The city arrived in fog, one spire at a time. People watched from windows, afraid to blink, as if their attention alone kept the towers from dissolving back into mist.

Maya discovered it first. She had always been the type to notice what others missed—the way shadows fell wrong on certain afternoons, how some streets felt older than the maps claimed them to be. But this was different. This was a city that shouldn't exist, unfurling itself from the harbor fog like origami made of stone and glass.

"Do you see it?" she asked her roommate, pressing her face against the kitchen window. The morning fog was thick enough to write your name in, but through it, impossibly, towers emerged. Not the familiar skyline of their city, but something else entirely—spires that twisted skyward with an architectural logic that hurt to follow.

Her roommate, coffee mug halfway to her lips, followed Maya's gaze. "See what?"

And that was when Maya understood the first rule of the fog city: it chose its witnesses.

She spent the day sketching what she could see—the way the buildings seemed to breathe, expanding and contracting with the rhythm of the tide. The windows that glowed with no electric light. The streets that curved in directions that had no names.

By evening, when the fog lifted, the other city was gone. In its place: the ordinary harbor, the ordinary sky, the ordinary certainty that what you see is what is there.

But Maya had her sketches. And more importantly, she had the memory of standing at her window, watching a city think itself into existence.

Dr. Elena Vasquez had spent thirty years mapping the unmappable—underground rivers, forgotten subway tunnels, the secret architecture of cities within cities. But the reports coming to her desk challenged everything she thought she knew about space and permanence.

Seven witnesses now. All describing the same impossible city, visible only in fog, always in the same location but never quite the same configuration. Each witness had drawn maps, and when Elena laid them over each other, the discrepancies told their own story: this was a city that existed, but not consistently.

"Cities don't just appear," she muttered, spreading the sketches across her desk like tarot cards. But even as she said it, she remembered the stories her grandmother used to tell—about cities that existed only at certain times of day, or only for people who believed in them hard enough.

Elena packed her surveying equipment and headed for the harbor.

The fog rolled in at 6:47 AM, precise as clockwork. And there it was—not where the sketches said it would be, but where her instincts said it should be. A city built from the dreams of fog, its architecture following the logic of water rather than stone.

She raised her theodolite, began to measure angles that couldn't exist, distances between buildings that occupied the same space but not the same time.

And as she worked, the city seemed to notice her noticing. Windows turned toward her like eyes. Streets realigned themselves to accommodate her measuring. It was performing itself for her, the way cities always performed themselves for those who paid attention.

The fog city had rules, Maya discovered. It appeared only in morning fog, never in rain. It showed itself to artists and cartographers, to children under seven, to people who were lost in more than just the geographical sense. And it was growing.

Each morning brought new spires, new neighborhoods spreading into the mist like watercolors bleeding into wet paper. Maya began to understand that she wasn't just witnessing something—she was participating in it. Her attention, her sketches, her growing certainty that the city was real: these were building materials as solid as stone.

She started leaving her apartment earlier, positioning herself at the harbor before dawn. Waiting. Watching. Drawing not just what appeared, but what wanted to appear. The city began to anticipate her, sprouting new districts in the directions her pencil suggested.

Other witnesses found her there. Elena the cartographer. Marcus the photographer, whose camera captured only empty fog but who swore he could see neighborhoods of impossible beauty. Children who drew the city's outline in sidewalk chalk, as if helping it remember its own shape.

They became a community of believers, gathered at the harbor's edge like priests attending a daily miracle. And the city, sensing their collective faith, grew bolder. Some mornings it lingered past the fog's lifting, visible for heartbeats in clear air before remembering it wasn't supposed to exist.

[To be continued...]