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On the New Year’s party, Marie received a lot of compliments, all including some form of, “you have lost weight!”, and she smiled through all of them.
When she retreated to the balcony for a bit of solitude she found it occupied already.  The date of someone else’s acquaintance, practically a stranger. He also seemed to be quiet, so that was all good. She leaned on the banister, keeping her distance, and he watched her watch the street.
Eventually he asked, “So, how is your health?”
After the initial shock, Marie all but collapsed with relief that someone cared.

When they came in sight if the water, the sky turned black. There was light just as before on the ground, faint shadows falling behind them, but looking up, there was nothing but darkness beyond their beacon. The bicolour trail the bird had left glowed even brighter.

The shore was steep enough that they needed to walk sideways, but it turned into a softer slope forming a sort of beach. There was a smaller copy of this shape at the water’s edge, not the continuing slope you’d find on a beach. There were no waves to form it; the surface of the water was perfectly still. The ground was covered in smooth, dark pebbles.

Sylvie crouched and bent her head until it nearly touched the ground to have a closer look.

“If it is this shallow all through, it should be no problem to cross,” Daaren said.

“I don’t trust it.”

Neither did he, but what good would it do? “Looks like a long way to circle around, if it’s possible at all. Any idea how to find out if the hunch has merit?”

Sylvie’s sigh did not stir the surface. She took another deep breath, and blew. There was the slightest hint of movement. Sitting down cross-legged, a bit back from the edge, she said, “I wonder if it’s water at all.”

“It’s not water. It’s not ground. It’s not air,” Daaren pointed out. What it was was bloody unnerving.

He dipped the tip of a shoe (which was no shoe, either) into the liquid. It rippled, at first faster than water would. The pebbles below disappeared, leaving blackness that could be formless ground, or an infinite void. As the turbulences died down slowly, the pebbles reappeared.

After a rather too long silence, Sylvie said, “Circling around it is.” Daaren did not argue.

A short time after entering the recently abandoned complex, Nico stopped in front of a lever. Whatever mechanism it belonged to must have been under the floor.

When she didn’t say anything, only glared at a sign sloppily taped up at the wall next to it as if it offended her, Daaren asked, “What’s the matter?”

“Says ‘Do not pull lever’.”

“Ah.” He understood the dilemma, and why it bothered her quite a bit.

“They could at least have mentioned what would happen if it was.”

“Would that make deciding if it was a trick easier?” he asked doubtfully.

She snorted. “No, but I could just pretend I believed it.” After another moment of consideration, she shook her head. “Oh, it’s stupid. Let’s just get on with it.”

“Right.”

After they had left it behind, she still couldn’t let it go. “I bet it does nothing, and they put it there just to mess with my head.”

Now, that idea would have been easy to test. So… “It seems to work.”

The gentle mocking tone apparently got through to her, pulling the tension out of her along with the irritation. “I’d better pay attention, eh?”

“Right.”

“With a good rifle, I could shoot him from here.” In Nico’s opinion, when you picked sides, you might as well do it properly. “Unfortunately I don’t think they make any here.”
On the way back from the lookout point to the camp, Daaren remarked, “I don’t like guns.”
“Oh? Why’s that?” He had shown pragmatic attitudes to fighting and killing, so moral objections would have been a surprise.
“They are too loud.”
Nico wondered if it was a good or a bad thing that an opportunity to introduce him to the concept of silencers was a long way off.