Valentina’s Point of View
Somehow I arrived at Berlin Hauptbahnhof.
I had walked toward the Reichstag without meaning to, crossed the Spree where the water held the city’s lights in long broken lines, seen trains arriving and departing through the station’s glass walls, and followed them. Not because they were going where I needed to go. Because they were moving and I wasn’t.
I could have gone to the airport. Put my knife roll into hold baggage and flown wherever I decided to go. But the knife roll was the only thing I had taken from the restaurant, and the only things I still owned that mattered and weren’t dead were my knives.
The station was quieter than I expected. Past eleven, the concourse had thinned to overnight travelers and the unhurried staff who appear in stations after dark — a man closing a kiosk, a woman mopping near platform seven with the focus of someone who knew exactly what needed to be clean and was making it clean. I understood her. I envied her. She would go home when she was finished.