Arcadia unfolded beneath her like a vast circle, enclosed by thick, uniform walls tall enough to cast entire districts into shadow. The ring of stone, solid and unbroken, traced a sharp boundary between the city and the outside world, as if everything within lived under a dome of order and light.

  The buildings were arranged in concentric rings, following the city’s circular shape. Pale fa?ades—almost white—smoothed by the sun, punctuated with modest balconies, clean cornices, wide windows. The architecture was refined without being ostentatious: soft lines, balanced volumes, proportions designed to appear simple only at first glance. Here and there, small metallic inserts—thin pipes, brass plates, copper joints—merged into the walls like hidden details, discreet traces of a timid, unobtrusive technology.

  Between the buildings, green zones opened up: long, sprawling parks cut by bright pathways; rows of trees with glossy, deep-green leaves; shaded spaces crossed by sharp beams of light. The vegetation was dense, suited to the warm climate, with compact shrubs and broad canopies that gave the city a natural breath despite its rigorous geometry.

  Not far from the center, a large domed greenhouse rose from the urban fabric like a translucent globe. Its metal structure supported slightly opalized glass panes crossed by irregular waves of reflected light. The dome gathered sunlight and returned it in soft, pulsing glimmers, like a warm heart embedded in the architecture.

  At the perfect center of the city stood the great government palace: an immense structure, the largest in Arcadia. Clean lines, light surfaces, an architecture that combined authority and restraint. Every side seemed designed to convey stability: no excess, no ornament, only the strength of a building fully aware of its central role.

  At the very top of the palace rose an elevated platform: an elegant, open-air pergola supported by slender pale columns, exposed to wind and sky. It was the observation tower. It rose just high enough above the walls to offer an unobstructed, far-reaching view. At its center, a table and several seats formed a small island of calm suspended above the entire city.

  From up there, Arcadia appeared motionless.

  The streets—broad enough to channel light like corridors—were entirely empty. No footsteps, no voices. The squares, devoid of movement, seemed to hold their breath. The parks didn’t stir, the leaves didn’t tremble: as if the city had frozen into a timeless pause.

  Toward the northeast, a large brass telescope—polished, weighty, precisely mounted—was positioned in front of her. Katherina held it steady, leaning slightly to adjust to the length of the eyepiece. The massive lens captured the distant landscape and returned it to her with unnatural clarity, as though the space between her and the horizon had suddenly been compressed.

  At the far edge of the view, far beyond the city’s borders, scattered caravans could be seen: slow lines of wagons, silhouettes of animals, small groups of figures reduced to dark specks. They moved in different directions, tracing diverging paths across dry plains and yellowish patches of withered vegetation.

  Diaspora.

  Good. They should be far enough away.

  It’s fortunate that, over the years, the effort to build solid bonds has generated such a wide synergy among the neighboring city-states — the ones we’ve managed to bring under our influence.

  Today, almost none of the city-states that form a node in this relational network are truly independent or fully autonomous anymore, and none consider it desirable to be so.

  Naturally, sovereignist factions still survive in each of them; that’s inevitable.

  But the political framework within which local actors make their decisions now rests on a balance of interdependence and semi-autonomy — an evolved version of the old system of Greek city-states.

  I would have preferred a different kind of confirmation, yet such proof would have come through a serious crisis anyway: it’s in moments of difficulty that the flaws of a system reveal themselves clearly.

  Despite everything, I’m satisfied to have pushed people to spread the idea that, together, it’s possible to build a social reality in which everyone believes the future can improve — as long as no one is forced to fight alone, and everyone retains a voice in the matters that concern them directly.

  At the same time, I feel a kind of anguish for having triggered this crisis.

  It’s been about a year since I last saw him. A couple of months after that, he had already carried out the coup — something several people in the city had predicted.

  The large city of Rebibuy became Anarchy.

  Micheal abolished local laws and legal tender. Money still circulates, of course, but it no longer has any recognized value: people create small social networks in which they self-regulate and attempt — often, practically always, with disastrous results — to manage price fluctuations.

  He forced the city into anarchism, but contrary to what one might expect, aside from a few small bloodbaths caused by the most agitated individuals, by violent and ambitious men, quelled only thanks to free citizen associations formed to preserve public order — and despite a clear rise in petty crime, domestic violence, and homicides — Anarchy has remained a wealthy and powerful city.

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  One of its strengths is complete autarky: everything it needs comes from the cities under its control, thanks to the project undertaken by the previous monarch to colonize the nearby urban centers in the region.

  I haven’t been able to gather much more information about him, despite having tried through every means at my disposal. It’s clear that someone who, a year earlier, was crying like a child could hardly overturn the socio-economic structure of a city as vast as Rebibuy — Anàrchy — in such a short time.

  So I had already intuited that the traumatized Micheal had never dethroned the psychopathic Micheal, even before he proved it ostensively, rushing across territory where he is anything but welcome, stopping right at the edge of my city’s walls with the implicit intention of avenging the humiliation I had inflicted on him.

  I don’t believe the predator will get the better of his prey — which would be me.

  He has surely become stronger, otherwise he wouldn’t be here. But I’ve improved too, if only a little.

  I had sensed something like this would happen. I would have been a fool to act otherwise.

  While she was still immersed in her usual, verbose, insistent stream of consciousness, she moved toward the nearly opposite edge of the panoramic pergola, turning her eyes southward.

  In the distance — tiny shapes arranged like a row of ants along the far side of an overly wide table — Micheal’s encampment could be seen.

