03 Jun The Wire Between Worlds

Part I

The house that Matteo Morales rented sat alone at the edge of a rust-colored bluff, where wind carved ridges into the earth and telephone poles leaned slightly eastward, as though drawn toward some invisible point past the horizon. He had chosen it for its silence, but also because it was far enough from anything that no one could come looking unless they already knew what to ask for. That privacy had become necessity.

Inside, the air smelled faintly of chalk dust and old sweat, the relics of a time he no longer acknowledged except in dreams. A coil of rope sat atop a wooden crate by the window, untouched for over a year. The balancing pole leaned against the wall nearby, gathering dust where the grips had once blistered his palms raw.

He had not stood on a wire since the fall.

The mornings came cold in the desert, and the sun through the slatted blinds did little to warm the room. Matteo stood in the kitchen nursing the same mug of black coffee he had refilled twice without sipping. A news radio station murmured low in the background, but the words failed to form meaning. His attention lingered instead on the manila envelope sitting on the counter, unmarked except for a wax seal pressed with a symbol he did not recognize—a thin vertical line crossed at intervals, like a ladder set aflame.

He had found it the day before, left on the porch without a knock. No courier, no signature, no tracks in the dirt.

Now, with reluctance more instinct than decision, he cracked the seal and unfolded the heavy parchment within.

“Mr. Morales, the time has come to return what was never finished. The wire remains. You are summoned to complete what others abandoned. The towers are prepared. The wind is watching.”

There was no contact number, no signature. Only a set of coordinates, and beneath them, a line rendered in italicized script:

“Cross where others turned back.”

For a long moment, Matteo stared at the page as if it might alter its meaning the longer he observed it. Then, setting it down with care, he crossed to the bedroom and opened the small fireproof box beneath his bed.

The photograph inside was folded at the corners, worn along the creases. It showed a younger Matteo, barely twenty, standing between his father and grandfather. All three wore performance silks and harnesses. In the background, a wire stretched between two scaffolds set over a darkened stadium crowd, scarcely visible beneath the stage lights.

Augustin Virelli had died during a canyon walk in 1975. Matteo’s father, Emilio, had died performing a tribute to that final crossing in 2004. Matteo had nearly joined them, a slip saved by a frayed safety tether that left him with a shattered hip, a fused ankle, and a ruined career.

And still, the wire had found its way back to him.

His phone buzzed once on the kitchen table, jolting him back into motion. The name on the screen froze him: Veronica Morales.

He let it ring once more before answering. “I’m guessing you know why you’re calling.”

Her voice came through sharp and tired. “I saw the article in the Santiago paper. Someone’s staging a walk. They’re calling it ceremonial. You haven’t—Matteo, tell me you haven’t already agreed.”

“I just got the letter.”

“You’re not going, right?”

He turned from the window as if that might grant him the clarity to lie. “I haven’t decided.”

There was silence on the line. Then, softer: “You remember the last time you were called to do something like this?”

“That was different.”

“No,” she said. “It wasn’t. It was dressed up differently, that’s all. They always are. Different sponsors, different justifications. But the wire stays the same.”

He said nothing. His gaze drifted again to the invitation. To his chagrin, the phrase “The wind is watching” had embedded itself in his mind.

“I still have the articles,” Veronica continued. “Old blueprints from your grandfather’s walk. You know how it ended, but no one talks about how it started. He got an offer like this, too. Same kind of phrasing. Same kind of nowhere.”

Matteo let his eyes drift shut. The coffee had gone cold in his hand. “I think I need to finish it.”

“You don’t need to finish anything. You’re not responsible for what they didn’t walk.”

“But maybe I am,” he said.

Her voice shifted into something lower, pleading. “If you go… promise me something.”

He waited.

“If anything feels wrong,” she continued, “feels wrong, not looks wrong—you turn around.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” he said, but neither of them believed it.

* * * * * *

He flew out the next morning with a single bag and no return itinerary. The ticket had already been paid for. A man in an airport uniform handed it to him wordlessly after passport control.

