The city tastes like iron and rain when I open my eyes.
Not the big, bright sky I remember — a slab of concrete, cracked and wet, a neon sign sputtering in the periphery. My mouth tastes of dust. My tongue knows nothing of mornings, only the dull, wrong certainty that something about me ought to be still.
I push myself up. The movement is slow and deliberate, the way you learn to move when you're trying not to wake a minefield. My hands find the familiar shapes of pavement, a torn sleeve, a ring of something that might have been my watch. I lift my wrist. The watch face is gone. The strap still smells faintly of smoke.
"I am alive," I say, because the world demands sentences to breathe.
The voice comes out small, like it is not ready to make a mess of things. It answers me back with something else — a whisper under the hum of traffic, a syllable that might be a word. Not again.
I do what people do when the obvious is not enough: I check for a pulse.
My fingers press under my jaw, over my wrist. Warmth answers me. There is a flutter, a tiny, stubborn beat. It is not the solid, stubborn drum I remember from living. It is thinner, like a borrowed rhythm tuned to someone else's song. I count out loud. One—two—three—then stop. Counting is for certainty; certainty is a lie tonight.
Above me, the city keeps walking on. Someone laughs. A dog barks in the distance. The streetlamp above me flickers and then steadies.
I stand, the world tilting a little as if it's been rearranged while I slept. A phone screen on the ground glows where someone dropped it. The portrait on the lock screen is me — a photograph that belongs to somebody who is either dead or lying. My name stares back in tiny letters beneath the glass: ZOH — Missing.
The word sits on my chest like a stone. Missing. The letters are brittle in my head. I do not feel like a missing person. I feel like a wrong invoice paid in the wrong currency — I exist, but the system has not yet reconciled me.
I search my pockets. An envelope in the inner lining, sealed with a smear of dark wax. My thumb knows the shape before my mind does. I break the seal. Inside: a single, folded scrap of paper and a list — names scrawled in a handwriting I recognize as mine because I have seen it on receipts, on grocery lists, on the back of a cigarette packet.
At the top, in a different hand, three words are stamped with a shaky, industrial stamp: DO NOT REMEMBER.
Under it, the first name is circled.
That's when the whisper becomes a voice again, close now, as if someone had leaned across the alley and told me a secret meant only for ears that almost stopped.
"Zoh?"
I turn. The alley narrows like a throat. A shadow at the mouth of the alley stretches long and wrong. For a moment I think it's a cat. Then it stands up.
There are a hundred ways to recognize danger — the wrong angle of a smile, the way a coat drapes too perfectly over shoulders that have no reason to be perfectly straight. This figure is a silhouette cut out of something cloth could not contain. No face. Only a hood and a smell like hospital bleach and old newspaper.
The figure doesn't walk. It tilts its head, as if listening to the city's background music. Then it steps forward, slow, as if on a stage where every footstep matters. When it speaks, the voice is not a whisper anymore. It is the sound of a decision being made.
"You were not supposed to wake."
I laugh, which is what I always do when the world tries to be sensible. Laughter is a bad habit. It comes out as a cough. "Neither were you," I say.
The figure pauses, and in that pause the city remembers it has work to do. Car horns, a bus braking. Somewhere up the street a woman shouts for a cab. Routine peels away until only the two of us remain.
"Do you remember anything?" the figure asks.
The list in my pocket folds coldly against my palm. I think of names, like keys I've misplaced. Empty rooms where memories used to hang. I say nothing, because I can feel the truth like a toothache: I remember only fragments now, as if someone had taken a film reel and cut it into shards.
The figure reaches out a hand. It is gloved, deliberate. I do not step back, and I do not take the hand. My lack of movement is a question.
"Why are you alive?" the figure asks instead, softer.
It is not a question people ask without consequence. It is a test. The city listens.
I want to tell a story that will make sense: a drunk, a fight, a wrong second. I want to give the straightforward answer. Instead, the truth that comes is something stranger and narrower.
"I don't know," I say. The sound of it cracks the air. "I woke up."
The figure nods like a patient teacher. "Waking is easy," it says. "Staying awake is the difficulty."
