Over time, she’s learned to relax in her
candid conversations with Avett. Not entirely, though. Only earlier
today did she catch herself hovering over an image showcasing one of her
teammate’s kills—a B5, the Equaliser—arranged in such a way that it had
curved over itself into the shape of a vague ‘A.’ She’d snickered at it
at the time, but now she just wants some real goddamn therapy. And a
new photo gallery.
She sends the photo of the Palerian child from
last week instead. She’s touched it up—not with image editing software;
she’s too lazy for such lengths—with her phone’s inbuilt image editor.
The reds are bright, almost magenta in their appearance.
Avett replies shortly after with a cute heart sticker. Lili thinks she’s going to melt. It’s literally just a sticker.
Then he types, “It’s saturday,” to her.
She watches another message pop onto the screen. “Wanna go somewhere?”
“somehwere?” she parrots.
“I know a bar, we could go there”
Lili
tries to remember the bar at the corner of the pier, the one she’d
thought about entering just last week in a fit of hunger.
She’s not sure about this. But maybe it’ll be fine if Avett is there with her.
She texts back. “sure it could be fun”
Then
before she knows it, they’re making times and setting meeting spots. If
she takes the five-o'clock train to central city, she’ll arrive there
around a quarter to six. This is plenty of time for them to tour around
the rest of the city looking for regional snacks and overpriced,
artisanal ice cream before they go drinking.
It hits her on the
train—the mistake she’s about to make. It’s not just something she can
brush off with a laugh or a stupid joke because they’re drinking. That’s
the problem. That they’re drinking.
Lili gets drunk off doing shots of beer.
There’s
no signal this far out in the country. As the train rattles past
towering, snow-capped mountains and dried fields of grass, she thinks
about sliding open a window and jumping onto the top of the train. The
signal might be marginally better there.
But by the time she’s
reached central Aurores, she’s already polished her excuses and steeled
her will to the point where she’s promised herself that—if she’s going
to have to drink tonight—she’ll do it professionally. Slowly,
methodically, and with purpose. She’ll sip on that singular bottle of
beer for the rest of the night if she has to.
The train station
is filled with workers looking to return home for the night. The tracks
squeal to a stop, and Lili gets off, weaving between the crowds of
Draconians and Palerians and New-Order Gallians who have other places to
be. There are no Humans—their train is on the other side of the station
and is eastbound towards Louisa. The residential districts on the west
coast have no place for Humans.
Off-landers board after her
disembarkment and the station drains out. Lili sits underneath the
striped awning on a bench that has a coating of white lichen on the
seat. The sun looks like it might set soon.
As if on cue, a
familiar, smartly dressed figure greets her from the far end of the
station. He’s wearing a button-down white shirt and light skinny jeans.
Lili feels really self-conscious about herself now because earlier,
she’d just thrown on whatever and called it a day. When she looks down
at herself, she realises that she’s wearing a yellow Rilakkuma hoodie
and a plain, ankle-length skirt.
Cool. Outing ruined.
Avett looks her up and down and says, “You look nice.”
She looks at the other station. “I don’t look childish?”
His eyes gravitate toward the bear on her lower chest. For a moment, she thinks he’s looking elsewhere. A little higher.
“I wish they made shirts with cartoon characters for adults here,” he says finally.
“It’s
not really a cartoon character,” she mumbles. She can’t believe that
this is the hill she’s chosen to die on: explaining the existence of
corporations that pump out cute icons by the hundreds every year to
someone who doesn’t even know what a McDonald's is. “It’s just a cute
character,” she ends up saying instead.
He asks, “How much was it?”
Lili looks at him curiously.
He
stifles a grin, but it comes through anyway. “Sorry, I’m just trying to
get a read on how much money you’re willing to spend on clothes.”
She
sucks in a breath through her teeth. “Looted it.” She’d found it in an
abandoned Sanrio store, one of the overpriced ones in the city, so she
had to take one, naturally. Then she realises that Avett probably thinks
she actually stole it, so she adds, “After the Migration, the store was
just abandoned. And I’d always wanted one.”
Another laugh. Lili feels her lips go wobbly. At least he’s not thinking of her as an impulsive kleptomaniac anymore.
