The unfinished building at the edge of Strength City had no walls on two sides and no roof at all, just a skeleton of stone columns and wooden beams that somebody had started and clearly abandoned at some point. The floor was dusty and uneven, and the wind came through from every direction, but it had been dark when they found it and dark was all they had needed.

Roman and Arnold had spent the night on the bare floor with their backs against the one solid wall and said very little to each other.

In the morning, the city woke up around them.

They could hear it before they could see it properly, the gradual build of movement and voices and the particular hum of a large, functioning city starting its day. Light came in through the open sides of the building and spread across the dusty floor, and Roman sat up and looked out at the street below them and thought about what came next.

The honest answer was that he had no idea.

"So," Arnold said from beside him, his voice still carrying the roughness of someone who had not slept well on a stone floor.

"So," Roman agreed.

"What is the plan?"

"I am working on it."

Arnold looked at him for a long moment. "You do not have one."

"I have the beginning of one."

"What is the beginning?"

"We get moving," Roman said, and stood up.

Arnold stared up at him from the floor. "That is not a plan. That is just movement."

"Movement is better than sitting here until someone finds us. After all, you have been wanting to leave, right?" Roman said.

Arnold considered that for a moment, then got to his feet.

They came down from the unfinished building through the open side facing the quieter of the two streets below, dropped to the ground one at a time, and started walking.

Strength City in the morning was a different thing from the night before. The streets were filling up with residents going about their business, vendors setting up along the commercial stretches, supply vehicles moving between the distribution points.

The city was wide and well laid out, which was both helpful and not, helpful because there were many directions to go, not helpful because the guards who were inevitably looking for them would know those directions better than Roman did.

Roman kept his head down and walked at the pace of someone who knew where they were going.

Arnold walked beside him and said nothing, which was the most useful thing he had contributed since the escape.

They had been moving for about twenty minutes, cutting through two residential streets and crossing one of the wider commercial roads, when Roman caught movement in his peripheral vision and felt the particular shift in atmosphere that comes before something goes wrong.

Two men in Strength City security uniforms had come around the corner ahead of them and were looking directly at them.

There was a moment, very brief, where everyone involved was assessing the situation simultaneously.

Then one of the guards raised his hand to his communication device.

"Run!" Roman shouted.

And they ran.

The alarm went up behind them immediately, the guard’s voice cutting through the morning street noise with the carrying quality of someone trained to be heard at distance.

"Unauthorized individuals, eastern residential quarter, heading north!"

"Hold on, comrade. I... I think it’s the captives."

The street ahead of them scattered as people registered what was happening, some stepping aside, some stopping to watch, and Roman cut left through a gap between two market stalls before the owner had fully processed that someone was using his display table as a running guide.

Something fell. Something else fell louder.

Roman did not look back.

Arnold was keeping pace, which was the one surprise of the morning, and they came out of the market stretch onto a wider road and immediately had to split to avoid a supply vehicle that had no idea what was happening and was simply trying to do its job.

Roman went left of it, and Arnold went right.

They came back together on the other side and kept running.

More guards appeared from a side street ahead of them, two of them, moving to cut off the path.

Roman did not slow down.

He hit the space between them at full speed, dropped his shoulder into the smaller gap on the left, and pushed through with enough force that one of them stumbled sideways into a wooden display board mounted against the wall, which collapsed with a sound like a small building falling over and scattered whatever it had been holding across the road in every direction.

Arnold came through the gap he had cleared and they kept going.

"How many of them are there?" Arnold said between breaths.

"Enough," Roman said.

They turned north because north was what was in front of them, and the road narrowed slightly as they went, the buildings pressing closer on both sides, which would have felt like cover except for the fact that narrower roads also meant fewer ways out.

Roman spotted the junction ahead and made a decision without fully explaining it.

"Split up," he said. "Go right. Find a way out. I will find mine."

"And if I cannot find a way out?"

"Then figure something out," Roman said, and went left without waiting for a response.

He heard Arnold’s footsteps go right behind him, and then the sound of pursuit splitting as well, some of it following Arnold and some of it still coming his way.

The left road brought him into a denser residential stretch, narrower still, with doors and windows on both sides and the occasional potted plant or piece of outdoor furniture that had been optimistically placed on a street too busy for it.

He went through all of it.

A low table that had been sitting outside someone’s door went over with a crash that probably woke whoever was still sleeping inside. A line of hanging cloth above a doorway that Roman had not seen until he was already under it caught him across the face and tore free from its fixings on one side, trailing behind him for several steps before he pulled free of it.

The guards behind him were close but not closing, which meant they were fast enough to stay in contact but he was fast enough to stay ahead.

For now...

He came out of the narrow residential stretch onto a slightly wider road and took the next left because it was the direction with the fewest people visible, and the fewest people meant the fewest obstacles.

What it also meant was that he was moving further into the residential district proper, away from the commercial areas and the routes he had any hope of reading, and within two more turns he was genuinely uncertain where he was in relation to the city walls.

The guards were still behind him.

He tried right but saw a dead end.

And he had to come back out and went straight, and the road curved away from him in a direction he had not expected, and suddenly the density of the buildings was dropping and the structures on either side were getting larger and more spread out, the kind of spacing that said this was a quieter part of the district, older maybe, less trafficked.

He passed three houses before he accepted that he needed somewhere to stop and think, and the door he chose was the one that was already slightly open.

He pushed through it, pulled it mostly shut behind him, and stood in the dim interior breathing hard.

The room was sparse and quiet. Simple furniture, a low table, a window with its shutters half closed letting in thin bars of morning light.

On the floor near the far wall, a very old man sat with his legs folded and his eyes closed, his breathing the slow and even kind of breathing that came from somewhere deeper than sleep.

Roman stood still and tried to control the sound of his own breathing.

The old man did not open his eyes.

But after a moment, his head tilted very slightly toward the door.

Then he spoke.

"Nesari?" He said softly. "Is that you? Did you get the Blossoming Grass?"

Roman stood in the doorway of a stranger’s home in the middle of a city that was actively looking for him, and had absolutely no idea what to say.