"Stay calm. Believe it or not, this is normal."

Arizona watched a trash can hit a telephone pole from her booth at Grandma's Grits. Agent Henry's face peered up from the screen of her laptop, her eyes smiling, like nothing was wrong. Arizona was pretty sure something was wrong.

"This does not seem normal. Everyone is freaking out." In the background, a car windshield smashed. Arizona jumped. "See, things are breaking. Things do not break when it's normal."

Agent Henry shrugged. "It's just a tornado. It'll be over soon. Trust me, I grew up in Kansas. We had them all the time."

Arizona did not know what a tornado was, but she did not really want to ask. It seemed violent, possibly deadly, and not something she ever wanted to see again. Suddenly the lights flickered, then went out completely. The only sources of illumination were her computer, another customer's telephone, and the dim, gray light from outside. The image on her screen began to glitch.

"The electricity is gone," she told Agent Henry. "Human systems are so breakable. My little sister could do better."

Agent Henry chuckled. "Isn't you power generated from dragons? It doesn't matter. Call me when this blows over."

As she said goodbye to Agent Henry and closed her computer, she thought about last time she had seen wind like this. Her city, with its 50-mile wide protective dome, never had anything more extreme than a drizzle. The only ones who ventured outside were freighters and social outcasts living in settlements in the surrounding cliffs. Arizona, however, was a diplomat's chauffeur and personal technician, second best in her school but supposedly too rebellious to work inside the dome.

One day, when she had dropped the diplomat off in another city and was heading home, she ran out of fuel in the middle of nowhere. She had landed and radioed for help, but before it could arrive, the wind came. Boulders the size of her speeder were flying around her. Then, suddenly, a hole had opened up in the sky. She blacked out as she was sucked upwards. Next thing she knew, she had crashed in the Arizona desert.

Arizona had never wanted to see wind again. But here she was, in a diner on Earth, trillions of miles from home, stuck in the middle of a wind storm. She had never felt more alone.