Natalie boarded the first bus she saw. She was desperate to get away. She figured she'd just hop buses a few times until it was close enough to the end of the day, then find her route and ride it back to the boarded up old store. So long as the timing wasn't too far off, she doubted Kendra or Lily would notice anything wrong. If they even notice I'm gone at all.

  She'd been gone for more than a day before, and the Laushires hadn't noticed at all. Besides, did she really want to just go back to the house? That wouldn't do anything for her. She'd just be trapped in another place, still wishing she were elsewhere.

  When the bus pulled up to the last stop she knew, Natalie didn't move a muscle. She let the music pumping through her ears block out the name of the stop over the bus intercom, watching the people bustle around outside with glazed eyes. The bus trundled away a few moments later, and soon enough Natalie was in unfamiliar territory.

  Anything that isn't the school or the house.

  She rode the bus for hours, until she realized it was traveling in a circle. If it was just going to keep showing her the same things, Natalie didn't feel like staying on any longer. She waited until it had gone deep into the city, in an area she was totally unfamiliar with, then took her leave.

  No one on the bus paid her any mind, which was exactly how she wanted it. Out here, she wasn't the tragic little kid everyone kept fawning over, tiptoeing around subjects like she didn't understand what they were talking about. Nor was she the object of obsession like at school, the mysterious troubled girl that everyone wanted to know more about.

  Being alone in the city was the same feeling Natalie usually got from being outside in the woods, but in this case she wasn't alone. There were people everywhere, but she was still anonymous. She could come and go as she liked. The best of both worlds, and in this place she actually knew how to make it do what she wanted. The city ran on money, and Natalie—for the first time in her life—had cash to spare.

  With her dad, she'd never really considered money much. Even on the one vacation she could remember, their trip down to California, she'd been paying attention to the rides and the cute characters and things way more than how everything actually worked. Only once she'd been abandoned and sent to live with the Laushires did Natalie really start thinking about the little pieces of paper that everyone just took for granted.

  Thanks to Lily, Natalie had a whole pile of bills stuffed deep inside her purse. The Laushire twins were rich—much richer than anyone Natalie had ever met. Where her dad might consider a twenty dollar bill a luxury jewel and take precious care of it, the Laushires wouldn't be even slightly concerned about losing wrapped stacks of a few thousand dollars, neatly packaged and stored away. In that way, when Lily had handed her a stack from the pile to keep on her 'just in case', she'd been unnervingly casual.

  To Natalie, it was more money than she'd ever seen in her life, by a massive amount. Even when she helped her dad count rent money a couple times, college kids usually paid in checks, so she'd never seen so many bills. Natalie took a handful, and then another, and then even more from the pile. It didn't stop coming, and soon Natalie had an entire section of her purse dedicated just to holding the sheer amount of cash the Laushires gave her. After she lost count, Natalie stopped growing her little stash.

  She supposed Lily trusted her since her purse wouldn't ever lose the bills. Nothing could ever fall out of it, after all, unless she let it fall or took it out herself. If she turned it upside-down, nothing happened. It had its own special law of gravity, as Lily explained it. No matter what direction she turned the bag, everything inside stayed upright.

  That same smooth faux-leather purse bounced against her leg as Natalie finally got off the bus. She stared up at the city, with buildings towering over her in every direction. Parking garages, offices, restaurants, buildings she could only guess what they were for. Natalie had absolutely no idea where she was—and at the moment, she was totally fine with that. She started wandering down the street. It started as a slow walk, until it became a happy skip as she felt so many pressures lift off her mind.

  No one was around to bother her, find out her secret, nag her, press her. No one even knew who she was. Natalie was free to do whatever she wanted, whenever she wanted.

  That's what I thought about the woods too, but then I almost died.

  Natalie pushed the frightening thought away. That had only happened because no one else was around. She was in the middle of a huge city, and there were people everywhere. There were hundreds of people just on her street. They'd help her if she got in trouble, right?

  What about the last time I was surrounded by adults on the street? I had to—

  "No," she said aloud. She wasn't about to let that memory ruin her day. She needed something to distract her. Anything would work.

  She skidded to a halt. Little marquee banners hung above the doors to every shop. She picked the first one that had an interesting sign, though she had no idea what might be inside, and ran right in.

  "Slow down there!" A man standing behind the register near the door shouted at her as she burst through the door.

  Natalie slowed down, embarrassed. She didn't reply, but she made sure to walk through the place calmly. There were trinkets and odd little things everywhere on shelves, as well as shirts with funny pictures and a lot of things about Seattle in some way or another. A 'tourist trap', as her dad might have called it.

  Her dad. Natalie tried not to think about him too much, but memories kept popping up—even more so now that she was alone in the city. Her earliest memories were of her mom and dad, back in Chicago. She didn't think about her mom much anymore, but what she could remember wasn't very pleasant. Her mom was a shrill woman, always whining about something or other. When she didn't get exactly what she wanted, she got mean.

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  Natalie and her dad had escaped her, running all the way across the country and to the total opposite of the big city.

  She found a necklace she really liked, a shiny silver chain with a pendant of a tree on the end. The price tag was way beyond anything her dad would have ever let her buy. Natalie felt a tiny burst of glee as she walked up to the counter, pulled out the little stack of cash and counted out the bills. The cashier gave her a funny look, but didn't say anything as she put it on and walked out of the store.

  There. I bought it and nothing bad happened. No big deal at all. Natalie looked at herself in the big reflective glass windows on the front of the shop. She really liked the way the light caught on the carved stone tree, refracting through it in a neat pattern. Out of curiosity, she sent a tiny wisp of magic into the stone. It was a real emerald, and a pretty strong one too, if she understood the feeling right. Really pretty and really useful, too. Cool.

