The Zodiacs

16. Chione of Capricorn

Walking through the busy streets, Lotus let her eyes roam around every market for her next food source. Running away from home so hastily proved not the best choice when she realized she had nowhere to sleep, nothing to eat, and no clothes to change. She pretended not to notice all the villagers who parted ways for her, eyeing the girl's unkempt sight judgmentally.

She ignored them and convinced herself that her appearance didn't look as bad as they made it out to be. Sure dirt stained all of her clothes, and the unclean odor of those same clothes was beginning to suffocate even her. The attempts at cleaning herself from the river had worked for a while, but it's been a couple days and, the longer she stayed in the same garments, the more their stink overpowered her cleanliness.

Lotus's eyes caught on a small market in the distance with all kinds of food: sun-dried chips, milk, bread, and more menu items that her mouth began to salivate at. It'd been five days since she last managed to steal something from another village a long distance away.

By now, her body weight had begun to dramatically fall, leaving the girl's energy more depleted than ever. Thankfully, she wasn't able to catch a sight of the dark circles forming around her eyes and the way her cheeks were beginning to sink in. Two days ago was when the hunger worsened to a painful sensation that kept her from moving for hours, but now the hunger had faded. She was just tired.

If her father had seen how thin she got... oh, right. Father was dead. He'd been dead for around two weeks now, hadn't he? Her stepmother never cared much for her health or wellbeing as much as she cared for her own twin daughters --Lotus's stepsisters. She....

A familiar anger began to grow in the girl's chest at the cold lady's memory, remembering how much she'd looked forward to the arrival of a new mother. Lotus had never had a mother before then. She had all these wishes and plans about how her new parent would be, and all the lovely things they'd get to do together. It would have been just like the books painted a perfect family out to be.

How foolish she'd been because, from the second day, her mother had taken on a new persona when father would go to work. She loved father --there was no question about that --but she didn't hold the same fondness for his daughter.

All she'd wanted as a little girl was a mother, not even a good mother, just a decent one would have worked because she'd never had one before. Lotus didn't know how a mother should behave. But the cruelty she saw from her stepmother was isolating enough to realize that this wasn't how a mother was supposed to be.

She hated the woman for what she'd done to her as a child more than she hated her for what she'd done now. Because of her, the little hopeful girl had to realize how terrible of a place this world could be. How terrible the people living in it could, and would, be to her.

The girl found a place to hide out of the view of the passing commoners in a narrow alleyway between two homes. She glanced to either side to make sure she was alone before using her abilities; being discovered as a Zodiac now would make all of this much harder. It would make the days she spent jumping from village to village to avoid the Pharaoh's troops useless.

When she opened her eyes again, Lotus was standing on top of a large beer barrel. She panicked for a moment, grabbing the shelves behind her to steady herself so she didn't fall to the ground and call the attention of the store clerks outside. Only after she carefully climbed down did Lotus celebrate the successful jump.

The first time she'd done it to escape the Pharaoh's men, she landed on the back of an abandoned sicilian cart that she always saw being pulled around the city. Her uncoordinated weight flipped the large wooden structure on top of her, landing the girl in a pile of collected donkey dung. It took her a day of cleaning herself off in the river to get rid of the stomach-flipping scent.