Once
they’re in the city, Avett shows her around. There’s an ice cream store
that’s been tucked away in the depths of an empty underpass shopping
district. A flower store between two residential apartment
buildings—she’d bought herself a tiny posy and zipped it away into her
bag there. The bulbs poke out like heads in an iron lung. Lili is
already licking away at the remains of her sea-salt soft serve (“It’s
really fucking good for the first two licks,” Avett had said, “but on
the third, it starts getting on your nerves.” It was true,
unfortunately) when they arrive at the bar they’re meant to be at. It’s
already eight.
Lili looks at the bar, at the people inside. All
of a sudden, her Rilakkuma hoodie and plain skirt don’t seem to cut it
anymore. There isn’t a single Human inside. And she looks like a lost
lamb in a pack of wolves.
“Um.” Avett looks at Lili. He’s sizing
her up. She’s thinking that he’s thinking the same thing until he says,
“You brought your ID, right?”
He holds up his driver’s license.
Lili holds up her IRC card. It’s been a year since she’s renewed it, but
surely it’ll work, right? She’d forgotten her passport at home. It has
to work.
Luckily, it does. When she asks for a glass of “beer,
any beer,” with her ID flat against the table, the bartender does a
double-take before pouring her something from the tap. Avett gets
something too, but she’s already forgotten the name. They find a nice
place to sit that’s against the window. Lili can smell the sea from
where they are.
She’s mid-bite through a hot chip when she
notices that Avett seems a bit reserved. She thinks about asking him
about it. Then she realises she doesn’t know how to bring it up, so she
forgets about it instead. She’s forgotten about a lot of things this
way.
“You don’t drink,” he says finally.
“Yeah, I do.” She’s not lying.
“You couldn't even name a single craft beer." He taps his glass against the table. "What am I drinking?"
She
shrugs. She's never understood why people care so much about the names
of alcohol. In the end, it is what it is. A nauseating means to an
awesome end.
"It's Gallian Adamado." Avett leans back in his
seat and turns the bottle around so Lili can see the label. "You have to
know the names of these things, else you'll be drinking for the sake of
drinking, and that's no good."
Which isn't far from the truth. This is the first time where she won't be drinking for the sake of drinking, actually.
Silence.
Lili nibbles on the edges of her chip between slow sips of her beer,
which is so bitter that she wants to throw up. But she has to finish it,
or she'll be wasting not only her money but also her time.
"So." Avett drums his fingers against the table. Again, with those fingers. "What do you do?"
"Huh?"
"You
know." He's motioning at her by rotating his wrist in a circular
pattern. "You told me about your hobbies, back on the carriage, but you
haven't really told me about what you're doing now."
Lili feels
her toes clench inside her sneakers. She doesn't really know how to say
this, like a word she's read a thousand times but has never really said
out loud. She'll say the word with conviction, and it'll be right but
also slightly off, like she's put her tonal emphasis on the wrong
syllable, or she's rolled through the individual sounds far too quickly.
She'll end up having to rely on the listener to fill in the blanks of
her sentence in the absence of that one botched word, and Lili hates
relying on other people more than anything. The latter is something
she'd only ever admit while buzzed.
So she stammers out, "I… um, give me a second."
She
tilts the glass up and into her mouth. The beer does not want to go
down smoothly at all, and she ends up swallowing a comically large
portion of it all at once. Her throat feels like it's about to explode.
"You… don't know how to drink at all," says Avett. He's almost disappointed in her.
Like
a true lady, she finishes coughing before she tries talking again. "I
live off the veteran benefit," she admits. "They pay for a lot of
things. I pretty much have two thousand dollars to myself every week."
He nods, happy with her answer. "Did you really need the drink to admit that?"
Her
cheeks heat. She's not sure if it's the alcohol and her dumb genes or
if it's actual embarrassment. "Unemployment is unemployment. I don't
like thinking about the future."
One of his ears twitches at
that. Lili drinks from her glass again. This is a big mistake because
she finds that she has to go to the bathroom.
Excusing herself
from the table, she walks through the bar and heads towards the back
door. Once she's in there, she does her business and washes her hands in
the sink.
Then she sees herself in the mirror. Her hair's
getting kind of long. Her face is an embarrassing shade of red. She
dunks her hands into the water and splashes her cheeks with it before
heading out again. She'll stop drinking so fast, she swears.
It's
then when she hears it. Across the counter is a rowdy group of
off-lander men in their mid-twenties, and they're giving her one hell of
a look. The kind of look that just screams attention.
