This dead city was, as far as she could tell, hers alone.

Whether she was lost in a dream, or wandering around in a fugue state brought on by the brain tumour, she had so far found no reason to be afraid.

She didn't feel the chill of the snow, no monsters were hiding in dark alleyways, and there were no rats in the walls, no cockroaches falling onto her as she slept. Even hunger mostly eluded her, returning only now and again to nip at her heels.

-

She returned to the launderette that first night, making up her bed inside one of the great wooden washing machines. It had taken some courage before she had managed to bring herself to crawl inside; as if the toy might spring to life around her and wash her clean into the next world, but such a thing had not happened.

Instead, it was cosy and warm, if not very spacious. Her own secret den. There was a faint smell of artificial perfume imbued into the wood, and she felt safer in there than she had in... Longer than she could remember, if she was being honest.

Fed and safe, she drifted towards sleep.

The bread had been warm and beautiful, even after being under her shirt for several hours, and that, combined with some fizzy pop and a rather battered tin of pears, was now luring her towards sleep.

She had avoided the COKE, she was learning how this strange new world worked, but the LIMONÁDÉ did, in fact, appear to be simply lemonade, and she had enjoyed every drop of it.

The bottles had been the old-fashioned kind with the glass marble in the top, and it had taken her a good while to work out the mechanism, but it had been worth it. Fizzy and sweet.

She had only ever read about those bottles in books before, being more used to… Something else she wasn't going to think about, but it fit with the aesthetic of the little old shop. She had been loathe to break the bottle, and the relief when she had managed to get it open without doing so was palpable.

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There was such a strange mix of old and new in there. The ancient bottles side by side with the reams of A4 paper, and she would have to go back tomorrow and give it a proper look. She had been so focused on getting food and getting home, that a lot of the details had passed her by.

As she snuggled down deeper into her nest, listening to the hail beat down upon a roof she knew it couldn't hit, she wondered. Why had she been singled out for this? She was just a runaway, one of the faceless many living on the streets. That she had managed to do better than most, holding onto routines and humanity, not falling in with the gangs or getting hooked on drugs, those were incidental things. She was still nobody.

Just a cellar rat. A library rat. A drifter through forgotten spaces. Had she been forgotten, too?

She lay there, in the gentle curve of the drum, and missed the home of her childhood. She missed the noises of the city, she missed the anonymity that came with being part of a crowd, and she missed her dad...

Maybe if she'd stuck it out in the end, things would have turned out differently, but there was no going back now, even if the world hadn't...

She winced as the headache spiked through her, wresting the thoughts away. Instead, she pulled the blankets up over her head, thankful for their warmth, drifting ever closer towards true sleep.

She liked the washing machine. It was a little like one of those beds with the curtains that she'd always wanted as a kid, but as great as it was, there was nothing else in the building to sustain her. There was no food, no tools, not even paper or any of the other stuff she had found today. There had been the one coat, and a few bottles of something she thought might be cleaning supplies, and that was it.

Tomorrow, she would move her den to the old shop and explore from there. It was the sensible choice, as much as it hurt her romantic notions to leave the launderette behind.

She would miss this bed.

If she was lucky, it would have stopped snowing by then.

She yawned. She was starting to hate the snow.

She huddled deeper, the hail like white noise, hovering on the edge of sleep. She was a being of two worlds now.

Her dad would have enjoyed this. He would have whittled himself a home in a tree and become the king of nowhere…

She could almost hear his voice in the hail, if she listened...

Rat yawned again, and the day slipped away from her.