City of Stolen Dreams (The Victorian Fantasy Series Book 2) by Anna Moore

Author:Anna Moore [Moore, Anna]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2024-02-21T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 16

Tarek looked out of the window. There was nothing to see there, just the house across the street, yet still he savored the view. It was his favorite thing to do in the city: to just sit there, watch some birds fly by and not think.

Not thinking was an important part of life in the city. Sometimes Tarek wondered if the only reason why he had survived so long was because he did not think. It wasn’t even as if there was nothing to think about, even if it felt like it sometimes. Without a past and without a real future, all he could worry about was the present.

It surprised him to feel a tug in his stomach. He took a couple of deep breaths to make the feeling go away, but it stayed there like a small fist clenched around his insides. Worry, he thought. He was worried. Now, that was something to explore further. Worrying meant that something was at stake, that there was something to worry about.

He knew very well that he could get lost in worries – he had the faint memory that that was what he had done in his first days in the city, maybe even the first weeks or months. Of course, he didn’t know for sure, it was only that there was something so familiar about that feeling.

“What should I do?” he asked no one. He didn’t know when he had started to talk to the city as if it were a person. Maybe it was a sign that he was going mad, but he didn’t worry about that. If there were no other people around, at least no other sane people, what difference did it make?

He tried to smile to cast away that feeling of worry but failed to do so. It stayed there like a stubborn pit in his stomach.

It was getting cold so he pulled his coat tighter. The old wool was threadbare in some places, but he couldn’t muster the energy to actually go around to look for something with which to fix it. Of course, he could also go around and look for a new coat, but something about this one made it feel like it was his. Maybe he had come to the city in it. Maybe he had found it on some day that might not be so far in the past. He didn’t know. He didn’t know.

The feeling intensified and he got up, giving in to the sudden urge to move. He knew two states: one of apathic stillness and one of a tingling restlessness. He hated both of them. Oh, how he hated to feel anything at all.

It wasn’t that he was against feeling in general, no. For Tarek, feelings were never really connected to anything. He would wake up in the morning with a sense of dread but without any chance of ever knowing what had caused it. Or else he felt happy and content, and then the fact that he’d never remember the reason why he felt happy and content made him sad again.

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