POV: lift
Summary
Half an hour and a hard run later, Lift is flat on a tarp stretched between the rooftops of a Yeddaw shanty alley, breathing hard. The guard from the immigrant quarter had been persistent. Now, with him gone, the tarp swings in the breeze and the day's noise drops to a single family talking under her — a mother, three sons, and a father, all together — marvelling at the miracle of a full cart of grain being dumped into the slums.
The Words come back to her up there in the wind: *I will remember those who have been forgotten.* The right Words, she knows. Important Words, sworn over a dying Gawx. What she does not know is what they mean for her now. Her mother is dead and no one in the world remembers her. There seem to be too many people like that — too many forgotten for any one girl to keep track of. The tarp rocks and she remembers her mother's arms, her scent, her warm voice.
Wyndle settles beside her as a small tower of vines and leaves shaking in the breeze, and asks, lightly, why — given how far she has roamed across Roshar — she has never actually visited the Reshi Isles she keeps claiming as home. She does not answer that. She gives him, instead, the thing she has been working toward saying out loud: she did not leave Azimir to chase Darkness. ("Sure," he says.) She left because people had started to know who she was. Shopkeepers had started smiling when she walked in and reaching for the thing they had already learned she wanted. That is bad enough; it is worse when they start thinking they are her friend. Gawx and the viziers had made assumptions; assumptions become expectations; expectations make her into the person other people have decided she is, instead of the person she is.
Wyndle takes the opening and asks the question under it: and who *is* the person you actually are, Lift? She does not have an answer. She is not even sure whether she ever did, or whether being young enough to ignore the question was the only answer she ever had. The wind smells fresher up here than it does in the slot — Yeddaw is not exactly ripe, but down in the trenches it is the smell of too much life packed too close, like animals kept indoors — and she lets her thoughts sit with her mother for as long as her empty stomach will allow.
The stomach does not allow long. The needs of right now go on muscling out the wants of the long-ago. She sighs, sits up, and gets to her feet on the tarp. She does not know the slot-city yet, she has put herself on the wrong side of one Yeddaw watch captain already, and the guards she fled from this morning will be off shift in some predictable number of hours; she does not need to think about that yet. What she needs is a place to sleep where no one will write down her name, and a way to find food in a city whose flame the law has forbidden. Both of those needs point in the same direction — the same direction they always point. She tells Wyndle to come on. They are going to find some urchins.