The city behaved like a stranger with a perfect poker face: polite, busy, and careful not to meet my eyes.
I took the main street because alleyways make conspiracies feel theatrical. Neon reflected in puddles, taxis sighed in and out like tired lungs, and storefronts arranged their goods into rows of ordinary promises — coffee, socks, batteries. I walked past people who hummed their routines as if the world had been stitched back together without me. A woman with two shopping bags crossed the street rather than pass me on the pavement. A pair of teenagers paused, glanced at me, and then started a new conversation as if whatever glance they'd almost given was an uncomfortable insect that needed to be ignored.
The cameras were worse. They hung from poles and shop corners like mute sentinels, their black lenses bright with the city's amber surveillance. When I walked beneath one, the little red recording light stuttered and then pulsed as if it were measuring its own heartbeat. Once, a camera's motor juddered and the lens swiveled a degree too far, then righted itself as if it had been corrected by an invisible hand. Another camera blinked out for a full second when I passed and came back on with footage that would later read something like "static" or "glare" — an explanation efficient enough for insurance companies and overly trusting police reports.
I tugged my jacket higher, as if fabric could disguise the way the city registered me. My pockets were full of fragments now: the stamped envelope with DO NOT REMEMBER, the card that said ECHO, the folded list with names like islands marked on some far-off map. I thumbed the paper until the edges softened. The first name — circled — was still there beneath my fingers. I wanted to tear it up. I wanted to fold it into a plane and fly it off the roof. Instead I shoved it deeper into the pocket where it felt like a small, hot coal.
I passed a newsstand where a dozen tabloids argued about celebrities I had never cared for. A headline on a political rag screamed about budget cuts; a lifestyle spread recommended pastries in ten different languages. Tucked under a stack of older papers, a flier had been pinned with a toothpick: a missing person poster, printed in hurried black-and-white. My name — ZOH — was across the top in caps. The photograph was grainy, taken at a worse angle than any human would choose for themselves, but it was definitely me. My teeth looked too white; my hair too neat. A phone number was scribbled under the photograph along with the word PLEASE.
People walked past the stand without reading the poster. A man in a suit glanced at it and kept walking as if he had read a mild ad for umbrellas. The city was carrying on as if the poster were a common thing — like advertisements for soup or a public notice — not a public announcement of a vanished life.
A child pointed at the poster and then at me, curiosity bright and immediate. Her mother tugged her away like a magnet being disconnected. The child's hand brushed my sleeve as they moved past and I felt the spark of something like recognition, not mine but nearby — a neighbor's recollection, someone else's echo. The child looked back once, and in that look there was something small and brave: the possibility that she did see me.
At a window, a man in a café turned from his laptop and the glass caught my face in reflection. For a second — the fraction of a heartbeat where mirrors lie and truth hides — the reflection didn't match me. My reflection's lips curled into a smile I had not given it. The curl was wrong: too practiced, too patient. In the glass I looked like a photograph of contentment. Outside the glass I felt like an unpaid debt.
I stopped because the world felt thin and brittle, like paper you might fold and then tear. Beside the café, a small convenience store playfully advertised "Open 24 Hours" in wobbling neon. The clerk inside looked up when I passed the window. For a moment his eyes met mine and then he blinked away, as if he'd been interrupted mid-thought by a text message no one else would ever read.
You teach yourself small rituals when thrust into uncertainty. I checked my reflection — again and again — in windows, in the black screens of abandoned phones on the pavement, in the darkened display of a closed shop. The face that returned my gaze grew more suspicious each time. Sometimes my eyes were the wrong color in certain reflections, sometimes an eyebrow behaved like an actor improvising. Once, in a chrome handrail, my skull looked slightly elongated, like the camera angles used to make heroes look taller in posters. The city had become a room of mirrors that lied because they had to.
At the bus stop someone had stuck a bundle of fliers to the post. A woman in a uniform swept near them, humming a song with no words. Under the tape, someone had left another missing poster. This one was wetter at the corners, like rain had tried to read it and failed. A quick, anonymous hand had scribbled across the bottom: Seen near Old Harbor. Beneath that, another note: Do not approach. Report to City Labs.
City Labs.
The words gleamed with authority and menace. They hinted at a place behind the polished city — a place with a whitewashed floor and buzzing lights and technicians with lanyards. The list in my pocket had names that could have been employees, signatures on forms, or worse: people marked for something. I shuffled the crowd like a novice in a parade, trying to feel along the back of an idea until I found its seam.
There were other small signs that the town had been rewritten to hide me. A bus announcement cut off when I neared and instead played an advertisement for toothpaste. A street performer who'd been playing a saxophone two minutes earlier had packed up and left without a goodbye. A dog that had been barking like a human choir across the street fell silent as if told to remember nothing. The city was busy editing itself.
My feet carried me toward the Old Harbor because humans like direction in their confusion. Old Harbor smelled of salt and rust and promises that sat like old receipts. The lamplight there haloed the wet cobbles. I walked along the quay where fishermen left nets like abandoned dreams. Someone had discarded a jacket on a bench — green, heavy — and inside its pocket I found a folded receipt and a lighter with a small word burned into its metal casing: R-03.
I did not know what R-03 meant, but the lighter winked like a key in the dark.
A noise — faint and deliberate — made me turn. It was not the city's open noise of engines and distant songs. It was closer: a footstep, measured and patient. Someone walking the same path as me, behind me. I felt his presence like a draft along the spine of the world.
I stopped and the footsteps stopped. I moved and they moved. It felt like a playground game with a rule I could not yet name. When I reached for the list in my pocket, my hand brushed the paper and the edge of the circle where my name lay burned like a hot coin.
The footsteps were soft enough that someone could call them nothing. The person behind me cleared their throat, a small professional sound.
"Zoh?"
The name was softer than my own voice had been the night I woke. It carried curiosity, recognition, and a tether that pulled me forward and back all at once. When I turned, the harbor air seemed to hold its breath.