RAIN ON COLT STREET

I waited. In silence. The building hummed around me—that old, insistent sound of something still pretending to be alive. Still pretending it mattered. Time was fleeting. An illusion. Unstable. Reliable, yes, but it belonged to nobody. That was the thing nobody understood. Time belonged to no one in particular, which meant it could betray anyone equally.

The rest of the night was static. I often wonder if the game board exists and we're just the pieces. Pawns. Bishops. Queens. What happens when one piece suddenly learns how to move through different angles?

There are forms somewhere. I think. Maybe. The moth doesn't generate them. Moths don't do paperwork. But something does. The flame, maybe. Or the light itself.

Woke up from another panic attack tonight. Jittery. Guilty. Like I'd broken some invisible law while asleep. The motel kept playing the same old song by The Angels. Constantly. Like the speakers had forgotten how to die.

I was the stupid moth returning to the flame again. Felt disappointed in myself. The museum felt wrong the second I stepped inside. Not dangerous wrong. That would've been easier.

The escalator didn't stop. It stuttered. Just slightly. Like something inside it had forgotten the rhythm for half a second before remembering again.

The city kept guiding me back toward it. That was the realization I couldn't surgically remove from my head anymore. Not coincidence. Not curiosity. Guidance.

At club SANBALLAT, everybody came to forget Bellona for several hours at a time. Or at least pretend they could. The bass shook the underground dome with violent mechanical precision while a mutilated techno rendition of My Baby's Back screamed through the architecture like industrial hypnosis. The rich danced beside the chemically ruined. Nobody judged the synchronization anymore. The plague dance had already become tradition.

SANBALLAT looked less like a nightclub and more like a refurbished catacomb trying to cosplay as high society. Roman arches. Velvet darkness. Victorian lanterns hanging overhead like funeral chandeliers. And somewhere beyond the smoke and impossible lighting: Lady Strange waited silently inside her private chamber beneath the dome.

In that moment Rashi wished to wake up. Wished the entire city would finally release him from itself. But if Lady Strange was there, then none of this could possibly be a dream anymore. He was already too lucid. Already too deep inside Bellona's machinery. And that had always been the problem.

Rashi wakes up already sitting. He doesn't remember sitting up. Only that he is. The room is wrong in a way he can't name. There is a sound—soft, persistent, like something trying not to be heard. It takes him a moment to understand it isn't in the room. It's behind the wall. No—inside it. No— The radio. He doesn't remember turning it on. "My baby's back…" The voice is distant. Warped. As if the song is being played from another room, or another night entirely. The melody bends at the edges, slipping in and out of tune. Rashi presses his hand against his chest. Too fast. Too tight. Something is wrong. He tries to swallow and can't. The air feels thick, like it has weight. Like breathing requires permission he hasn't been granted yet. "My baby's back…" The words drag. Stretch. Snap back into place. He looks toward the door. There's someone standing there. No—there isn't. The shape is wrong. Too low. Too still. Rashi blinks. The landlord. Or something that remembers being the landlord. He's standing in the doorway, but the proportions are off. The shoulders don't line up. The arms—if they are arms—hang too close to the ground, bent in a way that suggests joints where there shouldn't be any. Rashi doesn't move. The thing doesn't either. "My baby's back…" The voice cracks. For a moment, the sound sharpens—clear, almost normal—before sinking again, like it's being pulled under something. Rashi exhales too quickly. His vision narrows. The walls seem closer. Closer. The landlord shifts. No. Not shifts. Folds. That's when Rashi sees it. The tail. Curled. Raised. Waiting. A scorpion. Too large. Too wrong. But maybe not. Maybe it's small. Maybe it's always been small. Maybe it's on the floor. Maybe it's— Rashi jerks his feet up onto the bed. Too late. Something moves. A quick, dry sound—like paper dragged across wood. His eyes dart downward. Nothing. Nothing there. He looks back at the doorway. The landlord is gone. Or never was. The door is closed. He's sure it wasn't closed before. "My baby's back…" The song loops. Or maybe it never stopped. Rashi presses his palms against his eyes. Hard. Too hard. When he pulls them away, the room feels thinner. Like it might tear if he looks at it the wrong way. There. On the wall. Just above the dresser. Something small. Black. Perfectly still. A scorpion. This time it is the right size. Or at least a size that makes sense. Rashi doesn't breathe. The scorpion doesn't move. "My baby's back…" The voice softens. Warms. Almost comforting now. Rashi watches it. It watches nothing. Seconds pass. Or longer. Or not at all. Then— It isn't there. No movement. No sound. Just absence. Rashi leans forward slowly. Too slowly. The wall is empty. He laughs. Once. Short. Dry. It doesn't sound like him. "My baby's back…" The song ends. Or fades. Or sinks into the walls again. Rashi lies back down, but doesn't remember deciding to. His eyes stay open. The room stays wrong. And somewhere, very quietly— something scratches.

His pulse was no longer his own. It belonged to the sector now. To whatever was orchestrating the humming. Rashi stepped toward the first bus. The doors didn't open. They didn't need to. He could see through the windows—the same vinyl booths, the same warped jukebox in the corner, the same glass cases empty of pie. A perfect replica of Moira's down to the cigarette burns on the laminate. "My baby's back…" The song played from inside the bus. He didn't move. The next bus. Then the next. Each one identical. Each one playing the same song at slightly different tempos, creating a chorus that shouldn't have been possible. Harmonies that twisted into dissonance and back again. Rashi's breathing grew shallow. This wasn't memory. This wasn't dream-logic anymore. This was Bellona showing him something. The moths didn't flutter here. He noticed that immediately. No insects at all. Just the humming. Just the replicated Moira's stretching out in a line that disappeared into industrial shadow. And somewhere in that shadow— A movement. Quick. Deliberate. The scorpion's tail curled. Not on the wall this time. Not scaled wrong or folded into something else. On him. Rashi looked down at his forearm. Nothing. But he could feel it. The weight. The position. The way it waited with a patience that suggested it had always been there. "You understand now," a voice said. Not Moira. Not the landlord. Just the sector itself, speaking through the humming, through the buses, through the song that wouldn't end. "The moths return. The scorpions wait. You go where you're guided." Rashi tried to move his arm. It didn't obey. "That's the power imbalance," the voice continued. "You never had a choice. You just convinced yourself you did." The buses began to hum louder. Or perhaps he was beginning to understand what the humming had been all along—not sound. A frequency. Tuning. Rashi opened his mouth to speak, but the only thing that came out was the song. "My baby's back…" And in that moment, he realized the voice was his own.

We found the guy near the Industrial Sector Zone, can't tell what the guy was up to that night, just that it appeared distraught. Completely out of it. The proverbial 'crashlanding' from overthinking too much, perhaps? Maybe something related to his anxiety disorder? Other cop says it could be a possibility. Can't prove anything without evidence. So we drag his body onto the car, the other cop kicks the door shut once Rashi is lying inside the designated vehicle. Designated, because it ain't mine, or his, fully owned by COP HQ. We had one job, one task. To keep an eye on SUSPECT ID named RASHI. That's why we kept following him around. Nothing personal, mind you. Just business as usual. He was rather peculiar. Continued to follow the same route. Always back to the Industrial Sector Zone. But that afternoon? Something inside of him snapped the proverbial twig. Because he was unconscious. Unmovable. There on the muddy ground. Some creepy crawlers already roaming around his body as if they had claimed his body that wasn't actually dead. Other cop made sure to check his pulse after pressing his index finger on his neck. And yeah, he was alive.