Suddenly, the bar's once cheery glow feels a lot less comfortable.
She
straightens her back as she starts towards them. Avett is on the other
side. She has to go through them to get back to her table. Ergo: this
fucking sucks, and it will fucking suck even more when she passes them.
She wonders what they'll try to do to her that people haven't tried to
do already. She wonders if the experience will be unique at all.
She
steps in front of the first man. He's a New-Order Gallian, judging from
the deep, red hue of his skin. He stands just slightly above Lili's
height.
When she goes to sidestep him, he mirrors her movements with a smirk. She steps to the other side—he moves there too.
She thinks about vaulting across the table instead.
"Ah, ah." The Gallian leans over so that his face is right up against hers. "Where do you think you're going?"
"To my table," she answers smoothly.
He
doesn't even spare a glance back to where she's looking. "And I bet
you're not even planning on paying for those drinks, are you? Thieving
bitch."
She mentally measures him in her head. He can't be taller
than 179cm. Fighting opponents smaller than her is supposed to be
easier, but she's always prefered a match as the underdog. Even if he's
only four centimetres her senior.
Then he leans back, clearly
satisfied with himself. She knows where this dumb preamble is going
already. She can smell his plan of attack from a mile away.
Gritting her teeth, she says, "I can pay for myself. Let me through."
A well-timed snort tells Lili that he'll be doing nothing of the sort. She tries not to roll her eyes. Here it comes.
"Listen,
honey." The word 'honey' is soaked in a sickly sweet saccharine that
makes Lili want to cave in early and punch this guy out. "We all know
what you're paying with. Your family's gone, your home's gone, so you've
invaded our Therius—and that's apparently entitling you to free money.
You're leeching money off of the government. It's not your money that
you're spending, it's ours—"
And maybe it's the alcohol, maybe
it's the way he's referred to her family, but something inside of her
snaps terribly like a bone made of glass.
“You think you’re
special, huh?” Lili has her blaster pressed into the larger man’s side
in seconds. She can actually feel his breath hitch through the barrel,
can sense the exact moment when his heart skips a beat. “Let me tell you
something, asshole. We didn’t invade anything, we didn’t take jack shit
from you, and we owe you fucking nothing. The only reason we’re alive
and kicking in Therius is because we fucking survived.” Her breath comes
in shallow puffs. "That's more than you'll ever be."
The gun in
his side is enough for him to wave off his friends. She wonders how
Avett thinks of her, if he can even see what she’s doing at all.
“What are you waiting
for?” The Gallian is egging her on, and if she’s not careful, she’ll
end up biting down on the bait. “Shoot me then.”
Her grip does not waver. “I did not pass the frontliner exam with flying colours only to shoot some asshole back on Therius.”
“Then maybe I’ll shoot you first.”
Something cold presses into her temple.
Lili doesn’t even blink.
The New-Order Gallian actually laughs. “Scary, isn’t it? Having your life dangling by a thread. I could cut it at any time.”
By
now, they’ve caught the attention of the rest of the bar. Avett is
still in the corner, but he’s stuck between two positions, two opposing
ideologies. He’s sitting, but he’s also poised to move in front of her
at a moment’s notice. If he ever makes that decision.
“Apologise
and leave the bar, girl.” The barrel bites into her skin. “I’ve killed
for paychecks before, and I’m not above adding a Human to my
collection.”
Lili sees Avett’s voice catch in his throat,
culminating into an empty-mouthed shout of warning. She really hopes the
Gallian hasn’t noticed him.
The blaster at her temple sears
into her skin and brands her like a cattle prod. It’s a heady, emotional
feeling that leaves her fingers feeling electric and her heart in a
fluttery mess. She’s never had a gun pointed at her before. It could
kill her. It can kill her. She wants to drown and forget in the empty
thrill of walking against the edge of death again.
But that’s not her. Not anymore.
She sighs and slips her blaster into her camera bag again.
“Good girl.” He doesn’t lower the gun. “Now out. And don’t look back.”
She shrugs. “I’m out. I’m leaving. Chill.”
He
doesn’t say a word. But Avett does. He pushes away from the table,
which rattles his chair against the ground loud enough for the Gallian
man to notice. “Lili—”
One look is all it takes to freeze Avett to the spot. Don’t follow me.
