The boredom was only compounded by my knowledge that we were upholding an illusion. It felt absurd, then ridiculous, then infuriating. The easy relationship that I’d built with Graham twisted as he turned from “Dad” into “Boss”. We would look at each other over our morning coffee without saying a word but inside, I was screaming.
We both knew that it was bullshit. He’d received me straight from the world that apparently wasn’t there. I didn’t understand why we were talking to each other in falsehoods like we didn’t know any better.
But he wasn’t the only one who was lying. Because I had finally turned to look at the plan I’d been forming in the back of my mind, and I knew what I was going to do.
The doors weren’t locked from the inside. They’d been made to keep monsters out not citizens in. Getting into the walls from the city required badges and body-checks. Getting out the other side only required the desire.
Scared that I might tip Graham off to my desertion, I gave no hint of goodbye. On one of my regular tours, checking for damage, I found myself alone just inside the outer gate. I cranked open the thick bolts, slipped through the doorway and ran.
There was no attempt to stop me. I knew that there were weapons up there on the wall, but nobody called out or even fired a warning shot in my direction. They let me go.
Perhaps they were as relieved as I was.
It took me two days to find a friendly face. In a small shack by the river, I met a Satyr with mottled red fur, sparkling eyes and a short-cropped beard. He was the first non-Human I’d seen since I was a child, and I practically fell into hysterics when he welcomed me in. He shared his fish and laughed at my story and my non-stop staring. He let me touch the little horns that sprouted from his forehead and told me the directions to the city of Sunder. It was not the place for him, apparently, but he thought I might find some luck there. He packed me a satchel of dried meat and bread and gave me a few coins for the train that would pass through the valley that night.
I thanked him for his help and he thanked me for the company. I took the train north and arrived in Sunder City the next day.
It was dusk as I stepped out of Main Street train station. The sun was setting between the taller buildings to the west, so two of the city’s little lamplighters were doing their rounds. They were a couple of Goblins in top-and-tails, and their smiles were the happiest things I’d ever seen. Their beards were meticulously trimmed, their mustaches waxed and molded and their nocturnal eyes were shielded behind blue-tinted glasses. Around their necks, they wore shining ropes of gold, each threaded through the bow of a large bronze key.
One Goblin walked on either side of the street and their polished boots hit the footpath with perfect timing. At each copper lamppost, they slid their keys into a hole in the base and turned them together. The locks clicked as the switches inside opened up the pipeline to the pits below.
With the crackling sound of fast-frying insects and an eye-watering smell of sulfur, the flames filled the posts and shot up into the sky.
My dumb-struck face was shining as bright as the fire, and even the rude stares from the masses pushing by did nothing to dampen my spirits. There was work and there was food and there were interesting friends with powers unlike anything I’d ever seen. It was the real world. The world I’d always known was there.
And it was magic.
5
I missed the morning by half an hour and woke to the afternoon sun hitting my window. Nobody was supposed to live in 108 Main Street, Sunder City. It was a place of business. But, the previous tenant had installed a bed that could come down from the wall at night and then slide back into place during business hours. My landlord, Reggie, was happy to look the other way as long as he could call in the occasional favor.
I had a desk, two mismatched chairs and a table that had become a bar. There was an eternally hatless hat-stand in the corner and a trash can sprinkled with dried-up Clayfields. There was a sink and mirror in the corner but the commode was down the hall. The old carpet was as brown as the woodwork and almost as hard.
Facing back into the building (through the first exit), the office on my left belonged to a Werewolf with her own family-law business. She worked weekday mornings, and the only guests she ever had were groups of squabbling offspring fighting over the meager finances of their passed-on parents.
The office on the right had been empty since Janice died. She was an elderly Satyr who’d trained warriors back in the Hallowed War, when her species attempted to retake their land from the Centaurs. Her post-Coda business was a kind of physiotherapy, helping ex-magic creatures adjust to their new bodies.
Most of her work was house calls. When she passed away last summer, I was away on a job and she wasn’t found for weeks. When the wind blows from the south, I can still smell her through the walls. Reggie tried to clean it up, hoping he could rent the room out again. We ripped up the carpet, washed the walls, fumigated the whole floor and burned a forest of sage but that stubborn old gal wasn’t going anywhere.
I lugged myself from the creaking bed to the telephone and made another appointment with the Principal. He was eager to receive me when the school closed that day. In the meantime, I’d see if I could find him something more than a handful of sand.
The sole of my left boot was hanging open like a panting dog. It was no surprise. I’d scraped myself over too many miles of this city. There was nothing to do but tape it up and make a mental note to spend some of my new money on a cobbler before I pissed it all away.
Fully dressed, I splashed some water on my face and made my way downstairs.
Oh no. It’s Tuesday.
The silver-haired fellow had spent all week clearing out the laundromat at the base of my building. He would have been close to seven feet tall without the painful-looking hunch in his back. He’d had little help from his easily distracted grandson who groaned every time he was given an instruction. The aspiring cafe opened on to the street right by the entrance to the building, so the old man managed to catch my eye every single day.
“Opening Tuesday!” he would call.
“I’ll be there,” I’d reply, skirting inside with fabricated haste to wait for clients that never came.
Despite my usual aversion to social interaction, the old fellow had spiked my curiosity. Most people were still trying to patch their former lives together – Goblins out in Aaron Valley were attempting to run old inventions with electricity instead of magic, the Gnomish crime organizations had brought their underground activities to the surface, and I’d heard that a whole tribe of Giants had teamed up with Mortales, hoping that the Human engineers would find a way to reinforce their bodies with machinery. All over Archetellos, folks were doing their best to go back to their old ways. This was the first guy I’d seen who had the balls to start something new.
There he was, standing outside his empty restaurant with a five-year-old’s smile on a thousand-year-old face.
“Just the man I was looking for,” I said.
He directed me inside with a practiced gesture, and I slid on to a creaking seat to peruse the handwritten menu.
“Breakfast special. Soft boiled eggs.”
The silver-haired man checked his watch.
“Sir, it is one in the afternoon.”
I checked my watch as well.