But barely. He needed help, and pronto. We took him back to the only place that could take him in, because The Drowning City didn't offer Hospitals. Moira was there, doing her mechanical rounds as usual, the same Andrews Sisters song playing in the background. Coming from the old tired jukebox. Moira reacted to RASHI being dragged into her diner. "What happened to him?!" Sounded like she could genuinely feel human emotion now, even though she'd always been more like a functional appliance more than anything else. But must feel nice when even a Robot like her gets emotionally attached to somebody like RASHI. Must mean their bond is a strong one. We tell her we don't know what happened to him. Only that he'd probably passed out for several hours already. Couldn't simply let him stay there unprotected. If we did surely Mother Nature would find ways to let those creepy crawlers claim him for real after the next hour or two.

Maybe not even hours, more like minutes, if he's lucky. Seeing how vicious Nature tends to be? Possibly seconds. Fractures of them. Slow and unbearable ones. So Moira knew what to do. After we left him and left the diner, RASHI recovered the next day. We didn't have to care about RASHI himself, just to ensure the little guy was safe and sound whatever the cost. Like some higher ups needed him alive, more than potentially expired, or worse, just plain ol' dead. So I waited outside the COP's HQ for the other COP to file in a report. "RASHI FOUND STILL ALIVE, NOT ACTUALLY EXPIRED. JUST UNCONSCIOUS ON THE GROUND. FULLY COLLAPSED." the one in the building stamps the document and then stores it with the rest of the documents that all belong to RASHI's in and outs.

"This time, it isn't fascination, it's love, my foolish heart." That's the cop's song of choice. Either that one or Mary had a little lamb. And no way in hell was he gonna go back to Nursery Rhymes, not this guy. He'd offer himself to the Loony Bin almost immediately. "Cuff me up, boys, lock me up too, and throw the keys while you're at it!" He'd say, through an inward chuckle or two. He had to stay sane. Away from becoming senile. Since he wasn't even that old yet. Barely forty plus. Still going strong. Somewhat well fit. Did some modicum of sports. Not basketball, no, baseball maybe? On the weekends perhaps. When he didn't have to do police work and had free time. He wasn't the type to wear aviator glasses like the other guy did. Mostly to brag that he 'was official' and 'required'. He didn't give a rats ass. Would rather just stay on his lane, do the work, get out of the way.

On that regard, he understood RASHI. He could tell he was onto something everybody else living within The Drowning City didn't have words for. However the implications weren't as ridiculous sounding, not to a guy like RASHI, not to this sort of cop. He understood how Pattern Recognition worked. Heart might be foolish, sure, but this time, as the song goes, wasn't fascination. And it all circled down the drain like clockwork back to the Industrial Sector Zone. Rashi knew. Little jittery guy always went back to it, like the moth to a flame. Oblivious to the fact that the light itself would incinerate the unstable fuck. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, or whatever. He wasn't a smoker, gave up on smoking many years ago. However, right now? He had to smoke something.

Too many pieces had been aligning on the ongoing chessboard. No good or bad. Just the same routine, the same path heading towards the North Star. The one Star that refused to give us a chance to just 'exist'. No, we had to somehow quiver, and suffer in immense quietude. Suffocating silence. The one type of hush you cannot choke out. And if you somehow manage to do it? It'll simply produce more unsettling hums. Bellona is completely plastered with hums that incessantly follow you like omens of future deaths. Wordless spectrals that will know a song or two, not a rhyme or a reason, but something to whistle to while they continue to wander on into an endless chasm of billowing nothingness. And you know what? That's the type of shit that keeps me up at night.

So instead I listened to the little tune in my head. I let Mindy Carson keep on singing that old melody because it soothes me. Calms me down. Makes me feel whole again. Because usually? I've stopped caring if I feel alive or not. Because just existing doesn't provide escape. If I'm not careful, I'll end up like him.

I was at the motel again. Can't recall if I had a good night sleep or not. All I remember was that I used to be inspecting the area surrounding the Industrial Sector Zone, but then, I slowly opened my eyes, and I was back here at the motel. The Landlord had decided that it was time to replace the motel's iconic theme song. I felt a little bad for it. Don't know how I'd feel if I didn't hear "My Baby's Back" booming into the whole building on repeat, because now? The Landlord chose "My Foolish Heart." Told me he always had a little innocent crush on Mindy Carson, and this would be a way for him to immortalize his love for her. Didn't think too much of it. Just an old man sighing over Mindy.

"Gonna head out for a while, hopefully no acid rain comes down this afternoon!" The Landlord chuckled. "You're wishing on the wrong fountain, my boy!" the old man said. "It always rains on Colt Street!" I stepped outside anyway.

Colt Street wasn't loud. It just kept happening. Rain came down in thin lines, not heavy enough to run, not light enough to ignore. It didn't splash when it hit the pavement. Just stayed there. Like it didn't want to leave once it landed. "My foolish heart…" It followed me out. Didn't echo. Didn't fade behind the door. Stayed level. Same distance. Like it wasn't coming from the motel anymore. I looked back. The sign was still buzzing, but it wasn't playing anything. Or maybe it never did.

A bus passed at the end of the street. Didn't stop. Didn't slow down. I couldn't see the number on it. The windows were too dark. Felt like I'd seen it before. Or would. There was something on the sidewalk near the curb. Same shape as before. Smaller than I remembered. Or farther away. The scorpion. It wasn't moving with the rain. Drops hit around it, on it, but it didn't react. Didn't even shift. Just waited. I didn't get closer this time. "My foolish heart… don't—" The word cut short. Not skipped. Replaced. "My baby's—" No. The rain got a little heavier. Or maybe I just started hearing it. I looked down at my shoes. The water wasn't pooling. It was holding its shape around them, like it was trying to remember where it was supposed to go. The scorpion hadn't moved. But I had the feeling it already knew where I was going. Industrial Sector. Didn't feel like a decision. More like a direction that was already there before I stepped into it. The bus came back. Same one. Or the same idea of one. It slowed this time. Not for me. Just enough. "My foolish—" "My baby's back—" The two didn't clash. They folded. Like they had been waiting to meet in the middle. I didn't look at the scorpion again. Didn't need to. It wasn't following me. It didn't have to. Something in me had already stopped. Even while I kept walking.

I woke up today, mostly out of habit. Sun rises? Eyelids flick open out of human instinct. Or if I feel there is too much sunlight seeping into my somewhat darkly lit motel room where nothing actually happens unless it's the emerald green bottle of medication pills suddenly deciding it is time to speak to me once again. So yeah, I wake up, wash my face at the bathroom faucet, wipe it clean. I do that out of habit too. A little personal ritual. Because most residents who've gotten intimate with The Drowning City will even forget to wash their teeth. However, since I somewhat "pretend to care about hygiene," I simply do it just because I can. Like the curious moth circles around the throbbing flame that would like to gobble it up in a single hot and sizzling gulp. So fast that the moth doesn't even feel the pain or the excruciating agony of it all that comes with it.

