Chapter 2: The Echo of a Carved Word

For years, I told myself it was nothing—a child’s game, a summer riddle with no answer. But every time I thought I had buried it, something pulled me back. I would find myself in a library, my hand reaching for a book on cryptography or ancient scripts. I would hear a song on the radio that seemed to echo the rhythm of those strange words: "Hrono.? trauka .cripto 40%." I learned to recognize the pattern of the phrase in the world around me, like a watermark on a page.

When I was seventeen, I found an old dictionary in a secondhand shop. Its spine was cracked, and the pages smelled of coffee and dust. I opened it at random to a page marked with a faded ribbon. There, in the margin, someone had written in pencil: "Grok ir grok sinsttos dskna bet ji perdsug trapi." My heart stopped. I looked around the shop, half-expecting to see Juokas standing in the aisle, but there was only a woman flipping through vinyl records. I bought the dictionary for a dollar and spent the rest of the day turning its pages, searching for more notes, but there were none.

That night, I dreamed of the tree. Its bark was smooth again, but this time the letters reappeared, glowing faintly like embers. I touched them, and they burned my fingers. I woke with a start, my hand tingling. The dream felt like a warning, or an invitation. I decided then that I had to go back.

The drive took most of a day. My grandmother’s house had been sold years ago, but the field was still there, overgrown with weeds and wildflowers. I parked at the edge of the road and walked the familiar path, my footsteps sinking into the soft earth. The tree stood where it always had, but it was smaller than I remembered, its branches thinner, its bark gray and brittle. I circled it slowly, running my hands over the trunk. No carvings. No trace of the past. But at the base, half-hidden by grass, I found a small metal box, rusted and dented.

I pried it open with a rock. Inside, wrapped in a plastic bag, was a letter and a photograph. The letter was from Juokas, dated two years after we had last seen each other. His handwriting was shaky, as if written in a hurry:

"I don’t know if you’ll ever find this. I don’t know if you still think about the tree. But I need to tell you what I’ve learned. My mother didn’t just leave—she was following something. She called it 'the thread.' She said the phrase was a key, but it only works if you understand the numbers. 40%. She said it was the percentage of something that stays hidden. I don’t know what that means. I’m scared, and I don’t have anyone else to tell. If you get this, maybe you’ll understand. I’m going to find her. I’ll leave a sign at the tree when I can. —J"

The photograph was of a woman I didn’t recognize, standing in front of a building with no windows. On the back, someone had written: "The beginning." I stared at it for a long time, the afternoon light fading around me. Juokas had been searching. He had left this box, hoping I would return. And now, years later, I had.

I tucked the letter and photograph into my pocket. The air grew cool, and the first stars appeared. I looked up at the sky, the same sky we had watched from the grass, and I felt the pull of the thread Juokas had mentioned. Something was still unfinished. Something was waiting to be made.

I drove home that night with the windows down, the wind carrying the scent of dry grass and dust. When I got back to my apartment, I spread everything on the kitchen table: the dictionary, the letter, the photograph. I wrote the phrase on a piece of paper and underlined the numbers: 40%. I searched online for anything that matched—a code, a location, a date. Nothing obvious.

But the next morning, I received an email from an address I didn’t recognize. The subject line was blank. The body contained only three words: "Check the sky."

I looked up from my screen. Through the window, I saw a plane tracing a white line across the blue. The line curved and broke, forming a shape that looked almost like letters. I grabbed my phone to take a picture, but by the time I focused, the line had dissolved into nothing.

Still, the message was clear. Someone knew I was looking. And whoever it was, they wanted me to keep searching. I printed the email and added it to the pile on my table. Then I sat down and wrote a letter to Juokas, addressing it to the field, to the tree, to whatever thread might carry it. I didn’t know if he would ever read it. But I knew I had to send it.

Because the phrase was not just a memory anymore. It was a map, and I had only just begun to read it.