She holds Millicent’s body and passes her hand over the kitten’s eyes, closing them on blackness, opening them again.

She reaches up to her own eyes, then: feels them hard and dry, cold as glass, faceted. Ommatidia. So many pictures of the same thing.

She runs her hand over Millicent’s flank and feels how thin the kitten is, how flat, how her fur really feels like vellum. She listens for the endless chuckle. She begins to count back, from ten thousand, the number of steps she’s taken from the door of the train platform. She sniffs the air.

There’s water here.