“You have not seen him since,” Varek says.
“Nope.”
Another pause follows before he asks, “Would you seek him if you returned?”
That question punches straight through my ribs. I look away quickly, pretending to be very interested in tying off the grain sack. “Don’t know.”
My dad’s probably still in Coventry somewhere—same stubborn jaw I’ve got, same temper, if he hasn’t mellowed with age. Maybe. If he’s alive. Hell, he could be dead. He could have forgotten I exist. He’s likely to have started a whole new life.
I wouldn’t blame him if he has.
I shrug again. “Doesn’t matter.”
Varek watches me for a long moment. “It matters.”
“Yeah, well.” I shove the sack closed and hoist it onto the shelf with more force than necessary. Grain dust puffs into the air around my hands. “First step is actually finding a bloody way home.”
Even saying it makes something twist low in my gut.
Truth is, I stopped thinking about home a long time ago. The first year here, I thought about it constantly.
Earth. Australia. Roads that went somewhere familiar. Real rain. Real skies. Coffee that didn’t taste faintly like burnt bark. I used to wake up every morning convinced that if I walked far enough in the right direction, I’d find the edge of whatever nightmare had swallowed me and tumble back into the world I knew.
Turns out that’s not how Terrafeara works.
Terrafeara eats pieces of worlds and keeps them.
And the city—this sprawling, chaotic, half-civilised mess of markets and towers and alleyways full of creatures that would give Earth biologists a stroke—doesn’t care where you came from. It only cares whether you learn fast enough not to die.
The first months of moving here—after I’d forced Varek to bring me here and then he’d left—were… educational.
I learned which districts to avoid after dark. Which species you never turn your back on. Which ones will cheat you with a smile and which ones will simply stab you.
I learned how to keep my head down when the Queen’s guards passed and how to disappear into a crowd when someone started asking the wrong questions. I learned how to trade, how to fix things no one else understood, how to make myself useful enough that people preferred me alive.
Turns out being a mechanic translates surprisingly well across dimensions.
Machines are machines, even when half of them run on energy no one can properly explain.
So I stayed.
First because I had to, and no fucking way was I living with the rebels, and more specifically with the one being who’d all but torn Thomas’s body apart. Then because leaving stopped feeling real.
The hope of going home didn’t vanish all at once. It just… faded. Year by year, like a photograph left too long in the sun.
Eventually the city stopped feeling like a prison and started feeling like something else.
Mine.
Not in the grand sense. I don’t own it. This is very much the Queen and her minions’ domain.
But I know its rhythms now. The markets when they wake up before sunrise. The canals when the lanterns start glowing. The little underground network of favours and debts and quiet deals that keep half the place functioning while the crown pretends everything runs on royal authority.
Down here, people like me keep the city breathing. And somewhere along the way, I found my place in that.
So, yeah. Thinking about going home again now? That opens a door I nailed shut years ago.
“And if you did?” Varek asks.