The flight took him south along the spine of the Andes. At one point, the clouds outside the window thinned, revealing what he believed for a moment to be a thread stretched impossibly high above a distant ravine—too thin to be real, but unnaturally straight. When he blinked, it was gone.

There were no other passengers.

When they landed at a military airstrip near the Chilean-Argentine border, the sky had begun to darken. The pilot did not speak as Matteo disembarked. Another man waited by a waiting Jeep, dressed in black, with no insignia. He nodded to Matteo, opened the passenger door, and drove without a word.

The road turned to gravel, then to dirt. Hours passed in silence, the terrain flattening into a red plain surrounded by peaks the color of rust and ash. Distant dust devils spiraled in slow columns. Twice, they passed herds of vicuñas standing stock still, as though posed.

Finally, they crested a hill—and Matteo saw them. Two towers, black as obsidian, rising from the center of a canyon choked with shadow. Between them, barely visible in the fading light, stretched a thread of silver. It did not sag or tremble. It shimmered faintly, as though resisting the world around it.

The driver pulled to a stop.

Matteo opened the door and stepped into the cold wind, the smell of iron rising from the dust. The invitation had not mentioned a name. No plaque marked the towers. There was no scaffolding, and no nets. There was only the line, suspended in the void, waiting.

He did not smile or pray. Instead, he reached into his bag and withdrew the gloves, and took his first step toward the wire.

Part II

The helicopter came for him at dawn. It was already waiting on the ledge above the canyon when he emerged from the bunkhouse, its rotors ticking in place as if it had been there all night. The pilot did not introduce himself. He simply gestured toward the open door, and Matteo climbed in without comment, ducking low beneath the spinning blades. The flight took only minutes, yet the air changed as they descended into the basin—dry heat giving way to something thinner and older, as though the wind had scraped across too many forgotten things on its way there.

The towers came into view again, larger now and stranger in proportion. From a distance, they had seemed constructed—artifacts of steel and purpose—but up close, their surfaces betrayed no seams, bolts, or welds. Each rose from the red bedrock like a single solid extrusion, the color of wet volcanic glass. No ladders, no stairs, no maintenance lines. Just vertical smoothness vanishing into the morning sky, impossible to scale without aid and anchored in no visible foundation.

Between them stretched the wire. Matteo scrutinized it through the open side window, eyes narrowing. Its shimmer bent the lines around it. He could see the canyon floor on the other side, but only as if glimpsed through agitated water. The wire was too long for its diameter, too thin to maintain that tension unaided. And yet it hung perfectly taut, unmoving in the wind that buffeted the helicopter’s frame.

When they touched down on the platform carved into the south ridge, a figure awaited him—tall, suited in pale gray, holding a clipboard with nothing on it. The man’s face was forgettable in the most literal way; even as Matteo studied it, the features refused to cohere. There was a mouth, and perhaps a mustache. A faint outline of cheekbones. But everything else blurred the longer he looked.

“Welcome,” the man said in a tone that carried no accent, as though it had been scrubbed clean.

Matteo stepped out, shoulders hunched against the wind. “Are you with the foundation?”

The man’s smile stretched, but did not rise to his eyes. “The wire remembers you.”

Matteo froze. “I didn’t say that out loud,” he muttered.

“No,” the man agreed. “You didn’t.”

The man turned and walked toward the nearest tower, where a narrow outbuilding had been built into the rock face. It looked like a converted storage shed—aluminum siding, a power unit humming beside it, a cluster of empty folding chairs stacked under a tarp. As they approached, a second figure emerged from behind the generator, wiping grease from his hands. This one wore coveralls stained at the knees and carried the unmistakable posture of a man waiting to be dismissed.

He said nothing, nodding at Matteo. The gesture was slow, almost uncertain.

Matteo glanced at the generator. Someone had spray-painted a line of graffiti in crude black strokes across the metal casing. The words were in Spanish, and though weathered by sand and sun, they remained legible:

“El que cruza dos veces no regresa igual.”

Matteo translated silently: He who crosses twice does not return the same.