Its voice folds into the alley and fills the gaps of my curiosity with cold facts I did not ask for. Cameras blinked when you crossed them. People who saw you looked away. The phone that lit your face — the one that called you missing — was tossed to the gutter by someone who didn't want to be seen holding it. The city keeps tidy records; tonight it lies like a politician.
"How long?" I ask. Time is a thread I can still tug.
"Long enough for patterns to forget you." The figure's mouth moves beneath the hood. "Long enough for you to be catalogued as an error."
"My name's on a poster." I laugh again because there are jokes that hurt less than silence. "Missing person — that's a new one."
"You were catalogued differently," the figure says. "They called you a failure."
Something cold and metallic slides across my hand — a card, a small rectangle. I look at it. On one side, a logo I do not recognize. On the other, a single word printed in the same industrial type as the stamp in my envelope: ECHO.
I remember nothing, and yet when I see the word something like recognition stabs the back of my skull. Echo. A stunt of sound that returns and is never the same. That would be cruelly appropriate, I think. A life returned with edges filed down.
"Who are you?" I ask.
The figure steps closer, close enough that I can smell the bleach more sharply and something else underneath — smoke, like burnt paper, like things that were promised and then taken back. The hood drops a fraction, and I see eyes. The eyes are ordinary and terrible, like a photograph found in a wallet after a funeral.
"Names don't matter right now," the figure says. "What matters is that you are here, and someone wants you back where you came from."
"Who?"
The figure's reply is a laugh this time, not mine. It is a small, dry sound. "We all do."
That is not an answer, but it is more honest than any I have had so far. A dozen possibilities bloom and collapse in my chest like quick, ugly flowers. A government? A corporation? A ghost? My own hubris?
I look at the list in my pocket. The circled name is the first of six. Each name feels like a door. The topmost door has my mother's name, and because memory is a traitor I understand the weight of that and cannot explain why my heart responds like it has always been tethered to her.
"You remember anyone?" the figure asks again, insistently.
I close my eyes because it makes the alley a private place. Images come — a lab in blue light, the smell of plastic and coffee, a pair of hands on a console. A red button. Alarms. Someone screaming my name — a single clear syllable that is not mine but sounds like the metal of my bones being tuned.
When I open my eyes, the figure is looking at me with something that is not exactly pity. It reaches into its coat and pulls out a small, black device. It presses it, and for a beat the hum of the city drops out like someone pulling a plug. The air goes thin.
"You should leave," it says. "Leave now."
Something in me moves — old reflexes pull like strings. I step away from the alley, away from the glow of my missing face on the phone screen, away from the list that keeps promising names like bait. The street is full of strangers. They pass by as if we are two strange things in a novela, two props with no lines. No one stops.
When I look back, the figure is already at the mouth of the alley, its form melting into the night like smoke. My feet itch to follow it, to demand answers I do not have, but a new sound ripples through the city — not traffic, but a deeper, more brass something, like a siren from a place beyond police — an institutional sound that pricks at the skin.
The figure pauses at the top of the alley and turns its head as if to say goodbye or warning. It lifts a hand, a slow, almost ceremonial gesture, and for a moment the hood falls back enough for the lamplight to catch metal — a pin or a badge, I cannot tell which.
Then the figure steps into shadow and is gone.
I am left under the neon, clutching an envelope and a list and a card that says ECHO. The city breathes around me, indifferently. A pigeon lungs itself into flight. A siren wails, moving away.
My mouth remembers another sentence, the one I had been repeating like a prayer since I rose: "I am alive — but how?"
I do not have the courage to say it aloud again. Instead, I fold the list and put it back into my pocket. I walk toward the street, toward whatever ordinary person would have ordinary answers — toward the part of the city that sells breakfasts and paper and taxis.
I take two steps, then stop. On the rooftop that faces the alley, a shape shifts. It is small and impossibly still, a human silhouette posed like a statue. For a single ridiculous instant I think it is the same figure — then it is not. The rooftop watcher raises one hand, not waving, but pointing down at me.
The light from the rooftop is a flare against the night. The hand closes into a fist.
I keep walking anyway, because walking is what living people do when confronted with mysteries. But the city is a net and I have holes in me.
When I reach the corner, there is a sound like one more paper tearing: someone somewhere has crossed my name off a list.