The gunshot came from far away, loud enough to rip him out of sleep like a hook behind the sternum.

  Mark’s eyes snapped open with a half-jolt, still half-buried in the sacks, mouth sticky, body not yet convinced he was awake.

  Antea and Nahely were already tense.

  Tilted forward by a couple of degrees — just enough to say something’s wrong — shoulders rigid, eyes locked past the driver.

  As if the road had suddenly dropped an invisible wall right in front of them.

  Mark pushed himself up from the grain, wiped the dust off his face, and his vision lined itself back up.

  The walls.

  A vertical surface that erased the horizon: pale stone, massive blocks, a color seemingly designed to reflect light in the most irritating way possible.

  At least fifteen meters high.

  Above them, the towers rose even more — squat, heavy masses, grafted on like additional modules stuck onto a structure that didn’t want them.

  The gate was open.

  A dark mouth.

  And above it, on a slab more polished than the rest, a skeuomorphic, uncomfortably anachronistic symbol: a sculpted middle finger, detailed enough to leave no doubt.

  The nail faintly marked.

  The phalanges barely suggested.

  Out of place.

  Out of context.

  Out of logic.

  To their right, a dark river ran just a few meters from the road, the water taut, with a low sound vibrating beneath the noise of the wheels.

  Tall grass, low trunks, broad leaves twitching in nervous little jerks, as if being tugged by an invisible string.

  Another shot.

  Cleaner.

  And immediately after, a clipped laugh, cut in half.

  There were people in front of the gate.

  All facing the entrance.

  But not a crowd — they couldn’t even press together properly.

  Too many gaps between bodies, like spaces left behind by people who’d evaporated a second earlier.

  A man clutched a bundle to his chest and shuffled back and forth by a few centimeters, indecisive like an animal that’s lost its den.

  A woman dragged a child who was crying unevenly, pulling him by one arm and changing direction every three steps, without logic.

  Two boys argued with someone outside Mark’s view: no consonants left in the words, just torn breath and noise.

  Near the walls, a soldier leaned against the stone, loading a crossbow with a slowness that bordered on sensual — as if adjusting something precious.

  He lifted the weapon, looked at the people, lowered it, laughed to himself, and scratched his face as if rearranging it.

  Farther ahead, two men dressed like ordinary townsfolk were beating a third man lying in the dirt.

  Not angrily:

  short, measured blows, like they were testing the material’s durability.

  Every so often one of them stopped, checked the gate, then resumed.

  Another soldier fired at something Mark couldn’t see.

  A man farther away dropped onto his backside from sheer terror.

  No one spared him a glance.

  Along the ramparts, figures leaned forward slightly.

  A taut rope.

  A whistle.

  An arrow stuck in the ground.

  Another embedded in the post.

  A third bouncing off into the dust.

  The post stood farther ahead, vertical, planted in the pale earth.

  The body tied to it was a limp silhouette: dark ropes, the head swaying like a drunken pendulum.

  Arrows fell around it at random, like rain that hadn’t picked a spot.

  Corpses lay scattered on the ground.

  One on his back, legs spread in a V.

  One bent wrong, at an angle no body should take.

  One with an arrow in the lower leg, identifiable only by the wood sticking out.

  Two piled together, dust-coated up to their hair.

  Another half-sunk into the soil.

  Every now and then someone was let inside:

  a short gesture, a tiny opening, a shove into the darkness.

  And they vanished.

  Others were pushed back.

  One with a hit to the shoulder.

  One yanked by the arm.

  One kicked sideways in the shins.

  No pattern at all.

  A man tried to head back toward the road.

  Tripped over a corpse.

  Fell face-first.

  Got halfway up.

  Someone trying to pass before him shoved him aside like moving an inconvenient chair.

  Well, this is exactly the kind of scenario I should’ve pictured the moment I heard the word Anarchy — and instead, like an idiot, I let myself get sucked into the bullshit idea that we’d meet someone from our world here.

  Mark thought, watching the scene with a reflux of indifferent disgust and a hesitation that slipped out only through the micro-expressions of his stiffened face.

  This world is such a fucking dump.

  Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.

  And now?

  What the fuck do we do?

  He thought again.

  “What the fuck do we do? Do we really want to end up in the middle of that shitshow?”

  Mark finally said — in English, so Antea could understand him.

  “Don’t tell me you weren’t expecting it.”

  Mark rolled his eyes.

  “You’re seriously telling me you expected this?”

  He gestured broadly toward the brutal chaos behind them.

  “No money. No laws. Obviously some sadistic son of a bitch is going to take advantage of that, Mark.”

  Antea replied with a hint of superiority — the tone of an arrogant professor dealing with a timid, cognitively underpowered student.

  And that tone nearly set Mark off.

