6th arrondissement, Rue de Verdun, Paris
The afternoon sun hung high and warm, its light spilling over the street with a particular brightness that made everyone squint as they passed.
A lady walked along the footpath, green hair cascading past her shoulders, her face striking enough that heads turned without meaning to — a high, elegant nose, pursed lips, grey eyes with a watery, unfocused quality that made her look faintly somewhere else entirely. Her lashes were dark, several shades deeper than her hair, giving her gaze an odd, deliberate weight it might not otherwise have had.
She wore a brown-black gown, a few careful pieces of jewelry at her wrist and throat. As she walked, she passed mostly elderly locals until finally she let out a long sigh, her expression settling into something worried and regretful.
"I really should not have come here in such a hurry," Kalamine thought, followed by another sigh.
Her name was Kalamine Patrin. She was a computer science graduate from Ghent University, back home in Belgium. She'd been desperate to get out, to work abroad, to prove she could build something on her own, and in the end she'd picked Paris on a whim and booked the ticket before she'd built anything resembling a plan. I'll figure it out once I'm there, she remembered thinking. It had sounded braver at the time.
The first weeks had been everything she'd wanted. She had her own apartment, her own money, a life nobody back home had handed her. But two months in, the job offers still hadn't come, and her savings were running thinner by the day. The excitement had curdled slowly into something closer to dread.
"Maybe I should just model." The thought kept resurfacing, unwelcome and persistent. People had told her often enough, back home, that she had the face for it. She knew, in the practical, unglamorous way you know your own strengths, that she probably could break in with looks alone. But she'd also heard enough stories — the kind everyone quietly knew, and no one talked about at parties — to understand that getting into that world was easy, and getting out of it, on your own terms, rarely was. She wasn't ready to trade one dream for a shortcut into someone else's.
She turned left at an intersection as houses of medium or small size entered her vision.
"I wonder when I will have a house of my own..." Kalamine sighed again.
As she kept walking, still lost in thought, she was suddenly startled when she noticed the grass in the backyard of the house she was passing suddenly shake, as if a snake or animal was hiding there. But the grass stopped shaking shortly afterward, and she sighed in relief and continued her walk.
"I am sighing a lot these days," she reflected.
Behind her, in the backyard she'd just passed, the grass parted, and something rose out of it.
It was a light-green liquid, dark, almost-black particles drifting through it like sediment in still water. It turned toward her, tracking her retreating figure with an attention no liquid should have been capable of. It trembled — not with hesitation, but with something closer to hunger, the particular eagerness of something that has waited a long time and finally sees an opening.
It gathered itself, low and quick, reshaping into the sleek, segmented form of a leech. Then it moved — fast, all at once, closing the distance in a single bounding leap, landing against the small of her back. It caught the fabric of her dress, crawled up to her waist, and slid through the cloth as though it weren't there at all, disappearing into her skin.
During this whole process, Kalamine didn't feel a thing and kept walking normally as before.
"Gurgle!"
Her stomach suddenly let out a growl loud enough to embarrass her — heat rushing to her face as she looked around quickly, checking for anyone nearby. Finding no one, she pressed a hand to her chest and let out a slow breath of relief.
Even as a carefree, nonchalant woman, she still cared about basic etiquette, and a stomach growling that loudly in the middle of the street was a violation of it in every sense.
"I'm pretty sure I had lunch just a few hours ago, and I stuffed my mouth with all kinds of food to lower my stress. How am I so hungry again!?" she thought, raising a pale hand to rub at her stomach.
"Come to think of it, I am getting quite hungry. I should eat something before returning home and continuing to look for work. Every second matters. What if I miss a chance that someone else takes because I'm wasting time!"
She sped up her pace and soon found a small restaurant run by an old couple and their children. She slid into an empty table, picked up the menu, and started scanning the options.
The hunger built with every line she read — no longer just her stomach, but something that felt like it was crawling through every inch of her, muscle and skin and bone all suddenly, unbearably starving at once. It was like something inside her had gone unfed for months and had only just now been shown food for the first time.
She tried to focus, to pick something, anything, but the hunger had gotten too loud to think past. She caught the eye of the young waitress, called her over in a sweet, urgent voice, and ordered one of everything on the menu.
The girl blinked, clearly startled, but didn't question it. She stared at Kalamine for a few seconds before telling her it would take a while, given the size of the order. Kalamine nodded and sat back, quiet, waiting.
