Prologue

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It was going to be different.

The thought repeated in her mind day after day and night after night. Her current location: a bus, cold and damp and old, traveling down a deserted path during the dead hours of the night. Where was she going? She didn’t know and didn’t care to find out. She was free from that place and free to choose where she would live and how, and that is why she had been in buses the past week. The farther away she was from that place the better, and the less she knew of her location, the safer the haven she would soon arrive in would be.

She was balled up in her seat, her legs brought up to her knees and her arms wrapped around them. Her chin rested on her knees as her eyes looked at the back of the front seat. Torn and missing pieces of fabric formed an endless black hole in the old seat, and the feel of emptiness crawled into her insides the more she stared at it.  

Her gaze was blank; a dead look that many confused for blindness, and they were only partially wrong to think so. She wasn’t blind, but her eyes could not see normal, or what other thought was normal. Her vision was blurred, blurred in a manner that no prescription glasses could ever help. There was nothing wrong with her eyes and although she could not see sharp images in full color, her range of vision was beyond of what was deemed normal. She could see forward and both her right and left side without having to move her head. She thought it a gift, others thought she was some kind of demon-possessed blind girl with very poor manners. She never had to look someone in the eyes directly to be looking into their eyes, and most found that to be insulting an ill-mannered.

What was also different, what was also something abnormal in her sensors, was the fact that she could see heat radiating from objects and people and many other living creatures. One could stand as still as a statue and still she would be able to point them out by a simple flick of her tongue and that keen sense of the eyes that lead her to body heat. Her sense of smell was just as peculiar, and her tongue helped in that as well. It was as if she were tasting the air, and as she flicked her tongue out and tasted the sour smell of the damp, dirty bus, she almost gagged. She felt vile pushing its way up her throat, but she quickly tried to swallow it back down.

She could not afford to get sick now. Not after how far she had travelled. One quick trip to the hospital would alert them back ‘home’, and then she would be back in that hell hole faster than she could say ‘Justice League’. That couldn’t happen, and it wouldn’t happen as long as she kept repeating to herself that this time it would be different. This time she would not be stupid enough to believe there was any good in human beings. They were all rotted to the core. Immoral monsters with no hope for salvation. Everything belong to them, everything different was beneath them, and everything that disobeyed must be disciplined or destroyed. It was how she had seen them act time after time, with the same shameless and destructive manner only fit for a human.

The wheels of the bus squeaked to a stop, the drops of rain that had begun to fall moment ago where starting to come down faster, heavier. One by one the passengers walked down and out of the open doors and out into the cold rain. When she followed and the rain patted every inch of her body, she could feel the cold seep into her muscles, cooling them until a small muscle atrophy begun to harden her movements. She could not tolerate cold weather and cold water was no different than cold winds, but she first believed in surveying her surroundings and no amount of discomfort would stop her from doing so. It was important to know where one was, where one had been, and although her eyes might not be the sharpest, she could still form an image of the places she had been until it was photographed in her memory.

She had no idea which city she had arrive outside of, but it was extremely large and extremely intimidating during the late hours of the night, or the beginning hours of the day when the sun was not out and the moon had set. The air was cool, the rain cold, and the sky thick with gray clouds that would show no light even if the sun wanted to show its light. Several taxi lined the streets, but she hardly had any money left in her pockets after buying so many bus tickets, and the only amount she had left was for food. She would have to wait for the rain to pass and make her way into the more crowded streets of the city, find any source of shelter, and then figure out a way to earn a living without giving her position away.

Throwing on her only baggage, a small backpack given to her on her first bus ride by a kind old lady filled with three sandwiches, she began her walk towards the city after a few hours of waiting at the bus station. Some taxi men assured her she would have to walk several hours to get there and she should climb in one of the cabs, but she knew better than to listen to them. Their eyes said it all, they should not be trusted and she would rather drop dead then climb into the car with one of them. If it took her all day to get to the center of the city, so be it. She walked and walked and walked until the rain began again as she set foot onto the streets of the city. It has started pour as she turned into an alley and sunk to her knees beneath a cardboard box than held more warmth than being out in the rain.

She was huddled in the wet box that had begun to cave in, the sky didn’t clear and threaten to rain the remaining of the day. The cold was sinking deeper into her body and any warmth left was beginning to diminish. Her body lay dead still on the concrete, the wet cardboard covering her face and upper body, her hands turning a blue tint under the cold rain. She knew she had to get out of the rain and into a place that was warm. The warmth any place could offer would save her life, but she couldn’t even open her eyes let alone lift herself from the ground and make her way to a shelter, which was likely the only place that would take her in without question.

One more minute, she thought, just one more minute and she would stand up and force herself beneath the roof of a house. But she didn’t have one more minute, her body, much like her senses, had a peculiar condition as well and her body heat could not go under certain degrees without causing damage or long term paralyses until the lost heat was brought back into her body. Her body heat at the moment was below any she was used to and she lay motionless, her pulse slowed and her breathing could not be seen in the rise and fall of her chest. Any movement stopped, and she laid in a bundle at the edge of the alley where she was just ignored at any other homeless being roaming the streets.

Still, the thought formed in her subconscious, death was better than returning ‘home’.

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⏰ Last updated: May 16, 2014 ⏰

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