As those words slipped out of Mira’s mouth, she stopped walking.

  Not because she was tired.

  If anything, she had long since passed the kind of tired that sleep could fix. This was something else—something deeper, quieter. It felt as though her mind and body had both come to an agreement without consulting her.

  No protest.

  No dramatic collapse.

  Just… a full stop.

  The city continued moving around her. Shoes tapped across pavement. Conversations blurred into background noise. A bicycle bell rang somewhere behind her, bright and impatient, like the world gently reminding everyone that time was still happening.

  Mira stood in the middle of it all, oddly untouched by the urgency.

  She exhaled.

  The breath came out longer than she expected, as if it had been waiting for permission.

  It felt inappropriate to remain there.

  That was her first instinct.

  Not Not

  But…

  The thought was so automatic she didn’t even question it. People were walking. People had places to be. Standing still in the flow of things meant becoming an obstacle, and Mira had spent most of her life carefully avoiding being one.

  So, almost apologetically, she stepped aside.

  Her feet carried her toward a narrow alley tucked between two buildings. It wasn’t particularly dirty. It wasn’t particularly clean either. Just one of those forgotten spaces cities accumulate—too small to matter, too ordinary to notice.

  Perfect for disappearing without actually disappearing.

  She leaned lightly against the wall.

  “I’ll just… stay here for a moment,” she murmured, though no one had asked.

  The bricks behind her were cool. Not comforting. Not unpleasant. Simply there, solid in a way she didn’t have to think about.

  For the first time that day, no one needed anything from her.

  No emails.

  No expectations.

  No one asking if she could “handle this one small thing.”

  The silence wasn’t silent at all. The distant hum of traffic seeped into the alley, softened and diffused, like sound filtered through water.

  Mira closed her eyes.

  Not to sleep.

  Just to… stop looking.

  Her thoughts, usually arranged in neat, anxious lines, began to loosen.

  The thoughts started, then faded before they could finish forming.

  Strangely, her mind didn’t rush to fill the gap.

  It rested.

  Not happiness.

  Not sadness.

  Just rest.

  She had the vague sensation of setting down something heavy she hadn’t realized she’d been carrying.

  Minutes passed. Or maybe seconds. Time felt less interested in measuring itself here.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  Then—

  “Ah,” said a voice. “Found you.”

  Mira opened her eyes.

  There was a cat sitting a few steps away.

  It hadn’t walked in.

  It hadn’t climbed down from anywhere.

  It was simply… there.

  White fur, immaculately clean. Not the cautious clean of a street animal, but the kind of deliberate neatness that suggested either impossible luck or an alarming level of self-maintenance. Its tail curled around its paws in a composed, almost professional manner.

  Mira blinked.

  The cat blinked back.

  They regarded each other.

  “…Hello,” Mira said automatically.

  Because of course she did.

  Because when faced with something unexpected, Mira defaulted to politeness.

  The cat inclined its head.

  Not like a cat.

  More like someone acknowledging a greeting at a formal gathering.

  “Yes,” it replied. “Hello.”

  Mira stared.

  Her brain, still in that suspended, resting state, did not react with the panic one might expect upon hearing a cat speak.

  Instead, it produced a single, unhelpful thought:

  She frowned slightly.

  “…It doesn’t, actually,” she corrected herself out loud.

  “Give it a moment,” the cat said kindly. “Your reasoning faculties are currently buffering.”

  “That’s not how brains work.”

  “You’d be surprised.”

  The alley remained perfectly ordinary.

  A plastic crate leaned against one wall. A faded sticker peeled off a drainpipe. Somewhere, water dripped with persistent irregularity.

  Nothing shimmered.

  Nothing glowed.

  No grand revelation split the sky.

  Just a cat. Talking. Casually.

  Mira straightened a little.

  “I think,” she said slowly, “I might be more exhausted than I thought.”

  “A reasonable hypothesis,” the cat agreed. “However, if this were a hallucination, wouldn’t you have imagined something more impressive? Wings, perhaps. Or an inspiring soundtrack.”

  Mira considered that.

  “…That’s true.”

  “Also,” the cat added, “hallucinations rarely wait patiently while you evaluate them.”

  They paused again, looking at each other.

  Mira realized she didn’t feel afraid.

  Confused, yes.

  Disoriented, certainly.

  But not afraid.

  If anything, the presence of the cat felt… aligned with the strange stillness that had drawn her into the alley in the first place. Like this moment had been waiting at the end of that stop.

  The cat rose to its feet and walked closer, movements unhurried.

  It sat down again, now within comfortable conversational distance.

  “Good,” it said. “You stopped properly.”

  “…Properly?”

  “Yes. Most people don’t. They pause with their bodies but keep running with their thoughts. Very inefficient.”

  Mira let out a small breath that might have been a laugh.

  “I didn’t realize there was a correct method.”

  “Oh, there absolutely is. You, fortunately, stumbled into it by accident. That tends to happen when someone reaches their limit without realizing they had one.”

  That… sounded uncomfortably accurate.

  Mira looked down at her hands.

  They weren’t trembling.

  For once, they weren’t rushing to do something either.

  “What is this?” she asked quietly. “Why does it feel like everything just… stopped?”

  The cat’s tail flicked once.

  “Because,” it said, “you asked for somewhere kinder.”

  The words landed without force.

  No drama.

  Just recognition.

  Mira remembered.

  She hadn’t meant it as a wish.

  Just a thought that had slipped out.

  “People rarely do,” the cat said, as if answering that unspoken realization. “The important ones are almost always said by accident.”

  A faint sound from the street reached them—laughter, distant, passing.

  The world was still there.

  And yet, here in the alley, it felt like standing in the space between pages of a book.

  Mira hesitated.

  “…So what happens now?”

  The cat looked at her.

  Not like an animal observing a human.

  But like a host confirming that a guest had finally arrived.

  “Now,” it said, “we see whether you meant it enough to follow through.”

  Mira wasn’t sure what that meant.

  But for the first time in a long while—

  She didn’t feel like she was in the way.