17
After their visit with Cyrus, Marya led him back to Cephas’s apartment, her initial intention of showing Lukas around the city abandoned for their now more precise goal. Lukas counted this time as they moved quickly down the narrow, claustrophobic hallway of the apartment complex; Cephas’s door was the thirty-seventh on the right, and the hall stretched on for at least twice that length until Lukas could no longer judge the distance. He still didn’t appreciate his inability to read the written language of this new world, but resorting to counting and memorization through repetition would have to work well enough. He’d make it work.
Marya lifted her hand and pressed her three middle fingers onto a portion of the wall beside the door that didn’t look any different than the rest of it. T
