a residue of moisture, like the spray from a stream that had once flowed near the village. Now, there was no water — only parched stones and ribbons of dust. Yet, with every step she took upon the ash-gray snow, droplets fell. They were not water. They were droplets of sound.

I knew: once they dried, the final silence would devour everything. So I knelt, touched a dark spot with my finger, and pressed it into the fabric of the earth, much as we once rubbed oil into flatbread.

“You know how to notice,” the stranger said.

Her voice was like tea: neither sweet nor bitter, simply warm, like a hand you’ve forgotten to let go of. It was a voice without an echo, for there was nothing left for it to reflect upon.

I looked at her, finding it hard to believe she was real. She seemed drawn — like the images that bloom on the back of your eyelids if you stare at the light too long. She was like a sketch pretending to be a human being. Her outlines were too sharp, her colors too flat, as if someone had forgotten to add the shadows. It felt as though, if I were to blink, she would vanish. But she remained.

She placed a small gray stone beside me. A violet eye flickered upon its surface, then squinted immediately, as if frightened by the light.

“It is memory,” she said. “Inside is an entire world, and the warmth of a single hand. It will not last long. Things fade quickly here.”

“My name is Padma,” I said.

“And I have been called by so many different names that it is difficult to choose,” she replied. “Let it be Ayu. Today, I am Ayu.”

She surveyed the hollow outlines of the houses, barely visible through the gray haze.

“Are you alone here?”

“Yes,” I answered.

We sat, and the silence listened to us, licking its lips. Beside me lay the Book. Its pages were smooth and as empty as the sky. But the moment I cracked it open, symbols flooded from beneath the cover — flocks of ink-birds that remembered, for a fleeting second, that they possessed wings.

“Close it, and they vanish,” I said, without looking at her. “Open it to the end, and you vanish yourself.”

Ayu looked at the Book in silence.

I thought: If the one who reads vanishes… what becomes of the hand that holds the Book?

Code. Part One. Chapter One →
← A Road of a Thousand Years
← Paths
← The River
← The Battle of Bun’ei