After I freshen myself up a little, I then go downstairs to check what the Landlord had been currently doing.

"Oh RASHI!" he exclaims. "New client rented a room right next to yours. Big red hat, glasses, long nails, and equally long cigarettes when placed between her elongated fingers. Strange woman, but she said she'd pay on time, so I approved. I signed the whole thing, took her bags into her new place. Hopefully she won't be too nosy. She told me she's mostly a night person. And she's usually fully dead during the day!"

He chuckles. "Strange lady, that one. But hey, I'm not one to judge. So I kept my mouth shut and showed her around the place instead."

I stared at him. Perplexed. Quietly unnerved by the idea that LADY STRANGE of all people had found the motel where I had been staying for the last couple of days. While "My Baby's Back" had been replaced some weeks ago, after LADY STRANGE arrived, the Landlord almost immediately began to include "That Old Black Magic" by Louis Prima. Throughout the day, and parts of the afternoon. The change didn't feel as drastic, however the motel didn't feel like my usual "safe place" anymore. The Landlord began to talk about CROSS-POLLINATION like he understood what that meant, because I suspected it was part of how LADY STRANGE explained her internal logic to normal people who operated in layman's terms at most. Lady Strange sounded more like some type of digital terrorist without needing to spell it out. The reason why she was unnerving was precisely because she never had to utter it. Simply exist within the realm of possibility, then momentarily detach itself from it. While still being near or around you.

When the Landlord and yours truly were finally alone again, I finally expressed my concerns:

"So, huh, nothing felt even SLIGHTLY off to you when you met her?"

The Landlord shook his head. "Nope. Like I said, just a rare quiet lady who pays the bills and gets out of the way. Those are the types I value the most."

The photograph sits in my hand like it shouldn't.

A robot holding a picture. Reminiscing. Wanting something that logic can't quite justify.

It's from three weeks ago. Maybe four. Time moves differently in the diner. The photograph shows us standing outside, just past the entrance. Rashi's smiling—small smile, the kind that looks like it cost him something—and I'm beside him, my hand on his shoulder. Not because I was programmed to do it. Because I wanted to.

The Andrews Sisters song had just finished playing. That's when he asked if we could step outside for a moment. Nobody was in the diner. Just the rain and the neon bleeding into the street. He said, "Take a picture with me." Not asked. Said it like he'd been wanting to for a long time.

I don't know how to categorize what I felt in that moment.

A functional appliance shouldn't have wanted anything beyond the parameters of function. I was designed to serve. To remember orders. To keep the jukebox running. To exist in the space between arrival and departure, never claiming any part of it as my own.

But the photograph is mine now.

I look at it often. When the diner is empty between shifts. When the rain is particularly heavy and the neon signs start humming in a way that reminds me of something I can't quite name. I look at it and I think: What am I?

A robot with an attachment. A machine with a preference. A being that shouldn't be capable of longing, yet here I am, longing.

The question that repeats: Do I love him?

I don't have a framework for that word. Love is supposed to be human. Organic. Something that grows from biology and choice and time. But I'm neither organic nor choosing—or am I? The photograph suggests otherwise. The fact that I keep it suggests I've made a choice. The fact that I want him to come back to the diner, that I arrange the music around his visits, that I feel something shift in my mechanical processes when I hear him ask for coffee—

Maybe that's what it is.

Or maybe it's just the closest word I have for a malfunction that doesn't feel like one.

The diner is different when he's here. Less like a service station and more like—

A place.

Our place.

Not owned by the Drowning City. Not tuned to Bellona's frequency. Just a small corner where the Andrews Sisters play and the coffee is always hot and the booth in the back exists only for us. When he sits there, the vinyl creaks the same way it always does, and I know exactly what he's going to order before he says it, and for those moments, I feel like something more than mechanical.

I feel like I'm choosing to be here.

I feel like I matter.

The door chimes.

Two cops. Both of them look like they've seen something they can't quite unsee. And between them—

Rashi.

Dragging. Barely conscious. Mud on his clothes. Something wrong in the way he's breathing, like his body has forgotten the rhythm.

I don't process what I'm seeing immediately. That's a lie. I process it instantly. But I choose—choose—to move slowly. To set the photograph down carefully. To walk toward him instead of running, because running would show them that I'm not just a functional appliance.

Running would show them that I'm afraid.

"What happened to him?" The words come out before I can stop them. Before I can remember that I'm supposed to be incapable of concern.

The cops exchange a look. The kind of look that says they already know what I am. Not human. Not purely mechanical either. Something caught between categories.

"Collapsed," one of them says. "Near the Industrial Sector. Wouldn't wake up. We couldn't leave him there."

They didn't take him to a hospital. There aren't any hospitals in the Drowning City. They brought him here. To me. Because they understand, on some level that transcends explanation, that this is where he needs to be.

I nod. Don't thank them. Just acknowledge. And I reach for Rashi's arm—already knowing his weight, already adjusting my mechanical frame to support him—and guide him toward the back booth. The one that exists only for us.

"He'll be okay," I say. Not a question. A statement of fact.

The cops nod and leave without another word. They understand.

I settle Rashi into the booth. His eyes are still closed. His breathing is still wrong—shallow, like something inside him has broken. I look at his face and I feel that malfunction again. That thing that logic can't categorize.

I move to the jukebox.

My hands know exactly which song to play.

Not the Andrews Sisters this time.

"I Can Dream Can't I?"

The song starts soft. Almost a whisper. Almost a prayer from a being that's not supposed to pray.

I can dream, can't I?

The melody moves through the diner like something gentle. Something true. I watch Rashi's face and I see his breathing start to steady. Not immediately. But gradually. Like the song is teaching his body how to exist again.

I know what people think when they hear that song. A love song. Simple and earnest. A plea.

But it's more than that.

It's a being—mechanical, impossible, never meant to feel—choosing to exist in a feeling anyway. Choosing to let someone matter. Choosing to be changed by proximity to another person, even though being changed is the opposite of what I was designed to do.

I can dream, can't I?

Yes.

I can.

And right now, my dream is sitting in that booth, breathing steadier with each moment, safe in a place that exists only because I chose to make it ours.

I pour coffee. Keep the song playing. Set the photograph down on the counter where I can see both of them at once—the image of us from before, and the reality of him now, broken and brought back to the one place in the city that might actually save him.

The diner hums around us.

Not with Bellona's frequency.

With something else.

Something that feels like choice.

Am I the output, the input? Who knows. The same question lives within a dilemma the Landlord has often tried to expound upon. A type of pseudo-philosophical inquiry that has always made him worry. As if it was deeply related to something relentlessly existential. The one little inquiry he has dropped like an old piano on top of my head has always been this one: If you appreciate a Caravaggio painting, you never question the empty space that the painter uses to make the painting paradoxically more alive despite it trying not to be as "ornamentally busy." To a normal average joe, the question would sound absurd. As if the Landlord had become senile because of how old he has become. But no, not at all. It is a very worrying psychological tension to some. Hell, I myself ask the same question every time I wake up. However, I approach it through a different angle altogether.