Inside the shed, they handed him a keycard, a printed schedule, and a clipboard with a liability waiver already signed. None of the staff spoke more than a sentence or two at a time. Their eyes were alert, but distant, and once or twice, Matteo thought they were looking slightly to the left of him, as though tracking someone beside him instead. One man handed him a water bottle and whispered something under his breath—too quiet to catch, but repeated in the same rhythm a few moments later by another worker across the camp.

At first, Matteo assumed it was a coincidence. Then it happened again—an echo of a phrase he hadn’t spoken aloud, but had only thought in passing. “The wire can’t be supported at this length.” Minutes later, a woman in a jumpsuit muttered the exact words while passing behind him.

He turned, but she kept walking.

The training area had been demarcated with orange tape and weighted cones—an insultingly small strip of wire stretched between two steel supports just three meters above the canyon floor. Matteo stood beneath it, arms crossed, watching it vibrate in the breeze. It wasn’t remotely similar to the main wire. This one obeyed gravity and tension, behaved as expected, and gave no shimmer to the air around it.

He climbed up once, tested his balance, and then descended without a word.

For the next few days, time unraveled in threads too loose to measure. The sun seemed to rise too fast and fall too slowly. Meals arrived at inconsistent intervals. His watch would skip ahead, and then return to the hour he’d thought had passed. He began writing time-stamps in a notebook, only to discover later that half the pages had already been filled with shaky versions of his own handwriting, recording entries he didn’t remember making.

Each night, the wind picked up and pushed hard against the towers. The sound that came through the canyon was not a howl, but something subtler. Matteo would lie in the bunk and listen, eyes open, trying not to hear the footfalls he swore sometimes accompanied it.

The dreams came on the third night.

He stood on the wire—not the training wire, but the true one, the span that stretched over the canyon. Below him, the world rotated, and above him, stars blinked and scattered. He stepped forward, and with each step, the tension in the wire reversed direction—as though he walked not across it, but beneath it.

Then he saw the figure—upside-down, walking the underside of the wire with perfect balance, its arms outstretched in a mirror of his own. Its face was hidden by the dark, but its feet made no contact with the wire. They hovered a few inches above, yet it advanced all the same.

Matteo awoke before it reached him.

By the fifth day, he no longer trusted the mirrors in the washroom. His reflection lagged slightly when he moved, adjusting with a faint blur, then catching up as if embarrassed. He stopped shaving. When he tried to photograph the wire at sunset, the image came back inverted—the towers bent inward, the wire curving in ways the lens should not have captured. The photo erased itself minutes later.

He stopped sleeping with the light off.

On the seventh day, he stepped out near twilight and turned toward the far side of the canyon, hoping to clear his thoughts before rehearsal. The wind was low, the sun just beginning to slide behind the mountains, casting a wash of amber over the ridgeline.

And then he saw it, not in the air or on the wire, but in the rock face opposite. The sun’s position had painted a faint mirror of the entire camp onto the canyon wall, distorted and faint, but visible. He could make out the outline of the south tower, the antenna dish, even the fold-out bunkhouse where he’d been sleeping.

And across that reflection, blurred by heat and distance, a figure walked the wire.

It moved slowly, knees bending ever so slightly with each motion. It raised its arms and tilted its head, all with perfect form.

Matteo blinked hard and looked at the actual wire. It was empty.

And yet, the reflection still moved.

Part III

The knock came just after midday, a soft triple-tap against the aluminum siding of the bunkhouse. Matteo had been resting in the corner near the cracked portable fan, not sleeping, but not fully alert, either. He blinked, sat up slowly, and stared at the door. It came again—more insistent this time.

He opened it.

Veronica stood framed in the harsh light, one hand gripping the strap of her duffel, the other shielding her eyes. Her hair was tied back in a loose braid, and her clothes bore the creased look of someone who had slept in a car, or perhaps not slept at all. Behind her, the generator sputtered to life, then immediately cut out again, stalling with a cough of smoke.

“I told you not to come,” Matteo said.

