Chapter 10 # # The Word
944 Words
She saw his face.
Almost.
The grey city was the same. The cold air. The silent streets. But tonight, something was different. He was closer. Standing in the middle of the road instead of under the awning, his hands at his sides, his head tilted in that way she had come to recognize.
Waiting.
Sari walked toward him. The distance shrank faster than usual—five meters, three, one—and then she was close enough to see.
His face was still shadowed. The light behind him was too bright, too white, washing out his features like overexposed film. But she could see the shape of it now. The line of his jaw. The set of his mouth. The way his eyebrows curved, slightly, as if he was concentrating on something far away.
She stepped closer.
The light flared.
She raised her hand to shield her eyes, but it was too late. The brightness swallowed everything—his face, his body, the street behind him. All she could see was white.
And then, as suddenly as it had appeared, the light faded.
He was still there. Still shadowed. Still waiting.
But she wasn't looking at his face anymore.
Behind him, through a gap in the buildings, she could see a window. A large window, the kind that belonged to an office on a high floor. And through that window, she could see shelves. Bookshelves, lined with books.
She couldn't read the titles. Most of them were just shapes, rectangles of color, their spines too blurry to decipher. But one book—one book on the middle shelf, facing outward—had a word on its cover that was not blurry.
*Volkov.*
The letters were dark against a white background. Bold. Sharp. As clear as if she was reading it in daylight.
Sari stared at the word.
It meant nothing to her. It was just a name, a string of letters, foreign and unfamiliar. But something about it made her chest tighten. Something about it felt important. Like a key she had found but didn't know what lock it opened.
She turned back to him.
He hadn't moved. He was still watching her, still waiting, still impossible to see.
She pointed at the window behind him. At the book. At the word.
He looked over his shoulder, then back at her. He shook his head slightly—*I don't understand*—and spread his hands in a gesture that might have been a question.
*What?*
She tried to say *Volkov*. The word formed on her tongue. It had weight. It had texture. It felt like metal and stone and something old.
But when she opened her mouth, no sound came.
The dream broke.
---
Sari woke with the word on her lips.
"Volkov."
She said it out loud, in the dark, to no one. It sounded strange in her room—foreign, sharp, out of place among the soft Javanese vowels of her everyday life.
She reached for her phone and typed it into the search bar.
*Volkov.*
The results loaded quickly. Too quickly. Pages and pages of them. Russian surnames. Academic papers. A chemical company. A real estate firm. News articles about something called Volkov Industries.
She scrolled past them all, looking for something—she didn't know what. A face. A connection. A sign that the word meant more than just a name.
Nothing.
But the word stayed with her, heavy and strange, like a stone in her pocket.
She opened her notebook and wrote it down.
*Volkov.*
Then she drew a question mark beside it.
---
The next morning, Nenek found her in the kitchen, staring at the word on the page.
"You're up early."
"I couldn't sleep."
Nenek poured herself a cup of tea and sat down across from Sari. She didn't ask about the notebook. She didn't ask about the word. She just sat, drinking her tea, watching her granddaughter with calm, patient eyes.
Sari closed the notebook. "Have you ever heard the name Volkov?"
Nenek thought for a moment. "No. Should I have?"
"I don't know." Sari wrapped her hands around her own cup. The tea was hot, the ginger sharp on her tongue. "I saw it in a dream."
"Ah." Nenek nodded slowly. "The man in the grey city?"
Sari looked up. "How did you know it was a city?"
"You told me." Nenek smiled. "Not in words. But I can see it on your face. You go somewhere every night. Somewhere far. And you come back different."
Sari wanted to deny it. She wanted to say that she was fine, that the dreams were nothing, that the word Volkov meant nothing.
But she couldn't.
"His collar was blue," she said instead. "Last night. The first color I've ever seen there. Blue."
Nenek said nothing.
"And then I saw the word. Volkov. On a book. In a window. Behind him."
"And you don't know what it means."
"No."
Nenek set down her cup. "When I was young, my grandmother told me that dreams are doorways. Not all of them—most are just rooms inside our own heads. But some of them open onto other places. Other people."
"Did you believe her?"
"I believed that she believed." Nenek stood and walked to the stove. She poured more tea into Sari's cup, even though it was still half full. "That was enough."
She touched Sari's shoulder, lightly, and left the kitchen.
Sari sat alone with her tea and her notebook and the word that meant nothing and everything.
*Volkov.*
She said it again, softer this time.
The word didn't answer.
But she knew she would dream of it again.
- Writer