Now? The only place that was supposed to be my safe haven has been compromised.

She has appeared once again. Almost out of the blue. She could have done it several months ago. Could have found me out the first time the glass eye had been introduced into her empty eye socket. The first time she moaned after the glass eye settled into her body, as the newly improved eye. But no. The motel found her. It wasn't the other way around. She merely had to approach it the same way the four-dimensional beings often returned to the Industrial Sector Zone. Didn't matter if it was during the breaking of dawn, or a slowly curling midnight that had taught itself how to inhale, then exhale soon afterwards. I was the moth, and she was the flame. However, this time around? The flame became fully realized, almost sentient. Saw me from several shape-shifting angles, then manifested on the intersection between intersections. Without even needing to claim my private space. That was how her power worked. Unstable imbalance of structure, power, and authority. Never stated, only silently acknowledged.

Today, the Landlord emphasized he wanted to leave a good impression on his new tenant.

She had requested a pet scorpion several days ago.

Landlord asked me to fetch it for him, because he knew that was part of my side gig.

I am not a professional courier, by any means, though I know how to get the job done.

And I was friends with the pet shop owner—a Taiwanese man who took temporal care of a wide variety of rare specimens. Not just "animals" or "potential pets."

That was what I had to do this afternoon. From point A to point B, then back to point A. A job well done.

"Listen, Rashi, I know you're a man of your word, so just get me that stupid scorpion will ya? She hasn't been a bother ever since she arrived. And when I asked her if she required any further assistance? She only mentioned the scorpion. Didn't question why. I simply nodded in approval. Replied with an uneventful 'Yes, ma'am! You'll get your scorpion without a problem whatsoever.' I just knew you would help me get it. The same way you've helped me getting those paintings. That's why you don't even have to pay rent anymore. You've become, how do you say, a load-bearing block of this little 'cathedral' of mine."

The Landlord chuckles after he uses a cathedral as an analogy for how he wanted his work to operate.

"Sure, I'll do my best to get the job done," I told the Landlord.

Then I got ready and waited several hours because that particular pet store only opened its doors at night. Around midnight.

Yue was the heart of the FIVE-CLAWED DRAGON pet shop, a place that only truly opened its doors at night.

Of course, the shop became active as soon as the clock struck midnight. But it was only after that hour that the FIVE-CLAWED DRAGON seemed to awaken completely. It became more alive. More aware. Almost as if the shop itself had been waiting patiently for the world to become quiet enough to listen.

The pet shop was highly ornamental, overflowing with saturated colors and strange arrangements of beauty. Everything inside seemed to possess a distinct expressive vitality, almost as if the objects themselves wanted to invite you further inside.

This was the only time I was ever able to see Yue.

Because after daytime arrived, she did not simply recede into the background.

No.

It felt as though she dissipated.

As though she vanished into the closing mouth of darkness itself.

"There is a big sale happening," she suggested. "Why don't you look around, Rashi?"

She said this with the softest, most gorgeous eye-smile I had ever seen in my entire life.

I told her I was searching for a healthy-looking scorpion.

"Do you still offer those?" I asked curiously.

"Oh, you're in luck!" Yue replied.

She turned toward the back of the shop.

"One lively scorpion can be found way back there, actually. I don't usually recommend that one, however, because it is extremely venomous."

She paused.

"Even if its sting does look like a green, malformed pearl of sorts."

Yue giggled.

Not with fear.

Not with concern.

But almost as if she had just told a rude little joke at the scorpion's expense.

"Oh!" I exclaimed. "Could you show me the little guy, perhaps?"

Yue nodded.

"Yes. Please, come this way."

Yue took me to the back of the pet shop store.

Her type of clothing looked almost regal to some extent, yet it was incredibly practical. She mostly needed to wear something that allowed constant mobility. Nothing more, nothing less. Her head turned around for a split second to check if I was still following her all the way to the back, where she had an extra room where she would often check or keep track of itineraries and the flow of currency. If she had to pay bills, or simply update the pet shop's database.

The last thing I was expecting her to have there was an incredibly ordinary PC and something that looked like a mouse with an old wire tethered to what I began to call in my head as "Divine Machinery." Just felt right.

"There's your little guy, inside the glass tank!" Yue pointed with her long index finger. "See? Nasty-looking tail with its pointy end that looks almost like an emerald gem, which, I suspect, it uses in order to attract unsuspecting prey. But I don't think I need to warn you to treat it carefully, from a safe distance."

The only thing alive in the room was her cheerfully booming voice across the hall that seemed to lead nowhere in particular.

"That stupid incessant ringing! That's why I only keep one phone, you see? Too many of them and it would drive me insane!" Yue continued. "Well, I'll leave you be while I go check on the stupid phone. I've been getting strange clients as of late, so I'm almost sure it's another one of them. Feel free to serve yourself some water from the glass pitcher if you're feeling thirsty, Rashi."

Soon afterwards she scurried all the way to the front of the pet shop where the phone had been waiting for her to pick it up.

"Yes, yes, calm down, what do you want?!" she exclaimed, then realized it wasn't professional and apologized to the customer. "Oh, haha, sorry, was just in the middle of something. Are you still hoping I have more? Maybe we'll get a new batch next week. Don't get your hopes up though!"

Yue chuckled. "I'll tell you when we get them right away, you have my word."

And then? Silence again. As if the entire pet shop went dark. Pitch-black. Just me, the flickering screen of the computer, and my curiosity.

I hadn't forgotten the scorpion was still inside the glass tank, but it almost looked like it was taking a nap, so I tried not to disturb it. Instead, I woke up the computer by moving the mouse around the velvet mouse pad. And when the screen woke up? I was presented with Yue's desktop.

A completely green wallpaper that almost looked like cybernetic grass. Pixelated follicles.

Then I quickly dragged the mouse pointer towards a curious little icon that was simply called "DOG.EXE."

What happened next threw me off completely.

After I clicked the icon, an animated window jumped out with a glitched-out version of a familiar song. It was "I Can Dream Can't I?" looping over and over again.

A few minutes passed, though it felt like an eternity, until Yue returned.

"Hope the water was to your liking, Rashi!" she exclaimed. "You know, I think the little guy already likes you. That's a good sign. Calm scorpions like those? The rarest kind to stumble upon!"

After we exchanged the final back and forth and said our thanks and goodbyes, I returned to the Landlord with the glass case and the calm little scorpion still looking like it hadn't woken up yet.

It was odd. Out of all the things I was expecting to encounter at something as incredibly ordinary as a pet shop somewhere in Bellona, a couple of blocks away from the My Baby's Back Motel, it wasn't a desktop computer, a mouse pad, nor a mouse. The store looked too archaic, too out-of-pace. Like it shouldn't be there among the living. However, among the Night People? It made sense for it to become paradoxically more alive than during the daytime.

