Shen stood quietly in the warm evening air on the 12th-floor balcony of an apartment building in downtown San Francisco.

He found the balcony very settling. It was at once a forceful and direct view of the vast chaos of the human city, an immense forest of towering constructs bustling with machines, and a secure refuge, an outdoor, private place where all of these things somehow couldn't touch him. From a distance he could watch it all, invisibly observing for long, quiet hours, somehow able to soak it in at his own pace and slowly nurture his fragile capability to face it all on his own terms. He wondered if they had tea here.

What a strange day it had been. Nearly the whole day had been spent in the car, trying to find Cecily's demonic adversary, or bait him to find them, with no success. They had, over the course, travelled from shadow to shadow, sometimes subtly, sometimes obviously, and Shen had honestly lost track of how many times they had changed worlds. He wondered if all humans travelled between shadows as easily and casually as his companions seemed to. He wondered if they even thought of each shadow as a complete world, as its own Rheari, or if they all bled together for them into a single entity, something... larger...

He paused at the thought, looking skyward. His eye caught something and flicked to it. It was a machine far above him, like a bird, but clearly made of the metals and pieces that humans used to fashion things, and trailing the smoke that so many of their creations seemed to make, as if carrying some unseen fire within them.

They had eaten awhile ago at some harshly lit building that was seemingly no one's home in particular, trading something small for twistedly prepared meats and vegetables, and drinks and frozen porridges that were strikingly potent and sweet. Shen was honestly suprized that the foods hadn't hopelessly sickened him.

Nor had the city, also to his mild puzzlement. It now stretched before him in unending layers of complexity, a new nature of sorts, with its own patterns and rules, tediously built upon the old. It was something out of a dream, a raging tempest of chaos somehow contained in impenetrable barriers, compressed and funneled into sharply edged volumes and regulated channels searing with energy. Like their machines, their city held hidden a kind of fire, born of the concentration of particles into tiny spaces, and driving countless moving parts though a regimen of motion in its return to freedom, to at last be carried away as smoke.

He looked down at the streets, even now in the darkening evening, lit almost as by day and filled with movement. He considered his companions, the humans behind the crystalline sliding panes behind him, talking about the group's plans, and considering the faraway people and places they could see via their flickering devices. He recalled to mind their pace, their means of devouring questions, attacking them as if with some intrinsic vengeance inherited from a time or place so long gone that it cannot be understood, only carried out. Like the fire within the machines, it drives them, but also threatens them, he thought, with being burned or torn from the inside.

He slowly raised his eyes and looked back up at the city, and he saw the threat in it. It was a storm in chains, yoked and harnessed like a beast of burden, but a shapeless and violent creature. It wasn't malevolent, but it was fierce and uncaring, like a driving wind, and it could consume like a blaze, freeing itself bit by bit, unleashing the chaos that was dormant in things, tearing the very form from them and setting them in orderless motion identical to its own.

He stepped back a bit. He thought on Grayson's wound, probably being tended to as he stood, obtained from a mishap of some kind in the examination of the home of Lucas Reynard earlier that day. What were he, Griffin and Shen really doing there? Answering questions, had been Grayson's answer, trying to find a missing man. But Shen didn't quite see it. Grayson's reply made sense in words, but in images he saw something more voracious: that charge into battle against the unanswered, almost reckless, almost rageful.

Shen turned the thought upon himself, faced with the unreality of the sights before his eyes. What was he doing here? He had left the Rheari with Fletcher in part to assist the wanderer, but in truth to also try to answer questions for himself. In a way, it had all seemed prepared for him, but to leave, not even knowing how to return on his own, seemed a hurried move. Perhaps Grayson, too, had had his guidances. Perhaps his path pointed him where he'd gone.

For both of them, time would tell.

Shen stepped back to the rail and stood over the world before him, dance of whirring parts that it was. He peered long and wide at it, surveying it from his tiny cavelike nook high above the black streets. He thought on water, flowing gently between tall stalks of bamboo, carrying reddened leaves each down their own unique path amidst the stand to be set free to disperse and vanish in some distant unseen place. He thought on huge invisible oceans, slowly spinning and pushing through and past it all. He stayed and watched well into the night, eventually laying down on the hard floor and, trying to find the stars, surrendering to sleep.