Father

Me jumped the first eastbound train because there were six separate organizations that would kill her. She knew their signatures. She had belonged to them.

The bank-jump cartels. The prostitution racketeers. The drug networks. The others whose nationality shifted with the money flow. In the station, she saw two of them, beggars, but not really, the kind who knew faces, and she didn't look at them. Just moved around them like they were fabric.

At the terminus, another squad blocked the exit. She reversed. Hid behind the ticket machine. Bought a random ticket to the first train heading east and slightly north. This was how you disappeared: you didn't plan it. You followed the algorithm to the hotels, the restaurants, the routes, but you never let the algorithm book them. You called. You spoke. You left a voice in the system instead of a data point.

On the rails, she thought about fathers. A politician had died in the city she was approaching...Maybe him. The adopted father had been a politician too, the same party. She was building a father from available materials: death, politics, the mathematical coincidence of similar men. This is what minds do when they lack information. They fabricate. They arrange the fragments into patterns. Someone had hidden her somewhere as a child.

She arrived after 21:00. First taxi to a small hotel on the city's edge. The director welcomed her as though he might have already known her. Aperitivo. A conversation about art and politics that lasted longer than it should have. She left not knowing if she'd been there before.

The medication made her sleep early. No alcohol. The body sets the rules now.

What began that second morning was the Shout it loud tour, though she wouldn't name it until later, when the structure of what she was doing became visible.

Every person who fed her or transported her or gave her shelter: she asked them to speak. Not about her. About the dynamics of their own survival.

The taxi driver who drove her toward the city's center talked about vehicles. Electric versus combustion. In the city, electricity makes sense, infrastructure is easy, refueling is simple, the range is sufficient. But for long distance, the combustion engine still wins. Physics hasn't changed. Thermodynamic advantage still matters. The driver understood this. He wasn't defensive about it. He was practical.

She agreed. She disagreed. She listened to how he solved the problem of motion through space using the materials available to him.

The antiquarian market sprawled across the plaza. She wanted everything. Instead: magic glasses (the kind she would wear through two months and many cities, the kind everybody would come to recognize), and a slim book of early twentieth-century satirical poetry. The art of speaking what cannot be said.

She changed costumes constantly. Hats, glasses, scarves. In one shop as one person. Out of another as someone different. Not disguise exactly, transformation. The mendicants hated her. They recognized what she was doing: the same work they did, just with different stakes. Visibility as a weapon. Movement as refusal.

She took the first bus that passed and immediately doubted herself. Then she saw the graffiti through the window: >You are not alone, sister.

The direction was correct.

The cities taught her how to read themselves.

She rode the buses. Each route mapped a logic she hadn't known before: how urban infrastructure moved people toward certain places and away from others. How traffic flowed. How safety was distributed like resources. The buses were curricula.

Back near the station, a taxi took her toward the hotel but went another direction instead, leaving her at a restaurant. She stopped breathing. The food was impossible. The service held her like a hand. She tipped generously, her first rule of moving through other people's cities. And she had the sensation of having been there before. Possibly with her biological father. Possibly during a New Year's when she was small.

She called another taxi back to the hotel. Another to the thermal baths, where they didn't sell swimsuits. A trap, she thought immediately, and she moved the way she'd been trained: out, into an ethnic bar, calling a new taxi from there. The ethnic places were safe. They too were running from something.

In that taxi, she overheard the driver's phone conversation. Messages traveled like this now, overhead dialogue, white noise, the white space where real communication happened. The message was clear: leave. Everyone has seen you. It's dangerous to stay. But also: the city wants you to know. Thank you for your courage. Thank you for not hiding. You've shown us what's possible.

The motto of the Shout it Loud tour was mathematics: 1, nobody, 100.000.

One person afraid, nobody moves. But one person doesn't hide. Then another. Then another. Then suddenly it's a hundred thousand people in the streets and the structure collapses because it was always built on silence.

Someone has to break the silence first.

….since the world is round, what would change without the code of silence?….

In the hotel lobby, she saw the eastern cartels. They were real people now, not abstractions. In daylight, with witnesses, they couldn't touch her. The director called her a taxi. At the station, military personnel in the distance formed an accidental escort.

First train west. Second station. While waiting, she lost her backpack. This would become her pattern: she would lose everything she bought. Books. Shoes. The small accumulations of travel. The more precisely she acquired something, the less likely it remained in her possession.

A strange train toward the capital. It didn't stop anywhere. It moved like it had a single predetermined destination and nothing would change that.

By morning, a coastal train going north. She didn't trust the B&B. Instead, she called a convent-run hotel in a pine grove overlooking the sea. The place seemed familiar in a way that made her careful, the way childhood sometimes returns without being called. The building next door was some kind of facility for autistic residents. The architecture rose from pine needles like it had been part of her somewhere.

A small group of students lived there during the week. At dinner, they discussed the condemned, people sentenced for terrorism charges they'd committed without knowing the full geometry of the system. Like me, Me thought. Like all of us. Condemned by our own abuser for act did not even remember.

Morning in the haberdashery. New clothes for transformations. A quick trip to the B&B to collect a suitcase and return borrowed clothes to relatives. Then the pattern again: train to train. Hotel to hotel. The constant mathematics of visibility and disappearance.

Her routes kept pointing south. Toward the capital. Where the hotels clustered near the central station like they were all following the same algorithm. Where she kept finding herself, even when she wasn't trying to go there.

What the narrator observed: Me wasn't running away. She was running toward something. Toward the father she couldn't place. Toward the New Year's she couldn't quite remember. Toward the graffiti that knew her name. Toward the hotel directors who looked at her with recognition. Toward the messages hidden in taxi conversations. Towards the people who needed to be lightly pushed to break free.

The cities were speaking to her.

….Every district is the homeland of the rebel..

And she was learning to listen in a language made of movement, of costume, of what you lose and what you choose to leave behind.

Every block was homeland for someone refusing to stay hidden.

And Me was learning to map it.