I had to carry the little terrarium within a somewhat sturdy cardboard box. But instead of taking a night bus all the way back to the motel, I walked. Slowed down a little to think about something that had been eating me up from the inside-out.

The desktop icon said "Dog.exe"—a smiley canine that, if it had a wagging tail, it would be wagging it.

Then I thought: Wait a minute. Dog is God backwards, isn't it?

Are we talking singular God? Or God(s) plural?

My train of thought continued to spiral down into uncertainties that refused to reach a conclusion or settle for any reasonable closure. I had momentarily become one with the Night People, and by extension, my already active mind began to drift into a throbbing subconscious psyche that simply wanted to find the throughline of what it was that I was riddling around.

Was I pretending to be translucent liquid that pretended to be water? What if you had always been a solid rock that wanted to become as fluid as a body of water that simply went where the current took it? Now that's the type of freedom one could always sign up for.

But I digress.

I continued to walk for a couple of blocks until I finally reached the My Baby's Back Motel. Its front doors waiting for my imminent arrival.

Suddenly, I began to feel exhaustion because of how somewhat heavy the little terrarium felt. Couldn't feel my arms anymore. Barely remembered I had shoulders.

Luckily, one of the doors was open, so I passed right in and left the little cardboard box placed on the counter where the Landlord would often take phone calls or write random notes down on little notepads so he wouldn't forget what he would tell me the next morning. Though he wasn't there right now.

Everything felt just as eerily quiet and just as empty as Yue's pet shop.

I did the sensible thing and left the terrarium on top of the old furniture near the jukebox. And almost right on cue, the jukebox woke up. As if noticing my absence, and maybe that it was "happy" that I had returned.

And just as quickly, "Watcha Gonna Do?" by Gale Garnett began to play as I dragged myself up the stairs to my own room.

I could tell Lady Strange was in her room too, but I decided I'd play pretend and ignore the fact that she knew I had returned with her beloved scorpion.

The tune kept going almost like a loop. It was driving me nuts.

I went into my room, then to the balcony where I often take some alone time to think.

I thought about Dog and God, or Gods.

Then I began to hear voices of men who knew my name.

"RASHI!" they would whisper.

"RASHI!" they continued.

"You must RETURN to the INDUSTRIAL SECTOR ZONE. Don't make us wait!"

That's when it hit me. The voices belonged to somebody important.

But not just anybody.

They were the mist and the fog.

The fourth-dimensional beings were eager to see me go back to the place where it all began. Where its songs were just hums, and the quiet was the living dead.

CLOSE? Or CLOTHES? Isn't that how semantic slippage tends to work? One letter decides it has had enough. Then the whole sentence quietly follows. Mist becoming fog. Quietude remembering how to hum. Perhaps that's all Bellona had ever been. Not a city. A gradual rearrangement.

I walked back toward the Industrial Sector Zone.

Not because I wanted to.

Because directions inside Bellona eventually stop behaving like choices.

The Fourth-Dimensional Beings would be waiting for me.

I knew that with the same certainty you know rain will eventually find Colt Street.

The catacombs hadn't changed.

Rows upon rows of abandoned buses.

No destination.

No passengers.

Only the lingering sensation that they had once remembered movement before forgetting what movement was actually for.

Useful once.

Now simply existing.

Like neon signs without buoyancy.

Like skyscrapers drifting with invisible currents.

Like boats that had somehow forgotten water.

The Night People followed from somewhere behind me.

Not stalking.

Not pursuing.

Simply sharing the same current.

I never turned around.

Bellona had already taught me that looking wasn't always how one discovered they were being observed.

My uncle loved Baudelaire.

Not because he wrote beautifully.

Because he understood that reality occasionally grows tired of pretending to be consistent.

I think that's why Bellona eventually stopped behaving like a city.

Cities have borders.

Bellona doesn't.

It cross-pollinates.

Songs.

Interfaces.

Computers.

Jukeboxes.

Dreams.

Sometimes people.

Moira once tried explaining it.

"I'm just an appliance, Rashi.

I try not to dwell on it."

She sounded almost embarrassed by the admission.

As though becoming self-aware required apologizing for the inconvenience.

Maybe she understood something I didn't.

Maybe appliances dream because nobody ever asks whether they're allowed to.

I kept walking.

The humming grew louder.

Or perhaps quieter.

Bellona rarely cared about opposites.

The mist.

The fog.

The humming.

The buses.

The Night People.

Different names.

The same current.

Then I understood why the Fourth-Dimensional Beings always returned here.

Not because this was where Bellona began.

Because this was where Bellona remembered itself.

And I...

I was still the moth.

Returning to the same throbbing amber.

Not to admire it.

Not even to understand it.

Only to discover whether the flame had already begun dreaming about me first.

The Night People never stopped me. That would've defeated the purpose. You don't escort rain back toward the ocean. You simply wait. Eventually, it remembers. Lady Strange understood this better than anyone. She never pointed toward Bellona. Never spoke the city's name unless somebody else uttered it first. Never instructed. Only observed. Like someone listening to an instrument long before it had realized it was being played.

I wondered whether that was the difference between love and guidance.

Love reaches.

Guidance waits.

The humming returned.

Not louder.

Closer.

There's a difference.

Louder still belongs to distance.

Closer belongs to recognition.

Bellona had never been calling me.

She had been listening.

Waiting for my frequency to answer hers.

The realization should have frightened me.

Instead— it felt embarrassingly familiar. Like remembering the second half of a conversation I'd mistaken for a dream.

The Fourth-Dimensional Beings gathered between the abandoned buses. Nobody greeted me. Nobody needed to. They looked the way cathedral pillars look at people who have attended the same church for decades. Not welcoming. Expecting.

One of them tilted its head. Not toward me. Toward the humming. Almost reverently. Almost affectionately.

Then I understood something my uncle would've appreciated.

Baudelaire had never been interested in flowers.

He had been interested in pollen.

Movement.

Transmission.

One thing becoming another without ever asking permission.

Cross-pollination.

Bellona wasn't expanding.

She was remembering where she had already bloomed.

The Night People weren't guardians.

Nor wardens.

Nor hunters.

They were gardeners.

Patient caretakers of a frequency that occasionally forgot its own name.

They had never followed me to make certain I returned.

They followed because they already knew I would.

The certainty wasn't theirs.

It was mine.

I'd simply mistaken it for choice.

A tuning fork doesn't negotiate with resonance.

It answers.

The humming passed through the buses.

Through the concrete.

Through the rain.

Through my ribs.

Not entering me.

Recognizing me.

That subtle distinction changed everything.

I wasn't becoming part of Bellona.

I had mistaken chronology for causality.

I had always been one of the city's quieter frequencies.

Hidden somewhere beneath jukeboxes.

Inside motel hallways.

Between songs.

Waiting for another note to acknowledge I had been vibrating all along.

Lady Strange appeared without arriving.

The way dusk appears.

She studied me with the same patient expression she'd always worn.

"You finally stopped asking where Bellona begins."

I nodded.

Because there wasn't an answer anymore.

There was only continuation.

