Poyraz shrugged.
"If we die, then at least we'll have found out," he said.
That line made no one laugh.
Walking out in the open again felt strange.
The rocks had thinned, the plants had grown sparse.
There was almost nowhere left to hide.
But now we could make out movements in the distance more clearly.
Poyraz broke the silence: "I see you've all suddenly turned into professional survivalists. What did you do normally? You, Tunay, for instance—were you a librarian or something? Or did you just watch too many documentaries?"
"I studied history. Fourth year."
Poyraz weighed my answer in his mind for a while. "Dusty shelves and old maps… Given our current situation, you must have seen plenty that'll come in handy," he said, his voice in a more serious tone this time.
Sevda joined in without slowing her steps. Her voice, unlike its usual prickliness, was thoughtful this time.
"I study languages," she said briefly. "My specialty is the Old Common Tongue and its alphabet."
She fixed her gaze on Hak's back as he walked silently at the front. "As for our situation… it's a little more straightforward. Hak and I are the diploma-less graduates of the streets. We've been together for years—let's say we've specialized in the art of survival."
Hak didn't even turn his head to look. He just gave a slight shrug. That silent acknowledgment was a sign of the wordless, old friendship between them. The two of them were the quickest to adapt to this world; because they'd learned to deal with uncertainty not at school desks, but by the hard rules of the street.
Duru, from a little further back in the group, said quietly, "I'm a waitress." "I mean, I was at that café. You were all there."
I remembered Duru in that familiar café apron. Now she stood gripping a thick branch tightly, ready to swing it at a creature at any moment.
After Poyraz's question about our civilian lives, a deep silence fell. No one wanted to dig further into the past under this alien sky.
For the next hour or two, we listened only to the rhythmic sound of our shoes striking the ground and that static-like moan of the wind passing between the rocks.
As we moved away from that watered, living area we'd left behind, the valley began to change its face. First the daisies and shrubs thinned out, then gave way to faded, stubbornly surviving grasses.
Fatigue had settled into our legs now like lead weights, but no one offered to stop; the memory of the shadow behind us and those "gazes" was still on all our necks.
Hak was walking at the very front. He was studying the surroundings.
After a while he spoke.
"The ground is changing."
Actually we'd all noticed. The earth had hardened. In some places it struck the soles of our feet with a hard resistance, as if we were stepping on worked metal rather than a natural formation.
I bent down and looked; the color was different, the texture was different. The soil had gradually begun to give way to hard, black, enormous stone blocks.
The blocks were five to ten meters across. Each block was twenty to thirty centimeters higher than the next.
It was as if we were on an enormous staircase built by a giant.
Poyraz crouched too.
He scraped the surface with his fingers.
A fine dust rose.
"Untouched—as if not even the wind has blown here," he said.
Sevda grumbled.
"Everywhere's damned anyway."
We kept walking. It didn't take long before we had to pause.
Because there was something different ahead of us.
Rocks—flying rocks…
More precisely, there were rocks suspended in the air, tens of meters above the ground.
They weren't moving, just hanging there.
Gravity, in the depths of this valley, seemed to have given up or been forgotten entirely.
Between the ceiling and the floor of the wide valley, countless rocks hung in the air. Some were as enormous as a house, some sharp as spears.
There was no link between them, yet they hung as if knotted to one another and to the sky by invisible chains.
As mesmerizing as this sight was, it was just as menacing; as if a single wrong sound would break this silent balance and bring all those masses down on us.
Everyone looked at one another, no one said a word. This beautiful sight had both enchanted and frightened us.
We knew we weren't in a normal place, but we hadn't expected this.
Then Hak pointed: "Look."
When I looked where he was pointing, a strange feeling came over me.
Two columns forming the entrance of a tunnel.
Though the columns were broken and shattered, they were there. The ceiling they held up was an architecture I'd never seen, but in the end it was there.
It was the first trace of humanity we'd come across since arriving in this damned place. That is, if a human had made it.
"Should we go in?" said Poyraz.
No one answered his question. They didn't know what we should do. Maybe there was no right answer.
I felt uneasy. It could be dangerous, and we didn't know what was inside, but it could also hold a clue to surviving.
I decided to voice my thoughts:
"I'm in favor of going in. The tunnel could be dangerous, that's true. But maybe we can also learn something about this place. I think it's worth the risk. After all, there's nothing better we could be doing."
No one objected; they too had fallen into thought, seeming to weigh both possibilities.
