I had spent the entire day and night after Nova went missing running the forest along the border. The fire had taken several hours to douse fully and when it was finally out it left nothing behind but ash and smoke and the black skeletal remains of what had been living trees. The greenery was gone for a hundred yards in every direction.
All I could think about as I stood in it was how Nova would react when she saw it. How she would look at the destruction and feel it personally, the way she felt everything in the natural world personally. She would worry about the animals that lived in those trees, about where they had gone and whether they had made it out. Her face would do that particular thing it did when something hurt her, brows pulling together and lips pressing into a soft pout that she never seemed aware she was doing. She would stand in the ash and grieve the trees and probably not say a single word about it.
