My destination was a tent city. Most in the tent cities had already departed for more secure accommodations, but new people were coming in regularly, and there was a stubborn holdout. As I flew over, I could see the efforts that were being made to patch the problem. Rigid black sheets of insulation were being laid against the sides of tents with yellow fabric, tents were being moved together and connected, and equipment was being brought in—truckloads of what might have been heaters or furnaces.

It was like a game of musical chairs, but the winners moved on to the next room, new people filed in from outside, and the end of the game loomed closer with every passing day. Whoever was in these particular seats come winter was going to have a rough time of it. Tents weren’t houses and this area was going to be as bleak as fuck when the snow and food shortages came full swing.

Overhead, the sky was overcast with heavy black clouds, sunlight cracking through. The movement of air through portals was generating the flow to keep the clouds rolling, the cracks appearing and disappearing, casting down slices of light before they closed up again.

The landmark I was looking for was a building that looked like a cube. Trucks were parked around it, getting their fuel from large drums. Rather than construction uniforms, the workers were wearing civilian gear, with only vests to mark them as anything different.

I dropped out of the sky, landing on the ‘road’, where the passage of trucks and feet had worn away the grass. A gap in the clouds overhead provided a gap for the light to shine through, sweeping over the area. Had I seen that light in a movie, I might have imagined it was an alien spacecraft or a rapturing sweeping up people. This, though, it was aimless. The people weren’t carried up and away, here.

I spotted the teen Major Malfunctions before they spotted me. I took a second to take stock. Two girls and a boy, ranging from sixteen to eighteen years of age.

The oldest or tallest member of the group was a girl with a dress-like costume that hugged her body, extending all the way to the ground. I’d come across some of the individual pieces of clothing she’d used to put her costume together in my browsing of stores and magazines—and they weren’t clothes I would’ve looked at and thought ‘costume’. A dress in charcoal gray that hugged the body and legs down to a taper at the ankles, exploding into a poof of rolling yellow fabric around the feet. She might have bought two of the dresses, because the same ruffles had been borrowed from elsewhere to form the voluminous sleeves with their own yellow explosions of fabric. Her hands poked through those explosions, clad in black gloves.