A light gray plain beneath a dark gray sky, no light from the streetlights, no illumination in houses they passed. What wasn’t dead was slowly dying and what wasn’t slowly dying was being killed. It was cold and yet wildfires burned elsewhere, and the smoke from those fires turned the horizon from a line of light into a line of black. There were places near the cities where the water had chemicals in it and in places that meant that there wasn’t any ice, or ice could coexist with water that roiled in the wind, gray in reflecting the sky and white where it frothed.

She could see how it happened. The order of things, laid over one another. A fallen tree branch over a patch of leaves, telling a story. A car that had crashed, gone rusty, that rust a history and a timetable. Paring through it all, she could get a sense of how it had played out. A clock had ticked down without anyone the wiser and when it had hit zero, a world had ended. These were the consequences and the casualties.

To throw paint at a surface and see it mid-motion, splashing against itself, to see the potential, that was best. The next best thing was to see the aftermath. A rolled vehicle, a collapsed building with plants trying to grow over it, finding root in the clean water that had pooled in recess.

“Home,” she said.

“Sad,” Tori said. She touched March’s arm.

March shook her head. “No.”

The car sped by a long line of bodies covered by sheets. Rain had smashed down the sheets and the sheets had molded to the bodies, going stiff or getting stained, following the bodies on their to decay.

“…Maybe a bit,” she decided.

“I’m worrying about the pretzel thing,” Ixnay said, leaning forward a bit. His costume was black, a red ‘x’ across his face as part of his mask.

“She’s a hero, Ix, she’s not going to lay a trap that might hurt a civilian or any friends that are coming to help her. And she’s a teenage girl. What teenage girl is going to sit still and keep her power in place somewhere while doing nothing with it, when she knows the people she’s up against are making plans? She’s going to be anxious.”

“This is going over my head,” Ix said.