“I told you the same,” she answered. “Here we are.”

He stepped aside and let her in.

The room was small, barely large enough for the cot and the folding table that served as a desk. A chalkboard had been mounted against one wall, covered in notes and sketches Matteo had half-erased in frustration. The air inside smelled faintly of copper and dust.

Veronica set down her bag and turned slowly, her eyes scanning the room before settling on the window—the one that looked out across the ravine. In the distance, the wire glinted faintly.

“They rebuilt it,” she said, almost to herself. “Down to the last angle. Even the light falls the same.”

“You’ve seen this setup before?” Matteo asked.

“Not like this. But close enough. My uncle worked at a Chilean observatory back in the ‘80s. He used to bring me old aerial photos from government archives—stuff never meant for public eyes. One of them showed a nearly identical pair of towers outside Tacna. Same proportions. Same wire. There was no mention of why they’d been built, only a codename and a series of blacked-out lines. When I asked him about it, he told me to burn the photo.”

Matteo raised an eyebrow. “And did you?”

“I hid it under a floorboard in my grandmother’s house.” She paused. “It disappeared anyway.”

He said nothing. Outside, the wind pushed dust in uneven spirals against the windowpane.

“There’s more,” she said. “My grandmother—on my mother’s side—used to tell stories about a sect of performers called Los Caídos del Viento. It translates loosely to ‘Those Fallen from the Wind.’ She said they were acrobats, tightrope artists, highwalkers, but also something more. They weren’t entertainers. Not exactly. They were… channels. Ritualists. Every walk was part of something larger.”

Matteo turned away from the window and sat on the edge of the cot. “You think this is a ritual?”

“I think it’s always been one.”

She retrieved a tablet from her bag, powered it on, and handed it to him. The screen displayed a scanned copy of an old map—faded parchment inked in a mix of Spanish and what appeared to be Quechua. The illustration depicted a range of Andean peaks connected by intersecting lines and spirals, most of which converged near the central canyon.

“There are ceremonial pathways carved into the ground in this region,” Veronica explained. “They look like nothing more than walking paths at first glance, but their geometry is precise—constructed according to star patterns. My grandmother said they used to walk these routes during eclipses, or when the constellations aligned in certain ways. Some say they were trying to speak with the gods. Others think they were guarding against something from beyond.”

Matteo studied the map, then glanced toward the bunkhouse chalkboard. He stood, retrieved a ruler and compass, and began connecting points on the wire rig’s layout he had previously sketched. It wasn’t precise—just a quick attempt at orientation—but the pattern that emerged sent a cold tremor through his chest.

The towers formed one side of an incomplete geometric diagram—a sigil or mandala of sorts—mirroring ceremonial burial maps he had once seen in a museum display on Incan necropoli. When he added in the placement of the outbuildings and antenna towers, the pattern grew clearer. A seven-pointed star, intersected by concentric circles.

“What does it mean?” he asked quietly.

Veronica shook her head. “I don’t know. But I’ve seen versions of that same diagram in places you wouldn’t expect—European alchemical texts, fifteenth-century cosmograms, even satellite calibration layouts used by the early SETI programs. Different cultures. Different times. Same design.”

Matteo stepped back and stared at the chalkboard.

“Maybe it isn’t just about walking,” he said. “Maybe it’s about completing the shape.”

“Or unlocking something inside it.”

They worked in silence for an hour, comparing notes, sketching overlay maps, and debating symbolic interpretations. Matteo wanted to believe it was all coincidence—humans assigning meaning to patterns, grasping for structure in a world already fraying at the seams. But deep down, he had known from the beginning that the wire was more than performance. It had always been more.

At sunset, he agreed to do a walk.

Not the full crossing, not yet. Just a test on the main line—a slow advance out from the south tower, with the balancing pole and full gear. He would step out a dozen meters, pause, and return.

Veronica stood on the platform, arms folded, as he adjusted his harness. Her face was tight, the corners of her mouth drawn down. When he turned to face her, she nodded silently, and he nodded back.

