The air was hot. It was always hot. The sand blew regardless of the wind, like a lost soul looking for anywhere to be other than where it should. The grit blew against her face but she disregarded it, searching for her next target. She must make her quota; must deliver something to the King, or there would be worse things to deal with besides being blasted in the face with sand. She scanned the crowd; this was the Cairo Market. Everyone made it here: local, tourist, rich, poor, buyer, seller, King, thief. All made it to the Market. She smiled and stepped into the swells of people.
The Market was a creature all its own. The wares changed daily, and the cacophony of smells and sounds re-made the skin of the creature each dawn. The bones changed as the stalls did and only those that lived and died here could make heads or tails of it all. She was a child of this place; she felt the pulse of it as though it were her own heart beating in her chest. Tourists to this world, for it was its own world, stuck out as a cancer in the body of the Market. She let the waves of people carry her indifferently through the square, keeping her eyes open for the perfect mark.
Ororo Munroe was twelve, this year. She had been raised in these streets; an orphan after her parents were killed in an earthquake. She didn't remember much about her parents, but she remembered the aftermath. She could recall with achingly accurate detail the screeching sounds of twisting metal as the car roof caved in, having been swallowed by the gaping rift that had appeared out of nowhere. She could remember her mother's scream, her father's violent twist of the steering wheel, and then crashes like explosions. If she shut her eyes tight, she would still be able to see the front of the car filled with rubble and her parents' lifeless bodies. Even in the midst of all of these people, in the middle of the day, with her face warmed by the sun, if she tried, she could vividly recount every pebble that should've been the filling of her grave.
But it wasn't. She had lived.
Men had seen it happen. They were tending their livestock and the ground had begun to shake; they had taken shelter, and when they and their families were safe, they had looked for other survivors. Her parents' car had been dismissed as a hopeless case; there were people in dire straits all around. The volunteers had come and had cleared debris, rebuilt buildings, re-dug wells. They repaired fences and fixed the road as best they could, and all the while, they wondered how to get a buried car out of the ground. The Ethiopian government responded quickly; after all, the country was far more prone to these things than in other parts of the continent. It still wasn't fast enough for a girl trapped in what should have been her coffin.
Eventually the authorities had pulled the mangled car from the clutches of the earth and to their surprise, they had found amongst the two dead adults, one very much alive young girl. How she had managed to survive at all was anyone's guess. They had transported her to a local orphanage while they figured out the legalities of her situation. The girl had not waited for the bureaucracies of adults; she had escaped with others in the dead of night. And while the alarms of the orphanage blared, the girl and her new-found family escaped into the night. She barely remembered the life she had shared in America with her parents…and her older sister.
The gang travelled for seven days via A1 until they finally made Cairo. At their arrival, the oldest of their group stole bread and wine and the group celebrated their freedom. Ororo was six. The Eldest was Amadi. He had come from Somalia where his mother had died in the civil war and his father was imprisoned for piracy. He had grown up on the streets; he knew what their rag-tag gang needed to do to make it here in this new place. Amadi taught them to pick locks and pockets. He taught them how to evade, because to be caught was tantamount to death. They learned the fine arts of coercion and, if all else fails, bribery, so that they may move freely among residences surrounding Cairo. They learned to trust each other and they, in a way, made a life for themselves. This is how Ororo grew up; she was their bait at first and then, eventually, she came into her own. She earned her name in this world of thieves, and drew the attention of someone that would break her haphazard family apart.