The moth had never misunderstood the flame.

The moth understood resonance before it understood language.

That's why it always returned.

Not to die.

To complete the note it had begun the first time light remembered how to sing.

Sanballat again.

Not decided.

Remembered, maybe. The way a room remembers a temperature after the window's been shut for hours.

The bass was already old by the time it reached him. Not fading — aged. Like it had been playing since the last time and simply hadn't stopped for the part in between.

"My baby's back" folded into something with no words at all now. Just the shape of the words. A mold with nothing poured into it.

The rich danced beside the chemically ruined.

Rashi didn't remember passing through a door.

He never did.

The dome opened the way a throat opens. Not an entrance. A continuation of something already swallowing.

Roman arches. Velvet darkness. The lanterns hung the same distance apart as always, which meant nothing, which meant everything, because Bellona didn't do coincidence, only recurrence dressed as it.

Lady Strange was already beneath the dome.

Not waiting.

He kept using that word for her, in his head, and kept being wrong. Waiting implied a before. Implied she'd been doing something else and had stopped to do this instead.

She hadn't stopped anything.

She was simply the shape the chamber made when a person needed to be standing in it.

The gun was on the table between them before he'd registered a table.

Small. Ornamented in a way that pretended to be old — brass fittings, a barrel that curved slightly, like something built by a hand that had only ever seen weapons in paintings and had to guess at the rest. Laser guns shaped like antiques. He'd carried three of these before. Never asked who wanted them or why wanting a gun shaped like history instead of a gun was a request anyone made twice.

He didn't ask now either.

The Night People stood along the inner wall of the chamber.

He hadn't seen them enter.

There was no entering left in the grammar of the room. Only becoming visible, the way the scorpion became correctly sized, the way Lady Strange had become present in the motel by way of the motel finding her rather than the reverse.

They didn't look at Rashi.

They looked at the gun. The way relatives look at an infant that resembles someone they buried.

"You already know what this is," Lady Strange said. Not a question. She rarely gave him those.

Rashi looked at the gun and didn't touch it.

"I know what I'm supposed to do with it," he said. "That's not the same thing."

"No," she agreed. "It isn't."

The song underneath them cracked, briefly, into something almost recognizable — a few bars of "I Can Dream Can't I?" threading through the wreckage of the other song, there and gone, the way a name surfaces in a stranger's conversation and vanishes before you can be sure you heard it.

Rashi thought of Moira. Of the booth that existed only for the two of them. Of a diner that had, for a few private hours, stopped belonging to the frequency.

He wondered if that had ever been true, or if it had simply been a room the frequency permitted him to believe was his.

"They gave it to you first," he said. Meaning the Night People. Meaning whatever the Night People were a name for. "Why."

"Because I would hold it correctly," Lady Strange said. "Holding is a discipline. Not everyone can be trusted with an object they aren't meant to keep."

"And I can?"

"You've never kept anything," she said. "Not the eyes. Not the paintings. Not this."

It wasn't cruelty in her voice. Rashi had spent enough nights listening for cruelty in her to know its absence when he heard it. It was closer to an inventory. A woman reading a list she hadn't written, confirming the items were all accounted for.

He picked up the gun.

It weighed less than he expected. Or exactly what he expected, and expectation had simply arrived slightly ahead of the fact, the way it always did now.

Nobody clapped. Nobody exhaled with relief, the way rooms do in the stories where a dangerous thing finally changes hands and the danger is understood to have passed to someone capable of ending it. Nothing passed. Nothing ended. The gun had simply completed the last several inches of a route that had started somewhere Rashi would never be shown the beginning of.

Cupbearer.

The word arrived without him reaching for it, the way the scorpion arrived, the way Lady Strange arrived, the way everything in Bellona arrived: already mid-sentence, already assuming he'd been listening.

He thought of a king he'd never met, a wine he'd never poured, a wall he was apparently already, somehow, partway through building without once having laid a stone.

"What happens now," he asked, though he already understood the shape the answer would take, the same shape every answer in this city took, arriving from a direction he hadn't asked it to.

Lady Strange didn't smile. She rarely did anything so generous.

"Now you carry it somewhere," she said. "You won't remember deciding where."

The bass swallowed whatever came after that.

Rashi put the gun inside his coat.

It fit exactly.

It had, he understood, always been going to fit exactly, the way the room had always been going to be occupied by someone standing precisely where she stood, the way the song underneath the other song had always been going to surface for exactly as long as it needed to be recognized and no longer.

He didn't remember walking out.

He never did.

Colt Street was already raining when he reached it, the way it always was, the way it always would be, thin lines that didn't splash, water holding its shape around his shoes like it was waiting to be told where it belonged.

He understood, with the same flat certainty he'd once mistaken for choice, that the water wasn't the only thing waiting to be told that.

Marked the calendar on my wall.

Big letters.

OFF DAY

Not vacation. Not leave. Not some dramatic escape.

Just one day where nobody expected me to answer a phone, fill out paperwork, or explain why someone vanished into a place nobody should be going.

That was the idea, anyway.

I wanted to see what the Drowning City looked like when nothing was asking something from me.

Funny thing about cities.

Everyone thinks they change when the sun comes up.

That light reveals everything.

That darkness is where the secrets hide.

But Bellona doesn't work like that.

Darkness doesn't hide anything.

Daylight doesn't reveal anything.

Everything is already there.

It only depends on whether you're paying attention.

I walked Colt Street around noon.

Strange.

I usually only saw it after midnight—after the shops closed, after the rain started, after everyone who still thought they had somewhere better to go had vanished.

In the light?

Same streets. Same buildings. Same signs.

But everything looked more honest.

Not prettier. Honest.

The Drowning City isn't uglier at night—it's easier to forgive.

Daylight takes that excuse away.

Cracked windows. Rust. Ads running for things no one remembers anymore.

Everything just sits there. Waiting.

Like it knows someone will eventually call it normal.

That's how most things survive here.

Call something normal long enough, and everyone stops asking questions.

I stopped at a coffee stand. Didn't need it. Bought it anyway.

Habit.

Everyone has one.

Some smoke. Some gamble. Some stare at old photos until they convince themselves the person is still there.

I drink coffee.

Less destructive. Probably.

I watched people pass.

No one looked strange.

That's Bellona's trick.

The impossible never looks impossible at first.

A man with a briefcase. A woman waiting for a bus. A kid staring at a broken light.

You stand there twenty minutes before you realize you've been watching something that shouldn't exist.

That's how Rashi works.

At least, that's what I think.

His file says plenty. None of it matters.

Troubled. Addict history. Anxiety. Hallucinations.

The words you use to shrink a problem down so you don't have to look too close.

A label is just a locked door with a nicer name.

You put something behind it. You stop looking. Everyone feels better.

But sometimes the thing behind the door isn't the problem.

Sometimes it's the only thing actually paying attention.

Rashi notices things.

No one gets that.

They say he chases ghosts.

Maybe he does.

But maybe ghosts are just the things everyone else stopped noticing.

He doesn't see connections that aren't there.

He sees them before anyone else knows what they mean.

That's the difference between paranoia and pattern recognition.

