The city was sized for something inhuman. The buildings seemed correct, for what little Rust knew of city buildings, but the streets were too wide, the pavements too small, and the distances between things that little bit too far.

  "I used to walk through the woods on my way home." Shim announced after almost twenty minutes of silent travel.

  "When I started the job, it was summer, and I could walk in the sunlight and listen to the birds. But when it got to winter, it was dark, and the path was unlit."

  He shoved his hands in his pockets, and Rust, idly noting that the pockets were too small to make the action comfortable, realised all of a sudden that he had been wearing the same uniform for days now, that it was still splattered with grease, that she had been wearing the same jeans and shirt, and that Quilt was still dressed in her nightwear.

  "I woulda kept going through the woods," he continued, on a roll now and oblivious to her thoughts, "but my ma didn't like it. She said I'd get mugged or robbed, if I kept going that way."

  The two of them let him speak, and he pulled his hands awkwardly out of the pockets.

  "I said that was dumb, who's gonna hang around in the woods at that time of night waitin' for some kid to come along. Better to wait where it's lit, and you can see who you're robbin'."

  Shim peered up at the buildings around them, huge grey rectangles with no discernible features, apart from the one white curtain in the distance.

  "Anyway, I didn' walk through the woods after that. Even if I wasn' gonna get robbed, it woulda made her unhappy. But I hated walking on the roads."

  He huffed out a breath, and it was visible in the chill air. "Wish I'd bought my coat with me."

  Quilt suddenly shivered too, "I hear you on that one, lad. Reckon if we go back to my place we can find some blankets or something?"

  "Quilts." Rust smiled, and the other two looked at her uncomprehendingly. She shrugged, unwilling to explain the joke.

  The walk to Quilt's apartment would take them almost an hour, and after a minute of chatter, they collectively agreed to go back to the cottage. Quilt knew she had spare bedding, and hoped she could find some spare clothes too, if needed.

  -

  Halfway back, it started to snow, and then to hail. In a laughing panic, the three of them ducked inside a building styling itself as a hotel. The outside had been ornate, with grand steps, gold and silver accents and little bits of filigree, was that the right word? They hadn't seen it on the way up, but then, they had been trying to take a more direct route back.

  On the outside, above the first floor, the outer decorations morphed into the same grey building as all the others, tall and uninspiring, and if they hadn't been rushing they never would have found it at all.

  Quilt and Rust laughed as they brushed the snow and hail out of their hair, and Shim gave them a brittle smile, before staring around the lobby.

  It was a large space, and almost correct for a hotel. There was a desk over by one wall with a bank of keys hanging behind it, and a small area with sofas and chairs and something missing. A drinks trolley abandoned in one corner promised poison, and the place was decorated in white and gold. That was correct. What wasn't correct was the bare concrete floor, the peeling wallpaper and the flat concrete ceiling.

  The place didn't look abandoned though, Shim thought. Any piece of metal he could see, the bodies of the keys, the desk, and the legs of the chairs, were all polished to a mirror-bright sheen. It was only the structure which was weird.

  Rust caught him looking around, brushing off the last of the snow, and she shrugged at him. "That's what I meant, the other night. Nothing's quite right, it's like whatever, whoever's putting the world back together, it knows what things should look like and where all the parts go, but not what those parts are or what they do. Like a child putting together a dollshouse, out of a big box of bits."

  Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  She wandered over to the reception desk and rummaged around for a while behind it.

  A second later she emerged with a few paper-wrapped blocks.

  "Here, look at these," she passed two of them over, "I think it's meant to be chocolate. I keep seeing them in the store too."

  Shim looked at the object, turning it over in his hands. Red paper wrapped around silver foil, all surrounding something hard inside. The paper read BLOCK on both sides.

  He turned it over a few times in his hands, and then warily unwrapped it.

  A sniff, "I think it's curry powder?" He licked it and then nodded. "Definitely curry."

  The second bar was labelled BRICK, and he unwrapped it with less care this time.

