The last few weeks had been interesting, Rust thought to herself as she scattered oats to the chickens. A part of her mind still felt dazed and battered, but that feeling was fading a little each day, as she got used to existing again.

Taking some oats in hand, she crouched down and let Jenny and Jeremy take them from her. They threatened to bruise her palm as they did so, but she was long used to it by now.

"Good girls," she cooed at them, standing up and scattering the last of the food, "you know what's up."

Back in the kitchen, Quilt was griping at Shim over their missing sweets. They had found the jar empty and pushed to the back of the cupboard a couple of days before, and none had done it.

"Maybe there's fey here," Quilt was saying, "Sneak in the middle of the night and steal things, make shoes, eat all your sweets."

"So we what, put milk outside for them at night, leave out our half-finished shoes?" Shim offered in return, face scrunched up in thought.

"Fey. They're the ones that sneak into your fields and eat your lettuces too, right?"

Quilt stared blankly at him, her frown getting deeper and deeper as she stared at him.

"Those are rabbits. You are thinking of rabbits."

"No, rabbits don't wear clothes, I'm pretty sure…"

He trailed off as Rust made her way in, still brushing the last of the dust off her front.

"You are thinking of rabbits," she headed towards the stove, where there was water warming, "I used to read those books to my kids, when they were young."

Shim grunted, outnumbered, "I suppose? Maybe it was rabbits that ate our sweets?"

Quilt leaned over and punched him, and he laughed. "Hey, I thought we had an amnesty on violence!"

He rubbed his arm, still laughing, before looking over at Rust.

"Are we looking for a library again today? We seem fine for food, we're good for shelter, but I feel like Quilt is going stir crazy over here."

Quilt nodded rapidly, and Rust shrugged, "Fine by me, we can always pick up some more food and wood on the way home, if we do need it."

She eyed the empty sweet jar, "we can restock that, too."

-

"My grandkids would always clear me out of sweets whenever they visited," Rust mused as they walked, "I learnt to hide them in strange places, it was a bit like a scavenger hunt."

She smiled to herself, "I once hid a few chocolate bars in the roof of the chicken coop and the kids didn't find them, and I forgot they were there until they melted in the summer, I thought one of the birds was dying! Just couldn't work out what was wrong."

"Thought they were laying chocolate eggs?" Shim grinned, and she laughed.

"Something like that!"

-

"We checked three blocks over yesterday," Quilt was holding their map, drawn in pen on the back of a chocolate wrapper, "so if we go four from here, we should be able to see a good portion of the road before we have to turn around."

"And the snow is waning, finally," said Rust. She was right, what had come up to their knees a week before was now barely past their ankles, and there was the sound of dripping water everywhere.

"What do you think the library'll contain, if we find it?" Shim had his hands in his pockets, "I haven't even seen magazines like, and technology here seems strange. What if it's all like, medieval manuscripts and scrolls and shit?"

Rust huffed at him, "nothing we've seen is that backwards, you're just young. When I was a kid-"

"Oh here we go again." Quilt stuck her fingers theatrically in her ears, and Rust glared at her.

"Don't you start! You're almost as old as I am!"

"I cannot hear you, old woman, go back to musing about the past!"

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"Did you have a dinosaur as a pet when you were a kid, or had they not domesticated those yet?" Shim butted in, and narrowly dodged a badly thrown punch from Rust.

"I'll have you know I have five dinosaurs back home, and if I let them they would quite happily help me hide your body!"

He snorted, "From what authorities?"

She rolled her eyes at him, and they carried on walking. Soon whatever bizarre weather-rules this place was operating under would catch up with the thaw, and the lightly drifting flakes would turn into sleet and rain, but that hadn't happened yet and the three of them were grateful for it.

"There should be flooding." Quilt complained, kicking a chunk of snow out of her way, "I haven't even seen any sewer grates, where's all the water going."

"Maybe there's cracks in the pavement, that lead into nothing?" Shim suggested, "We've seen buildings with no floors, maybe the water just flows into there. Maybe it just ceases to exist? We are working on some weird video-game rules here."

"I hope this isn't a video game, my grandkids used to bring their gameboys with them and I never understood it." She sighed, "Except the one with the stealing and running into people, I enjoyed that one. They used to put it on the tv every…"

Rust trailed off, staring up at the sky, and the other two watched her out of their peripheral vision, continuing to walk. Their memories weren't really coming back, but what little they did know was starting to solidify.