Like a dog told to sit and wait for its bowl, Kalamine's body reined in the hunger almost the moment the order was placed. She'd been on the verge of shaking from it; now she felt only relief, her whole body loosening like a held breath finally let go.
Every second that followed dragged like an hour, the kind of stretched, restless waiting she hadn't felt since sitting through the most boring class of her school years.
After thirty minutes her food arrived, and her table was filled with delicacies: La Poule au Pot (chicken served with potatoes and vegetables), Baba au Rhum (a cylindrical sweet soaked in sugar syrup usually flavoured with rum and filled with cream), La Galette des Rois (puff pastry filled with frangipane, a sweet almond cream—sometimes chocolate or apple), Omelette de la Mère Poulard (a souffléd omelette with added crème fraîche).
That was not all; there were also classic French pastries like macarons and crêpes, savoury dishes like escargot and croque-monsieur, and the ever-present baguette.
All of this made her salivate; she gulped multiple times. Her body, which had suppressed its hunger for the last thirty minutes, suddenly erupted.
She rushed to grab the food and started to eat—no, devour it—making the others around her feel as if she hadn't eaten in days. After three hours, she finished, and finally, the hunger in her body was controlled. She felt relieved, with all her stress gone. She wanted to burp right then and there, but remembered her etiquette and held it in.
The young waitress returned with the bill, and Kalamine gathered what remained of her dignity to sit up straight and receive it properly.
Then she looked down.
The number on the slip did not seem real. She blinked at it, certain there had been a mistake, that a decimal point had wandered off somewhere it shouldn't have, that someone in the kitchen had simply added an extra zero out of spite. She checked again. The zero was still there. So were the others.
Somewhere in the back of her mind, a small, tired voice reminded her that she had, in fact, ordered one of everything on the menu. Twice, technically, on the crêpes.
Her soul left her body for a moment and hovered somewhere near the ceiling, looking down at the wreckage of her savings account with the calm detachment of someone watching a car crash they were powerless to prevent.
"I..." she started, then stopped, because there was nothing to say that would make the number smaller.
She was going to have to become a model after all.
...
Vnukovo International Airport, Moscow
They reached the airport by taxi at last, Eric and Max in suits, Ruby and Zoe in dresses that had clearly taken longer to choose than they had to put on.
The airport sat seventeen miles from the Khamovniki District, and the drive had eaten most of an hour in Moscow traffic, but it was still the closest one with a direct flight to Paris.
Max was, as always, running loose around the terminal while Zoe chased after him, half-scolding and half-laughing. Ruby had wandered off toward the nearby shops. Eric sat alone on a bench, eyes closed, lips pressed together, waiting, with an hour still left before their flight.
It was there, sitting in the quiet and thinking ahead to Paris, that a voice surfaced in his mind. It wasn't quite heard, more like something remembered from somewhere deeper than memory usually reached.
"Be careful."
The voice was gone as quickly as it came, a whisper he would have doubted if he hadn't heard something like it before. From the outside, nothing about him changed. There was no flinch and no stiffening. Whatever this was, it wasn't new to him.
He opened his eyes, looked to his left, and started to deduce the meaning of the message.
"Be careful? So there will be dangers in Paris." He let out a short breath. "As expected. No matter where these visions and voices lead me, there is always danger."
He continued thinking, quiet and unhurried.
"The only problem is that the voice and visions are always vague and give little information, forcing me to deduce everything. The core of the warning just now was simply to be careful. If the voice, which rarely speaks, has personally given me a warning, it indicates that the danger in Paris will be extremely great, with death or worse looming over me at all times, ready to pounce at any moment.
So I not only need to prepare ahead, but also stay wary of my surroundings and take every action after much thought, leaving enough backdoors to escape in case I fall into a trap or need to flee a fight or an ambush.
Hmm. I will first settle down in Paris and start collecting information. After becoming a police officer, gathering information will be even easier."
He finished deducing the warning and planning his course of action for Paris. He felt fully confident about passing the test and becoming a police officer.
He stood up silently and looked up at the big black screen displaying plane names, their destinations on the right, and arrival times. Paris sat near the top, boarding in less than an hour.
Somewhere behind him, Max was still laughing about something, and Zoe was still failing to make him stop. Ruby was walking back toward them with a small paper bag in her hand, already smiling before she'd said a word. None of them had heard the voice. None of them ever did.
Eric watched them for a moment, and something in his chest settled, quiet and certain, the way it always did right before things stopped being quiet.
His pursed lips curled into a smile as he spoke in a soft tone.
"This journey is going to be an exciting one."
He did not yet know how right he was.