The landlord had sent an email, asking if we were staying and asking us to either check and see that the place was intact or let her know so she could stop in. With it being a hero headquarters of sorts, temporary or no, I’d decided it was better to err on the side of caution. Easiest for me to stop in, considering how much easier it was for me to travel around the city.

I had originally planned to simply stop in and check that the place was intact. Now I found myself staying. Fifteen minutes of tidying became thirty. After another fifteen minutes, I dug into the snacks, getting a drink and a small bite to eat.

Food not from our Earth. An unfamiliar variety of trail mix gathered together by something like honey and some preservatives, packaged in waxy paper rather than plastic. It was supposed to be in bars, but it crumbled so much that I ended up eating more of it by tipping the open bag into my mouth to let the broken-off bits fall in, than actually eating any bar.

This was where we were at.

This is how things are now.

We weren’t in a position to fight against a dedicated, serious enemy that wanted to dismantle us. The foundations our buildings were built on weren’t as solid as they should be. Our infrastructure was stretched thin, and a lot of it had been built with things given by other worlds. Things that had strings attached.

Clothes, appliances, even things as simple as screws were coming from elsewhere. We’d been desperate to set ourselves up and get back to a semblance of normal; it was to the point that a lot of things that looked like Earth Gimel things with the inevitable shortcuts and changes made were actually foreign products. Not Gimel, not Bet. The clues were subtle. The font had weird serifs on it, the layout of things like ingredients and the absence of nutrition info, the lack of anything like trademark or copyright symbols by brand names—

It wasn’t ours.

Now relations with other worlds were tense. Some remained allies, but the construction workers’ riots, Cheit in general, and the sheer mess of this portal disaster were taking their toll.

I picked up some papers that had blown against the wall and beneath a table. Kenzie’s homework, with doodles all over it. She was experimenting with art styles on her English homework. An apple in the top corner, realistic and shaded, with ‘apple for teacher’ written beneath it. A lot of disembodied heads littered the page, drawn in an art style that consisted of circular heads with details and hair drawn on. ‘T.soup’ praised the drawing of the apple. ‘Maxtag’ suggested asking Sveta for tips. Another, unnamed one at the bottom right told her to start over on a fresh page, because the current one was a mess.