I stopped at the mirror to braid my damp hair as best as I could with the one hand, taking my time to do it, and then put a bit of makeup on around my eyes. I was mid-application when the woman with the bun who’d given me a dirty look passed through the shower room, walking behind me and into the locker room, eyeing me as she passed.

I almost said hi. Maybe I would in the future.

I got my things, put them in a bag, took a minute to situate my arm in the sling, and situated my bag on my other arm.

Leaving the building, I left the smell of sweat made muggy by showers behind me and ventured into the cool outdoors, closing my eyes against the cold sun. Opening those eyes, I saw the gold-tinted city and a mostly blue sky that would have been pleasant in any other circumstance.

Pleasant if the horizon hadn’t been shattered like a dropped mirror. The sky was divided, with vague shapes stabbing up into it, the sky on the far side taking on different tints and weather.

The portals hadn’t been flat doors that things could pass through, but three-dimensional objects, transition points with rules that we’d simplified by driving trains straight through them. Nothing about it was simple now.

Four portals in this area of the city had been drawn out to a height taller than our tallest buildings, and expanded out to encompass multiple city blocks. The fourth had been a surprise by a parahuman that had used a power to hide until the heat had died down. The worst expansion covered twelve blocks, and it would have covered more if it hadn’t been close to the water.

At the edges of those portals, buildings and one bridge had collapsed. Within the areas encompassed? We still didn’t know. The portals had expanded out, bled into one another to surround one of the more critical areas of the city, because that area had been centered to be symbolically near the largest cluster of portals, and they’d scrambled. They didn’t point to where they once had.

I checked the coast was clear enough that I wouldn’t scare anyone, and I took flight.

The bugs in the city were bad, stubborn even as the weather was cooling down. It had been that way for a while, but the spring and fall seemed worst. They hadn’t gotten the message yet, that the city was here and wildlife and insect life needed to move elsewhere. Now, though, we had wind. Different Earths had different weather and we had gaping holes in our city with starkly different pressures on one side than we had on the other. Flying, I could feel it.