Death when it comes for Petra is boring, not worth all the bother. Pop, and she’s alive again on the other side. Maybe her clothes are cleaner? If they are, she can’t tell. It’s a lot more crowded here than it was before, that’s how she knows, that and she makes eye contact with a prick with giant muttonchops and he winks and curls down into age, all liverspots and rheum, then further down into springy adolescence (awkwardly hunched forward over a boner, dear GOD), then unfurls back as he was.

Some sort of welcome, she guesses.

She was a roving sort before, and not much for city streets, but there doesn’t seem to be an end to this one, or maybe they’ve all bled together, cities piled high and strung along an endless network of rivers. She walks for centuries and never sees a tree without a sidewalk girdling it or a house spread underneath it, and everywhere EVERYWHERE people, thousands deep. You’d stifle if any of them weighed a damn. As it is she never quite gets used to people sliding through her; always a plucked nerve, or one thin violin string that never falls silent.

Every day, monsters.

One of her regulars: a woman with the diamond-toothed head of a kitten. Nonfat sugar-free vanilla latte. She drives a Humvee, and though Petra has never seen them, a kindle of children squabble deep within its cool, mirrored depths. Do they take after their mother?

Another, new today: one singular chicken-scaled leg below, one impudent fleshy horn above. Blank, nonjudgmental eyes of a newborn saint and the tight-curled hair of a prophet. Depth charge: a shot of espresso in an artillery of coffee. Pleasant-voiced, as deep a soothing rumble as his child’s chest will allow.

“Good work again today,” the blemmya tells her, her voice muffled by the thin muslin shirt. Petra struggles as always for politeness, drifting haplessly from the space where her head isn’t to the motile expansive of her shirt. “You’ll make manager yet.”

Petra shudders in delicate horror.

Petra’s hit with a wave of homesickness so intense she has to lean her rifle against the ship’s rail and close her eyes for a second. One of her fellow baleares bobs over. “Hey, are you okay?” She waves him away, swamped by faces she hasn’t remembered in years, old lovers and family.

It takes her a while to pick out the sun among the byzantine tangle of the rigging. Out here it’s little more than a slightly larger, marginally brighter star. She locks on it, slows her breath and her heartbeat, lets the minor hypnosis calm her. The past drops away. She blinks, and there’s the homely face of her centurio; she’s quiet in a way that means she just finished saying something.

“I’m sorry,” says Petra. “Just a little light-headed.”

The centurio sizes her up, not unsympathetically. “First time off the islands?”

“I— yeah.” She’s obscurely ashamed; for a second dizzingly young again, vulnerable and adrift.

“Don’t worry about it. Leaving hits some folks that way, that’s all. You’ll get over it, assuming y’stay on; people mostly do. Y’need a moment?”

Petra reshoulders her rifle and tries to claim her old brave swagger. “I’m okay.”

“That’s the way!” The centurio claps her on the shoulder, then has to grab her before she goes over the railing. They build women strong on wherever her island was. “Back to your post, balear.”

“Yes, ma’am,” says Petra, and retrains her eyes on infinity.

Cannon fire between rings.

Walking to work, Petra passes through at least three rings: high-tension wires embedded in concrete, shop awnings and the long shadows of cross-street buildings, scaffolding. She wears headphones. Each ring is a new body: heavy and shaggy, small and liquid, gray-furred and spider-eyed. The headphones are constant, somehow.

It was all a novelty when she first moved here, but these days she’s over it. She ducks shrapnel from the latest revolution happening in D4 and turns her headphones up, drowns out the death cries of alien beasts with a Prince album. Well, Prince and the Revolution. She’s not completely over it.

The bus only comes in D2, which means it’s about a kilometer long and seats 20 comfortably. She curls nose to anus and watches boiling mud slide by. At work she’s a file clerk; she strenuously avoids any implication of metaphor.

Walking back from the theater, very animated. Rain gurgling in the gutters.

Gillibrand had killed both Gladstone and Disraeli in the third act, Gladstone with a horse and Disraeli with an eagle, a shocking development by anyone’s standard. Where they can possibly go next is anyone’s guess, but that’s the bitch about these sequence plays, isn’t it? Petra’s glad she has a season pass and maybe she’ll buy another couple of tickets because there was a bit of prestidigitation in the middle of the sun city shuffle that she didn’t quite catch but must have been important and that’s going to come up again fasure and maybe she’ll stop for a beer on the way home and it’s too early to go

Three of them.

“Hey,” voice like a rotten berry, all grey fur and sweetness. “You look sad.”

She smiles, not desperate, just smiles, tooth and gum. “Nope, I’m fine.”

Circling, wary, suspicious. She can smell them through the rain, garbage and ordure and that permanent alien reek. “You looked sad.” Doggedly.

“Heal thyself. Do I look sad?” One, the littlest—and it’s always the littlest ones that are trouble, the ones with the knives and the brains—looks up at her, leans in close to where the tag hooked into its chest catches the light, breathes her in, tongue tasting the air. Smile, smile.

“No,” it says, doubting. “Be happy. Stay happy.”

“Yes,” she says, “very happy,” and smiles wider, to prove it. Slows her heart down, and her breathing; swallows adrenaline back into acid. All friends here.

Circle opens and she’s gone. Looking back from the light she can just see them watching her, eyes aglow. She hurries on, no longer wanting that beer.