The moons were slow to set. The pavement was like silver, and the leaves of the trees shone like miniature moons themselves, suspended on swaying strings in the breeze. The city slept and all was still. Very distantly, one could hear the tired strut of a guard doing his rounds. A few candles flickered in a few lonely windows, and the silhouettes of their patrons stretched and slumped and sank into their beds. Darkness fought valiantly at streetcorners and the mouths of deep alleys, but it was a battle fought in vain. The moons’ light fell harsh and unforgiving on all shadows, chasing them until it was so bright torches weren’t needed. A few people walked the streets: a very old man walking a very large dog at the end of a frayed silken ribbon…a girl wearing a cap and a necklace and nothing else…a pregnant woman in a sky blue hood drawn over her face. They saw each other one at a time and gave each other the slightest of nods, the casual acknowledgment of strangers who are bound together by nothing more than being in the same place at the same time.

Even the alleys were lit tonight, and while her fellow strangers turned onto sidewalks and strode into waiting open doorways, the girl stole to usually-shadowy places. Though they nodded to her in solitude, in the light of the crowd, neither the old man nor the pregnant woman with the beautiful cloak would give her a second thought, or even a first one if they could spare their eyes elsewhere. She was dirty and skinny and an excess of human creation. She looked a child despite her near twenty-years, for she was slight and shapeless. She acted a child as well. The entire city was her playground, the guards her playmates, and the prize of the game was her very life. Some would call her a street rat, some called her a cur and mutt and bitch, but not a soul called her by her name, for no one but she remembered what it was. For the sake of record, her name was, phonetically, Keeva.

She walked the streets with the casual familiarity of one who has spent all of their lives out in them. Her bare feet were light on the stone and cobble streets. She eyed buildings she passed with the claustrophobic caution that almost reminded one of a wild animal being reminded of a cage. But she did not stare long or bear resentment for the buildings, nor more than she did for the people inside them. She ignored them as easily as they ignored her.

Her path was winding and circular and it took her home. “Home” to Keeva was a house tucked in the heart of the city, in an abandoned square. Once, the houses in the square had been lovely and lively, full of rich, happy family with fat, bawling children who tumbled and squealed in the streets. But years ago there had been a fire, and the people had left and they had not come back. Now moss and trees had taken over the square, and the houses had folded into themselves, simultaneously wall-less and walled in. None but rats and mutts and small orphan girls lived here any longer. Keeva moved from house to house as she pleased, for there were twenty-one to choose from, but her favorite was the one in the right corner: the one with the huge oak tree right in front and the walls all grown green with moss and the room upstairs still intact, with abandoned toys and books and a small child’s bed with a blanket that didn’t have too many holes. The room was inaccessible from inside the house, but if you climbed up the oak tree and swung from the right branch, you could land, light as a sparrow, onto the windowsill.