The Walled City

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There are three rules of survival in the Walled City: Run fast. Trust no one. Always carry your knife.

Right now, my life depends completely on the first.

Run, run, run.

My lungs burn, bite for air. Water stings my eyes. Crumpled wrappers, half-finished cigarettes. A dead animal — too far gone to tell what it used to be. Carpets of glass, bottles smashed by drunk men. All of these fly by in fragments.

These streets are a maze. They twist into themselves — narrow, filled with glowing signs and graffitied walls. Men leer from doorways; their cigarettes glow like monsters’ eyes in the dark.

Kuen and his followers chase me like a pack: frantic, fast, together. If they’d broken apart and tried to close me in, maybe they’d have a chance. But I’m faster than all of them because I’m smaller. I can slip into cracks most of them don’t even see. It’s because I’m a girl. But they don’t know this. No one here does. To be a girl in this city — without a roof or family — is a sentence. An automatic ticket to one of the many brothels that line the streets.

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