I grow bolder every day, as the city and I draw closer. I feel like I’m part of it now, even if I still don’t understand it. I start to move faster, taking greater risks and spending more and more time outside the shadows. I sprint along the rooftops, leaping across narrow alleyways with my tail swinging out behind me. When there’s a larger gap, I slip into the shadowed rooftop and accelerate, launching myself across the streets faster and farther than I could ever have jumped. I merge straight into the shadows on the next roof over, like a salmon leaping in and out of a stream.

One time, there were no shadows on the opposite roof and I landed gracefully on all fours before immediately tripping, rolling and stumbling along the hard surface like a fish out of water. I was scraped and bruised, but otherwise unharmed. Turns out the tissue and blood beneath my skin is as black as the rest of me, and I only realised I was bleeding when I saw a pool of inky black liquid on the roof beneath my left leg. Guess I didn’t get super-healing along with the amnesia…

This time, the shadows are there and I slip gracefully into them before reforming myself on the rooftop. My favourite hobby is still people-watching, but I’m a little bolder about it now. I’ll get closer, clawing up under handbags or slipping beneath coats and clothing. I listen in on their conversations, and start to wonder what it would be like to be them. Who would I be, if I wasn’t this? Would I care about the stuff they do? About insurance or work or college or whatever the topic of discussion is?

More importantly, why do I know about how salmon swim upstream when there are no salmon in the city? Why don’t I know about the things that concern these people? I know I’ll probably never have answers to that, and it’s weighing on my mind. Sometimes I find myself acting on instinct, then wondering where those instincts came from.

In the end, though, I always push my doubts to the back of my mind. It’s like the world outside Seattle. Sure, it exists, but I’m never going to see it. Instead, I focus on the small things, like the smell of spices from the streets below. I slip down a drainpipe, pouring myself out at the bottom before sprinting into the shadows behind a row of stalls.

The market is lit by hanging lanterns, cheap electric lights and the odd streetlight poking through the shadows. It’s raining, and the stall keepers have secured themselves beneath raised tarpaulins to create an enclosed space inside what looks like a ruined warehouse that’s been gutted and cleared. It doesn’t keep all the water out – there are occasional streams pouring through holes in the tarpaulin – but it does the job well enough. The whole place is poorly lit, but with a warmth and an intimacy created by the enclosed space.

My kind of place.

The first thing I notice, when I reform myself out of sight, is the smell. The air practically hums with the scents of dozens, hundreds, of different spices mingling with curries cooked in enormous metal tubs, meats sizzling on flat surfaces of heated metal and the tantalising smell of fresh meat and fish from further in the covered market. I’m floating on a bouquet of sensations, and I slip from shadow to shadow, pausing only to sneak a taste of something nice. I’ve never tasted anything quite like this before. I mean, obviously, but it feels like so much more than that. Other food has been unfamiliar, but comforting, whereas this feels like something utterly new.

The market heaves with people, from all walks of life. There are the stallkeeps, of course, dressed in aprons or hats as they shout their wares to the sky. The customers are more varied, some gangsters in a myriad of local colours, their only concession to their overlords a light blue sash shared by all the different gangs. They’re not acting out, though. Out on the streets, I’d often see two different gangs fighting each other over territory.

The Triad doesn’t care, not so long as they still offer tribute and follow orders. Seems like this place is different, though. Here the criminals can rub shoulders with the businessmen without fear of getting mugged or attacked. There’s a sign near the entrance, painted in three languages onto a wooden board. It says ‘we have a one-strike policy for pickpockets and thieves’, and there’s a crude picture of some guy with a sword cutting another man’s hand off.

I sneak about the place, hiding under tables and in the shadows of people’s clothing. Sometimes I’ll hear a gasp, or someone will stop suddenly, but they never see me for long enough to convince themselves that it’s anything more than their eyes playing tricks. I’ve gotten quite good at staying unseen even amongst the busiest crowds. It’s not perfect, of course, but it’s good enough.

I spend hours here, creeping around in the shadows or slipping up through the holes in the tarpaulin and tiptoeing across the support beams. I’m surprisingly light for my size, and can move utterly silently even outside of the shadows. Eventually I stagger out, drunk on gluttony and pilfered alcohol that I think was made from rice, of all things. Some part of me feels guilty about drinking, so I don’t do it that often, but it helps when I get a little too introspective. It helps bring me back to the here and now, even if it means I sometimes stagger a little when I walk. Lucky indeed that my shadow state isn’t affected.

