Xing Huo reflects …
She often stood in the semi-darkness watching the one in the tube, suspended, both eyes closed. She wondered how he felt, lying so still it seemed he was almost dead…and in a sense he was, unable to move or talk. Perhaps it was pity at first, then fascination, and then a desire to do what was right. For though her master formed her, inside her, the first stirrings of separate thought, separate feeling, a separate conscience had begun to move.
For the longest time yet, she knew her master's plan would never work, and in the silence where the tube was, that knowledge was the strongest. The doubts seemed to be amplified by the tube and his presence. The one who had taken her loyalties away from her master and began making the small sliver of doubt larger within her larger and larger. Could this, she asked herself one day, be love? She supposed she did not know, but her loyalties had begun to shift as surely as sand shifts when the waves hit it.
Her master often watched them through the mirror, and as she watched, she could not help but feel a little envious at their freedom in spite of her master's machinations. Because she had begun to believe in this thing called 'hitsuzen' and she had begun to see her place in it. The belief spread in her heart, almost like the wings that the Princess had and gave her a new sense of purpose.
Soon the days turned into months, even in this place where time appeared to stand still, she saw blood and lives lost and blind ambition and in her heart, she knew someday she would have to decide. And she would surely die. But for the sake of the dream which she knew had to end, and for him and for the ones who had fought so bravely and so hard, she chose.
Then death came to claim her.