((Prepare for...FAILURE!! [
Shot]))
A stinging sensation seeped into my thin fur, something hard at my back. With a moan, I opened my eyes. I instantly regretted it, as the cold bit into my eyes. The distant sound of barks echoed in the distance, and the sound of traffic was not too distant. Slowly, I sat up, rubbing my eyes with frosted paws and blinking them several times. As I did, I felt a dull ache in my wings that wasn’t entirely from the cold. I turned and winced; one feathered appendage was crooked.
Musta broken it sometime, I thought.
But…when? My mind skittered from it, and I hunched over, trying desperately to remember anything. But I couldn’t. It was all a black shadow that did not respond. I couldn’t remember.
I groaned and opened my eyes. My frozen fingers were clasped around a piece of paper. I frowned and peered at it. Letters crawled across it, and lines crossed it. I hissed in frustration. I couldn’t read it. I was sure I could read, but the words were alien to me, dotted with capitalization in odd parts. As for the lines…a map? It certainly looked like one, with a star in one corner and a formidable skull in the other.
But where on the map am I?There were more pressing matters. Darkness was falling fast, as were the white snowflakes, hovering in the air to fall into the dirty snowdrifts. I couldn’t stay here, not for long. I padded out on frigid paws into the street beyond an ancient lamppost at the end of the ally. The streets were busy, glowing shop windows decked in wreaths and bows of evergreen. That seemed right as I glanced into the windows, weaving in between booted shoppers clutching their bags. If only I could remember why…
As I walked along the icy sidewalks, heads turned to stare at me on my left side. Whispers, talk, glares. I hid my paws in the end of my scarf and turned away from them.
Something must be wrong with my face…dirty, or scarred, or something. But when I touched my cheek with my paw, it was clear—nothing attached, no flaw in the fur. An odd marking of some kind, or something. I stopped by a store with a mirror in the window. I peered into it, suppressing a gasp. A barcode was tattooed to my cheek. I stared, open-mouthed for several moments before turning numbly and walking on. I couldn’t stay still for long—my feet would freeze.
A quick glance at the piece of paper and a glance around seemed to give me a location—if the street bent like
that and curved
there…then I was sure where I was. I was only three or four streets from the star on the map. Doubtless it was my destination when I had fallen—a glimmering star in the distance, an island in a sea of darkness. The darkness of a frozen winter night and the darkness that bit at my mind. It was the only place there was, I was sure—besides the ominous skull. I had to stay away from there at all costs.
It was getting late, and the buildings shifted from large department stores to restaurants, to apartments, and finally to isolated houses surrounded by gardens. Clearly, only major streets were marked on the map. In fact, there were no streets now, really—just roads. The snow was deep and the crowds had long since dispersed. Now it was just me and the cold. I knew my place. The cold would win unless I reached the place marked by the star.
Not long, I told myself firmly.
Pretty soon you’ll be… I didn’t know what I would be. Safe? Warm? It could be a meeting place out in the elements. It might not be warm. It might not be comfortable. But it would probably be safer than the other place at the other end of town. Probably. But not surely.
One last road. I had long since memorized the map with feverish vigor. Just as well—there was no light, just blinding darkness. I wrapped my scarf across my nose, clutching my arms with my paws. One last road, winding through sparse woodland, and I would be…wherever I was going. My broken wing ached, ached, ached. I couldn’t go much longer without getting it treated. The road was under my paws somewhere—the map had been to scale so far as I could tell, and besides, no trees grew on this strip.
One thing, however, which I did not remember, was a blue line across the map that indicated a river, and had I been able to read the language and understand it, I would have known that it was marked “Creek bed.” One false step, and I was tumbling down a ten-foot tall bank, hitting my head hard on a rock. I whimpered as my head ached and my wing screamed. But then…
I could remember. Dimly, but I could remember again, for the first time. The horror of hands clutching me, dragging me away from this very creek bed, thrown in a cage at an emporium to be sold. Blackmarket noodles. Very popular, I suppose. I was tattooed with the barcode to identify me—the map, given to me by a friend, the wing broken while escaping, the fall from the roof while running from the noodle catchers that robbed me of my memory temporarily.
But the memories, however painful and frightening, made me grin. I knew who I was, and where I was going: Matthäus was coming home!
