Chapter 2

He stopped. The memory came in fragments, like a corrupted file—smoke curling under a door, the smell of burnt paper, Astro’s grip on his arm. But the sequence was wrong. The timeline in his head had gaps, holes where the data should have been. He tried to fill them, but the image kept dissolving into static.

He remembered being in the library, reading about algorithms. He remembered the alarm. Then Astro’s hand. Then the field outside, cold air hitting his lungs, and her voice saying, “Don’t look back.” He hadn’t. But now, at forty-three, he couldn’t stop looking.

Mikaldas leaned back in his chair. The study smelled of old paper and dust, the same smell that had clung to Morė’s clothes. She had died five years ago, but her presence lingered in the stacks of books, the faded photographs, the teacup she had left on the shelf. He had never moved it.

He typed again: I REMEMBER THE DAY AFTER. THE SKY WAS GRAY.

A flash of that morning: him sitting on the front steps, Astro beside him, both of them silent. Their mother had died years before—he barely remembered her face—but Morė had been the one to hold them that day. She had brought them tea and said, “The library will be rebuilt. But some things can’t be rebuilt. You have to carry them differently.”

He had asked her what she meant. She had only smiled, her hands wrapped around her own cup.

Now, in the present, Mikaldas’s phone buzzed. Astro’s name lit up the screen. He picked up.

“Still staring at a blinking cursor?” she asked.

“How did you know?”

“Because you always call me when you’re stuck. But you didn’t call. So you’re stuck and pretending you’re not.”

He laughed, but it came out hollow. “I’m writing about the fire.”

Silence. Then, softer: “Why now?”

“Because it’s part of the story. The memoir—it’s supposed to be about patterns. About code and life. But I can’t write the beginning without understanding the first error.”

“The fire wasn’t an error, Mikaldas.” Her voice had an edge he didn’t recognize. “It was a signal.”

“What do you mean?”

She didn’t answer. He heard the sound of her breathing, the distant clatter of a brush against canvas. “I have to go,” she said. “But think about it. Why were you in the back of the library that day? Why were you reading about algorithms?”

“Because I wanted to understand—”

“No. You wanted to hide. You’ve always hidden in code. And I pulled you out. But I can’t do that anymore.”

The line clicked dead.

Mikaldas stared at his phone. The screen went dark. He set it down and turned back to the laptop. The cursor had started to blink faster, or maybe that was just his pulse. He typed: ASTRO SAID IT WAS A SIGNAL. BUT A SIGNAL OF WHAT?

He paused. The memory shifted. He was ten again, standing in Morė’s study, watching her hands move over the keyboard. She had taught him about loops and conditionals, about how a program could make decisions. “Every if has an else,” she had said. “Every choice leads somewhere. But sometimes the path is hidden, and you have to write the code to find it.”

He had asked her what happened when the code broke. She had laughed, a soft, sad sound. “Then you debug. You look at the error messages. You trace them back to the source.”

He had never asked her about the source of her own sadness. He had been too young. Now, he wondered if she had been talking about more than programming.

His fingers moved again. IF THE FIRE WAS A SIGNAL, THEN WHAT WAS THE MESSAGE?

He didn’t know. But he remembered the book he had been reading that day: a manual on data structures, with a chapter on binary trees and recursion. He had been trying to understand how a search algorithm could find a path through a maze. The library had been a maze of shelves, and he had gotten lost in the back corner, surrounded by old journals and faded maps.

He remembered the smell of smoke before he saw the flames. He remembered looking up from the page and seeing a flicker of orange at the end of the aisle. He remembered thinking it was a trick of the light. Then the alarm.

And then Astro.

She had found him. She had pulled him. But why had she been there? She was supposed to be in art class, painting a mural of the night sky. She had always loved the stars, the way they mapped the darkness into constellations. He had never understood why she wanted to paint them instead of log them in a database.

He typed: I NEVER ASKED HER WHY SHE WAS IN THE LIBRARY.

His phone buzzed again. A text from Astro: “I know you’re thinking about it. Don’t. Just write what you remember. The rest will come.”

He wrote: I REMEMBER THE SOUND OF THE ALARM. HIGH-PITCHED, LIKE A BUG IN THE SYSTEM.

Then another fragment: Morė’s face when she picked them up from the school. She had hugged Astro first, then him. Her arms had been tight, her breath shaky. “You’re safe,” she had said. “That’s all that matters.” But her eyes had flickered to something beyond them, something he couldn’t see.

Mikaldas closed his eyes. The cursor blinked behind his lids. He thought about the memoir, about the chapters he had planned: syntax and soul, debugging life, loops of love and loss. But they all felt like abstractions, frameworks without data. He needed the raw input.

He opened his eyes and typed: THE FIRST INPUT WAS A QUESTION. NOT “HELLO, WORLD.” BUT “WHY AM I HERE?”

He saved the file and stood up. His legs were stiff. He walked to the window and looked out at the street. The afternoon light was fading, turning the world a soft orange. He thought of the fire again, the way the flames had painted the walls the same color.

His phone buzzed a third time. Astro again: “I found something. In Morė’s old things. A letter. It’s addressed to you.”

He called her immediately. “What does it say?”

“I haven’t opened it. It’s sealed. But the date is from two weeks before the fire.”

His throat tightened. “Bring it over.”

“I’m already on my way.”

He hung up and stared at the screen. The cursor was still blinking, waiting for the next line. But now the story had a new variable, a piece of data he hadn’t expected. A letter from Morė, written before the fire, before the library burned, before everything changed.

He sat down and typed the only thing that made sense: THE NEXT INPUT IS A LETTER. AND I DON’T KNOW WHAT IT SAYS.

The cursor kept blinking. The doorbell rang. And Mikaldas realized that the algorithm of his own life was about to encounter a condition he hadn’t prepared for—a branching path that led not forward, but back into the smoke of that afternoon, where a signal had been waiting for him all along.

He stood, his hands trembling, and walked to the door.