In the large circular square of the black tower, merchants with their stalls of fruit and vegetables, amulets and talismans, or various trinkets surrounded the outer sides of the tower like a ring around a finger. The line of patients was already well organized, and Nico recognized the same man who had placed him in line for the visit the day before. It seemed like an eternity had passed, but less than twenty-four hours had gone by. Despite what the healing surgeons said, he realized that his head was clear: no forgetfulness, in fact, his mind was focused on a single goal, to escape from that tower.

  He looked around for an escape route, all those eyes were on them; his throat felt dry, his breathing shorter.

  Behind him was the black tower, the door they had opened with Peter leading to a corridor full of bins with kitchen waste and perhaps something else that Nico tried to forget by shaking his head. In front of them, a group of five apprentices in white robes fastened with dark belts blocked their way. He had to think fast. Peter grabbed him by the sleeve and said, “Come with me.” Nico didn't need to be told twice.

  Coming from the left, a huge attendant in brown clothes, with a swollen belly from drinking, who had just come out of the tower with others, tried to grab him. Nico dodged to the side, narrowly avoiding the man, and slammed his elbow against the smooth black stone of the tower. He heard the thud of the fat man who, losing his balance, crashed like a boulder against a wall. Several people burst out laughing. But they still had five other apprentices and four attendants on their heels, and none of them seemed to be in difficulty: they had sent the strongest ones, Nico thought, discouraged.

  He would have liked to take the main road, which seemed fairly clear despite the comings and goings of people and carts. It was the same road he had taken with Gareth and the others when they arrived the day before, but Peter, strange as ever, led him toward a group of stalls.

  A junk dealer was showing something shiny to a lady accompanied by several women; the buzz of the square and the shouts of those encouraging the servants and those wondering, knowing that the patients' robes were gray, how it was possible that patients had escaped from the tower, mingled all around. Nico heard the women giggling, unaware of what was happening a few steps away from them. His thoughts turned to Aunt Flora's feline eyes as she stared at a jewelry store window, poking Uncle Diego's flabby belly with her pointed elbow to convince him to buy her a piece of jewelry.

  As they ran towards them, Nico saw the merchant's face change in an instant: from smiling and mellifluous to wide-eyed, his hands in his sparse hair. The man screamed, and immediately the women, frightened by his cry as he waved his arms and shouted “stop, stop!”, turned abruptly as if they had seen a Nerakth and began to scream like madwomen.

  Peter dodged to the side. Nico slipped slightly on the soft sole of the shoe he had been given at the tower, but leaned on a burly man next to him who stared at them amused as the scene unfolded. Peter stopped in front of the stall and grabbed one corner, tipping it over; being just a plank resting on boards, it overturned, spilling all the finely crafted bronze and silver jewelry onto the ground. A crowd of women gathered around the stall, in a cacophony of simple dresses or rich gowns with lace and embroidery; the screaming lady and her companions were part of the group. They all threw themselves to the ground to pick up the trinkets as if they were gold coins, while the vendor, also bent over and kneeling among his merchandise, begged and cursed, asking the women to stop and the passersby to help him.

  Taking advantage of the chaos, Nico and Peter slipped into the alley, blocked by the crowd of women crouching on the ground. Nico's heart was pounding; he could still hear the buzz of the square in the background as their footsteps pounded the pavement and their pursuers shouted.

  The alley they had slipped into narrowed immediately, and as he tried to avoid a pile of clothes hanging out to dry that obstructed his view and passage, hanging between one house and another, he bumped his shoulder against the wall of a house as he ran.

  When he could see better again, beyond the maze of hanging clothes, the face returned to him in the darkness, while something soft and semi-wet covered his face.

  “Take off your tunic and put this on,” said Peter, as he pulled the gray tunic over his head and slipped on a slightly worn brown blouse.

  Nico did the same as they turned into another alley, this one wider, and the dry smell of herbs hanging from the windows, a mixture of balsamic and pungent scents he did not recognize, reached his nose in irregular waves.

  Nico threw the gray tunic behind him and tried to put on the soft garment of a strange violet color, while struggling, bare-chested, to find the top or bottom of the overly cumbersome garment.

  “This way!” Peter shouted, turning into another alleyway while Nico, having finally found the neck hole in the garment to slip it on, tried to figure out if they were still being followed.

  As Nico ran through that maze of streets and alleys, he thought of Leo, Kiah, and the others, hoping at every inn that the door would open and he would find them waiting for him there.

  They turned right onto a main road and found themselves in front of a fruit cart. An old man shouted something, pulling on the reins of a battered donkey. Nico passed so close to the cart that he brushed against the apples balanced on the edge. One fell and rolled to Nico's feet. He squinted, hoping that would be the end of it, but after the first one, two more fell, then three, and so on, like an avalanche, until all the apples spilled onto the road, rolling down the slope that Nico took following Peter, while the old man behind them cursed.