She’s weaving through the crowd now. They part like oceans at the feet of a blessed messiah.
The
Gallian is polishing the round of his barrel with something Lili knows
for sure isn’t meant for polishing. “Human bitches, all the same. They
come to Therius, they fuck our catboys, they radicalise them to their
side, and we lose another part of our community.”
She stops right
as he finishes.
“Sorry about all of that, folks—drinks on me,” he adds, raising a hand in the air. He's acting like she’s
just some minor Saturday inconvenience. It’s not
excitement rushing through her body this time, but the spark of seething
rage. She's never felt so mad before. She likes it.
With
unnerving grace, she slides her blaster out of the bag holder, flips it
into her hand, brings the rear sight ever so slowly to his head—
He’s
faster. An air-piercing bang rings throughout the bar—she watches Avett
and several other Kattish cover their ears in pain. But it’s nothing
compared to what she feels. Her head hurts, despite the self-warding,
she’s put all over her skull. The blaster must be modified to favour
shorter distances. It’s a different type of pain from what she’s used
to.
Her back hits the floor. Fuck, she’s out of shape. She’s
actually winded from all of this. Maybe this is too much excitement for
her nowadays, and she should go back to high-rise window cleaning for
cheap thrills.
Avett is suddenly over her, shaking her shoulders
and everything. He’s yelling something; the two staccato-thin syllables
of her chosen name. She thinks he might start crying. He shouldn’t have
to see this. This hadn’t been the best idea.
In one fluid
motion, she’s up on her feet. The Gallian man’s back is turned against
her because he’s expecting her to be dead. Which is the perfect time to
throw the blaster at his head with all of her ether-charged rage. Not
hard enough to completely knock him out, of course. She wants the
pleasure of doing it herself with her bare fists.
He turns, but it’s too late. He’s out before he hits the ground.
His friends start to move towards her. Lili steels herself for what she thinks is going to be a very, very long night.
Then
the manager hollers at them. He’s got his own weapon pointed at them—an
actual energy cannon, one she knows has terrible recoil. It’ll leave
him painfully open if he actually fires it, but a cannon pointed at you
is what it is, and neither of them are keen on taking that chance.
“Out. All of you.” The barrel wobbles in the air. It’s clearly too heavy for him to use. “Before I call the authorities.”
Lili
is the first to bolt. She snatches up her blaster and Avett and makes a
run for it while the Gallian’s friends are still peeling him off the
ground. They run forever. For who knows how long. Her camera bag won’t
stop slapping her thigh, and she’s worried the equipment inside might
break by the time they’re safe. The flowers droop their petals to the
earth and bounce like the heads of unconscious children on a vicious car
ride, the zipline of her bag having dug into their soft stems a long
time ago.
The streets are so full. She doesn’t want to be around
anyone else right now. She spies a dimly lit park in the corner of her
eye. There’s a singular bench underneath a blinking, cone-shaped shaft
of light.
They slow into a walk, Avett’s hand intertwined with
hers. He’s panting really hard right now, despite being a Kattish. She’s
forgotten how easily the untrained body tires under duress. She’s
worried about breaking him, about scaring him away. Maybe it’s for the
better that she does.
Sitting on the bench with Avett, Lili
doesn’t know what she’s meant to do. Dust drifts from the sky, their
edges illuminated by the harsh light, their forms accentuated by the
infinite world of the unseeable that stretches out before them.
She
sits very still. Whatever Avett wants to say to her, she’ll take it.
She’ll take all of it. Then she’ll go, or she’ll stay, or—fuck—maybe
she’ll leave him. She’s no good for him, not in the traditional sense,
but yes, maybe in the traditional sense because she’s a pretty pathetic
person, but also because she’s a magnet made to attract danger and
shitty decisions and—
Avett goes, “I’m going to kiss you.”
Her mind blanks out. “What?”
Avett repeats, this time with an emphasis on each syllable, “I’m going to kiss you.”
She finds herself swallowing down a ball of air.
It's
almost comical how quickly her mood changes. Her heart feels like
someone’s nailed strings to it and given her a yank. Is this what they
refer to as one’s heartstrings? It makes her feel like someone’s pointed
a gun at her head, except Lili is used to cheap thrills made against
her life. She’s not sure what this is. She wants to cling onto
something—someone—and never let go. All of a sudden, intimacy is
something she wants and not something she loathes.
