The day passed like a daydream, and afterwards, and as she sat at her kitchen table, Gertrude on her lap and Jenny and Jeremy perched precariously on the back of one of the chairs, she mused about what she both had and hadn't found.

She had wandered for much of the day, getting lost in the monotonous grey, orienting herself by the reflections of the sun off the windows and the call of the cockerel in the distance, and in all that wandering, she hadn't found anything worth looking at.

No stores, no shops, and no signs of life. Nothing.

She had ventured into some of the buildings, but they were wrong, somehow. She was pretty sure that the tower blocks were meant to have floors inside. There should be spaces for human habitation or shops or endless banks of machines, people divided up into their own individual spaces by wood and cloth. She remembered seeing images of things like that, even if she knew she had never experienced it herself.

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Instead, there was nothing. The buildings all identically grey, each one just a facade, cloth stretched around nothing, jelly moulds on an unimaginable scale.

It gave her a headache to look upon them, she couldn't imagine how they'd been built, or how they stood up. Blocks placed by a child, sandcastles awaiting an incoming tide.

That she had managed to find her way home at all was a miracle, she was unused to navigating in landscapes such as this, outside of human scale, but she had made it back.

As she settled towards sleep that night, the chickens arranged along the foot of the bed, Sightmind on the windowsill, and the cockerel on the roof, she wondered if she would ever wake up again, if her children would visit.

She hoped so. She missed them.