A weeks of searching, of flying through worlds with only her shadows for company and assistance. Of finding the meat and vegetables for her own meals, including tubers and edible roots found in nature that were dim substitutes for things found on supermarket shelves. Her shadows prepared and cooked the meals while she rested.

A week. A week, a day, and four hours, and she found the first settlement. Shattered buildings had been repurposed. Graves were laid out at the far side of a field. Water, food, and shelter seemed to be secured.

There were cheers and cries of excitement as they saw her. An eerie feeling, given that they were people from the city. The Megalopolis.

And the questions. They came one after another. They wanted to know what had happened. The portals had expanded and then things had connected. People had been cast through, but they wanted to know why. They wanted to know about the city, and if the city was okay.

She felt as impatient as she ever had and she forced herself to answer in as patient and measured a way as she could.

It might have taken ten or fifteen minutes before there was a break in the conversation long enough for her to ask her own question.

“The Wardens? Did their headquarters come through here?”

“Yes, actually,” came the response, from a younger member of the group.

But that answer was less of an answer than the exchange of glances, the silence from the people who had been so talkative a short while ago.

A finger pointed the way, and Valkyrie flew in that direction, buoyed by shadows.

Had the two sites switched, the remnants of the Wardens’ headquarters serving the hundreds who had come through on the other site, the remnants of the one or two apartment buildings lying on their side for the patch of people situated here, it might have seemed more fitting.

She released the shadow that was allowing her to fly, and stepped to the edge of the Wardens’ site.

Riley was here. So was Rinke.

There was a thinker who had been kept in isolation, because he found stimuli to be too much, and there were five members of the Wardens’ office.

Again, she was pulled into conversation, when she only wanted to ask. Questions about the state of things, and that sing-song rhythm that Rinke and Riley could pull her into, where they played off of one another and seemed so natural, in a world that felt so hollow, shadowy and unnatural. A siren call.