Her body can’t keep up.
“Do I close my eyes?” she stammers out.
“Preferably.” He’s talking right into her parted lips. His breath is warm.
“Then, yeah, we could kiss.”
At first, nothing happens. The air is electrifyingly still.
Then
it’s lips on lips, a hand brushing against her shoulder, a tail
skimming the fabric of her skirt and a heart-pounding against her own
jackhammering soul. She’s going to die of a heart attack, she swears.
There’s so much happening that it’s easier to forget that any of it is
happening at all. Her first kiss. Her first fucking kiss. It's as intoxicating as her first drink, as heady as the thrill of her first encounter all of those years ago.
She still doesn't know where she'd put the taste of his lips in relation to the taste of her first kill.
Avett
pulls back first. His eyes are wide and glassy; they shine like
polished metals. Lili wonders if she looks the same under the lamp post
as well. He’s so goddamn beautiful.
“Was that your first?” he asks.
“I’ve
kissed before,” she stutters. Yeah, kissed the heads of babies after
birth during that one excursion to a Human settlement back on Earth.
Doesn’t count. Shouldn’t count.
“You shouldn’t have to lie to
me, Lili.” He sits back on the bench, almost slouching against it as he
looks beyond the light. “Just say you haven’t kissed before. No shame in
doing so.”
She wonders what he sees. She wonders if his
eyesight’s good enough to catch the scurry of a squirrel in the bushes
or a peek of a sleeping bird amongst the branches. She doesn’t respond.
“Ok.” Avett turns to Lili again.
She wonders what the hell is going to come out of his mouth this time.
“I
didn’t want to say this earlier, but you’re bleeding from the forehead.
And, uh. It’s swelling. And very purple.” He squints at her wound. He’s
close, unbearably so, but all of that previous intimacy is gone, having
been replaced with a sense of familial protectiveness. It’s still
there, sadly, for Lili.
“Um.” She jerks back. Her heart can’t take much more of this. “You have napkins, right?”
“Napkins.”
He’s doing the thing where he exhales hard enough to blow strands out
of his face. It’s so cute. “You need bandages. I’ve got some at home.”
At
home. The words hit hard and burn slow, like a well-aimed punch to the
gut. Lili knows what’ll happen when the date ends at someone else’s
home.
"Thank you, but I'll manage." She puts on her bravest smile.
"I'm
not going to try and fuck you," he says bluntly. "That's not how it
works.” Then a grin. “Unless, of course, you change your mind."
Cracked
wide open like a ripe coconut. It's hard for her to hold back her
blush. Desire pools in her core like molten copper, incinerating and
burning at her like a thrill she’s never known before. She could do it. It
could happen. That’s the worst part; it could happen. And when it does,
she doesn't know what she'll end up doing.
"I'm not going," she says. "I'd rather stay here. Give me a napkin."
Avett
sighs—not out of exasperation but out of resignation—digs into his back pocket, and fishes out a crumpled tissue.
Lili presses it against her forehead. She winces at the bruise around
the wound.
With an exhale, she starts stitching her skin back
together, cell to cell, blood vessel to blood vessel. She's never liked
the sensation of applying first-aid to herself—it stings like a bitch
and is a pain to execute safely, as most ether-related techniques
are—but she's not keen on walking around in central Aurores with what
looks like a giant bullet hole in her forehead anyway.
When she's
done, she removes the napkin. The skin around the site of impact is
still painfully raw, but at least the worst of it's gone.
“Do I look ok?” she asks.
“You like you’ve just run into a wall,” he admits. “But better than before.”
Lili
almost knits her eyebrows together before she stops herself from
potentially agitating her bruise again. Her bangs easily fall over her
forehead. “I guess I’ll just have to live with it.”
This prompts a
downcast smile from Avett. Lili could live between the lips of that
smile forever, she’s thinking. But then his expression hardens. His eyes
glisten, becoming almost too reflective.
He’s still looking downwards as he balls his fists into the loose hang of Lili’s hoodie.
“Why’d you do that?” He sounds like he’s either about to start screaming or start crying.
Lili thinks about holding him or wrapping her arms around his back at the very least, but she can’t bring herself to do it.
He
continues, his voice low and barely there. “You could’ve walked out.
You could have left. But you turned around. You knew you could
have—would have, should have—”
“Yeah.” All she can do is nod. “Yeah.”
