He opens his eyes to a cracked white wall. He has no idea where he is. Panicked, he searches through a kaleidoscope of remembered images: sun-yellow curtains, an open window, the cornice of a high-ceilinged apartment. Finally, it comes: he’s in the hostel. He reaches for his notebook, finds what he scribbled half-conscious as he woke. A lightning-shaped hole, two figures falling.

He sits up, feeling the old pain in his neck that he puts down to his year on the streets. He turns to face the grid of images on the wall, linked with pinned-up lines of red string. The ruined clock tower in the old town; a time-lapse photo of a starry sky, constellations blurred into streaks; the imprint of a bird on a window, ghostly feathers on glass. Together, they form a map that he hopes will one day lead him to meaning.

He looks down and starts to draw: image after image of Thora, old and young, her hair all the colors of the rainbow. The ruled lines of the notebook cut each picture, interference on a transmission coming from impossibly far away.

He tucks the notebook into his jacket and follows the rising sun outside. His shoulders tense as he passes through reception, but the person behind the desk isn’t Thora. He stops to pet the skinny black cat that haunts the hostel door. She meows at him plaintively, as if she’s trying to remind him of something important.

He begs a slice of burek from the Turkish café across the street. He eats half and keeps half for later, dropping the crumbs for the parakeets. The birds are talking in the trees, muttered fragments of conversations he’s heard before. This world is overlaid with itself, parts reused to patch up what is worn out. He wonders if he is made of fragments too: if somewhere he can’t see, his skin flashes feathers. If he jumped from the top of the clock tower, would a fragment of feather be enough for him to fly?

He walks on, into the city’s tangled heart. Sooner than it should, the cathedral looms, a vision of darkness against the sky. Santi still remembers how his throat went dry the first time he stepped inside: how the space between him and the vaulted ceiling gave him the illusion of movement, as if the whole thing were about to lift off and carry him to the stars. He should have taken it as a warning, not a promise. He should have left the city then, while he could still afford to. Now, he’s stuck in the labyrinth, wandering in circles until he finds a thread to lead him out.