Matteo stepped onto the platform, lowered his foot to the wire, and tested its tension. It held. He shifted his weight, adjusted the pole, and began to walk.

Step by step, the world behind him dropped away. The canyon fell into shadow beneath his feet, and the towers behind him receded into peripheral haze. The wire sang beneath his boots, a faint vibration rising into his bones.

He reached the midway point of his short walk and paused.

Then, he did something foolish.

He let go of the pole.

He didn’t plan it. He simply opened his hands and allowed the metal to fall.

It should have tumbled into the canyon. It should have clanged once against the cliff, bounced, and vanished.

Instead, it disappeared.

Not fell—vanished. There was no sound or impact, and no dust. It was simply gone, as if swallowed by the void.

Matteo stood there a moment longer, then turned and walked back to the platform.

Veronica met him at the edge. “You dropped it,” she said.

“I did.”

“And?”

“It never landed.”

They both looked out at the wire together, and neither of them spoke again until morning.

Part IV

Dawn arrived without brilliance. The sky brightened in slow increments, its hues washed-out and clinical. When the sun finally crested the ridge, it cast a sterile light that drained color from the canyon rather than illuminating it. The landscape no longer shimmered.

Matteo had risen early. He hadn’t slept. From his perch atop the south tower’s scaffold, he watched the arrival of the broadcast crew. They came in two matte-black trucks that descended the ridge with unnerving quiet. The men and women who stepped out wore matching utility gear, their movements coordinated but impersonal. They unpacked drone rigs and calibration instruments without discussion, stringing cables between antennae whose origin Matteo could not identify. No insignias adorned their vehicles. No logos marked their crates.

Veronica stood several meters behind him, her arms crossed. She had observed the preparations in silence until one of the technicians passed within arm’s reach without acknowledging her presence.

“They don’t have names,” she said. “No ID tags. No company markings. None of their equipment matches. If this is being broadcast, no one will admit to funding it.”

Matteo nodded without turning. From here, he could see the wire in full, stretching across the ravine. It no longer shimmered in the heat or bent the light, and now appeared fixed. As the crews prepared below, he continued his warm-up in silence. The movements felt hollow; repetition had become meaningless. There was no sense of progression, only continuation.

At 7:00 a.m., a single tone issued from a mounted speaker. It rose in pitch for exactly three seconds before cutting out. A technician raised one hand and announced, without emotion, “Two minutes to live feed.”

The voice was flat and artificial. It had no accent or inflection, and Matteo could not tell whether it had been spoken aloud or transmitted through a device.

Veronica approached, placing one hand lightly on his shoulder. “You still don’t have to do this.”

He met her eyes. “I’m not here to finish a performance. I’m here to break one.”

She didn’t respond. Her hand dropped to her side, and she stepped back as he ascended the starting platform. The scaffolding had been reinforced since the test walk. Additional grip tape lined the rails. Cameras mounted on gimbals followed his movement, but none made a sound. No crew directed the shots. No one counted down.

He stepped onto the platform, adjusted his gloves, and scanned the wire. Its surface was taut, unblemished, and free of any visible point of origin. The north tower mirrored its counterpart, though at this distance, the stone around it seemed less real.

A voice repeated, “Live feed active.”

Then everything fell silent.

Below him, the audience remained in place, their heads tilted upward, arms mid-motion. Their expressions had frozen. One woman’s hands were poised together, fingers millimeters apart, as if waiting to clap. No one blinked. No one shifted.

Matteo stepped forward. The first placement of his foot on the wire felt familiar, the movement coming from a place buried beneath practice and memory. The second step followed with the same certainty. The third resolved into a rhythm. He adjusted the pole across his shoulders and continued, each footfall landing with intention, no longer perceiving time and space. And the wire beneath him held without complaint.

When he reached the halfway point, he saw it.

At the far end of the wire, a figure emerged. At first, he mistook it for his own shadow stretched forward by the rising sun. Then the silhouette stepped forward, and the illusion fell apart.

