The main square was bedlam.

The Poors was seething with years of discontent and an unexpected promise of something better: a better future for one's children—mothers shielding their daughters from the unfolding violence as fathers swung fists to provide for their sons—and a better pair of leather boots for one's feet, taken angrily and by force from some screaming merchant or nobleman who'd purchased them with ill-begotten gains and deserved to try his luck in the world barefoot!

An unshackled mob roaring toward something.

—as dirty bodies flashed past, Lem was still standing, albeit ever more precariously, on his box, until a shoulder caught him in the side and he fell to the ground.

From there, he looked up to see a tangle of criss-crossing legs and fallen victims.

He avoided those of several onrushers, rose and grabbed Oakley to prevent his companion box from getting inadvertently trampled, then decided that safety lay away from the square rather than toward it.

He retreated the way he'd come.

Except now there were no lines of people or soldiers asking for tickets, just emptiness punctuated by anger and running and the receding din of violence.

The streets were subdued but not desolate. Sometimes a person would appear—footfalls announcing an arrival in the uneasy stillness—sometimes pursuing another or being pursued himself, as from the windows of closed-up shops worried owners peered out into uncertainty. Lem did not doubt they were ready to defend their wares. The merchant's stalls, which had previously been so numerous, were gone: packed up and carted away, or at least as far away as possible before someone had decided to take Blackmoth at his word and take what they wanted, leaving as moral detritus a smashed wooden skeleton stained with wine, berry juice or blood.

Lem's stomach rumbled.

This recalled to him the everyday essentials of life: water, shelter, and food, of which he lacked all three. When was the last time he'd had a drink of water? His throat was parched and the afternoon sun, descending heavily toward evening, reminded him in golden light that he had nowhere to sleep. Although he had always been poor, Lem had never slept on the streets or under the stars (except for camping, but even that only a few times, for he was very much a city boy) and he felt a kind of panic that only those who doubt their own survival can feel.

His thoughts would have turned to the alley in which he'd arrived in this world, the closest he had to a home here, if not for the woman—

Clothes torn / Face bloodied—

Upper body bent forward on the verge of collapse / Bare feet stomping unevenly on the cobblestones—

"Help! Help me!"

Her breathing: heavy.

The two men pursuing her: gaining.

Lem got the feeling they'd had her once and she'd gotten away. Now they wanted her back. "Don't run, love," one of them called. "We ain't done with you yet!"

Lem looked around.

No one was coming to her rescue.

Of all the faces plastered to the surrounding windows, none so much as blinked.

"Help!"

Lem felt a responsibility to act.

The men couldn't be allowed to catch her, no matter who she was or how much money she had. And the remnants of her clothes suggested she may have had a lot of it.

Lem put down Oakley.

He saw a smashed merchant's stall and pulled the heaviest piece of wood he could find from its wreckage. It was sharpened at the end like an oversized splinter, and he imagined he could use it as a makeshift spear. Holding it tightly with one clenched fist, he stepped out onto the street.

"Stop," he said a little too softly.

The men ignored him.

He stepped farther into the street and tried again—louder: "Hey, you! Stop!"

The woman looked back at Lem but kept running.

The men stopped.

"And who's you to order us around?" one of them asked, looking tougher than he had a second ago.

"Let's have some fun with him," said the second to the first.

A pair of brass knuckles caught the sunlight.

"Somebody who thinks you shouldn't take advantage of people just because you can," said Lem.

The woman had disappeared. Hopefully ducked into an alley or rounded a corner, free of the danger pursuing her, thought Lem, yet his feeling of heroism (I saved her!) didn't last long with the two goons bearing down on him.

"The fuck is he wearing?" one goon asked the other.

Lem awkwardly twirled the makeshift spear. "Don't come any closer. I'm warning you."

"He looks weird like a foreigner."

One of the goons smirked. "You got any underwears under that dress, boy?"

They were now mere strides away. Lem thrusted with his spear, but his thrusts were slow and tame, and the goons easily avoided them. One more and—

One of them grabbed the spear and tore it out of Lem's hands.

"Lookee now. Dress boy's all unarmed."

He cracked the spear in half over his knee, while his friend threw a cross to Lem's jaw. Luckily not with the brass-knuckled hand, but it connected anyway and Lem stumbled backward on shaky legs. The goon with the broken spear—now effectively two sticks—swung them at Lem, pounding on him like on a drum. "Rhythm, boy. Show me some of that foreign rhythm!"

Was this it, thought Lem. Transported to an alternate dimension only to die on the first day at the hands of some common street thugs? It couldn't be.

He lifted his arms to protect himself.

Somewhere down the street: the sound of a door opening:

One of the goons looked sideways. "Well, well. Not quite the plan but works just the same."

"Stand aside," a man called out.