  "Huh," he gave it a taste before drawing back, stumped for a moment. "I don't even know what this is, something lemony?"

  Quilt came over for a look and a taste, "Oh, I think it's a lemon curd, but… Dried? Meringue?"

  She gave it another taste, scrunching her face up a little at the acidic sweetness of it, "Weird. All the food's like this?"

  "No," Rust shook her head, "most of it's just normal stuff in odd containers. It's all placed like it belongs," she gestured towards the desk, "but labelled wrong."

  -

  They spent a while exploring the lobby, shivering a little as the hail pelted down outside. Shim watched as it piled up on the window sills and blanketed the streets in a soft white haze.

  Rust fretted and worried over her chickens back at home, but they were smart birds, they would find shelter, probably. How smart were chickens, anyway?

  "Not very," Rust snapped after he asked, "I once had one get stuck upsidown behind the coop, against the wall. I don't know how she got there or how she expected to get out, if I hadn't gone looking…"

  She huffed and walked ahead of him, slamming open a door and only remembering to check for a floor at the last moment.

  They had headed towards the big double doors at the back of the lobby, expecting it to lead onto stairwells and corridors, but instead, it opened onto a long room, reminiscent of a military barracks.

  At the back of that had been another, identical room, even down to the trinkets on the bedside tables and the layout of the blankets. At the end of that room, they found stairs.

  Armed with sheets and blankets, they had attempted to head upwards, but the stairs had ended abruptly, and they could see the hollow of the building above them.

  "Foiled," Quilt complained, raiding the beds for more covers. Rust had gathered up more BRICK and BLOCK bars, finding one placed gently under each pillow.

  "I think they were meant to be on the pillows," Rust said, arms full, "But they were too big for that, so underneath. Absolute epitome of form without understanding."

  -

  That evening they sat in the main lobby by the doors, sitting on stolen mattresses and wrapped in stolen blankets, snacking gingerly on the BRICKs. The BLOCKs had been stacked up in a corner, in case they felt like cooking sometime in the future.

  BLOCK was always curry, BRICK was always lemon, and BAR- which they'd only found two copies of- turned out to be a light, dull grey metal, shaped exactly how you would expect a chocolate bar to be shaped.

  -

  "This is where it turns into a horror film, right?" Quilt suggested, and the other two looked over for an explanation.

  "Snowy outside, trapped inside an old hotel?

  Rust nodded, whilst Shim looked confused, "What's a film?"

  "Huh," she thought about this, "I think it's like a book, but with only pictures?"

  Rust seemed unconvinced, "No, no, I remember. I used to go into the village for films," she hesitated, "But I also used to go for books. Huh."

  She considered this as the snow came down, preparing to ask a difficult question. "Have we, have any of you actually seen any books, since we awoke?"

  Quilt burrowed into her blanket mound, pulling the sheets over her head and looking like nothing more than one of the piles of snow outside.

  Shim already had his blankets over his head, with just a space left open for his face, but he shook his head anyway. "Seen some empty shelves," he scrunched downwards into the blankets in much the same way as Quilt, "there might have been some magazines, back in the Store?"

  He snuggled down further, his voice muffled now, looking like a melting ice cream, "we could look?"

  Rust shook her head, although neither of them could see it. She was wrapped in her own set of blankets, but was more wearing them like a cloak, her head free and her bearing strong, unbothered by the chill. This was partly because of her personality, but also partly because she was the only one of them with real clothes. "You don't want us to go back there, so we won't."

  There was a muffled sound of agreement from the mound of blankets which had once been known as Quilt, and Shim poked his head out again, looking at the both of them with sad gratitude. "But you love books, the both of you right?"

  Rust shrugged, looking out at the snow.

  "We'll find somewhere else to get them, if they exist. And if they don't we'll write them ourselves, on the backs of chocolate wrappers. We'll bind them with string from the bedsheets and glue from egg whites. Not sure what we'll do about ink, wood ash maybe?"

  Shim raised an eyebrow at her, and Quilt poked her head out from under her covers to give her a look.

  "What?"