The figure matched his height and build exactly. Its gait mirrored his with impossible precision. Its arms extended with the same span, its hands gripped a pole that reflected no light. The clothing matched his own, down to the seams and creases. At the level of detail, however, the imitation failed. Its posture lacked the minor imperfections of a living body. The sway of its hips came a fraction too late. The bend of the knees followed without causality. The figure moved as if reenacting something already completed.

Matteo stopped.

The figure continued forward by two steps before halting in place.

He shifted his weight to the left. The figure mirrored him—but not instantly. He raised his hand, and he figure responded.

This time, its movement came first.

He resumed walking, altering his pace. He shortened one step and extended the next. He began to move with irregular timing, inserting pauses and changing rhythm.

The figure adjusted, then began to anticipate.

Each time he tried to disrupt his routine, the figure predicted his next move. When he leaned into his left foot, the figure had already mirrored the correction. When he raised the pole slightly above shoulder height, it had already moved to match the adjustment before his arms had fully lifted.

The world began to distort. At first, it was subtle. The edges of the canyon bowed inward, creating the impression of concavity. The horizon tilted to the right. Clouds elongated into uneven threads. The north tower extended vertically for several meters, and then snapped back into place as if caught in a loop.

The figure resumed its walk.

Matteo remained still.

The audience below remained frozen. The space around the wire had been excised from the flow of time, or perhaps redirected. He could no longer tell whether the wire suspended him above the canyon or suspended the canyon beneath him.

The figure advanced.

Its face had become visible in full. It was his face, down to the scar near the jawline he had received at sixteen, when a misjudged dismount had introduced him to the edge of a steel support. But something in the symmetry had failed. The eyes did not track movement. They stared forward without recognition. The smile at the corner of the mouth held too long. Its arms adjusted the pole with an efficiency suggesting automation.

The illusion of humanity collapsed. This was not a performer, or even an imitator. It was a recording.

It walked toward him as if guided by instructions he had unknowingly authored years earlier—and there was no stopping it.

Part V

The figure advanced with the certainty of someone retracing their own steps. Every aspect of its movement had been shaped in his image, but distorted in subtle, disturbing ways. Matteo had expected a confrontation, perhaps even a collapse of reality, but he had not anticipated the experience of watching himself rendered hollow.

It stood before him now at the center of the span, no more than a few meters away. The illusion of humanity held only at a glance. Upon closer inspection, the facade fell apart. The eyes were shaped like his, but they reflected no ambient light and never shifted focus. The mouth remained slightly open, and the corners had split just past the natural range of motion, giving it the expression of a man mid-laugh who had forgotten how to stop. The symmetry of the face had been preserved, but only externally. No internal thought moved behind it.

The arms adjusted the balancing pole with a familiarity that made Matteo’s throat tighten. The motion was too smooth, and the limbs extended at angles that suggested more joints than should have existed in a human body. When it blinked, the eyelids dragged across the sockets a fraction too slowly, as if the memory of the action had degraded and was now being forced through a corrupted playback.

Matteo did not speak, nor did he shift his stance. Instead, he observed.

The figure mirrored a familiar sequence from one of his earliest televised performances—the same shallow tilt of the torso, the exact positioning of the feet. He recognized it immediately. That walk had aired live in São Paulo, and the routine had been his father’s invention, preserved and passed down as a kind of homage. Watching the figure perform it now felt less like a tribute and more like a theft.

Then it changed. The figure began a routine Matteo had not performed publicly. It pivoted its shoulders into a three-count sway and planted its weight into a heel turn that Matteo had only ever attempted once, during a private rehearsal with his father in a training facility outside Naples. No audience had been present. No cameras had recorded it.

Yet here it was—recreated with mechanical accuracy.

Matteo narrowed his eyes in recognition. This was not mimicry in the conventional sense. The figure was not observing and copying, but repeating. Somewhere beneath the fabric of the ritual, beneath whatever force had constructed this encounter, a record had been kept. The figure on the wire had not assembled itself by watching Matteo but by absorbing the residue of his past.

It was reanimating his choices, not just the ones made in public, but those he had long believed forgotten.

