Paths, Thora thinks, as Lily’s steps diminish down the corridor. Paths diverging again and again, infinite and terrifying. But hopeful too. Maybe she hasn’t trapped herself after all. Maybe it isn’t too late to seek a better world.

She locks the treatment room, wraps the scarf her father knitted around her neck, and heads down the stairs. Her phone rings. She sighs and picks up. “Hey, tati. How are you?”

“Oh, excellent, excellent.” Her father sounds drunk. “How are you?”

“Not bad. Just finished at work.” The automatic door lets her out into the spitting rain. “Had a bit of a weird conversation with a patient.”

He makes a dismissive noise. “Not surprising. They are all senile, your patients.”

No more senile than you. She hears the echo of her angry response, as if another Thora says it, but she makes a different choice. “Listen, I have to bike home now, but—I’ll come and see you tomorrow. Okay?”

A pause. “Yes. Okay. See you.”

The rain intensifies as she reaches her bike. She pulls up her hood and sets off, dodging a truck that nearly pushes her into a pothole. “Watch it!” she yells, in German, English, and Czech for good measure. That would have been a good ending to her little epiphany, she thinks. Killed in a bike accident.

As the rain eases off and the clouds begin to break, she cycles on through Neumarkt, skirting the Belgian Quarter and crossing the park where the mosque glitters in the evening sun. She pedals on into Ehrenfeld, passing the Turkish café, the landlocked lighthouse by the train tracks: home. As she parks her bike and unlocks the door of her building, she rubs her breast, feeling the lump Jules keeps nagging her to have checked. Later, she thinks, and closes the door behind her.

We Are Here

Santi is lost.

He stands in the middle of a busy shopping street, a stone in a river of staring people. He knows what a year of rough sleeping has done to him: the haunted eyes, the tremor, the nervous tension that makes people keep their distance. But he knows that’s not why they’re looking. Being the center of the world is exhausting. He wishes, sometimes, that they would just stop. Look at someone else, he wants to say, but the problem is that everyone else is perfectly transparent: even if they all lined up in front of him, it would be as useless as trying to hide in clear water.

He’s not sleeping rough these days. He has a place in the hostel now. That’s where he was trying to go. But the streets of this city lead back on themselves, knot and tangle into dead ends. He reaches into his jacket for the talisman of his grandfather’s knife. The key, he thinks, is to know who you are. Only then will you know where you’re going.