4.

It had only just occurred to Thora that she was alone. The thought had saddened her at first, but then she realised the simple solution �" she had to find everyone else. They had to be somewhere, right? This new determination gave her energy, another thing she was lacking. Then again, it was most liking a lack of food that was leading to her lack of energy. She made a mental note to keep an eye out for anything edible.

Thora figured the first thing she needed to do was figure out where she was. In order to do this she needed to find the highest accessible point and climb it, so that she could get an overview of the area. She had wandered in to a few buildings, but judged the staircases in each too dangerous to climb, or took one look at the shattered walls and cringed. It took a while but after about the eighth building, Thora found a staircase she deemed stable enough to climb. 

From the top of the building, Thora could immediately see several land marks that gave her the answer to where she was. The giant, sea green lady with her symbolic torch shining her light toward the towering skyscrapers crawling with greenery and a huge, black bridge. And Thora knew immediately that she was a long, long way from home. 

It was at this point that Thora had to stop and seriously consider her situation.  She tried to remember who she was, where she came from, and slowly pieces started coming back to her. First she started to remember faces, people she had recently interacted with. Not many names came back to Thora, and when they did, she wasn’t able to put them to any of the faces either. As the lack of information started sinking in, she began feeling more and more lost.

Thora sat for quite some time, thinking and forcing her brain to remember things that it had almost wiped clean. There had to be a wall, a tall, thick, menacing wall, somewhere in her mind, blocking and hoarding this information. A wall stopping her from knowing who she really was. A wall stopping her from finding her family, friends, and anyone else that she had some kind of connection to. There had to be someway of knocking this wall down. 

Thora decided there had to be someway of remembering things that had been forgotten, like restoring computer memory, or retrieving lost data from a flash drive. And it was this thought, this small inkling of hope, this idea of finding someone, anyone, everyone; this idea of finding herself, that finally gave birth to an idea. If she could find a place that was familiar, a place she had been before, then her senses: sight, touch, smell �" these things could trigger her memory, and make her remember.

With a new, invigorated energy, Thora jumped up and headed back out of the building, down the stairs with a hopeful spring in her step. She stepped back out into the sunshine and took a deep breath, then headed off down the street in the direction that looked the most appealing.

After a while, and passing the same ramshackle little store several times, she started to feel the truth press down on her �" she was in a strange city, with no idea where anything was, and no idea how to get home. Thora had been walking aimlessly for about thirty minutes when she saw something that gave her a small inkling of hope.  

A newspaper stand stood on the corner of the street opposite her, looking almost untouched, save for the few rotting pieces of fruit that lay around the base of the cart. She hurried over, making sure not to trip on the large chunks of asphalt that had jutted up as a result of huge cracks spreading along the road. As she reached the stand the first thing she looked for was food, as her stomach had finally convinced her that she was absolutely starving. The fruit was completely inedible, but Thora was lucky enough to find a packet of biscuits that were secured in a colourful plastic wrapper, which she tore off extremely quickly, and started shoving the biscuits into her mouth. 

While struggling to swallow her mouth full of dry, unflavourful biscuits, Thora spotted a number of torn, dirty newspapers and magazines lined up along a huge rack beside the stand. The magazines seemed to display a large array of superfluous glamour girls, but one of the newspaper articles caught her eye. It was titled ‘New York City Lost’. She snatched up the article and read it diligently.