Adana's doing some touch-ups on her wings. She's got them both off of her, there was something - weird about the balance earlier. She thinks it has something to do with the feather placement, if she just tweaks it a little here and there -

She gets a summon.

Damnation. She's not even ready - ugh, she might miss the summon entirely and that will bother her. She hates missing summons, hates missing chances of persuading someone to let her have a phone so she can talk to her brother or her father, hates missing chances to help people even if they won't give her comm access. But she also dislikes doing rush work, especially when she's going to reattach her wings and have to wear them, and have them feel wrong for the entirety of the summon. She does rush work anyway. Her wings are reattached, she flexes them, finds them feeling just as wrong and unbalanced and icky. But then she accepts the summon, somewhat late.

...

Okay, she was a bit late to answer the summon, but not that late. Where is everyone? Why doesn't she have a binding?

"Summoner?" she asks, confused, and then she looks down at the summoning circle.

Oh, that explains everything. Children drew this. It's done in colorful chalk, in all kinds of colors - really it's only happenstance that it turns out to be a circle at all, around the outside are squares and triangles and flowers and little drawings of cute creatures. The circle itself is done mostly in lime green, but it looks like it was touched up after by someone with a steadier hand and hot pink chalk. Okay, well, no biggie, some kids are going to get grounded, but maybe she can sweet talk their parents into comm access.

Or. Or she could ditch the wings, pretend to be human, and pretend she's lost and needs to call her dad. Technically true. She doesn't know where she is, and she does actually need to call her dad. Just - half truths, she hasn't gotten any better at lying in the past two years.

Wings come off and get turned to air, and then off she walks.




She realizes pretty quickly that she isn't on Earth. Or Luna, for that matter, or even Mars. She's on - some planet called Barrayar? Obviously she is - very, very far from home.

Adana finds a place to sit, and think, and try not to be frightened. She weighs pros and cons in her mind, weighs her options, and then comes to a decision. It's not like she's going to die of old age, and there's a lot of good a lone, unbound angel can do on a planet that obviously doesn't know about daeva. She just needs to - adapt. Figure out what's going on, deal with it, and use her angel abilities for good.

She stands, and then asks for directions to the nearest hospital. She's got work to do.