Ten minutes of walking later, Shim stopped, biting his lip.

"I'm gonna regret asking this. But what's a gameboy? I know the term, and it's something I knew, but it's gone from me."

Rust shrugged, continuing ahead and leaving him behind. "What's a video game? You started it."

"Okay," he skipped forward to catch up with her, "you broke down at the end, so we'll skip that, but you said…"

Quilt stayed silent, letting them talk, watching out for wild libraries. She didn't know what those things were either, and she was painfully aware of the gaps in her memories. Sometimes, she thought she had even less than Shim. He had started with nothing, but he was doing his best to compensate for it. What did she have? Some sort of care-worker degree and a love of books which no longer seemed to exist.

She sighed as she looked around. There were no footprints or signs of passage in the snow, apart from a few animal tracks. The creatures of the forest were moving further into the city each day, despite the fact there couldn't be anything there for them to eat.

She was a bit worried that one day they would find rats or mice infesting the Store, and then what, where would they get food from? But the reality was, right now, food still wasn't all that important. Sure they got hungry, but if they didn't eat then they didn't get hungrier, and if they didn't drink then their thirst wouldn't worsen. It was an annoyance, more than anything.

But eventually, that would change, she was sure of it, as more of the world settled towards normalcy. Already the void in the distance was receding, being replaced with a long, flower-filled meadow, bordered by mountains. They had gone back to her old apartment building and looked out from the roof to check.

She had mixed feelings about that place. It was where she had been happy for so, so long, but it had also become a prison, a Sisyphean limbo. If she never had to go there again, never had to eat another pancake, it wouldn't bother her.

She made note of one of the buildings up ahead. It wasn't much different to the others, but here even a small change indicated something.

"Ahead."

The other two looked at her as she interrupted their discussion, and then ahead, trying to work out what she'd seen.

"Oh!" Shim saw it first, "the windows are all the wrong way up."

Quilt hesitated, and then looked closer, "ah, hey you're right. I thought they were just off somehow."

She tilted her head ninety degrees, "huh, we should look inside."

The other two agreed, and they made their way over to it.

-

It wasn't a building without a floor, but it also wasn't a library, which was disappointing. Instead, the building defied reason. The internal structures were all made out of beer bottles, melted into differing forms. There were bottle walls, which wasn't that unusual, but also bottle seats, tables, sculptures and even facsimiles of machines.

It was like an art gallery, dedicated to one particularly alcoholic artist.

Rust licked her lips, staring around, "I don't recognise any of the brands, but maybe if we look there'll be a storeroom, and some of these bottles will be full? That would be nice."

Shim agreed, but Quilt was more reluctant. She wanted to find the library, not be distracted by this modern-art nonsense. They could see that there was more than one floor, and it would be just their luck if it went up all the way to the top.

She liked reading, but she did not enjoy museums, especially not this kind. At least with the regular sort of museum you could admire all the stuff dead people had made, pretty paintings, and stone carvings. This was just… Beer bottles. Capitalism calling itself art.

"Did a student design this?" she asked, and the other two startled as she spoke, and then looked around again.

"I wouldn't know?" Rust offered.

"I'm only sixteen, I haven't gotten into any of that yet." Shim shrugged, and Quilt rolled her eyes at the both of them.

"You're both so sheltered. Come, we'll go look at the first floor, hope it's more interesting, and then we can go somewhere else."

There were nods, and they headed off towards a great glass staircase they'd seen on the way in.

-

The first floor was dedicated to chocolate wrappers. Paper and foil twisted into shapes, used as wallpaper, used as a floor covering, and unused and uncut blocks of paper, stacked together to make display stands and surfaces and stairs.

The third was biscuit tins, half of them battered and worn from age, the others looking as shiny and new as the day they were made. Some of the battered ones even had writing on, 'screws', 'blades', that kind of thing.

They tried to get a few open, the ones that weren't beaten flat or warped beyond use, but they had, upon closer inspection, all been tack-welded shut.

None of the brands were recognisable, even though the tins were definitely stolen from somewhere, but that was just another oddity of the world they were living in now.

They had a brief look at the fourth floor, but to their combined relief it appeared unfinished. Nothing up there except bare concrete and empty space, stretching up towards the roof, far far above.

The three of them retreated back to the entrance, talking idly and pointing out the weirder sculptures to each other. Time was getting on, and they still hadn't found their library.