He raised the balancing pole in contemplation. It rested across his palms, a familiar weight that had once steadied him in hundreds of performances across dozens of countries. He remembered when it had felt like a partner, an extension of his intent, a fulcrum between fear and precision.

Now it felt like a relic from someone else’s life.

He opened his hands, and the pole fell.

Instead of tumbling into the depths of the canyon, it hovered in midair momentarily, motionless, before drifting sideways, slowly and without resistance, until it disappeared into a crease in the air itself.

All the while, the figure remained motionless. In its arms, it held a replica of the same pole, but the ends had begun to blur.

Matteo, of all people, knew the discipline the wire demanded. The structure around it—the ritual, the audience, the uncanny mirror—had all been designed to feed on repetition. The walk was a reenactment of past forms, not an act of creation. Matteo understood now that the only way to end the madness was to deny it.

He shifted his weight deliberately, but he chose to place his foot too far forward. The movement lacked refinement. He recovered his balance, but not gracefully. His hips overcompensated, and his shoulders swayed inconsistently.

The figure across from him twitched. Its reaction came delayed by a beat, then two. Its shoulders adjusted, but the correction lacked precision. The pole it held bent slightly at the center, as though its form no longer registered with certainty.

Matteo lifted one foot and positioned it over the cable for a full three seconds, holding an unsteady posture that any professional would have immediately corrected. Then he placed the foot down with a shuffle, his heel landing before the ball.

The figure stuttered. Its left arm snapped upward, then corrected. The eyes rotated independently of the head, realigning after half a second. Its mouth twitched wider. The corners cracked.

Matteo began to walk again, but this time he introduced errors with intention. He rotated his upper body before his lower half followed. He blinked in an erratic rhythm. He muttered a half-remembered lyric from a childhood song in the wrong key. With each imperfection, the figure’s coordination degraded further.

Its body attempted to follow, but the gestures no longer aligned. The pole shifted from a straight line into a jagged arc, and its feet pressed down with no visible reaction from the wire. The space beneath it had started to ripple, and the tower behind it pulsed faintly.

Matteo reached for the tether clipped to his harness. His fingers unfastened the latch without hesitation.

He did not intend to fall. That was not the point. The point was to break the seal that had been written into the performance.

The figure lunged. However, its movement lacked structure. It propelled forward as if the idea of proximity were more important than physics. Its arms extended too far, and the pole it held cracked open lengthwise, separating into interlocking strands that unraveled as they moved.

Matteo did not brace for impact, or attempt to dodge or resist. Instead, he stepped forward and raised his arms.

When the figure collided with him, the wire did not bend. There was no recoil, no displacement. The two bodies overlapped, their forms meeting without violence, folding into one another in a manner that defied material comprehension.

There was no flash, and no sound, only a collapse. The figure’s gestures, routines, tics—all the rehearsed fragments of his history—dissolved as if returning to their source. The sensation was strange, like that of a memory being returned to storage.

For a moment, everything went still. Then, high above the canyon, where two figures had stood moments earlier, there remained only one faint disturbance in the air. It rippled once, and then contracted, leaving the wire perfectly still.

Across the ravine, the audience had remained motionless. The hands that had nearly clapped remained suspended.

The towers stood as they had before, and the wire held its form, but the note it emitted—faint, continuous, and almost inaudible—had changed.

Part VI

Matteo awoke on bare stone, face turned toward a sky that had shifted in hue. The sun hovered behind cloud cover, muted and distant, as though filtered through layers of mist or memory. His limbs ached in a way that felt structural rather than muscular, as if the process of re-entering his own body had introduced strain to the architecture of his bones.

He did not move at first. The texture of the rock beneath him felt unnaturally smooth—wind-polished, but without grit. The wire was no longer beneath his feet. The harness, the gloves, the tether—all were gone. His clothes were unchanged, but something within him had been reconfigured, and he could not yet identify what had been removed.