  An emotional conatus — a tiny bodily flicker, imperceptible on a conscious level — signaled that this Antea felt far too familiar.

  Normally, he wouldn’t have gotten irritated at her for something like that: Anton had always behaved the same way, and Mark had grown used to it.

  That’s why, in his phenomenal consciousness — the term Ned Block uses for everything accessible only to the subject experiencing a specific mental state — a jolt of surprise surfaced, with Antea in the role of actress.

  But he didn’t pay attention to it.

  Exaggerating his arm movements — like a cartoonish Italian — and raising his voice, he snapped:

  “Then why the hell didn’t you mention it? I was way too excited to think about the negative possibilities… My idea was to come here, look for people from our world — even just one — and then find some way back home. I’m sick of this place, and it only took three days. So I really doubt things are going to get any better.”

  “Think, bro.”

  It was so strange hearing her say that — her — but why?

  On the first day it wouldn’t have felt strange at all.

  He was sure of it, in that moment when the intuition sprouted, only to vanish beneath his friend’s voice.

  He lost a piece of her monologue, though.

  “...it’s rather simple, I think. I admit I’m not sure the reasoning actually makes sense, but it seems right to me, so I relied on it when I decided to come here. I should’ve told you before the bartender spoke, though… now it sounds like a post hoc strategic argument, and I’d rather not—”

  “Can you get to the point, please?”

  “I’m trying. It’s hard for me, you know that.”

  I’m not sure I do know that, Mark thought, a small, dull sadness spreading through him.

  The fact that she seemed more aligned with her past identity than he was with his made him — for an instant — want to derail the conversation onto that point.

  But he held himself back.

  Or maybe he was overwhelmed by Antea’s charisma.

  Hard to say.

  “Well...What else could we have done? Before we stepped into that sort of rundown station, I heard that sound repeating several times: kà, always placed in front of a name, always paired with a gesture pointing in a precise direction. You didn’t need to understand the language to recognize the pattern. I heard kà–Anarchy like that, swallowed by the noise, identical to the other kà–names being spat out by the locals while they traded directions…”

  Mark rolled his eyes, let out a loud sigh, and then said — in the same tone that made Antea smile in that disarmingly beautiful way of hers, as if she were used to that kind of reaction and that small hint of intimacy had worked as a viaticum for a discomfort that, at least to Mark’s eyes, she was hiding remarkably well:

  “OH, where the hell are you trying to go with this?”

  He threw his arms up theatrically, as if to underline just how frustrated he was.

  That irritation was something Mark knew well — but in that moment, unfortunately, less well than usual.

  It’s that urge to yell at someone who’s superior to you in some respect and behaves as if that superiority were intrinsic, natural, and that there were nothing wrong with treating you like someone who has to keep up instead of being met halfway.

  A gentle humiliation.

  If taste is the space in which an artist experiments with their own subjectivity, indifference toward another’s limits is the space in which those who are — or appear — cognitively sharper test the cognitive tolerance of the people around them.

  “Mmh… basically,” Antea said, “I think the nearby cities don’t have English names. So the probability of finding people who could actually help us — definitely better than the locals — shouldn’t be any lower, right?

  Even though, now that I say it out loud, the idea sounds a bit flimsy.

  Whatever, you have to lean on something.

  Ever heard of incremental rationality?”

  “And why do you think the cities nearby don’t have English names?” Mark asked.

  “I was literally explaining that before, but you cut me off.”

  “And I was right to. I’m not in the mood to put up with your mental handjobs.”

  Nahely, meanwhile, looked both lost and entertained.

  The driver glanced back at them from time to time, with a kind of lazy curiosity.

  “We don’t know shit, Mark,” Antea went on.

  “Even if the other cities had some kind of government, there’s no way we could be sure they’d be any better than this place.”

  “But we could’ve just asked the bartender about other cities, even farther ones.

  He did say Anarchy is a weird city…” Mark replied.

  “For us, every city would probably be weird.

  And why exactly should we trust the bartender?”

  “But we trusted him!”

  “You trusted him.

  I’d already considered that possibility before you realized English existed in this world even before we showed up.”

  Mark snorted. “Sorry, I didn’t know those tits were actually storage units for extra gray matter.”

  “What the fuck does that have to do with anything?” Antea snapped, half annoyed, half incredulous.

  Antea was shocked; she stopped meeting his eyes and went quiet and withdrawn with unnatural speed, like a turtle that needs only a second to fold back into its shell.

  Mark felt like shit.

  “Sorry, Ante… I mean, Anton.”

  Jesus Christ, I’m such an idiot, he thought.

  And now what the fuck do I do?

  …And why am I even this worried?

  A cluster of pre-emotional flashes tried to nudge him toward the obvious intuition: Anton is ridiculously touchy, and how could he not know that?