Hak moved to the front. He was the first to approach the tunnel entrance.
He placed his hand on the surface of the broken column. He waited there a while. As if he were listening to the pulse of the stone.
"Old," he said. "Very old."
Poyraz laughed faintly.
"Thanks, expert. I thought it was freshly built."
But his voice was a forced joke.
No one was at ease.
A cold air blew from inside the tunnel. It was different from the wind outside: stiller, heavier.
We took a step.
The light faded a few meters in. Our eyes tried to adjust to the dark.
The ground beneath our feet had changed. There were no black stones; there was a hard, smooth surface.
Our footsteps echoed.
The echo was too clear.
As if the tunnel weren't empty but giving our voices back to us.
When we drew near the walls, details began to show.
Cracks, shattered wall, and fallen ceiling…
On the ceiling and walls there were stones like the ones lighting the valley. They weren't as large or bright as the ones in the valley, but they were enough to light the tunnel.
For a while we moved on in silence.
There was nothing meaningful in the tunnel.
No relief, no symbol, no writing.
The ones who built this place didn't seem to have valued architecture much. What was surprising was that, despite being old and ruined, it still looked solid.
I didn't know how old it was, but a voice inside me said this place had managed to stand for many long years.
I went up to the wall to inspect it, touched it: hard, cold, and smooth…
It was Hak who spoke up: "It looks solid and safe. If there's nothing further in, we could stay here temporarily."
"As long as there's nothing further in," Sevda's answer was cold, and just then she picked up a stone from the ground.
"To throw?" asked Poyraz.
"Yes." As she spoke she picked up another stone. "If there's something inside too, I hope it's something we can answer with stones."
"I hope so," said Poyraz, grabbing a stone too.
Duru had her branch in hand. Hak too was holding a branch he'd found earlier in the valley.
Two of us had sticks, two had stones. I had nothing in my hands.
Whether it was courage or carelessness I didn't know, but it hadn't occurred to me to take a weapon.
We walked, walked through the long tunnel until something appeared.
There was silence.
Hak and Duru held their sticks, the others readied their stones to throw.
We began to approach slowly.
From a distance it couldn't be made out, but a black object stood on the ground.
We stopped about five to ten meters away and looked at each other. But before we could speak, Hak kept approaching.
Then he gave an explanation that reassured us:
"A chest or a box, whatever it is."
After his explanation we drew closer too.
The box was, as expected, very old. It was covered in dust. It was strange, it was different, but apart from that there was nothing extraordinary about it.
While I was thinking, Hak was trying to open the box. For a moment I opened my mouth to stop him, but then I thought, never mind. I was curious about what was inside too.
"Looks like it'll be hard to open," said Poyraz.
Just as he said it, a sound came. Hak had opened the box.
Sevda and Hak gave Poyraz a reproachful look. The poor man hadn't even finished his sentence before Hak was lifting the lid of the box.
Poyraz's mouth fell open; his words hung in the air as he cleared his throat. Sevda raised one eyebrow and looked at Poyraz.
"Your prophecies are sharp, Poyraz," said Sevda, not hiding the needling tone in her voice. "Next time, say we might be attacked, so we don't have to deal with ridiculous creatures."
Beneath the chuckles, Hak and I were looking inside the box. The others stopped talking and looked too.
"How?" Sevda spoke first.
We all just stood there, frozen. The faint smell of fresh-baked bread spreading from beneath the dusty lid had suddenly scattered the damp air of the tunnel.
"This is impossible," whispered Hak, his fingers still on the edge of the box.
I rubbed my eyes and looked again. The skins of the apples sitting in the chest were so smooth and shiny there wasn't a single blemish on them. The sesame seeds on the bread beside them were still golden.
Setting aside her mocking manner from a moment ago, Sevda took another step toward the box; the surprise on her face had given way to a deep, eerie feeling.
"Poyraz, your prophecies didn't come true, but isn't this more frightening than an attack?" said Sevda, pausing just as she was about to reach for one of the loaves.
Poyraz still hadn't shaken off his astonishment; he cleared his throat and crouched beside Hak.
"If this is a trap, I swear it's the most appetizing trap in the world," he said in a trembling voice.
"But Hak, don't touch it. Finding fresh fruit at the bottom of a centuries-old tunnel is a bigger anomaly than running into a monster."
Hak seemed not to hear Poyraz. He brought his nose right up to the box. "It's still warm…" he said in amazement. "This bread is still warm."
Then he took a hearty bite.