The sound that brought him back to himself was that of a breath—shallow, measured, and close. He turned his head and found Veronica seated beside him. Her posture had collapsed inward, and her clothes were coated in red dust. Her eyes, though open, held the emptiness of someone who had watched a process unfold that she did not understand, but could no longer deny.

“You’re back,” she said. He noticed that her voice and cadence had changed. He opened his mouth, as if to speak, but hesitated. “You walked for seven days,” she said. “You never stopped. Not once.”

Matteo blinked. The sensation was unfamiliar, as if eyelids had only just been reassigned to his face. “I don’t remember any of it.”

She nodded without surprise. “You started walking before the sun had fully risen. You reached the midpoint and… something changed. The rest wasn’t walking. It was—” Her voice faltered. “It was continuous. No breaks, water, or food. You didn’t respond to anyone. You didn’t fall. But you didn’t perform, either.”

He sat up slowly. His back cracked at the base of his spine, and the pop echoed across the ledge louder than it should have. The towers still stood. The wire still stretched between them, but it no longer shimmered. Whatever had animated its impossible tension seemed to have dissipated. It sagged now, only slightly, but enough to notice.

She followed his gaze. “It changed after you stopped, or maybe it stopped after you changed. I’m not sure anymore.”

He touched the ground with his fingertips. The stone no longer hummed. The silence around them was natural again, filled with the occasional whisper of wind and the distant thrum of insects. The compound had emptied. No technicians remained. No trucks, no antennas, no cameras.

“How long was I gone?” he asked.

Veronica closed her eyes. “Seven days here. But I don’t know what that means anymore.”

He rose to his feet. The movement was smoother than expected. Whatever damage his body should have sustained had not manifested. He felt intact, but dislocated, as if the boundaries between his awareness and his surroundings had thinned.

She rose as well. “You merged with it.”

Matteo tilted his head.

“The thing,” she said. “The figure. I saw it. Just once, from the southern tower. I watched it reach you. Then you were both gone.”

He breathed in, testing the air for scent, but detected only dust and heat. “It wasn’t trying to replace me. It was trying to complete me.”

Veronica’s eyes flicked toward the sagging wire. “Or complete the ritual.”

They walked in silence along the edge of the cliff, back toward the trail that led to the lower camp. The camp had been stripped of structure. Even the portable bunkhouse had collapsed, as though folded into itself. Only a few metal pegs and a torn sheet of weatherproof plastic remained, fluttering weakly.

They reached the transport jeep. It sat with its doors open, keys still in the ignition. Matteo climbed into the passenger side without speaking. Veronica took the wheel, though her hands trembled when she gripped it. The vehicle started without protest, and they drove away from the canyon without looking back.

* * * * * *

Months passed.

A city skyline emerged against a colorless dusk. The glass towers reflected lights not yet lit, and cranes rotated in slow arcs across rooftops that had no clear architectural history. Near the heart of the business district, two newly erected towers stood in defiance of zoning laws, constructed faster than materials should have allowed.

Between them, a wire stretched across the sky.

It was thinner than standard rigging and anchored without visible mounts. No official press release had acknowledged its presence, no permits had been filed, and no show had been scheduled.

At street level, a child stood beside a vendor cart, clutching a paper cone filled with roasted nuts. He looked upward, his eyes narrowed against the descending twilight.

A figure had begun walking the wire. It moved effortlessly, with its body parallel to the line, its hands splayed outward, its spine arched in a curve too symmetrical to be maintained by muscle alone.

The boy blinked and tugged at his mother’s sleeve, but when she turned, the figure had already passed behind the neighboring structure.

Inside a nearby office building, Matteo stood beside a window. He wore a dark blazer, his shirt unbuttoned at the collar. His face had aged, though not in the way most would recognize. The years had not creased his skin or dimmed his eyes, but rather hollowed something beneath the surface.

He held a glass in one hand, untouched. The television mounted above the office desk remained muted. Headlines scrolled without context.

He watched the sky.

Behind him, the elevator chimed.

He didn’t bother to turn. Instead, he muttered to himself, his voice almost too quiet to carry.

“It’s not me this time. But it still knows my name.”