I slip off into the night, away from all the sounds and smells, and sneak down the side of the street, stretching out my tail to bridge the gap between shadows. I pass a one-handed beggar, huddling out of the rain beneath a stone doorway, and duck into an alleyway before soaring up a drainpipe, past a steady stream of cascading water, and emerge onto the roof, pausing to take in the smell of the rain before sprinting off into the night. I lose myself in the sensation of rain running along my skin as I leap from rooftop to rooftop, before a muted shout has me scrambling to a halt.

I creep to the lip of the roof, peering down into a dark alleyway set back from a well-lit bar. There are three people in the alleyway: a man and a woman dressed in business clothing, and another man shrouded in the darkness, carrying a long knife. The couple are clinging to each other, shuffling backwards ever so slightly while fumbling about in their pockets and purse for money. I lean closer, wondering what I should do, when something strikes me about the third man. I drop down silently onto the fire escape and start to clamber down the metal rungs, not bothering to hide myself. As I get closer, I see more of the figure. His face is hidden from me by the hood of his coat, and he’s wearing a tattered green overcoat.

I’ve seen that coat before.

I draw closer, and see the couple’s eyes widen as they catch sight of me, before they scream and sprint off into the night, the woman slipping out of her heeled shoes in her efforts to escape. The other man looks startled, before slowly turning with his knife raised up protectively in front of his face. Mike’s jaw drops when he sees me, and his arm drops back down to his side. His eyes dart around furtively, looking anywhere except at me, as the din from the bar drops in volume.

“What are you doing here,” he asks, almost dreamily, before his eyes snap back onto me with a calculated expression.

“Never mind,” he says, his eyes darting towards the open end of the alleyway. “Somebody probably heard that scream. Drop the fire escape for me, would ya?”

I hesitate for only a second before moving forwards again, pressing my bodyweight against the last set of stairs until it swings down on springs and taps the ground below. Mike follows me up, his steps heavy and lumbering when compared to my soft grace, and we both scramble onto the rooftop. I turn, pressing a hand against his chest when he tries to keep going, and tilt my head in an unspoken question.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

“Look…” He sighs. “I can explain, but can we at least get out of the rain?”

I nod, leading him across a narrow gap between two buildings before heading back down a different fire escape. We take shelter underneath the lip of a building; he sits down on an abandoned packing crate while I perch myself on top of a dumpster, looking down at him. His eyes are fixed firmly on the ground, and the knife is still in his hands. I rap a claw twice against the metal dumpster, bringing his eyes back up to me, and tilt my head yet again. His shoulders slump in resignation as he starts to talk.

“I used to live up in Everett. I was just starting to get on my feet. I’d got my GED and a job at an auto repair shop. The pay wasn’t great, but the work was steady and I was pretty good at it. I was eighteen in two thousand and three, and things were starting to look up.”

A wry smile plays briefly across his face, though I don’t know if it’s because of fond memories or some bitter irony.

“It’s all gone now, of course. My home got swept away, and my work got crushed by a chunk of the Pacific Wall. There wasn’t any space for me in the refugee camps, so I ended up joining a crew of guys and we started hitting the FEMA convoys on their way in. I’d fought before, but this was different. We were animals, desperate, vicious animals.”

He turns the knife over in his hand, and the silvery metal glints in the light. It’s the only thing he owns that’s kept clean. I’d sometimes seen him sharpening it against a stone, but I'd thought nothing of it. I thought it was a tool, but he clearly doesn’t see it that way.

“It took six months for them to get the power back on, but they never bothered with that part of the coast. Just rebuilt further inland. By that time, I had a record, and I wasn’t going to be let in on any of the housing schemes. Things got worse from there, and eventually I ended up right here.”

There’s no anger in his words, just resignation. I start to wonder what could have caused all this, but I know better than to ask him. Some wounds should stay closed.

“Every night, I remember what life was like back then. I never really focused on the future, but I was happy enough with what I had. Now I’m twenty-five, but I look like I’m forty. I’ve been run out of every part of town, and I’m only safe now because I’m in the same building as a cape.”

He folds the knife up, putting it in his pocket, and meets my eyes for the first time.

“I’m just tired of it all. I just… I need money. I need it for food, I need it for clothes, I need it to cope with everything that’s going on. To get through the night.”