"Or what—" Lem spun, trying to locate the voice. "—you gonna make us?"

He saw a balding man, a shopkeeper, holding a handheld mini-crossbow trained on the goon with the brass knuckles. It somehow warmed Lem's heart that a stranger would risk his life for him. "That's right," said the shopkeeper. "Leave the kid alone or you'll feel a bolt to the—"

A stiletto interrupted the sentence, dug deep into the shopkeeper's paunchy midsection.

The mini-crossbow clattered on the cobblestones.

The shopkeeper fell to his knees and pressed a hand against the hole in his body.

A woman stepped out from behind him:

The woman Lem had saved.

"What are you waiting for? Get inside and see what you can find," she told the goons.

One of them spat at Lem before following her instructions and entering the shop, from where a primal wailing soon escaped. A woman's? A child's? Lem couldn't tell. "What about dress boy?" the other asked, passing by the woman and the crawling, dying shopkeeper.

"Leave him to me," she said. "Just get the goods."

He disappeared inside.

The woman watched Lem for a few moments, then grabbed the shopkeeper's head and put him out of his misery.

Lem recoiled at the gruesome sound.

The woman started towards him. Patiently: not a care in the world. Her clothes were still tattered but she no longer looked the victim of anything. She stopped to pick up the mini-crossbow and toyed with it as she walked, a very pretty picture of predation. "Ever hit a woman before?" she asked.

Lem shook his head.

"Pity."

"I thought you… I was trying to save your life," he said.

"I know, my dear. That's why I'm not going to kill you, just teach you a lesson about minding your own business. You shouldn't—" In an instant she divided into a series of overlapping shadows that covered the distance between where she'd stood and where Lem now felt a sting: pressed his palm against that sting, and felt warmth and wetness and tasted pain. "—poke your nose where it don't belong, and where it don't understand it don't belong." Lem looked down to where the woman's stiletto was lodged under his ribs, blood leaking through his fingers, expanding as a stain on the sack he was wearing, dripping down his leg. He wanted to say something, anything, but his agony silenced him as effectively as any gag. "Keep the knife," the woman added. "Consider it a gift. Wasn't mine anyway."

And with that she was gone.

And Lem hobbled off the street, finding support against the stone wall of a tavern.

From the windows across the street, half a dozen faces watched him.

None dared help.

Only the bald shopkeeper—but the bald shopkeeper was dead, and Lem didn't want to imagine what was happening to his family or his shop. The wailing had died down, but it's memory hung over the street like black funeral cloth.

He slid forward.

"Young master," Lem heard Oakley say.

The magic box was alongside him. When had it gotten there? Why was it speaking again?

"Young master, you are in a bad way indeed. Perhaps—"

"You're talking," Lem said.

The box sighed. "We've been through this already. We are a magical adventurer's companion box. We speak. We hold more than our exterior dimensions…"

"I mean you stopped talking back there," Lem said.

"Of course, young master. There are rules. We mustn't speak in the presence of others, for instance."

"Yes," said Lem. His eyes were starting to roll back into his head. His balance was harder and harder to keep. The street was spinning or swimming or—

"Oh, dear."

"What is it?" asked Lem.

"You look pale, young master. And your liquids are leaking."

"What happened back there—in the square?"

"That we wouldn't know," said Oakley with a hint of blame. "Someone was standing on us, and what sights could we have possibly seen from the ground? Perhaps if someone had lifted us above his head while standing on a non-magical non-adventurer's non-companion box…"

Lem coughed.

He smelled of blood. He was thirsty.

Evening was falling quickly.

"But 'tis not the time for that conversation," said Oakley. "When young master is in a better way."

Lem collapsed.

"Oakley," he said, hoping to at least hear the box's familiar voice one more time, a friendly voice. "Oakley…"

But the box was silent and the world dim.

And such was his end, and the end of our tale of a boy thief who had been transported from his to another world through a gateway manifesting as the elongated mouth of a mall Chief Security Officer ("Getway… Getway…"), stuck in the gut with a long knife—which was in his gut still—by a she-brigand in whose ploy to coax brave shopkeepers into the street so that her two goon accomplices could accost them and ransack their shops he had heroically but naively intervened, and for which he had suffered the consequences. Never again to see his sister, Jewel, or his overworked mother, Marcia, and never to feel the sweet-lipped kiss of his beloved, Jane, for whom he had committed a minor crime. One mustn't be a philosopher to follow the logic. Cause and effect: crime and punishment: to steal and to die in the street, starving and alone, cold hands caressing the intricately carved handle of a deathly stiletto. Fog and quiet and insignificance in the greater scheme of politics and revolution. Just another pissant squashed by the rolling and rumbling wagon wheel of progress. Goodbye, cruel world. Goodbye!