She's been out all day. She doesn't know where she's going, but she trusts she'll be able to find her way back later if she needs to.

Mostly she just wants to be away. She's finished all the chores they assigned her and doesn't want to be around for them to make up more.

She's seven. Her aunt drags her out of her cupboard and tells her to cook breakfast. When she burns the bacon, her aunt swings a pan at her.

She's good at dodging now.

She really just wants to be gone from there. She doesn't have anywhere to go yet. But she wants it.

She keeps walking, climbing various walls and jumping gaps as needed. She wants to be farther away.

She's eight. She brought home a better grade than Dudley. He complained. 

"How dare you! You bloody cheat, I'll beat it out of you, boy."

Another grab, more bright lines of pain.

Hailey carefully doesn't get good grades now. Good enough to pass, but worse than Dudley. It's a narrow needle, but she manages it.

They want her to be small and obedient and crush herself out of being any of the things that make her herself.

She wants out.

She can't walk all the way to London, but she'll bloody well walk as far as she can.

Her eyes track across her surroundings, watching everything around her as she wanders.

She probably has to go back to Privet Drive at some point today, but she'll put it off as long as she can. And watch — though not really hope — for a way not to.

One of the walls she comes across is an old brick wall, the mortar turning black and starting to crumble with age, the bricks themselves slightly uneven and a orange-yellow instead of the usual brick red. Set into the wall is a door made of metal, rusted over and slightly bent, so that it no longer quite properly fits into the rusted metal doorframe.

The wall itself has no graffiti, but someone has taken some sort of implement to the door to scratch (or melt, upon closer inspection) words into it. "Be Sure," the words say, in unrusted letters each a hand tall, scrawled diagonally from top corner to bottom corner. 

...Huh.

How would someone melt words into a door and not have access to spray paint instead? That's... odd.

That's really odd.

It's a great way to make sure it can't be washed off, but "be sure" is the kind of tosh nobody'd bother with making that permanent, yeah?

Bloody hell she's curious now.

She hops off the wall she's walking along and goes to try the door.

It's hotter through the door, hotter and darker, and it smells different too -- a mix of mushroom and rot and sweat and soot and ozone and something that makes her nostrils tingle, like she touched her tongue to a battery, but only inside her nose. 

The door opens onto a cobblestone street, with tall walls or buildings on either side of the narrow alley that the door opens into. A couple dozen feet from her (as best she can tell in the dim blueish light) the alley turns to the left about 60 degrees and disappears from view. The walls that Hailey can see are made of the same kind of orange-yellow bricks and crumbling mortar that the wall the door is in is made of. Far, far above her head, in the sliver of sky she can see up through the tall walls on either side of her, is something curved and blueish and flickering slightly, tinting the sunlight coming through a sickly greenish color. The alley itself is dirty, and poorly kept -- though this looks to be mostly because it is untraveled, there is no obvious evidence that a person has stepped in the caked dirt here for quite some time. 

Huh. This is really different. She didn't think there was anything like this in Little Whinging or any of the surrounding areas.

And the sky is different.

That's a really short distance for the sky to be different. And have a sudden unexpected thing in it.

She's really confused about that. But weirdly a little hopeful?

What's around the bend in the alley?

The door closes behind Hailey with the sound of metal scraping against metal. 

The alley narrows after the turn, quickly becoming only wide enough for her to move through while turned sideways at her current size; an adult would find this impossible. In fact, most children her age would find it difficult if not impossible, it's only because she's so scrawny that she has little trouble moving down the narrow passageway. 

After one more turn in the other direction, the comes to 3-way split, giving her two choices: left or right. The left passage is a little narrower than the right passage, but not by much. 

Lefty girl gonna go left. She scrapes herself past walls as needed — it's not like that even rates next to her uncle's bloody belt.

After a couple bends in the alley she comes to another junction, split 5 ways this time. 

Right, any different sounds or anything? Smells?

If she strains her hearing, she might be able to hear the sounds of people down the right-middle path. Hard to tell for sure, though, it could just be her imagination. 

Pros: people.

Cons: people.

Probably useful even if tiresome.

Middle-right, here she goes.

Another bend, another junction. This one is a four-way split, but the sounds she was hearing before are now unmistakably the sound of human hubbub, and the noise is coming from the middle path. 

She'll head down the middle path. And not like it, even if she's very curious.

Can she tell what kind of hubbub?