And with that, he breaks. He puts his head in his hands, and just stares down at the ground. What he’s doing is wrong, but I can’t find it in me to be angry with him, not when I still know so little about him. I wait there for a while, watching him, and try to uncover who he is. In the end, I can’t decide. There’s nothing for me to draw on, no point of familiarity. My life began in that alleyway, so how can I understand someone who remembers all of it? Who’s been made by it?

After a while, he looks up, but I’ve already gone.

The night drags on, and the streets start to clear. I return to the market, only to find the stores all packed up and the site shuttered and padlocked. The smell still lingers, so I sneak in and lay there for a while, immersing myself in the scent of spices and fish and frying meats. I’m sure I smell awful by the time I leave, so I take a quick dip into the river and swim out into the bay.

I spend a little longer there this time, moving effortlessly through the murky darkness of the water. I can still ‘see’, in muted shades of grey, and so I crawl along the base of the bay, looking for interesting finds. I move through shoals of fish without disturbing them, and pass sunken ships or loose scraps of building material. I spot crabs clambering sideways through the silt, and look up at the passing silhouette of a boat overhead.

Something looms ahead of me in the water, and I travel closer. It seems like some ancient monolith, dark and angular, covered in kelp and hosting whole shoals of fishes. I can’t tell how tall it is, and it looks like there’s even more buried beneath the silt, but if I had to guess I’d put it at the height of a five-story building. It’s an immense shape, built of sturdy concrete that’s been pockmarked and worn by time. I move around the structure, noting sections of crumbling concrete where it seems to have been torn away from its mountings. That’s when it clicks.

I’ve seen this before, dozens of blocks like this, all along the shoreline of the city. I don’t know if this one is from a second wall further out, but something tore it free and slammed it into the harbour, just like how something tore through Mike’s old neighbourhood, and put him out onto the streets. I can’t imagine the effort it would take to move something this immense, but I find more of them as I swim out into sea. The surface of the harbour is littered with chunks of concrete, old artillery pieces, racks that may have held rockets and even a few chunks from what I can only assume were aeroplanes.

There are corpses too; old skeletons picked clean by the silt and the fish and left to lie at the bottom of the ocean. They’re hard to spot, blending into the rocks and sand, and their sudden appearance sends me into a panic. Sometimes I’ll be looking at a patch of rocks, or into the wreckage of some vehicle, only to spot a skull peering back at me. My curiosity turns cold, and I travel back to the shoreline, determined to leave the dead to their rest.

As I haul myself up the immense sea wall, I can’t help but think about the concrete monoliths scattered just below the surface. I look out over the bay with fresh eyes, spotting long lines of flashing green lights that chart a safe path through the wreckage. A cargo ship weaves its way through, immensely long and piled high with steel containers in a myriad of colours, all tainted with red rust.

I turn away from the sea and drop off the edge of the curtain wall, freefalling for a few blissful moments before slipping into the shadows. With a little more context, my understanding of the city deepens. I understand the barren north now, why it’s home to the desperate and the restless dead, just as I understand why the south hides itself away behind fortress walls. They survived the calamity, whatever it was, and they’re determined to keep surviving. Just like Mike, in their own way.

I pass another fight on my way back: a dozen gangsters with light-blue armbands fighting against another group. They’re brawling with chains and lengths of pipe, vicious and short fights before being blindsided by another hit. Near the back of one group, one of the gangsters turns and runs, clutching a brown paper bag in his hands.

There’s the crack of a gunshot, and the losing gang scatters to the winds as a stocky man in a tank top, with a light-blue scarf covering the bottom half of his face, steps forwards and fires again towards the man with the brown paper bag. He’s hit, and the bag flies from his hand, scattering green scraps of paper all over the street. Some of them land near me, and I sneak out a hand to grab some.

I slink back to the factory after a few more hours, scrabbling unsteadily over the chain-link fence, and push aside the rotten wooden board we’ve been using as a door. I look into Mike’s room, seeing him curled up in his sleeping bag, his knife jammed by the blade into the wall. I reach into my pilfered carrier bag, taking out the small number of green bills, still soggy from the rain, and place them beside him. I put an apple next to them, and turn my attention to my own room upstairs, pushing aside the tarpaulin I hung over the window and looking out towards the glowing yellow towers at the city centre.