  As they descended a small flight of steps, accompanied by the jeering crowd and the old man's curses, while here and there apples fell like a small red stream flowing downhill with them, Peter turned and glanced at him from head to toe, then whistled in appreciation.

  “Wow, what a beautiful young lady we have here,” he said teasingly.

  Nico looked down at his figure, noticing that what he was wearing was indeed a woman's dress. He cursed under his breath and glanced at Peter, who burst out laughing.

  Behind him, he heard the confused shouting increase, but he couldn't tell if it was ordinary people or the servants.

  He frowned, because it occurred to him that Nadia might not approve of his choice, and Kiah would tell him with concern that she thought he should go back to the healing surgeons. He shook his head; he felt fine, he would convince them.

  At a fork in the road, Peter said, “Left!” Nico obeyed without question, but saw Peter, two steps ahead of him, turn right. Nico was already leaning in that direction, and when he swerved to follow Peter in the other, he stumbled, sliding with one knee on the pavement.

  He gritted his teeth, thinking that as soon as he had the calm and time, he would punch Peter in the face.

  He found himself in another narrow street and almost tripped over a woman with a basket of clean clothes who was just coming out of her front door. The woman took a step back, frightened, and the basket slipped from her arms. The clothes flew everywhere, and Nico decided to grab a handful as he ran, to see if there was anything decent and, above all, not feminine in the pile.

  Dropping a sock here and a cloth there between junctions, he finally found a white men's shirt; he took off his dress and put it on while it was still wet, but better that than the women's dress, he told himself.

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  He thought that once he found Leo and the others, he would come up with something to hide the wound from them and maybe it would resolve itself... He shook his head, shivering in the cold, wet shirt on his chest, just thinking about that nonsense.

  Peter turned again. “Right, hurry up!”

  Nico hesitated, then followed him.

  The wound had receded, the healing surgeons said, but it hadn't healed. He shook his head again, troubled by those thoughts. They would find another way, he told himself.

  On the opposite side of the street, a minstrel was tuning his lute, sitting on a step; Nico had a flashback, remembering Dan being preyed upon by the puppet men. He didn't want to end up like that, he thought, troubled.

  The road closed in again in a maze of alleys, then out of nowhere, a turn brought them out onto a larger street. They cut across several horses pulling carts while the carters behind them cursed.

  Nico looked back: “I think we've lost them.”

  They slipped into a narrow alleyway and Peter opened a worm-eaten wooden door leading into a dark room; Nico darted inside and, with a sharp thud, Peter closed the door behind them.

  Nico tried to focus his eyes in the darkness, barely lit by a few candles scattered here and there. A low murmur, like the gurgling of a pot of boiling water, was the only sound in the silence. The air was saturated with pungent, acrid odors, like chemicals mixing and bubbling, giving off a vapor that stung his nostrils. It was nothing like the balsamic aroma of herbs that filled the streets of Narbras.

  When his eyes adjusted, he saw a counter laden with flasks and stills in the center of the room. Under the flickering flame of an oil lamp, some substances were fermenting and giving off a thick smoke, which was most likely what was weighing down the air. Around him, shelves overflowing with books and flasks filled the walls. There seemed to be no windows: everything was immersed in a darkness that only candles could mitigate.

  From the back room, a veiled, trembling voice with aspirated vowels asked, “Who's at the door?”

  Nico looked at Peter, who seemed amused as always; nothing ever seemed serious to him. Nico stared at him questioningly. “Do you know this place?”

  Peter shook his head, as if to say he had never seen anything like it before.

  “So why did we come in here?” asked Nico.

  Peter shrugged. “We needed a place to hide, didn't we? One place was as good as another... and this one's perfect. See how well hidden it is?”

  Nico wasn't convinced, but by now, with Peter, he no longer understood what was normal and what wasn't. He had to take control of the situation.

  He approached the counter and muttered a ‘hello’ that came out like a croak.

  The same voice from the back replied, sucking in the vowels: “Just a moment, dear, I'm busy. I'll be right there. In the meantime, feel free to look around, but don't touch anything, please. You might knock something over that would kill you instantly.”

  The sentence ended with a cacophonous laugh with open vowels.

  Nico stood still, taking those words literally. Peter, on the other hand, wandered among the shelves, touching bottles and rattling the glass, which made Nico even more anxious.

  Finally, the shopkeeper appeared.

  It was a middle-aged woman with enormous horn-rimmed glasses, as thick as bottle bottoms, on a thin, elongated face that reminded Nico of a chameleon. She stared at him from the back doorway as the smell in the room began to make his temples throb: nothing unbearable, but enough to guess the cause in the fumes that hung everywhere. It was like a perfume that was too strong, almost dizzying.

