That night Thomas went down to the basement of his house.
He had always thought that place resembled a memory more than a room. Maybe it was the smell of dampness, or the dust floating in the air with an almost deliberate slowness. Everything down there seemed tinted in sepia, as if time had decided to settle between those walls.
It was in that basement that he had found his father's books. In that same basement he had begun reading Childhood's End.
For years he had avoided going back there. Not exactly out of fear, but because of the uncomfortable feeling that something down there was waiting for him—something that had already happened.
He turned on the light.
The boxes were still in the same place.
Thomas began opening them one by one, with the distracted gesture of someone reviewing his own archive. Photographs he preferred not to look at for too long. Video tapes that no one would know how to play anymore.
Fragments of a life that seemed to belong to another era.
He thought that memory resembled that basement very closely: a space full of objects no one remembers exactly when they decided to keep.
At last he found what he was looking for.
Five volumes bound by hand.
On the spine of each one his father had written the same title, always in the same precise handwriting:
The Impossible Cities.
Thomas opened them with a caution that owed less to respect than to a vague unease.
He flipped through the pages without lingering on any of them, as if part of him suspected that reading them carefully would mean accepting something he was not yet ready to understand.
Diagrams. Notes. Maps that did not correspond to any known place.
In one of the notebooks he found a series of drawings.
At first they seemed like simple variations of the same symbol. Yet after studying them for several minutes he realized each one was slightly different from the previous one, as if they represented the stages of a transformation too slow to notice at a glance.
It took him a moment to understand.
What he was looking at was not a symbol.
It was his mark.
The birthmark he carried on his back.
Just then his phone vibrated in his pocket. The sound made him jump.
He took it out and read the message.
"We'll meet where we always do."
It was Sunny.
Thomas realized then that he hadn't seen her all day.
He closed the notebook with a quick, almost guilty motion, tucked it under his arm, and climbed the stairs.
The basement fell silent again, as if it had recovered something that had never stopped belonging to it.
The night was calm.
Sunny was sitting on the sand with her knees drawn up, looking at the sky as if searching for something that had not yet appeared.
Her golden braids glowed faintly beneath the red light of the moon. Thomas had always been surprised by how she stood out in the darkness.
Almost like a star.
Sunny raised a hand.
"Sometimes I think I should look at the sky more often."
She slowly moved her fingers, trying to trap the red moon between her thumb and forefinger. The blue sphere floating beside it was caught there too for an instant.
"Sunny," Thomas said. "What's wrong?"
She lowered her hand.
For a second she seemed suspended between two different gestures. Then she adopted her usual posture: the confident, ironic, slightly arrogant girl.
But something didn't quite fit.
"What's wrong," she said, "is that I don't understand how someone can become more stupid every single day."
Thomas laughed.
He understood she was trying to say something and decided not to help her too much.
He sat beside her and looked at the sea. The waves came and retreated with an ancient patience.
"So now you're going to the Explorer Academy," Sunny said after a while.
Thomas turned his head.
"How do you know?"
"I heard everything."
"You were spying on us? Sunny, that's very rude."
She repeated the phrase, imitating his voice.
"That's very rude."
Thomas smiled.
The wind barely disturbed the surface of the sea.
"I heard everything, Thomas," Sunny said finally.
She paused.
"And… I'm afraid."
They stayed silent for a while.
The red moon had climbed a little higher in the sky.
"Me too," Thomas said.
Sunny looked at him then for the first time.
There was something different in her expression. It wasn't exactly sadness.
It was more like the look of someone watching something that had not happened yet.
Thomas realized he had never seen her like that before.
"Thomas…"
Her voice was almost a whisper.
"Whatever happens… don't forget me."
Thomas was about to say something.
At that moment he felt a sharp pain in his back.
It was brief but deep, as if something had moved beneath his skin.
At the same time, the city sirens began to sound.
Far away, above the sea, the red light of the moon seemed slightly larger than before.