If we get split up in public, stay right where you are. I’ll move, not you. Two moving things will never find each other. One still thing and one moving thing might.
I hoped that she too would stop moving, just let the sea of people wash past her and leave us together in an empty street. But they just kept coming. I could see over most people, impeded somewhat by a few tall formal hats, and scanned the crowd for something small, blonde, swept away from me as if in a riptide. My heart was beating so fast that when I opened my mouth, a purring noise came out. Shit. Shit. Jesus.
She’d lost her shield—the so-called ‘guide’ I represented, that kept others from harassing her—but so had I, the person who knew where we were going and spoke the languages I didn’t speak. I felt as if I’d stepped out of a suit of armour I hadn’t even known I was wearing. Everyone seemed to be staring at me, even people who weren’t even looking at me, glued to the wall in the darkness, just a pair of staring eyes and an open mouth in the noise.
Finally the mob passed—the bride and groom last, obviously exhausted and lagging behind, dressed in sweat-soaked finery and trailed by a half-dozen professional photographers. When the clicking and flashing and singing and honking was gone, I scanned the empty street. She was gone.
A prodigy, right? A genius. Someone who knew damn well that she should stay put even if she got caught up in the crowd. Someone who would wriggle or fight free, and come back to the last place she’d seen me. So if not...
Had someone taken her? Or something?
There were no rules against that, were there? Were there? Not for Them. Not even with the warding spell she carried on the back of the laptop, not the... the warding spell that was no longer protecting me.
“Shit, shit,” I whispered. I dug in my bag for the cell phone I had put in the front pocket—nothing. I frantically rummaged through the bag’s interior, fingers running across paper, sodden clothes, a smooth surface—the phone? no, a water bottle—pens, cardboard, receipts, garbage, a package of cookies. Lost. Or taken. More likely taken. I wanted to dump the bag out and search properly, but knew already that the phone wasn’t there. I hadn’t even gotten to use it.
The silence was stunning after the wedding parade. Normal sounds slowly returned: the chatter of the remaining tourists, the hushed hum of traffic in other streets. The brick of the wall behind me was cool under my palms. True night, heat escaping the day-baked clay and cobblestones. A sharp movement across the street was myself, reflected in a mirrored diadem decorating a doorway. And for the first time in my life I was alone in a strange country, functionally voiceless and voicelessly functionless, and lost.
Stay, I told myself. She’ll come back for you.
Minutes passed, my breath and heart eventually slowing. This solved the problem, though, didn’t it? Of wanting to kill her and not wanting to kill her. Of wanting to so much as touch her, which would have gotten me ineptly but immediately beaten up. Of saving the world. Of being part of this, drafted like an unwilling soldier, fighting an enemy I didn’t know in a war so big I couldn’t even see the edges of it; nothing but machine-gun fodder. I wondered why I hadn’t thought of it sooner.
I gasped at the humid air and began to walk, taking turns at random. I kept looking down at either side of me, glancing back into my blind spot. It was as if I’d lost a limb. But—maybe a rotten limb, I thought. Something amputated for my safety. An operation I’d looked at with terror beforehand, relief after, knowing that I didn’t have to worry about it any more. I’d compensate with the others, I knew I could. She wasn’t the only tough one here.
The renewed noise echoing up the street alerted me to having caught up to the wedding party. I trailed it discreetly—where were they going? Would someone there know enough English to be able to get me to, say, the Canadian embassy?
They were heading to what looked like an event hall, a lot like the ones you’d see back home on the south side of the city—low, frosted white with stucco, pierced with dozens of round arches, surrounded by dark greenery and drooping rosebushes. Someone