  But anything connected to Anton — and not Antea — slipped away from him immediately, as if his affective memory had a hole punched right in that spot, a thin but persistent defect, some kind of built-in damnatio memoriae woven into his connectome for reasons he couldn’t even graze.

  A heavy silence fell.

  Even Nahely tried to strike up a conversation with Antea, who dismissed her outright.

  Mark noticed the girl didn’t take it personally at all; she simply went back to watching, without a trace of anxiety on her face, the social wreckage they were driving toward.

  Mark tried to distract himself by thinking a bit about her presence among them.

  Her lack of reaction was genuinely strange: it seemed absurd that an ordinary person — and so small, at that — could move toward a catastrophe of unknown proportions with the same bored expression of someone going to church.

  It almost felt like she had an ace up her sleeve.

  Or maybe she was just someone who’d seen a bit of everything and had turned stoic because this world was saturated with violence and other filth.

  Hard to tell, and Mark wasn’t particularly interested anyway.

  Honestly, who the fuck wanted her around?

  He hoped to get rid of her as soon as possible, but feared Antea might not agree.

  And she definitely wouldn’t — not for a long while.

  Well, now the problem was boredom.

  The chaos felt closer than it actually was, and that bizarre creature appeared faster than it probably was.

  He decided he might as well try to gather some information, even if it felt pointless.

  Who the hell would act based on anything said by a guy calmly riding toward that kind of pandemonium?

  So he asked a stupid question.

  “No fear of walking into that crowd of lunatics?”

  No preamble.

  “Huh? I’m used to it. And I don’t have to walk into it, anyway.”

  “Eh?”

  “I’ll stop in a clearing far enough from that mess, and some soldiers — if it still makes sense to call them that — will come pick up the goods.”

  “But it’s still risky.”

  “Someone’s gotta do it. If our city stopped doing it, Anarchy would wipe us out.”

  “And how would they do that? Who would risk their life in a war if they’re not forced to do it in order to get food or anything else?”

  “Kid, you just said a huge load of bullshit.

  You’re not from around here, right?

  First of all, there’s no need for soldiers.

  You, who speak the language of the mages, should know that well.

  And it’s not true at all that the fear of dying is stronger than greed.

  War’s a great way to unleash your desires.

  Around here, there’s plenty of people like that, unfortunately.”

  Language of the mages?

  Didn’t think he was much of a talker.

  And he doesn’t even sound like an idiot, Mark thought.

  “Language of the mages?”

  “Of course. You and your girlfriend—”

  “She’s not my girlfriend.”

  “Sorry for you, then…”

  Shut the fuck up, Mark thought.

  “Anyway, you come from the land of the mages, right?”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Yeah, I’d heard that mages, when they first arrive, seem really lost.

  Almost stupid…”

  Asshole! Do I look stupid to you? Mark thought.

  “…It’s what they might become once they adapt that worries the people of our continent.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Oh, I’m sure you’ll figure it out on your own.”

  Why the fuck are you being mysterious, you son of a bitch? Mark thought.

  “Guess so,” Mark said, without much emotional investment.

  Then he slumped down, folded his hands over a sack, and rested his head on them.

  In front of him, Antea was staring at something in the distance with a sulky expression that — if anything — made her look even more irresistible.

  “Planning to keep sulking for long?” Mark asked, not exactly tactful.

  He was brutally ignored.

  He pushed himself back up, sat upright, scratched his head, and sighed.

  He really wasn’t in the mood for silence, so he tried to start a conversation with Nahely.

  “Did you see that symbol above the city entrance? Do you happen to know what it means?”

  Nahely looked surprised he was talking to her.

  Surprised, not pleased.

  Her expression was neutral, but Mark wondered whether the irritation was mutual.

  “Ah, yeah, I saw it,” she said flatly. “I don’t know what it means, though.”

  “And you, sir?” he asked, turning toward the driver.

  “I didn’t take you for a man of many words, you know?”

  And enough with these fucking meta-comments, old man, Mark thought.

  “Not many people use that gesture, but if I’m not mistaken it means fuck you.

  Am I wrong? It’s a gesture imported from the mages, so you should already know what it means.”

  “I never said I was a mage.”

  “But you definitely are.”

  Grimace.

  Silence fell again.

  Mark wondered whether those soldiers the old man had mentioned would be willing to escort them into the city.

  I could ask him… but I don’t want to talk to him.

  His face tensed up as he thought.

  How the hell are we staying this calm while getting closer to a place that could turn into a slaughterhouse at any moment? I have no idea.

  He thought lazily.

  Do I subconsciously trust my powers that much?

  We could still turn back.

  Meanwhile, the place where the cart was supposed to stop was only a step away.