“If you’ve any other place to be, turn around.”
Wade’s footsteps stop, and I follow suit. A brief silence follows until Yori speaks up.
“And if I don’t?”
He speaks half-heartedly, as though the warning means nothing to him.
“You look like you’ve been dragged behind some horses,” the man replies, his voice a little calmer now.
“Yeah, by these two mutts,” he says derisively, jerking forward on the rope and nearly dragging me to my knees.
“Caught two runaways all by yourself?”
“No, there was another,” Yori says softly.
It gets quiet for a moment, then my heart jumps as I hear the man stepping toward me.
“It’s been a long week,” Yori interrupts, walking after him and stopping him from getting any nearer to me. “I just need a place to rest, resupply, and get these two back home.”
“I’ll have to see their records.”
“Do I look like I have them? I barely got out with my—”
“You can’t bring them into the city without them,” the man interrupts. “Don’t give that smirk like you should be surprised, this is how things work.”
Yori pauses, and I feel like we’ve already lost. But then he starts speaking with a lot of emotion.
“If I go back out there, I die, either by their filthy hands, some beast, or worse.”
“Then let them go free and you may enter, it’s simple as that.”
“You know that I can’t return empty-handed,” Yori pleads.
There’s another pause, one I don’t quite understand. Then a surprising concession by the man barring our entry.
“Wait here, let me go talk to the captain of the gate.”
The time comes and goes quickly, my heart racing with every beat, fearful that at some point they will insist on uncovering us. But to my surprise, the man returns and grants permission to enter with a hospitable calmness in his voice.
“You are free to enter the city,” he says, the sound of unfolding paper scratching in my ears as he continues giving instructions. “These documents will let you keep your cargo in holding, but only for tonight. In the morning you need to report back at this gate, not the south or river gates, and leave the city by midday. If you don’t meet all these conditions, you will be arrested on site, do you under—”
“Of course,” Yori says excitedly, the noise of crumpling paper suggesting that he has taken the documents and is stuffing them in his vest. “You’ve saved my life.”
“Today, at least,” the man mumbles as he walks away.
With another tug on the rope, Yori has us headed into the city. Once we get beyond the gate and walls, the sound of rushing crowds immediately encompasses me, as well as the smells of food and spices. This is hardly the impoverished city I was expecting in a place so dire. Instead, wonderful aromas tickle my nostrils as throngs of people push by.
It reminds me of Kalepo, except the streets here are stuffier, more frantic. I can’t help but look around at people, see their faces, and wonder what is going on in their minds. My father once told me that you can see people’s stories by looking into their eyes, and if that is true, then I see a lot of difficulty and hardship. There is definitely an anxiety, a fear beneath the surface of this hectic place, but maybe it has something to do with the hurried movement of soldiers throughout the city.
“So strange,” Yori muses. “You can feel the panic.”
His words, directed toward us, make me feel as though we are safe to walk a little taller. I lift my eyes up and find that he is glancing back at me.
“Not here,” Wade says snappily to my left, “We should wait until we get somewhere less likely to have eyes.”
Yori nods, and I lower my head a little more to avoid the periodic glares I’ve been getting from people. We turn right just before a bridge that goes over a canal, one of many I’ve noticed throughout the city, and walk along it until we cut back into a narrow corridor leading to a square.
The square is empty, at its center several low-hanging trees whose branches are heavy with dark green leaves. I observe them, admiring that such luscious things could thrive in the shadows below the wide edifices here that hide all the light. The buildings themselves are made of a white-cream brick, unlike the darker sorts used in many of the city’s other structures, but the differences go beyond cosmetics and into actual design. The