The wall never moved, but it changed with the light.
In the mornings it was gray, at noon the color of old bone, and at dusk it drank the sunset like a wound refusing to close.
I liked to sit near it after chores, toes digging into warm dust, watching wind chase scraps of paper across the ground. The slums were louder now that I could tell one voice from another. Merchants shouted, dogs barked, metal clanged. All that noise, but still the wall stayed quiet.
Mira said walls were good things.
"They keep fools from walking where they shouldn't," she told me once while wringing laundry. "Curiosity kills the cheap first."
She didn't smile when she said it. She never smiled much anymore.
I started helping more around the stall fetching water, carrying bundles, running errands for people who forgot I had ears. They called me "Mira's find," like I was a trinket she'd pulled from the mud. Some even asked her how much she'd sell me for when I was older.
She'd just say, "He's not ready yet."
Not no, just not yet.
I pretended not to hear, but I heard everything. The slums teach you early silence is the safest lie.
The air near the wall smelled different after rain sharper, cleaner somehow. I liked to imagine that the wind that crossed over carried stories. Sometimes I'd whisper questions to it:
"What's on the other side?"
"Do people there ever get hungry?"
The wind never answered, but it listened. I could feel that much.
One evening, when the lamps started to hum with low blue light, I saw shadows moving on the other side long shapes like banners, a flicker of gold, then a laugh carried by the breeze. It sounded free.
I laughed too, quietly. The sound surprised me.
Mira threw a rag at me when she noticed. "Stop grinning at nothing," she said. "The world doesn't like dreamers. It eats them first."
When the market was busy, Mira left me to guard the bundles. I used to count the footsteps that passed by trying to guess which ones belonged to people who'd seen clean water, who'd eaten meat that day.
Once, an old man stopped in front of me. His eyes were milky, his beard tangled. He smelled of dust and something sharp. "You got the look," he murmured.
"What look?"
"The look of someone who ain't supposed to stay here."
Before I could ask more, Mira appeared, grabbed my arm, and pulled me away. "Don't listen to drunks," she hissed. "They see omens in every puddle."
That night, she worked later than usual. I heard her counting coins, the sound dry and quick. Then she said, not to me, not to anyone, "Everyone's a tool until they break."
Her voice was steady. That scared me more than if she'd shouted.
I began keeping small things stones, bits of colored glass, a button shaped like a leaf. I hid them under a loose board in the floor. I told myself they were treasures. Maybe they were proof that I was real, that my days added up to something.
Once, when I was sick, Mira found the hiding spot. She didn't take the things; she just looked at them, then at me.
"You hoard junk like a rat," she said. "At least rats know when to run."
After she left, I put everything back exactly where it had been. Rats run, but they also come back when no one's watching.
The older I grew, the quieter Mira became. Her eyes started following the coins more than people. I don't think she hated me; I think she just stopped remembering why she'd taken me in.
Sometimes she'd stare past me, lips moving as if counting debts no one else could see.
When she slept, I'd study her hands thin, cracked, trembling. Those were the hands that had pulled me from the rain. I tried to picture them soft once, before the soap and the cold and the years. I couldn't.
The wind returned one night, stronger than before, howling through the gaps in the boards. I woke to its voice scraping the walls like nails. The roof leaked; water pooled beside me. Mira cursed and shoved a bucket under the drip.
"Go back to sleep," she said.
But I couldn't. I kept staring at the window slit. Through it, the clouds moved fast, flashing white and blue lightning, maybe, though I didn't know the word yet.
I pressed my palm against the wood. It pulsed faintly with warmth from the storm. My heart answered, but not with power just wonder.
For the first time, I felt something close to longing, though I didn't have a name for it then.
Morning came gray and brittle. Mira sent me to fetch water. The puddles on the street had turned the color of old mirrors. I looked into one and saw my face: narrow, eyes too wide, red hair sticking out like straw.
I wondered if I looked like my real mother. If she'd had the same hollow stare.
Maybe that's why Mira called me Zero because some stories start and end in the same place, with nothing left to measure between.