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For a full minute after they arrived on her homeworld, Daphne did not open her eyes. She squeezed them shut, and she squeezed Adria's hand, too. so hard that her knuckles felt a little numb. With Soleiyu, she had to settle for curling her fingers into his fur.

She needed to be here. She knew that. She needed to know what was here. What had happened on Alastor, and more than that, what had almost happened on Alastor, made that abundantly clear. Soleiyu had been right. She needed answers and a baseline before she gave up completely, and so she'd gathered the others, and after a tense moment, she'd pressed the button on her phone.

It didn't mean she wanted to see.

Of course, even with her eyes closed, she wasn't completely spared.

The Chaos was inescapable. There was a slightly different flavor to it than what was in the Negaverse agents on Earth, or in the Dark Mirror. It felt hotter, angrier, but there was no question about what it was.

Then, when she did open her eyes, she immediately let out a horrified gasp. "It is dead," she whispered, and her grip on the others went slack.

It was daytime, which meant the heat was scorching. It also meant that she could see for miles. The city wasn't too far behind them, but it was the savanna that was stretching out in front of them. The savanna, which she loved. It had been one of her many escapes.

It had been her final escape, before she had ended up on Earth.

It was supposed to be full of grasses in all kinds of colors, and small flowers peeking through here and there, and scattered groves of spindly pastel trees wherever there was groundwater. From a distance like this, it was supposed to look blue, and pink, and green.

Instead it was all brown, and sickly yellow, and everything was so quiet that Daphne could hear her own breath.

Before she could stop herself, Daphne turned to look at the city. She took another ragged breath at the sight of that, and suddenly her knees didn't feel so solid. Her head felt like it was full of water.

"That's dead, too," she said. Her voice felt small and tinny and far away. "I can tell from here. It's supposed to be-" her voice faltered, because she could imagine it easily. She could picture the sliver ribbon of the river at the center of it, and the lanterns that were always strung overhead, and people calling to each other in the streets, and laughing. She could picture the skyline as it was supposed to look from here, soft and pastel from the permaculture gardens that lined every rooftop, and the insulating plants that lined most of the walls to fend off the harsh sun.

All she could manage to say was, "It's supposed to be beautiful."

Even outsiders would be able to tell that it wasn't that. The buildings were naked, and while most had stood the test of time, some were crumbling at awkward angles, like they'd been bombed.

"It's not-" she started. "It's not-"

She gave up and buried her face in Adria's shoulder.

Daphne had cried so much over the past few days that now, she seemed to have run herself dry. She didn't start gasping or sobbing into Adria's vest. She was still.

She was too still.

This feeling was a different one. She felt light-headed. She wasn't snapping back to herself. In some ways, she felt like she was a million miles away, to the point where she could barely hear what her friends were saying. In other ways, it seemed like she was deeper inside herself than she had ever been, like her presence didn't reach all the way to her fingertips.

Things swayed, and so before she could fall and make one of the others have to come catch her, she slid away from Adria, just enough that she could sit down, cross-legged, with her face in her own hands.

"It's supposed to be hot," she said, because that she was fully able to wrap her mind around. "That's why we do everything at night."

Her own voice sounded distant, too, but she was able to speak.

"Soleiyu," she said, without moving, and then she was silent for a long moment as she tried to find the will to finish the thought. "You've found others like me, haven't you? You know Fang. You know Alastor. How many of them have had anyone from their world escape, or survive?"

She took a breath, slowly. Her words felt hollow. Her heart felt hollow, too.

"The others, born on Earth? When they restore their ruins, when they clean, how many of them bring people from a thousand years ago back to life?"

She curled farther into herself, shying away from touch for the moment. Maybe the Chaos was already getting to her.

"Please don't try to make me think there's hope."

Daphne heard the words. She understood them, even if they sounded more distant than they had a few seconds ago, and not less. It was just hard to listen. It was hard to accept.

Her tail had puffed up without her noticing, but other than that, she was completely still. Her breath was shallow. Her eyes were frozen on the jagged shapes of a ruined building. They were watery again. Maybe it was from the sun, but maybe she wasn't quite out of tears after all.

"I can't stay," she said, pushing past the urge to snap back as the feeling of something hot crawled under her skin. "I can't go farther. Not now. The Chaos- I can't."

It wouldn't come for her like it had come on Alastor, but it would come for her. It probably already was, and she was in no state to resist it.

It already had her pushing her friends away.

"How-" she swallowed, her throat dry, "How do we go back?"

"I. Okay," muttered Daphne, still staring at the ruins off in the distance. She didn't know why she was saying that. Soup wouldn't help. Soup wouldn't fix any of this.

She just didn't know that there was anything else to say, anything else to do. She didn't even know that there was anything else to think.

She went through the motions of reaching out Adria, and then of fumbling through subspace for her phone. One hand found his upper arm. She squeezed just as hard as she had when they'd first arrived.

She pressed the button, and then they were gone from that hopeless place.