A walk would fix everything.

Taya liked walking even if she wasn't good at it. She liked the way wind would whip hair into her eyes and burn her cheeks red. She liked the way her hands tingled with blood rushing and the way her muscles locked when she collapsed on her bed at the end. Walking to the edge of the wall and back was enough to wash away the sound of twelve jeering voices or dull the pain of tripping over someone's leg and crashing onto the classroom floor.

If she walked enough, she could even lose their faces. At least for a little while.

All her attention was on her feet. She didn't trust the slats in the sidewalk to join smoothly and she didn't want to stumble, not out here in front of so many strangers. While distracting, having her entire family line cursed for wrinkling someone's coat wasn't especially soothing.

It wasn't as if she liked the city view, anyway. The buildings were too tall and too boxy; the largest in her town looked stumpy and decrepit by comparison. Everything felt crushed together shoulder to shoulder without a garden or a park to split the buildings. Any greenery around the houses was blocked by thick wooden fences or else sprouting up as weeds between the sidewalk slats. There were no trees lining the boulevard, just ugly lamps that shined a sickly lemon color.

Walking without Koneko was more hazardous than she expected. The sun was setting and the streets were busy with couples out to dinner and vendors closing shop. She bumped from stranger to stranger to lamppost, eventually clinging to that until she saw a fresh path and ventured out again. The noise was louder without any conversation. A carriage screeched stop at an intersection and she almost jumped into its path. A man on her left shouted conversation to his friend across the street and she shrunk against the side of a building until he finished.

Someone in front of her was smoking. The air was still and the smell of it lingered along his path, along her path until she couldn't breathe for coughing. Her nose stung and her throat felt furry, her head throbbed with the smell and the noise. Heart hammering, eyes watering, her body ached in memory of fire, of sleeping in smoke, buildings burning, people shouting, running running running and feeling like her throat would explode...

A hand closed over her mouth and jerked her backward into an alley mouth she didn't notice she had passed. She forgot all about coughing and breathing when something metal pressed against her chin.

"Yer money or yer life."