Free Half World by Hiromi Goto Page A

she whispered. She unclenched her fingers and raised both hands to push her stringy hair behind her ears.
    As she navigated the stairs Melanie no longer had to scoot on her bottom. There was even a handrail, though she couldn’t say when it had begun. She continued with her descent, anchoring herself with the railing, as she continued to gaze upon the frightening dreamscape.
    As she neared the ground she could make out people; strangely shaped creatures dressed in human clothing; dogs endlessly chasing their own tails; a woman jumping into the canal, only to reappear on the worn paving stones to jump again anew.
    A man sat on an ox-driven cart, a tangled heap of scrap metal filling the back. What looked like children chased after the metal collector. The children lobbed things at him, jeering and shrieking. The man didn’t care. He was missing his head.
    The roar of a jet sounded in the distance. Followed by a terrific explosion. The cloud cover throbbed momentarily with light.
    The children on the street began to clap and cheer.
    The spiral sound of a siren was overcome by the wild clanging of church bells, the distant heartbeat of an enormous drum, a deep melodic gong rippling across the night sky.
    A flock of pigeons burst off a distant rooftop.
    From somewhere a burst of machine-gun spray clattered metallic.
    The stink of fried chicken, oily and rancid. Putrid garbage, raw sewage thrown onto the streets. Rotting offal.
    A train on a raised railway roared past in a stutter of yellow rectangular lights, and was gone.
    Melanie stopped.
    She was no longer descending a mountain.
    She stood upon the rooftop of a tall building.
    The mountain stairway was no longer there. She anxiously searched for the place she had come from, crisscrossing the expanse of the enormous featureless rooftop, but the access to the mountain high above Half World had disappeared.
    Maybe, Melanie’s thoughts babbled, maybe it will come back again. After a time. Like the woman drowning on repeat. Maybe things skipped. And the stairs could come back in time.
    Because it was the only way home that she knew.
    When she turned around she could not stop herself from gasping.
    Before her was a rooftop entrance, with walls and a door, where there had been none before.
    Melanie stood there, heart pounding, until she was able to breathe again.
    She curled her fingers around the jade amulet inside her pocket. “Lucka, lucka, lucka,” she crooned as she opened the door.
    She entered.

EIGHT
    SHE SAT, PANTING, upon the third-from-last step from the ground floor. As she had spiraled down, down the fire escape, she had considered at each landing exiting through the door into a hallway to take the damned elevator, but each time fear stopped her. She ran into no one, but sometimes there were noises she could not identify. So she had continued, soaked through with sweat, legs so exhausted they had become numb.
    Now what?
    Now what?
    She let her forehead fall into her dirty palms.
    If only she were more clever. Like the smartest girl in her school, Eleanor Cortes-Quan. They were both in the same grade, but Eleanor had already skipped two years in a row, and she had placed first in the provincial math competition. If Melanie were smarter she could figure out what she should do; she could use her head and make intelligent decisions.
    Or if she couldn’t be smart, if only she were stronger. Like jogging-in-shorts-outside-even-in-the-middle-of-January Lali Vukov. Captain of the field hockey team and the cross-country running team, she could out-bench-press all the boys and half the P.E. teachers.
    What could she do? Melonball Tamaki, pudgy and stupid . . . She groped for the jade amulet, hoping to touch the coarse fur of the rat, but all she could feel was stone. It felt colder than before. Letting the amulet fall from her shaking fingers, she turned to her last bit of hope.
    The Magic 8 Ball felt a little different—the slosh of liquid that held the