On a rooftop below me, I saw people burning something in an improvised stove. I flew close, passing through the smoke and warm air, and saw it was construction material.

Lineups around a block, mid-afternoon. In the summer and fall it had been to buy the latest line of clothes or tech, when options were so few and far between. We’d peaked over the fall where a bunch of new options landed, and then… this. A paradigm shift that came with the colder weather. I was willing to bet the line was for food. To stock up and prepare.

There were streets where people shuffled forward on foot, the sidewalks so clogged that people were forced to go the speed of the slowest person. Some people walked in the road.

We weren’t at the hard part yet, but the bite of last winter had been bad enough that people had learned to conserve, prepare, and wait.

But this was going to be different, I was pretty sure. Last winter had been something we’d collectively endured, with the mindset that we could get through the difficult patches, and if we could make it through then things would be okay. This winter, the titan loomed on the horizon and the portals shattered the sky. This winter, we had someone to blame. Mayor Jeanne Wynn. Citrine. I was sure she was trying, and I was sure it wouldn’t be quite enough to satisfy.

Blame was a hell of a thing.

Fuck, I wished I could fly faster, to get to Sveta and Weld in a workable span of time.

Fuck, was I cold.

Fuck this character assassination bullshit, fuck the people who had done it.

I could find my way across the city by the flavor of the buildings. How densely they were packed together, the style of them. I had a sense of which materials had come from where, with a lot of the prefab building segments having come from Cheit, a lot of crude materials from Shin, and outright raw materials from Earth N, with processing and industry set up within arm’s reach of the destinations for the end-products they made.

I saw my destination, at a point where the neighborhoods ceased to be places I’d flown over fifty times and became familiar. I felt the same hollow feeling from earlier, recognizing the stores, restaurants, and the peninsula that was Hollow Point, just over the water from our headquarters.

I wasn’t sure what to expect, but what I saw felt off. Rain on the ground, leaning against Tristan and Byron’s car. Tristan out of costume on the fire escape stairs, and Ashley standing in the doorway.

I floated close, because Victoria catch-up was an interruption that stood to make it harder to grasp the immediate situation and its demands.

“Please leave,” Sveta said. Her voice was tense, breaking slightly. “Give us a bit.”