  The woman was wrapped in shawls. When she saw him, she said in her breathy voice, “Welcome. What is a young man like you looking for in a pharmacist's shop?”

  She stepped over the threshold. To Nico, it seemed as if she was gliding rather than walking, dragging the bulk of her skirts and shawls behind her.

  The woman continued, still aspirating her vowels: “So, what do you need, my dear? A remedy for lovesickness? Or is your mother unwell? I'm an expert on gout, you know. With that, we can solve everything in four, five days at most.”

  “Um, no,” said Nico, hesitantly. “I'm not sure what this place is.”

  “It's a pharmacy, dear,” she replied. “We sell all kinds of remedies here: to lower fever, help heal bones, relieve burns, but also amulets against the evil eye, talismans for health, love, long life, and crystals to rebalance personal energy, aid concentration... if you have a problem, we have the solution.”

  Nico looked around, not understanding who she meant by ‘us’, as the shop seemed empty. He shook his head to dispel useless thoughts. His side was starting to tingle.

  “And do they really work?” Nico asked skeptically, then shook his head. “Anyway, no, I don't need anything.”

  “Of course they work, dear,” said the hurried woman, slipping sideways behind a display case. “You look stressed,” she said, pulling a crystal hanging from a chain out of the display case and handing it to him with her slender hands. “This is an amethyst, dear,” she said with her vowels aspirated in a theatrical tone. “It helps you relax and relieves anxiety.”

  Nico shook his head: “Actually, I don't need anything, thank you,” he said hurriedly, turning to look for Peter to tell him he wanted to leave, but he couldn't see him anywhere.

  “Then a love charm, or a potion to reinvigorate your strength...”

  Nico snapped: "Fine, will you help me? I was looking for something to help me find people... for example, if you could prepare a concoction of jasmine sap that would help me find my traveling companions, I would be grateful, but otherwise, really, I don't need anything."

  The woman raised her eyebrows behind her thick glasses; a crooked smile creased her sharp face, marked by fine wrinkles. “If you're looking for a remedy for insomnia or agitation, jasmine sap is excellent. But I don't think it has any divination or locating powers, I'm afraid. This is a pharmacist's shop, we don't sell magic potions,” she concluded dismissively.

  Nico frowned, irritated. “But you sell talismans,” he said, pointing to a display case full of oddly shaped amulets.

  “Those are just to make ends meet,” she replied, as if it were obvious.

  Nico shook his head, then looked behind him. “Take a look outside and tell me if there's anyone else around. I have to leave this crazy city now.”

  He turned to look for Peter, but didn't see him. In the dim light of the shop, a shadow darted past him. Nico backed away. It was a black cat, thin and elongated, staring at him with bright, feverish eyes. Eyes that were strangely familiar. The cat seemed to smile, then turned toward the woman and slipped between her feet.

  “Oh, Peter,” said the woman with aspirated vowels. “You're back. I thought they'd hung you upside down to study you. Have you made any progress?”

  Nico's eyes widened as he stared at the cat beyond the counter. ‘Peter?’ he wondered, frowning.

  “This time I came really close, Clarissa,” replied Peter in his own voice, ringing, ironic, but not even a shadow of Peter.

  “But in return, I brought you this one...”

  Nico's eyes widened. “Peter? Where are you?” he said as he looked around in the dim light, searching for the source of the voice, without understanding. Maybe Peter was a magician and was hiding.

  “Oh, so the boy is your friend,” said the woman as if she had solved a mystery.

  “This isn't funny... I'm leaving, okay?” he muttered to Peter, whom he could no longer see, and to the woman, heading for the door.

  “Stop,” said the cat, placing itself in front of him. It had Peter's voice.

  Nico shook his head in disbelief. “You... are Peter?” he asked, bending down toward the cat, which responded with a simple meow.

  The woman snorted behind Nico. “It's him. He's an Animutant.”

  Nico looked first at her, then at the cat, who seemed to be laughing. “But that's amazing!”

  Peter snorted. “Nonsense, it's nothing.”

  “What were you doing in the Black Tower? Did they capture you to study you? Those healing surgeons are horrible, people to stay away from!” Nico said in one breath, suddenly feeling himself speaking in a mixture of Kiah and Leo together. He laughed. “Cool... anyway, I have to go. My friends will be worried by now.”

  The cat shook his head. “Not so fast, buddy. Remember? I helped you escape. You owe me a favor.”

  [AUTHOR'S NOTE]

  Updated log: Readers are invited to provide comments, evaluate the behavior of subject N_01, and state whether they like the new characters introduced.

  [LOG_025] will be released on Thursday ET.

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