Story Fragment -- Lost Girl and the City

She was lost in the darkness. The city had swallowed her up as it does all runaways, and William began to tremble as soon as he passed under the gilded archways, past the fountains glowing green with algae, onto the roads. If you didn’t pay attention the roads would change direction, trick and turn. The city was a puzzle piece, a tesseract. Only fools and the unwary trust it, and they are folded into it and forever lost, changed into the landscape. No one has ever known how many live and move through the city—such definitions are lacking here, and cities scoff at those who seek to diagram and measure. Always unfolding, always dancing.

William remembers the childhood tale of the musician sought to compose the city’s theme. He should have known better, the rhythms with which the city speaks are enough to drive any man mad. The composer forged his own manacles.

Enough daydreaming. He had to find her. His father had approached him in the predawn dark-light, telling him that she had run away and that it was his duty to leave the village and enter the great god-city looming on the horizon, sometimes to the west, sometimes to the east.

William had reacted in apprehension, squinting up at the lantern gripped in his father’s hand, which was casting shadow phantoms as it swung from white knuckles.

“Son, go find her.”

“Okay, well—where should I look.”

“You know good and well where to look. You have to go where everything ends up.”

“You mean the City.”

“Where else?”

“Once there—then what?”

“It won’t be easy, Will. Comb the back alleys and loading docks, parking garages and abandoned warehouses. Talk to the orphans there, find the places where lost children gather. Fetch her quickly, those who stay there too long begin to bend, becoming accustomed to the city’s logic and forgetting all else.”

So William, slouching under his burden, had arrived into the city’s boundaries. At first he sat, eyes closed, listening to the flood of people passing, hoping to be lent a clue. And although when he opened his eyes it could have been at the most a minute or two since their closing, the sun seemed to hang in a completely different position and the city glowed from new directions.

After a moment of vertigo William’s eyes came to rest on a street vendor who was calling out the street, advertising the greasy skewers of meat behind him. William approached the man, and although shy and too conscious of his young age he attempted to look as if he belonged by making his gait long and purposeful.

“Sir, I was hoping that you could provide me with directions.” As soon as the words left his mouth he felt foolish, knowing that his tone was too formal and would mark him as an outsider.

The vendor glared at him for a moment and then looked away, smirking. “Well I was hoping you might buy some of this here meat. Ain’t nothing free here.”

“I was wondering if you might help me find a girl.”

“Heh, girls everywhere around here. You’ll find brothels on the Street of the Open Port. Seems like you might not know what to do once you get there though.”

“You mistake me. I mean a girl, a lost girl. My sister.”

The vendor looked away, stoking his fire pit with a huge wand of iron. He cackled at the rising flames. “Well I don’t know where you should look. There are untold numbers of people here, all of them lost, none easily found. Now leave me be.”