  So it went down the whole row, with Natalie popping into every store that looked remotely interesting. She found a new green jacket that looked a whole lot tougher than hers in a store of army stuff, which she swapped out for immediately. Even the smallest size was a little big on her, but she liked the feeling. She felt like she could disappear into it if she needed to. She stuffed her slightly ripped up older coat back into her purse. She also found a knife she wanted to buy, but apparently they wouldn't sell it to someone under eighteen.

  Sometimes, Natalie was really frustrated by how young she was. It felt like the world wanted her to be an adult already, with all the stuff it kept throwing at her, but it also kept telling her she was too young to actually do anything yet. She wished it would just make up its mind already.

  The next stop turned out to be a whole mall of stores, instead of just a single shop set into the wall. Natalie felt like she could get lost just in that building alone, much less the entire city. She set about trying to find replacements and upgrades for everything she used every day. She had so few opportunities to buy things, and she always felt weird asking Kendra or Lily to get her something.

  In an electronics store, she found new wireless earbuds that wouldn't get caught on things out in the forest, and a portable battery for her phone so she wouldn't get totally stranded again. She was too easily tempted into a fudge shop by the smell, and came out with enough to make her feel a little queasy. She stopped before she downed too much, since she didn't want to have to go home early.

  Browsing the smaller, specialty clothing stores, ones her father would have never stepped foot in, Natalie picked out a new scarf for the dropping temperatures. It was, again, too big for her, but she'd noticed she'd already grown a few inches just in the months since leaving Rallsburg. Measuring herself in the mirror, she'd finally made it over five feet, with inches to spare. She'd fit into her new clothes sooner or later.

  That also meant she wouldn't fit into some of her older clothes anymore. For most of them that wasn't a big deal, since her dad had tended to buy things too large for her anyway. Lily had actually gotten her measured and fitted for her nicer clothes, sending off the measurements to a tailor they knew. Those clothes were already a little too short, a little too tight. Natalie wanted new ones, and now she could afford them.

  In a store bursting with color and playing fancy music, she found some. Dresses that looked like as nice as they felt, with all sorts of designs from cute to cool, to elegant and graceful. Natalie started to resist, sorely tempted to buy one of everything, until she realized—she could. She took a pile of them into the dressing room and spent a whole hour trying them on, one by one, until she found the size that fit her best.

  With another stack of bills and a wide-eyed cashier, she left the store with a wide smile on her face and a bundle of new dresses and outfits. She quickly made her way to the bathroom so she could hide them all in her purse, before anyone started to wonder how she could be carrying everything around.

  When she stopped into one of the big clothing stores, to pick up some more practical clothes, Natalie had a bit of a shock. Back in the t-shirt area, looking for anything from her favorite shows, she spotted a shirt on a clearance rack with a worn-out band logo. Her eyes widened.

  It was the exact same shirt that older girl always wore—the sad older girl with grey eyes everyone was always so obsessed with. Natalie didn't really understand it, but apparently for normal people, that girl was how they got magic. She wondered what made that girl so special. Obviously not her taste in music. That band was so lame.

  Natalie ate in the food court, from the only fast food place she remembered. She ate slowly and carefully so she wouldn't get anything on her new dress. She could have taken it off, but it felt nice and she liked how it looked on her. Along with the makeup she'd tried on in another store, it made her look older and prettier than she was. Like a future Natalie she could be someday, if she made it that far.

  As she ate, a man in a uniform walked up. She stiffened up, looking straight at her food and avoiding the man's gaze. Boris said don't be memorable. Be totally normal. What's normal though? I don't know what I'm doing. I never learned normal.

  "Everything all right?" the man asked. He had a nice voice, even if he was kind of ugly. His moustache looked absolutely horrible.

  "Yes," she said, chewing her food very slowly.

  "Are you here with someone?"

  "No, just me."

  "Oh, okay." He shrugged. "Sorry to bother you." He pointed over to a corner, where she saw a desk with a woman standing behind it. "If you need help with anything, or if anyone tries to mess with you, come let us know okay?"

  "Okay."

  He walked away, and Natalie breathed a sigh of relief. As he rejoined the woman at the desk, Natalie decided to practice one of the spells Hailey had shared online. She murmured it quickly under her breath, and soon enough she could hear everything they were saying—as well as everything else between them, much louder than usual.

  Natalie winced, and tried to focus the effect on just them, but it was no good. She could only catch little bits of their conversation. Something about her being all alone, and being young, and lots of money.

  They'd noticed her. They'd remember her. She quickly finished her food and dumped the tray into one of the bins. A few minutes later, she exited the mall.

  Why is this so hard?

  She just wanted to breeze through without everyone paying so much attention to her. It wasn't so bad in the small shops, since she knew exactly where they were, but in the big malls and department stores they could be watching from the cameras all over the place. Natalie could pick them out with the spell she'd been practicing, but it didn't do her much good when they were everywhere.

  The sun was going down. Rays of warm light punched down the city streets in the little columns between the buildings where it could shine through from out over the water. Natalie had to shield her eyes whenever she looked out that way, but the warmth felt nice on her skin, especially as the city got colder. She pulled up her new jacket and scarf tight. A trickle of rain pattered her head, but it passed by quickly. Natalie started walking down toward the water, hoping to find a beach or somewhere nice to relax for a bit and read. She'd been walking around for so long by now that she was ready for a break.

  She didn't find any sand, but she did find a bench overlooking the water that seemed good enough for a rest. She pulled out an outdoor blanket and a book from her bag, wrapped up snug and began to read. Music blotted out the annoying noise of the city, leaving her in her own little world as everything else faded away.