  She raised the binoculars to see what they were doing, and immediately noticed agitation. Far more agitation than there had been during all the days of the two weeks since they had arrived.

  The siege towers had been completed with astonishing speed.

  Not by chance — Anàrchy is known for having top-tier technologies compared to the other cities on the continent.

  But what the hell do they even need siege towers for?

  Pathetic showman.

  So the day of reckoning has come.

  We barely managed to evacuate the last portion of the population that was still inside the city.

  Good.

  For a moment, her mind fell into a silence full of interference: intrusive thoughts she tried to push away with sheer force of will. She needed to act, but she wanted to think. She enjoyed far too much building self-narratives that helped her understand how she had reached the point of having to make a specific decision in a specific conjuncture — and, somewhat masochistically, she found pleasant those digressions that made her question the very foundations she was trying to set.

  It was probably an academic deformity.

  She hadn’t been like this as a girl.

  It had developed during her university years and had intensified while she worked on her doctoral dissertation in Italian Studies, focused on the works of the Sicilian writer Maria Messina.

  And she had probably been influenced by her partner at the time, Dmitrij.

  And indeed, Dmitrij came to mind.

  The world she was in now had torn her away from him.

  She had, naturally, tried to return to her own reality, but the thought that she hadn’t tried hard enough gnawed at her now and then.

  And it was strange, because she had loved Dmitrij madly, just as she loved her father and her friends.

  A poem by Montale came to mind as well, though she couldn’t remember it clearly. She tried to reconstruct it from memory, but only a small fragment surfaced — probably faithful, yet not enough to let her reshape the images in which her state of mind might have fully reflected itself in those brief instants before the clash:

  The pulley creaks; the well-water rises into the light,

  and memory shivers on its trembling surface.

  She was forgetting her loved ones.

  Too quickly.

  More than once in those five years she had paused to think about how rapidly the memories tied to her native reality were fading. It was unnatural.

  Especially because it happened only with information connected to her emotional bonds.

  It didn’t happen in the same way with the skills she had acquired in her other life, for example.

  And the same was true for the other “mages.”

  Perhaps it was part of the design of some force she had discovered nothing about — and perhaps could never discover anything about.

  Maybe Dmitrij was trying to shed light on the mystery.

  He was very intelligent.

  She had always thought he was more intelligent than she was, but it had never intimidated her — it fascinated her.

  Who knows. Useless thoughts.

  Since defeating Micheal one year earlier, Dmitrij had resurfaced in her mind a little more often. The only positive thing her fixation on what had happened at the end of the duel had produced.

  Now, at least one memory was a little clearer than the others, which were completely unreliable.

  Perhaps this one too should have been considered unreliable.

  But it felt true.

  Unlike her other memories of her past life, this one felt true.

  And the feeling it gave her was so soothing that no doubt could worm its way into the conviction she formed around it.

  They were having dinner.

  It was winter.

  She couldn’t have said how long before she had vanished from her world.

  Dmitrij had begun speaking at length about the Iran–Iraq War of the 1980s and then, somehow — passing through a guy nicknamed “pineapple face,” from she couldn’t remember which country, the Gulf War, and a flood of other events (absurd that someone could remember so many, truly, she thought, a smile etched on her face whenever she recalled this memory) — he had arrived at Operation Gothic Serpent.

  And he had lingered for a long time on Mohammed Farah Aidid.

  The words Dmitrij had once attributed to a historian—she couldn’t remember the name—climbed back up through the jagged slope of her memory, referring to Hussein:

  A supremely inept commander, with little understanding of his enemies and fantasies about the strength of the Iraqi military.

  The historian’s full opinion had certainly been longer than that. But it didn’t matter.

  There was no real connection between Hussein and Aidid—not in what she recalled of that historical pilgrimage Dmitrij’s mind had undertaken at her expense that evening.

  She was the one who linked those figures to Micheal.

  Or rather: her brain had created the association on its own, and she had tried to make it explicit, though she ultimately knew almost nothing about either of them.

  Both men were ruthless, but one was inept and the other wasn’t.

  No Westerner would approve of most of Aidid’s decisions; but if we could see the world through his eyes, judge him by his own parameters, and even tell him what we thought, we wouldn’t say: “You’re about to do something incredibly stupid.”

  To Hussein, we would. Because he was an idiot of the highest order.

  She jumped down from the pergola.

  Hopping thoughtfully between buildings, her eyes lit up.

  The sky turned to clouds streaked with rose, gold, and gray, dotted with fleeting sparks and crossed by heavy electrical discharges.

  She reached the top of the southern stretch of wall.

  A gigantic mud–mecha—so that’s what that strange silhouette on the horizon had been—hurled massive boulders at that exact moment.

  She destroyed them with two pink lightning bolts and vaporized the mecha with a descending golden bolt of immense proportions.

  It cost her a great deal of energy.

  Perhaps it hadn’t been the right choice. She had acted on impulse.

  Now, before her, there was nothing left.

  Micheal. Are you a Hussein or an Aidid?

  Are you attacking me because, after careful evaluation, you think you can actually beat me… or are you overestimating yourself?

  Know that this time no somatic marker will come to your rescue.

  This time, I will kill you.

  At the foot of the walls, a figure sprang out with a fluidity that was almost edible.

  Micheal emerged. The usual ironic smile stamped across his face.

  “HAHAHAHA. I knew it—you’re wearing pink panties.

  Slut.”