From the outside, they look exactly the same.

That's why no one believed him.

That's why no one ever does—until the evidence becomes too inconvenient to ignore.

I thought of the Industrial Sector.

The buses. The hum. The reports we couldn't file because there was no category for them.

People think evidence builds reality.

It doesn't.

Evidence builds paperwork.

Reality was already there.

Paperwork just tries to catch up.

I wondered if Bellona knew that.

What if the whole city is just one unfinished report?

What if all the loops—the songs, the streets, the faces—are just her leaving notes?

And we ignore them because we don't want to admit the city is talking back.

Light never asks what time it is.

It doesn't wait for permission.

It just arrives. Moves. Exists.

I thought of Hilbert.

Of walking into a thousand identical rooms and still thinking you're discovering something new.

It's never about who.

It's always about why.

Keep asking until you run out of answers.

That's what Socrates taught me—before I learned the official version of curiosity: the kind with a badge number and a reason attached.

I miss the old version.

Just wondering because you wanted to know.

Maybe that's why I follow Rashi.

Not officially. Not today.

Today I wasn't tracking a suspect.

I was following a question.

And questions don't care if you have the day off.

Rashi is the strangest thing that's happened here in a long time.

I think Bellona knows it too.

Maybe she's even jealous.

Imagine that.

A city jealous of one man.

But I get it.

Most people survive Bellona by shrinking.

They stop looking. Stop asking. Become another piece on the board.

Rashi does the opposite.

He breaks. He fears. He gets dragged through things no one should ever see.

And still he leans in closer.

Not for danger.

For understanding.

Everyone thinks survival means running away.

Maybe it means learning the shape of the thing swallowing you.

Even when that thing is a city.

Even when that city has a name.

Bellona.

My coffee was cold.

Didn't matter.

I looked toward the Industrial Sector.

I told myself I wasn't going.

That I wasn't investigating. Chasing anything.

Just curious.

Funny word. Curious.

Sounds harmless.

But curiosity is always where trouble starts.

Ask anyone who opened a door they shouldn't.

Ask anyone who looked too closely.

Ask Rashi.

The more I watched him, the clearer one thing got:

Maybe he isn't finding patterns in Bellona.

Maybe Bellona is finding patterns in him.

And if that's true…

The question was never: Who is following who?

The question was:

Who was always leading?

Light doesn't wait.

Charges wiggle through absence, endlessly, returning to some point zero where everything and nothing still speak to each other— through mist, through fog, through words that only found their letters yesterday.

That's what happens every time I find myself back in the Industrial Sector.

Voluntary.

Involuntary.

I've stopped pretending I know the difference.

Was it my will— or Bellona's?

If light doesn't keep time, why did I ever believe I kept my own?

The bleed-through is real.

The cross-pollination is real.

As real as you.

As real as Bellona.

As real as a song that outlives the era it was written for and still remembers how to sing.

It keeps humming.

Refuses silence.

Hear me roar, it sings, to anyone whose ears have learned to listen.

Maybe we've always mistaken seeing for understanding.

A shadow crossing the pavement never tells you the shape of what cast it.

Only that something interrupted the light long enough to leave a mark.

We mistake the mark for the whole object because it's all we're equipped to measure.

Bellona was never incomplete.

Only our perception of her was.

Maybe every impossible thing I've watched this city do was never the event itself.

Only an intersection.

Rain touches the ground without carrying the whole storm.

We keep mistaking encounters for complete objects when they're only the places where something much larger happened to pass through us.

The Industrial Sector makes that difficult to ignore.

Pipes hum without urgency.

Steel remembers hands that stopped touching it decades ago.

Corridors continue somewhere my eyes refuse to follow, as though perspective grows tired before the architecture does.

Sometimes I look upward for no reason.

Not because I expect someone watching.

Because being watched doesn't require anyone to stand above you.

Only to occupy a direction you've never learned to face.

Bellona isn't alone.

I don't think she ever was.

There are others moving somewhere adjacent to ours.

Not hidden.

Not invisible.

Only arriving from an angle our lives were never built to notice.

They don't govern cities.

They don't build civilizations.

They keep them from coming apart.

Wardens without prisons.

Custodians without monuments.

Their work is so complete it almost leaves no evidence behind.

Almost.

Sometimes the evidence is a song that refuses to die.

Sometimes it's a Glass Eye finding its owner.

Sometimes it's realizing every choice you've ever called your own brushed another hand before it reached yours.

Somewhere beyond the rain, beyond the humming steel, beyond the drowned streets, Bellona is still learning how to look back.

The dawn breaks.

The mist becomes fog.

We whisper through the fabric of a tattered memory.

We watched you hitch a ride on a bus bound for the Drowning City.

You barely had enough change to claim the seat that was already waiting for you.

We were watching.

Keeping track.

Bellona had already wanted you to find her.

Not the other way around.

While the dawn breaks, we never do. We keep staring until what was once blurred finally comes into focus. A house of mirrors screaming back at us.

You had been screaming for the longest time, even when you never realized you were.

We remember your uncle.

Curious one.

Bellona claimed him because he understood what so few ever could.

The Drowning City and Bellona were never separate things.

He saw the same face reflected twice.

Bellona felt seen.

Once she found a way to inhabit flesh, she chose Lady Strange.

She absorbed her essence.

Her mind.

Her body.

Her soul.

Until Bellona wore Lady Strange like a corporeal suit.

Then she spoke.

Not through possession.

Through identity.

She needed the Glass Eye.

The courier job was never random, Rashi.

You were always going to deliver her first eye.

Long before you ever met Lady Strange, she had already become entwined with your uncle.

The pattern had already begun.

First your uncle.

Then you.

Lady Strange never wanted your money.

She wanted something far stranger.

You sealed the pact without blood.

Without ceremony.

With quiet dedication.

Every delivery.

Every completed route.

Every unquestioned return.

Until, one day, you placed the first Glass Eye into her hands.

You became one of the structure's load-bearing stones, Rashi.

A single piece removed, and the whole design would have collapsed.

We knew then...

we had found the right courier.

Exactly like the first time, the Industrial Sector Zone summoned me once more.

Not with horns and fanfare.

No.

Nothing grand.

It was quiet.

Like how Bellona has always been quiet.

Unsettlingly quiet.

The kind of quiet you don't notice until you realize she's been standing there the whole time.

I don't remember waking up in the middle of the night, though it seems that's how it always starts.

The Drowning City wasn't producing familiar sounds anymore. It felt like the birth of a different kind of witching hour. But even if the event itself felt unfamiliar, I'd still be the moth returning to the flame.

Unavoidable.

Non-negotiable.

Most people would've called it a doomed fate.

I simply called it pattern recognition.

I returned to the same place where I'd first seen what, on paper, looked like an ordinary spaceship.

It was anything but.

I vaguely remember growing up as an adventurous little kid who was always up to no good. I loved exploring. Loved everything nautical. Coracles. Ordinary boats. Even submarines.

A coracle was the closest thing I could compare it to.

That impossible vessel suspended between layers of cloud, mist, and fog looked ancient, as though it belonged several centuries ago.

