Michael doesn’t turn around, doesn’t reply to give a ‘good luck’ or a ‘goodbye.’ He doesn’t want to hear his own voice anymore. He doesn’t want to look at other people anymore, other people who aren’t Lee.
The shop stinks of disturbed dust as well as a nauseating mixture of many different spilled herbs and mystery substances. Oddly (mercifully) there’s no blood or any other overt sign of injury, though he can’t imagine they weren’t harmed somehow in the middle of all this. Little shards of Lee’s belongings are scattered everywhere in the room. He feels pieces of himself cracking like dry clay and flaking off to join them on the floor. His eyes are dry, too, he can’t seem to close them. He imagines them falling out and breaking when they hit the wooden panels below. Clay eyes. Golem eyes. Monster eyes.
He sinks to his knees, since it seems to be where he’s headed eventually. Chunks of wood and glass and who-knows-what-else needle into his shins. Belatedly he realizes—in a distracted, confused way—that the room is almost completely dark, or would be to the typical type of person. The sweat on his face is cooling even though he still feels feverish. And that’s probably not good, it’s probably terrible that he’s losing control of himself right now, but instead of making him panic, it makes him think.
It’s a foreign idea to him despite everything, but: he’s not powerless. He has the right ability for this. No matter where Lee is he’ll be able to find them and go to them. They taught him that, they showed him that from halfway across the planet. Unless the SWAT guys found the moon door, Michael’s pretty sure they’re on Earth somewhere. If there were ever a single, solitary reason for him to be grateful for his mutation, it’s this moment.
Dizzy and shivering with nerves, he lies down on his side, then rolls onto his back. The ceiling is the one thing that hasn’t been damaged; it’s a placid landscape to shut his eyes on. When the darkness swallows him down through the floor it erases all the sharp edges digging into him, all the conflicting scents, all the wearying gravity. It stops the daylight from hurting when he looks into it through all the thousand windows. There’s no time to be scared of how right it feels to be like this or how sometimes when he looks too far he thinks he might get lost in himself. Fine, whatever, he can get lost. He just needs to get Lee first.