His
hands tighten, and for a moment, Lili wonders if he’s about to start
pounding into her chest. Like he’ll give her an artificial heartbeat as a
substitute for the heart she’s never had by doing so.
Avett
stops shaking instead. “I’ve seen them happen before—gunfights, working
repairs in a mechanic store and all. ‘Heard’ is probably a better word
for it. The only gun owners on Therius aren’t mercenaries—they’re people
who want to own guns. Sometimes they ask for modifications. Other times
it’s an easy in-and-out thing. You’ll be minding your own business,
doing your job, then you’ll go over and hand over their weaponry, and
you’ll realise that they’ve had to use them—and that they’ve probably
taken lives with them, and that they’ll probably do it again. I don’t
like looking at killers, Lili.” He’s burying his head into her chest. It
must not be very comfortable down there, but he stays, breathing
against her lungs. “I don’t like knowing that I’ve helped kill someone.”
“You’re just the repair boy,” she decides on saying. “You can’t choose what they’ll do.”
He shakes his head. “But I could’ve. I’m an essential middleman. That means I could’ve done something.”
“No.” She shakes her head. “That’s not something you should be deciding. That’s not your responsibility.”
“I want to do something. I couldn’t do anything about it.” Another shaky breath. “I saw you die.”
Oh.
A
lump of anger bubbles in her throat. She slams down on it, keeping it
locked inside of her, but she feels some of it boil over anyway. “That’s
my problem then.”
“It’s not just your—'' He nibbles on his
bottom lip. He looks at Lili like she’s more than what she really is.
“Nevermind. Forget it. Forget it. We shouldn’t have gone to a bar, we
shouldn’t have gone to central city, we should have stayed out of it
all.”
Something about that sentence strikes Lili right in the nerve. “We can’t let other people decide what we want to do—”
He
drops her hoodie and clenches his fists at his sides instead. “Yes, we
do! I do, Lili.” He stands up abruptly—something in the bushes rustles
and darts away. “I have to.”
It feels like someone's knocked all
the air out of Lili, like her lungs are now cavernous vacuums, and her
heart’s just pumping pure blood through her muscles. Is he breaking up
with her? What's even going on between them? It doesn’t seem like a
lot’s happened. Not to her, anyway. She’s about to ask when Avett
exhales vocally.
“I didn’t… know you brought a blaster with you everywhere,” he says. He’s so quiet that Lili almost misses it.
Ah, that thing in her bag. She takes it out. Its matte, grey coating doesn’t catch the light of the lamp post at all.
“Yeah,
I know what it looks like, you don’t have to take it out.” His Adam’s
apple bobs with uncertainty. “Does it make you feel safer?” He doesn’t
say anything else after that, but Lili knows what he’s thinking. Knowing you could kill anyone at any time?
“Safer
is a stretch.” She holds it out to Avett by the barrel. He doesn’t
accept it at first, but he caves and takes it in the end anyway. He
holds it like she’s just given a part of her soul away.
Realisation lights up his features. The battery chamber is a dull beige.
“This isn’t loaded,” he says.
She shrugs.
“But you pointed it at him anyway.”
“I
did. He must’ve seen that it was empty.” She shrugs again. “I wasn’t
really being subtle to him about it. Kind of didn’t care. Kind of
expected him to shoot at me with an empty blaster pointed at his head
anyway.”
Every emotion tramples through his face at once.
Confusion, then anger, then acknowledgment and acceptance. “You wanted
him to shoot you.”
Ok, she wouldn’t exactly say she wanted him to
shoot her, just that it hadn’t mattered back in the bar whether or not
he did. That it hadn’t mattered because, between all of the kisses and
hugs and shameless flirting, she chases a thrill she knows he can’t
give.
This time, it’s his turn to nod and rub at his mouth. It must be written all over her face.
She gets up as well. “Sorry. I’m going back to the train station.”
Avett stumbles forward. “I’ll walk you there.”
A twinge of guilt pokes at her heart. “Actually, I’ll walk you home. Is that ok?”
Reluctantly,
he agrees. The trip back to Avett’s apartment complex is intensely
awkward and filled with dread and silence. However, the train ride back
to Louisa makes her feel like a caged bird in the middle of an Amazonian
rainforest. She watches the dark landscape roll past her window,
content with staying inside the cart this time.
Her chest feels like it might burst.