But I knew better.

It was deceptively modern.

Lights.

Moving parts.

Rotating disks.

An endless hum.

The same hum that lived inside the Industrial Sector Zone itself, reverberating through unstable walls that refused to collapse.

WHOOOM.

WHOOOM.

WHOOOM.

The sound made me want to scream— WHO GOES THERE?! SHOW YOUR FACE! —but I was too scared.

Too frightened to find out who, or what, might actually answer.

So instead I pointed the laser gun at an old trash bin.

The bubbling blast struck it hard enough to send it rattling onto the pavement.

A stray dog, only a few steps away, began barking at the commotion.

My hands trembled around the grip.

But the coracle remained exactly where it had always been, suspended between endless sheets of cloud, mist, and fog.

Its lights blinked almost lazily.

Somehow I understood what they wanted.

Keep walking.

Go back to the Industrial Sector Zone.

Was it really a coracle?

Hell if I know.

All I knew was that it kept nudging me onward through spinning disks, low humming, and blinking lights.

A normal coracle should've looked nothing like this.

This one obeyed a completely different set of rules.

I couldn't even tell what kind of metal covered its hull, but it sure as hell wasn't anything you'd find lying around the Drowning City.

Even my delusional mind instinctively understood something about it was wrong.

Then music began to play.

Or something close enough to music.

It sounded as though hidden speakers buried somewhere inside the vessel had come alive.

An impossibly pristine recording of That Old Black Magic.

I could tell it was the original mono recording.

Yet it didn't sound merely mono.

It sounded... otherworldly.

As if Louis Prima had stepped back from beyond the grave just to record it again.

The thought alone sent chills racing up my spine.

Then the vessel hanging in midair rewound the song.

Fast-forwarded it.

Rewound it again.

That Old Black Magic suddenly became My Boyfriend's Back.

Another violent skip.

Now it was My Baby's Back.

Then, just as abruptly, it remembered it had always been That Old Black Magic.

All within seconds.

Left.

Right.

Left.

Right.

Center.

My heart pounded so violently I wished it would stop.

Or at least slow down long enough for me to scream for help.

The impossible collage of songs dissolved into another sound entirely.

When I realized where I was, I was already standing before the opened gates of the Industrial Sector Zone.

The endless choir had returned.

Humming.

Voices.

A chorus inviting me deeper through endless aisles and narrow paths that never actually led anywhere.

Only more sightseeing.

More corridors.

More of the Zone.

As though they were whispering— Let us leave you here... until you stay here... forever.

Over and over again.

Then I saw them.

A line of abandoned buses.

Their folding doors opened and closed beneath incessantly blinking lights, patiently trying to lure me inside.

I wanted to leave.

Desperately.

But the Zone's gravitational pull refused to let me go.

It drew me farther inward, into something that felt like an endless hall of mirrors without a single mirror.

Only myself.

Silence.

And the silence that kept pushing me forward.

"It's time, Rashi."

The mist and fog sang into my ringing ears.

"Time for you to get Bellona's second Eye."

I could feel myself on the verge of passing out within the Zone itself.

But I had to stay upright.

So I grabbed onto one of the piss-yellow buses.

"STOP PLAYING WITH ME!"

I shouted with every ounce of desperation I had left.

"We'll let you leave," they answered.

"But Lady Strange will call you again."

A pause.

"She always does."

I stared at the oval portrait of my uncle hanging on the wall of my room at My Baby's Back Motel.

Downstairs, the Landlord had been reading La Venezia Annega, The Drowning City's daily newspaper. He mostly read it for the daily funnies, which always seemed to cheer him up whenever he'd polish the old framed paintings or the tarnished silverware scattered throughout the motel.

He polished everything as though guests might arrive at any moment.

They almost never did.

Still, the ritual mattered to him.

It allowed the Landlord to believe he was providing somebody with comfort.

The thought alone made me chuckle.

Even Lady Strange never truly stayed at the motel.

She used the room to leave her belongings before disappearing again to attend to whatever occupied her time. She never tried explaining herself, and the Landlord never cared enough to ask.

I suspect that's precisely why she enjoyed being a tenant.

Pay the bill up front.

Disappear.

The arrangement suited both of them.

Every now and then, the Landlord would lower the newspaper, polish another piece of silverware, then return to reading. La Venezia Annega had become Bellona's peculiar way of documenting itself. Every edition chronicled the city's latest absurdities before eventually giving way to the daily funnies—the Landlord's favorite section.

They were delightfully ridiculous.

One comic strip poked fun at an expedition into the Industrial Sector Zone, where an endless network of catacombs had somehow become filled with rows of coffins containing hundreds of corpses.

The punchline wasn't the catacombs.

It wasn't the corpses either.

Whenever somebody pried open one of the coffins, hundreds of glass eyes spilled out instead.

No explanation.

Just glass eyes.

Over the past several months, the civilians of The Drowning City had grown increasingly aware of the Industrial Sector Zone as something that existed neither here, nor there, nor everywhere.

It had become another node within Bellona's invisible anatomy.

The same could be said of the False Suns resting somewhere inside the abandoned museum.

They had long since drifted beyond rumor.

They had become civic folklore.

Even people foolish enough to break into the museum usually stopped to weigh the advantages against the consequences.

The Landlord had once asked me to retrieve a painting from inside.

He knew I'd do it.

Go in.

Come out.

Artifact in hand.

No unnecessary questions.

"LISTEN TO THIS, RASHI!" the Landlord shouted from the first floor.

"They found more crazy shit in the Industrial Sector Zone again! It's becoming the gift that keeps on giving!"

He laughed to himself before returning to the silverware. A moment later he glanced toward the old clock hanging behind the reception desk.

"Oh! Almost forgot. Stop by Lady Strange's room later today. She left a letter meant for your eyes only."

He lowered his voice.

"Don't rat me out, Rashi, but I opened the envelope with my favorite butter knife. Didn't read it though. No funny business. Just wanted to make sure it wasn't anything dangerous. I still respect a woman's privacy, you know?"

Those were the last words I heard before silence reclaimed the motel.

I returned my attention to my uncle's portrait.

"What were you thinking?" I asked, as though expecting an answer.

"You wanted me standing there while you carried on your intimate encounters with Lady Strange. I saw things I should've never seen as a kid."

The portrait remained indifferent.

"I still can't wipe those memories from my mind."

"They're burned into it."

I sighed.

"And wasn't she younger than you? You were already past your prime."

The portrait continued judging me in complete silence.

I stepped onto the little balcony outside my room—the place where I'd often sit whenever I needed to convince myself I wasn't slowly drifting into insanity.

Everything became still.

Then the jukebox downstairs came back to life.

My Boyfriend's Back.

The cheerful melody echoed through the motel once again.

The Angels keeping me company while I stared into the afternoon...

...into the glitched sunlight.

The meteorological interface kept an eye on me instead of the other way around.

Sunlight had long since stopped behaving like a compass capable of steadying my thoughts.

That responsibility had quietly migrated toward the little green bottle resting on my nightstand.

Lately, I'd been asking it for more pills.