The one in front was tall with a coat made of at least four different coats sewn badly together and he looked at me the way people looked at things they were already planning to carry home, and the first thing he said was, "New entry. Scan her."
A woman to his left pulled out a device that was held together with wire and optimism and pointed it at me and read off the results in a flat voice, "Wrist device, active, mid-range model, coat, thermal grade, boots, reinforced, bag — wait, she has no bag."
"I dropped it," I said. "In the alley. Before I fell through the wormhole. It's gone."
The tall one looked at my wrist device. "We'll take that first."
"Coat's worth more," someone said from behind me.
"Boots," said another voice.
"The wrist device has a family registry on it," the woman with the scanner said, still reading, "Lee family, city sector, upper district," and the energy in the group changed the way energy changed when a number got bigger, and several people shifted their weight and looked at each other and then looked at me with considerably more interest than before.
"Lee family," the tall one said slowly.
"Upper district," someone repeated.
"I'm not carrying any currency," I said immediately, which was true, so at least that part was honest.
"She won't need currency," a short man to my right said, adjusting something on his belt, "once we've taken the device and the coat and the boots she can walk barefoot for all we care."
L.I was making a small urgent noise near my ear that I was choosing to process later because I was busy taking a full inventory of who was standing where and what they were holding and what expression they were wearing, which was something my mother had told me to always do in a room and which I had thought was advice about dinner parties but was apparently advice about this.
"Before anyone takes anything," I said, at a volume that was calm in a way I was not, "I want to make sure we're being fair about distribution because I can already see this is going to be a problem."
The tall one looked at me. "What."
"The wrist device," I said, looking at the woman with the scanner, "is worth significantly more than the coat and you both know it, so I'm curious how you're planning to split that because from where I'm standing the two of you have already decided you want the same thing and neither of you seems like the type to share."
The woman with the scanner looked at the tall one.
The tall one looked at the woman with the scanner.
"I said I wanted the device first," the tall one said.
"You said you wanted it first," the woman said, "but first isn't the same as yours."
"I am the one who spotted her."
"You spotted her because I ran the scan."
I turned to the short man on my right. "The coat is thermal grade, which in a place with no reliable heat source is genuinely more useful day to day than a device that needs charging, and the tall one is already planning to take the device and leave you with nothing, I heard him say boots as an afterthought and he looked at you when he said it."
The short man looked at the tall one. "I do want the coat."
"You're not getting the coat," someone else said, "I've been in this group longer than you and I've taken nothing for three entries running."
"That's not my problem."
"It's about to be your problem."
L.I, very quietly, right against my ear, said, "Mani. Left. Gap between the two in the back. Go now, slowly, do not make a sudden movement, just drift left like you are simply repositioning your feet."
I turned back to the group, who had reorganized themselves into two distinct clusters that were no longer fully looking at me, and I said, loudly enough to help, "And another thing — the scanner she's using is reading my wrist device as mid-range but it's not mid-range, it was custom built by my father's company, which means whoever ends up with it needs to know it's keyed to Lee family biometrics, so good luck accessing anything on it without my thumbprint, which I am absolutely not giving voluntarily," and while the group processed that and the woman with the scanner looked down at her device and the tall one said "what do you mean keyed" I took one step left.
Then another.
Then I turned around and ran.
I made it approximately eight steps before my left foot caught on a piece of rubble that was half-floating and half-not and I went down on one knee and scrambled back up and kept moving, then caught my right foot on something else entirely and went down again on both hands and the sound I made was not dignified.
"You have two left legs," L.I said.
"I know that, L.I."
"I'm not sure you do because you just tripped on flat ground."
"It wasn't flat, it was a — there are things floating everywhere, the ground isn't even the ground in places, this isn't a normal running surface —"
I looked back, which was a mistake, because the group had stopped arguing and remembered I existed and the tall one was already moving and behind him so was everyone else, and I turned back around and ran harder, through a gap in a collapsed wall, across a section of floor that dipped alarmingly on one side because the ground under it had partially given up, past a cluster of rubble pieces that were rotating slowly in the air at head height and which I had to duck under without slowing down.
"Left," L.I said.
I went left.
"Jump."
I jumped over something I hadn't seen.
"Duck."
I ducked under a piece of floating concrete and my hair caught on the edge of it and pulled and I made a sound that was half pain and half indignation and kept moving.
"Mani, you are slowing down."
"I am wearing one shoe properly and one shoe I grabbed while falling," I said, breathing hard, "so I think I'm doing well actually —"
My foot found the hole in the ground before my eyes did, which is the worst order in which to find a hole, and I dropped through it with no time to do anything useful, hit a slope on the inside, slid down it fast with my coat riding up and my elbows taking damage, and landed at the bottom in the dark with a sound like a bag of expensive equipment hitting dirt.
I lay still. Above me through the hole I could hear feet, voices, the tall one saying "where did she go" and someone else saying "there, she fell in there," and then silence while they looked down into the dark at me.
I pressed myself against the wall and did not breathe.
"How deep is it," someone said.
Nobody answered that, which told me nobody wanted to find out personally.
"She's dead," the short man said.
"She might not be dead."
"She fell pretty far."
"Even if she's not dead she will be," the woman with the scanner said, practical, "nothing down there worth having and nothing she could do about it if there is, and we still have the argument about the other group's territory to finish, so."
A pause. Some shuffling. The sound of feet moving away, then more feet moving away, then nothing, then silence that stretched long enough that I started to believe it.
I let out a breath that I felt like I had been holding since the alley that morning and said, "L.I, I think they're gone, I think that actually worked, I can't believe that worked, I genuinely thought I was about to be stripped for parts in a broken realm by people in patchwork coats, but I talked them into arguing and ran and I fell but falling actually saved me so technically the falling was good this time, I want credit for that —"
L.I did not respond.
I frowned. "L.I?"
Something shifted in the dark behind me, something large, something that displaced enough air that I felt it move against the back of my neck, and the sound that followed was low and came from a chest that was significantly bigger than mine and it was not a sound anything small made.
I did not turn around.
I did not move.
I just sat there in the dark at the bottom of a hole in a broken realm with one properly functioning shoe and an incomplete AI who had gone very quiet, and I thought, with total clarity, that I should have stayed in bed this morning and let the alarms scream.