It’s been a long day. It started when we stepped through the portal back in East Bay. None of us had any idea what we were walking into, only that we had run out of good reasons not to go.
The last familiar thing was the generator hum. It cut off the instant we crossed the ring, so cleanly my ears waited for it to come back. When it didn’t, my body finally believed we were somewhere else.
The first difference was the air. The annex smells like dust, cold metal, oil, and Gracie’s soap. Here it smelled like wet stone, old wood, salt that had soaked into everything, and a faint edge of smoke and tar. Not comforting, but solid. My brain filed it as “foreign but consistent.”
The light was worse. I had expected some version of our sky, even if the weather was bad. Instead there was a pale disc high above us that looked like a weak sun. It was bright enough to see by, but it gave off no warmth. Colors never quite came up. Faces in the open air looked like they belonged to people who hadn’t been outside in months. Shadows stayed soft. It felt like standing in a photograph that hadn’t finished developing.
We were on a stone quay when we arrived. The portal ring sat on a slightly raised block behind us. A rim of frost marked its edge, a thin white circle where the two kinds of air met. As we stepped away, the frost thinned and faded into damp rock. I watched it longer than I needed to, just to prove to myself that the doorway had been there at all.
Then I realized everyone else on the quay was watching us.
A dockworker with a coil of rope in his hands stared straight at my face, then at my braid. Back home it’s just practical: one long braid to keep my hair out of the way. Here his hand slipped off the mooring ring, his shoulders tightened, and he said one low word to the younger man beside him. I knew the word, but whatever weight it carried moved down the quay faster than sound.
No one screamed. No one pointed. Instead, the whole space shifted in a quiet, coordinated way. A woman with a basket angled her path to give us more room. Two boys who had been running near the edge stopped and stayed close to a wall. Conversations dimmed. People still moved, but they moved around us instead of past us, like we had become an obstacle everyone had practiced avoiding.
It felt like walking into a building where a fire drill is already in progress and realizing you are the reason for the drill.
The three of us adjusted without needing a conversation. Todd moved half a step ahead and off to the side, the way he does when we pass the bar at night. Charles shifted closer to my other side, between me and the water. I let them. There are times to argue about optics. This was not one of them.
We followed the quay toward the inner harbor. The stones under our boots were tight set and slick. Every few steps my ankle reminded me not to get careless. Boats sat low in the water, built of dark wood patched and tarred. There was no plastic anywhere. Ropes looped from bollards, nets hung to dry, and overhead, narrow footbridges stitched buildings together.
A lane narrowed around us, with tall walls and crosswalks overhead. Laundry hung stiff in the cold air. On one wall a mural showed a line of armored women walking through a burning city. Their hair was braided back, faces steady and unromantic. For one breath I saw my own silhouette in that line. Not literally, but close enough that my stomach knotted. I pulled my hood up over my braid to help hide my features.
The lane opened into a small square, maybe the size of the school gym, only made of cobbles. A well stood in the center. An oven house on one side threw steady heat into the gray air. Two girls in aprons moved loaves from a deep oven to a table. Every time they opened the door, steam rolled out and carried the smell of bread across the square. After everything we had just done, that smell felt like an anchor.
Opposite the oven house was a building that announced itself as the center of things without needing a sign. Wide doorway, tables visible inside, shelves with stacked bowls, light that looked less harsh than the sky. My instincts tagged it as the best possible place to test our luck.
Inside, the floor was worn wood, scrubbed often. The air smelled like stew, yeast, and metal from somewhere in the kitchen. A handful of people sat at tables. All of them looked at us. Conversations dipped again.
The man behind the counter was clearly in charge. He studied us from boots to faces, taking his time. We needed food and a room. We did not know what counted as money here, and pulling out the wrong thing could have gone badly. Todd solved the problem by going basic. He took out one of Finch’s rope coils and set it on the counter.
Rope in a port city or harbor town is the same everywhere. The innkeeper ran his fingers along the lay, checked the splice, and his expression shifted in a way I recognized from Dockside. The rope passed inspection. Without ceremony he accepted it and gave us three bowls of stew, bread, water, and a brass disk stamped with a number. Payment complete. No extra questions. I felt my shoulders loosen a little. Skill and materials had currency; that gave us something familiar to hold onto.
The stew was simple but dense. Barley, roots, bits of meat, long-simmered broth. It was probably nothing special here. To my body it was proof that this place ran on the same biology we did. Hot food, heavy in the right ways, pulled me a few inches back from the edge.
The innkeeper also gave us a rule with the key. With a few words and some deliberate gestures, he made it plain that we were expected to keep the room’s shutter closed after a certain bell and not go out after another. His tone sounded less like a suggestion and more like a safety briefing. I treated it that way and filed it next to every other rule of the day.
Our room was small and plain at the top of a narrow stair. One bed, one table under a window, a chair, a washstand, pegs on the wall. The window had old glass and a solid shutter that barred from the inside. One door. One way up. Simple geometry. After the harbor, I was grateful for obvious boundaries.
We did our usual setup without needing to discuss it. Packs where we could reach them. Boots lined so we could step into them in the dark. Shutter checked and tested. The tape Todd stuck over the keyhole looked strange in a place with no plastic, but I did not argue. Overkill is still a form of safety.
The plan for tomorrow came next. Observe everything. Watch the square, the well, the ovens, the path of any patrols. Look for patterns and see if they repeat. Do not split up. Do not wander. Use our watches to mark time because the sky would not help us. First day: information only.
Emotionally, that all sounds very neat written down. It felt less neat in the moment. My body kept replaying the way people’s eyes caught on my face and hair. Fear is familiar. I know how it looks. I’ve seen it before in smaller doses in East Bay whenever people do the math and realize my family is the only one that looks like ours. This was sharper. More practiced. Whatever I resembled here had been added to their stories a long time ago.
Later, when the square began to shut itself down for the night, I took first watch at the window. Lamps along the eaves outside were turned low one by one. Shutters closed in neat sequence. A bell somewhere beyond the square sounded a single note. Then a deeper bell struck another pattern. Patrols walked through with staffs tapping the stones in a rhythm I started counting without meaning to. Metal rang against metal in the distance, slow and regular. The city folded into itself like it had done this every day for as long as it had existed.
Nothing dramatic happened, which somehow made me more uneasy. Obvious danger is easier to respond to. This felt like danger that had been absorbed into daily routine.
Between watches, I lay on the bed with my clothes still on and my boots within reach. My mind kept flicking back through the day: Gracie at the panel, Finch’s quiet preparations, Mel’s booth at the diner, the generator hum, the frost circle around the ring, the way the mural women’s braids matched mine just enough to sting. A whole season of running tests in East Bay had led to this one crossing. There was no way to pretend it was still just an experiment.
Now I am writing with the pale light seeping through the window and the sounds of the square starting up again below. The sky has not changed much, but the volume has. Voices are louder. Buckets creak on the well rope. Ovens open and close. Somewhere a bell marks whatever passes for morning here.
What I know at the end of this first entry is simple and not enough. This city runs on rules we do not know yet. My face and braid mean something here that they did not mean at home. Rope and work buy us food and a room. The sky does not care about our sense of time. Gracie is back on the other side holding the line. Charles and Todd are here, tired and steady.
The only thing I can control right now is how carefully I pay attention. So I am writing everything down. If we make it back, I want more than a blur in my memory. If we don’t, I want whoever finds this to understand that we noticed as much as we could.
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