And for every genre different from Harper’s life before, I was surrounded by people who'd come from those kinds of stories. There was more diversity on the street corner I was standing on now than I'd ever experienced before in my life.
I had been fumbling for the familiar and missing out on the incredible, wanting to change into clothes like ones I'd worn a million times before, and as a bonus, to pretend like none of this ever happened. Harper was right, this was a beyond unconventional afterlife that no one had ever considered. But no matter what was happening, it was time for me to start appreciating the possibilities it offered.
I'd escaped whatever had almost happened to me in the park, got a free meal, and already made a friend. At least, I hoped so. I'd more than earned the chance to explore and see something truly cool. I couldn't even imagine where the people disappearing into the side of the ice cream truck were going, but suddenly I wanted to find out for myself.
“What are we waiting for then?” I asked. “After you!”
Harper laughed and happily obliged. To my relief, there wasn't anyone standing at either door, stopping people from entering. Everyone around us was simply acting like it was a completely normal passageway from one place to another, so I tried to do the same. There was no real line, so we simply merged with one group as they went in, matching their pace. Easy.
One second, I was going up the stairs into a hallway cloaked in darkness, and the next I was exiting into a massive room showered with light, the air pressure suggesting we were far higher up than we had been a minute before.
Wherever we were, it was open and airy, but still enclosed. Interlocking stones lined the floors, and the room was filled with more people than I could count. They milled between stalls and carts and the few normal shops that looked like they’d come from every corner of the world, all filled with goods for purchase. Someone bumped into me, and I realized I'd stopped to look a little too long. I moved with Harper off to the side.
Nearby, a small woman exchanged a handful of coins with a man behind the counter of a slushy stall. Beside them was a tent full of handmade jewelry.
Harper took a step forward to start exploring, but something else had caught my eye and I tugged her after me. The two of us made our way over to the very edge of the room, to a glass window that took up every inch of the wall. We were standing at the top of a skyscraper, over a massive city that stretched out in every direction. To the south, a stretch of wooden docks met a massive body of water. I reasoned that was the source of the salty air I had smelled earlier. That was, if we were even still in the same city.
"Wow," Harper said without a drop of cynicism in her voice. "This is really something else." "What do you think that is?" Harper asked, nodding her head to the west. She was looking at the same white building I'd noticed right before I had run into that jerk in the park. Even from way up high, it still looked huge.
"No idea, I saw it before and kind of wanted to go. I thought maybe it would be my best shot at finding some help, or some answers."
"It looks pretty official, right?"
I nodded, still admiring the building from afar. I was looking at a different side of it than I had been before, and could see just how massive it was, stretching for multiple blocks.
"It's funny," Harper said quietly. "But the city isn't at all what I expected when I first showed up and read that letter. I mean, they said I'd be somewhere not that different from where I'd come from. And I can promise you, this is nothing like where I came from. But maybe there isn't anything like that here."
I laughed a little to myself, not because the situation was funny but because I hadn't even considered it. "You're right. This isn't at all like home sweet home for me either. I mean, I would have been okay taking a little time to be eased into the magic thing. Just one more thing to add to our complaint forms later." I laughed, trying not to sound like I was whining about any of this.
"What now?" Harper asked, turning back toward the busy area we'd entered. "I'm guessing we can probably find you something to wear in here, if nothing else."
"Honestly, I'm suddenly in a whole lot less of a rush to do anything at all. If it’s okay with you, let's wander for a bit and check things out. We’ll say we’re weighing your options for what makes the most sense to spend your money on, but really just be looking for cool magic shit."
"I like it. I like it a lot."
I grinned, glad to have finally contributed something.Together, we wandered, stopping every minute to get a better look at something or someone, though Harper was good at reining me in when I was staring a little too obviously.
"Sorry," I mumbled after she caught me a second time in only a few minutes. "There are just so many people here that I never imagined could even be real. Did you see the nose on that guy?"
"Hah, right? People don’t look like that where I come from."
Okay, time to dig in a little deeper. "So where did you come from?" I asked.
I wasn't looking directly at Harper as we walked, but I could almost feel the shift in her mood and instantly regretted my question as she paused. "Sorry, ignore me. You don't have to answer that." I couldn't imagine why it might be awkward to describe the place someone had come from, but it was making Harper uncomfortable, and I knew there were no guarantees as far as our friendship was concerned. Not yet.
"No," Harper said, waving me off as I turned to face her. "It's fine. It's just, I let everything today push all of that back so far, I think part of my brain was trying to repress it. I'm from New York."
"Oh, I've been there." Probing my memory, I tried to come up with something more specific. But absolutely nothing came to mind. New York—I know what it looks like, I know where it is, and I know that I've been there. But I don't remember when or why.
Harper shook her head and smiled. "Somehow, I don't think the New York you know is quite like the one I do. World War III broke out a few years after I was born. New York is a bombed-out wreck of a city, not really a place to go visit."
