~5.15~

Laurie didn’t stop to look around the latest courtyard like she had the others… she headed straight for the nearer and more open of the two openings she saw leading out of it, the further one being another covered passageway.

When she could clearly see that her first choice wasn’t going to take her to a street, she went back to the passageway. It lacked lanterns or any other light, but an outdoor fireplace with a design that vaguely resembled the Olympic torch was visible on the other side of it, with a limestone wall on the other side of it.

No street that way.

Her first thought was that she’d wandered into a really strangely laid out neighborhood, with an unusual density of big residential buildings clustered around each other. Her next thought was that buildings didn’t work like that… they could rub shoulder to shoulder, but in a modern American city they’d have to front on a street for emergency access and fire control purposes if nothing else, didn’t they? And they were all different buildings that were enclosing her… she could see that clearly.

She headed back the way she had first come, the spooky part of her brain… the part she blamed for her being out there in the first place… telling her that everything would have shifted around and she’d never find the way out. But the lighted fountain was still there, and a passage with lanterns and an iron grate in the floor and a puddle still took her back to the first courtyard, with a bench and a stagnant little bird bath.

Iron grate, she thought. The way she’d come in from the street had been closed off with an iron gate at the end. She had gone out the wrong way after all, she realized to her relief… fooled by a similar but not identical passage. She could have laughed at her foolishness…

And she might have, if there had been any other passage there.