The Exchange Lior's Eyes - Chapter 5
The ExchangeLior's Eyes - Chapter 5
Dedication: To every secret alley that ever decided to open when we needed it most.
continued from Chapter 4
The meeting at Berta’s had ended the way all good meetings end: with too many crumbs on the table and not nearly enough answers. Lior had told them about the boy running through the wheat, barefoot, laughing, untouched by the long shadows that followed everyone else. They’d listened the way only people who have carried their own impossible memories can listen: quietly, hungrily, without trying to fix it.
He left before the drinks got cold.
Outside, the December night pressed close, the old quarter exhaling frost and chimney smoke. His boots found a rhythm on the wet cobblestones: stomp, breathe, march. Not angry, not tonight. Just restless. The kind of restless that starts behind the ribs and leaks out through the soles of the feet until the only cure is distance.
He turned corners he didn’t know he knew, slipped between buildings that leaned together like conspirators. The alleys narrowed, then widened, then narrowed again, as if the city itself were breathing. No children cried tonight. No ghosts tugged at his sleeve. Just the clean, metallic taste of coming snow and the steady drum of his own pulse.
Bleed.
Stomp.
Breathe.
March.
Then the alley opened its mouth and spat him out into light.
A building stood where no building had any right to be: six stories of pale stone laced with copper gone green, long windows blazing warm against the dark. Art Deco lines sliced the night clean—sharp, proud, unapologetic. Across the entire façade, letters taller than doors burned platinum:
THE EXCHANGE
The doors—thick oak banded in brass—hung wide, spilling music and woodsmoke and the bright clatter of voices into the courtyard. Lior crossed the threshold without thinking. Some invitations don’t wait for permission.
Inside was a riot disguised as order.
The hall stretched impossible, vaulted and golden, tables and booths and blankets thrown together like someone had raided every attic in the city and decided rules were for tomorrow. Lanterns swung from chains, candles guttered in jars, bare bulbs glowed behind colored glass. The air smelled of solder, cinnamon, and wet wool drying by a fire.
People moved everywhere, all of them busy doing something that looked suspiciously like joy.
No one asked for five dollars at the door.
No one asked what you did for a living, or whether you were qualified to touch the tools.
You just walked in, laid whatever you carried on a table (your hands, your stories, the weird thing that keeps you awake at 3 a.m. wondering), and started trading.
Even if all you brought was curiosity.
Even if all you had to offer was the question burning a hole in your skull: What else is there?
Lior drifted.
A woman with ink-black hair down to her waist was teaching three strangers how to throw knives at a slab of pine—badly, loudly, gloriously.
At the next table a boy no older than twelve demonstrated lock-picking with a paperclip while a gray-haired man in a three-piece suit took furious notes. "That's how we open doors to keep people warm!" the child said.
Someone had dragged in a letterpress and was letting anyone who wanted pull a print; the floor was already littered with fresh sheets that read, in tall defiant type, I WAS HERE.
Further in, a circle of people sat around an old door laid flat on crates. On it: a map of the city made entirely of found objects—bottle caps for streetlights, broken watch faces for clocks that had stopped telling time, a single red thread stitching the route from heartbreak to here.
No currency changed hands.
Only attention.
Only the electric moment when someone said, “I never thought of it that way,” and meant it.
Lior watched a teenage girl teach an old man to solder circuits onto dead leaves so they glowed like fireflies.
The old man taught her, in return, how to tie the perfect sailor’s knot that would hold through any storm.
A woman with a shaved head and a laugh like breaking glass showed a cluster of wide-eyed newcomers how to bind books from grocery bags and dryer lint. “Strong enough to hold your whole damn life,” she said, and handed the first finished volume to a boy who looked like he’d never been handed anything before.
Hours slipped by, or minutes; time had taken its shoes off at the door.
Eventually Lior found himself in front of a table piled with scraps of leather, bone folders, threads the color of storms. The woman behind it had a scar that started at her left temple and disappeared into her collar. She was stitching a cover onto a blank journal, needle flashing.
“Trade you,” she said without looking up. “One secret for one page.”
He hesitated only a second.
“I used to run through wheat fields when I was small,” he said. “No shadows followed me then.”
She tied off her thread, bit it clean, and slid the finished journal across the table. The cover was midnight blue, embossed with a single running figure—no shadows.
“Write the rest when you’re ready,” she told him. “We open again next month. Bring something to teach. Or just bring the hunger to learn. Either one spends here.”
Outside, the platinum letters still burned against the dark. Inside, the music had shifted to something slower, something that felt like the city itself exhaling.
Lior tucked the journal beneath his coat, against his heartbeat.
Stomp.
Breathe.
March.
But the rhythm had changed. It sounded, for the first time in years, like it belonged to more than just him—like it was waiting for the next voice to join in.
Author’s - Artist's Note: If you ever stumble into a room where the only price of admission is what you’re willing to explore, pay it. Pay it gladly.
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