I felt like an idiot for opening my mouth again. Even when I was aware of my own assumptions, I couldn't seem to stop them. "I want to ask questions, but I don't even know where to start. It's weird, I keep assuming everyone else’s experiences before were like my own, even though my brain is screaming at me saying that they weren’t."
"Ask away.” Harper’s usually easy expression furrowed with tension. “Until this morning I’d never even considered that there could be places all that different from my New York. I’m in pretty much the same boat you are."
"Is there a lot of fighting where you're from? Country against country, that kind of thing?"
"Not really, the war ended a long time ago, before I was really old enough to participate. Now, everyone just fights to survive. Against each other, against invaders, against wild animals and warlords. It was pretty bleak." Despite welcoming questions, Harper’s tone was clipped.
I didn't probe much further, and Harper didn't seem all that keen to volunteer more information. The conversation died away and we continued our endless wandering between the stalls.
I was dying to see the kinds of things you only see in fantasy movies, but there were no magical lamps, magic rings, enchanted swords, or anything else of that nature among the snacks and handcrafted items. At least, nothing obvious enough that it jumped out at us, and we didn’t stop to talk to anyone who didn't talk to us first.
After an hour, we found a blue tarp tent filled with an eclectic mix of clothing both on racks and stacked on tables. There didn't seem to be any method to the madness in terms of what went where, but both Harper and I enjoyed losing ourselves in the treasure hunt. There was a changing room in the back made up of little more than a curtain on a rod that I could pull open and closed, but that was more than enough for me to wiggle into a pair of jeans and a plain gray tank top. I should have gone for something a little warmer, but didn't want to press my luck since I was still missing a key piece of my outfit that may well cost more than t
he rest of my clothes combined. Thankfully, the tiny black woman with short cropped hair and a brightly colored outfit also had a few choices of shoes at her register. I tried not to look too surprised when she asked me what size I was and then quickly altered the pair I'd been looking at with a few mumbled words to become the size I needed.
"Here," Harper said, handing me the wallet while simultaneously cutting off the questions I’d just been about to ask. “We’ll take one of those backpacks too.”
I shut my mouth and passed the credit card to the shopkeeper. As she moved to grab me a bag, Harper shot me yet another look. She still thought I was being too obvious about how lost we were, saying too much and her motto in life was don't ask questions.
"Did you want to throw out those old pajamas?" Harper asked once we left the tent. "There's a garbage can over there."
I looked down at the bundle in my hands, knowing I should just get rid of it. But instead, I shook my head. "No, it's kind of all I have left of home, you know? Maybe I can get them cleaned up or something and use them later on. Besides, it's not like I have anything else, so throwing things out probably wouldn't be my best plan ever."
Harper shrugged, handing me the new backpack. "Here, shove them in so you don't have to carry them around. We'll try to grab a few other things while we're here and stock up."
After buying two new toothbrushes and a tube of toothpaste, plus a hairbrush at a cart that sold things usually found at a convenience store alongside an elaborate collection of teacups, we finally stopped, out of things we desperately needed to make it through the next day or so.
I tried not to think about figuring out where we were going to sleep that night, and instead put on my biggest smile. At least we still had the credit card, even if we didn’t know its limit or if it might be cut off at any minute. Hopefully what we had would last long enough to find some real help. Assuming Harper let me ask any questions ever again.
"What do you say?" Harper asked. "Time to get out of here and back into the world?"
"Sounds good." I looked around the room, trying to find the door we came from. Instead, I found half a dozen doors all spread evenly throughout the room, pressed back against the clear glass of the walls.
"Any chance you made note of which of these we came through?"
Harper glanced up and noticed the same thing I did. "Nope. But worst-case scenario we end up in a different part of the city, far away from the guys we ran into today. I'd almost say let's aim for going somewhere new. What's the worst that can happen?"
Yeah, that wasn’t a question I wanted to find the answer to.
"Okay, what's the worst that can happen in one part of the city that couldn't happen in another?" Harper amended.
"Fair point."
We decided on a door with a sign over top of it labelled West End. I forced myself to keep breathing as we stepped through the dark passageway with another group of people and back down onto the street. At least this time, the odds were in our favor and we ended up somewhere completely new from where we first entered the bazaar.
I heard the rush of nearby waves before I noticed anything else, and it wasn't long before we found the docks I'd seen from up high. Ships lined endless piers, the extravagant vessels moving off into the distance. I looked up to see a signpost, one direction pointed toward the theatre district, another to the Archive, and the third to a Reclamation Center.
It was strange, I hadn't even thought about the idea of a Reclamation Center since reading the letter. At any time, I could’ve sought the nearby facility and escaped this whirlwind of a day to go back to my old life.
No thanks.
Every time I thought about my life before, all I felt was sad. Sad because of Darren and Kelsey, and sad because I didn't know where my parents were. Or anyone else I’d ever cared about. They could be in the same city I was, even a block away, and I had no way of tracking them down.
But going into a Reclamation Center to return to my story would mean throwing away any sort of future with them here. And saying goodbye to any real future for myself. I’d live on forever in a familiar world going through the same motions repeatedly, but I knew how that story ended and I didn't like it. Sure, there were other parts of my life that I loved like my job, my friends, books, movies, and board games. And I couldn't argue that life there was easier than it was here, at least so far.
But I wasn't ready to give up on the idea of more. The Reclamation Center would always be there if the time came when that was my only option. But all things considered, my day had taken a pretty positive turn and things were going far better than they had been back at that park.
If Harper didn't decide she would be better off without me, I could convince myself I might be okay.
"What are you looking at?" Harper asked, drawing my attention back. I nodded my head toward the Reclamation Center sign.
"You." Harper made a face. "You're not thinking about going in there, are you?"
"Not a chance. Just kind of got lost in thought."
"I hear that happens when you're hungry."
I laughed appreciatively, not at all surprised that Harper was hungry again already. My own stomach was starting to gurgle again.
"Any chance you want to help me track down a grocery store? Maybe we can find some cheaper food that will help our money last a little longer."
"Fine," I said, drawing out the world. “But only if we get something really decadent, that’s not at all good for us.” It was only as I said those words that I really took in Harper’s tiny frame. She had said the world she'd come from had been a hard one. It was more than possible that she hadn't been getting enough to eat before arriving here.
"Yes, please! Let’s go big. There are always more wallets where this one came from. Well, not specifically. But I'll figure something out, I always do.”
CHAPTER FIVE
The store we had stumbled into perfectly fit my mental image of a typical grocery store, but its name written was above the door in a language I didn't recognize, let alone understand. The food inside wasn’t much better. Half the fruit I spotted when I walked through the door came in shapes and colors I didn’t recognize. The meats looked even more mysterious. Thankfully, a little hunting through the aisles left both Harper and I with a couple of goodies worth a few meals.
Although, to be fair, I was sure Harper would eat absolutely anything put in front of her.
We ended up at a park, unpacking Harper's backpack full of food while we settled in under a large oak tree. The sun had almost disappeared behind the skyline, and I tried to get comfortable as blades of grass pricked against every inch of my exposed skin.
I reminded myself repeatedly that this wasn't the same park I'd been in earlier that day, but I still found myself looking around every minute just to be sure we were truly alone. Thankfully, the park only had streetlights around its outer edges, leaving its interior dark and gloomy. The best hideout we could find. There was still a little light coming across the skyline, but my eyes were quickly adjusting to the growing darkness.
Neither Harper nor I said anything about it, but I suspected we were both thinking the same thing. Something this random couldn’t be a coincidence.
But Harper's priority was food. We'd gotten a loaf of bread and some fixings for sandwiches that wouldn’t hold up all that well in a warm backpack overnight, so it made the most sense to eat those first. As much as anything made sense anymore. Harper had also thought to grab some fruit for the morning so we wouldn't have to go looking for more right away. Hopefully, that would give us some time to come up with a better game plan than living meal to meal and hoping no one noticed us.
We still had a little money left, but nowhere near enough to get a room in the one hotel we’d passed. I’d love to find some sort of directory in case there are any cheaper accommodations that might be an option for us in the future, but at least for that night we were committed to sleeping in the park. At least, Harper was, and I was too tired to argue. I was
usually too much of a wimp to spend the night sleeping outdoors, but it had been a day of firsts and I was feeling a little more confident than I had that morning.
As Harper spread out our limited supply of food on a few paper towels in front of her, I set about taking off my shoes. Putting them on had been one of the best feelings of the day despite how worn down and battered my feet were, but taking them off wasn't nearly as much fun. The blisters I'd noticed earlier had already bled through my socks, and more were already forming all over the soles of my feet. A few stray bruises also decorated my skin here and there. It wasn't a pretty picture, and it felt even worse.
I’d never given much thought to my shoes before, but I promised myself I'd be grateful for them every day from that moment forward.
"Ooof," Harper said waving her hand in front of her nose as she swallowed down a bite of her sandwich. "Put those bad boys away."
"I'm sorry," I whined. But I didn't put my shoes back on. Instead, I grabbed one of the two remaining pairs of socks from the package I'd purchased at the bazaar and moved to put those on instead, hoping the bleeding had stopped and I wasn't about to ruin a second pair.
"Don't be dumb, I was just kidding. Your feet need to breathe. And eat. Or you need to eat to feed your feet. I don't know, I'm really tired. Weird day."
"Weird day," I agreed. Thankful, I stuffed my new socks back in our backpack before handing it over to Harper. I left the bloody ones beside the trunk of the tree we were leaning against, not willing to put them anywhere that might touch our food.
The temperature had started to drop a little, but the air was still comfortable. I hoped it would stay that way overnight since all I had to cover me was the thin fabric of a sweater Harper had insisted on getting at a discount bin, unless I was willing to put my now seriously grimy pajamas anywhere near me again. We should’ve considered a blanket, but we never seemed to stop to figure out our next step, instead Harper seemed intent on going from A to B and planning as she went. And I was just grateful to be around someone who had any plan at all.
City of Magic (Happily Ever Afterlife Book 1) Page 4