Maly is but one life on the planet, and that fact does not bother her.

There are a thousand things she will never know, and a million experiences she will never have. The world turns ever onward, a steady progression of eons and ages, and she cannot possibly be aware of everything that happens in one day.

She is not there to witness the walk Father Gabriel takes, creeping out of his church like a scared mouse. He will stroll through the desolate woods toward her school, hoping for something he can't name, tense and nervous as he takes in the abandoned building stained with the fluids of the dead, and she will remain ignorant to it. His own inner conflict will come to a crescendo inside those empty halls when he stumbles over a corpse missing an arm, then finds the limb in the kitchen, cooked and half-eaten.

His revelation will be one he comes to by himself, and in the place once used for teaching, he will learn.

Likewise, Maly will be busy scrounging when a group far away stumbles into the knowledge that there is no cure. That there was only a lie told by a man to inflate his value because he knew very well that others would deem him not worth saving if he told them the truth. She will be absent for the subsequent breakdown of those who left, their struggles, and the way they piece themselves together and come back.

Maly will not know of how they return to a church, find a trio inside, and share information between each other. How they whisper of a survivor from before, of another fundamental piece found in a faraway city, and frankly, she wouldn't care if she was there.

Nor would Maly have any feelings other than bewilderment about how those who returned leave once more, riding on rumor and hope to their people to a city packed with the dead.

In that city, life will go on. A group that left will try and gather members of a rival faction to ransom back for their own. They will succeed in gathering three, but loose one to his own struggles and a thoughtless execution.

She will never see what happens next, never live through the tense exchange in a hospital hallway. The trading of prisoners will go unknown to her, as will the elation of seeing missing member come back to them. She will not feel that titillating joy, that heavenly elation, that heart-swelling love.

Likewise, she will not feel the breathtaking sense of loss as they lose one of their own after just having got them back. That sorrow will never touch her, that pain will not linger, and she will not dream of the sound of echoing bullets for years to come.

Maly will not be there as the group takes a dead girl with them through streets full of corpses, or for the car ride filled with tears. She will not be privy to Rick's thoughts of the hostage that attacked and ran, about how they could have traded even and fair if he had spared a life. In his head, he will think of dogs and men and lives worth more living than dead.

Maly will go on not knowing about any of that, and it will affect nothing about her day.

That is until she returns to the church as the sun hangs a just a hand span above the horizon, and finds all those that had left gathered together once more.

She looks at them; downtrodden, disheartened, and soul sick as they gather on the steps of the chapel. She does not know what happened, does not particularly care.

Maly walks toward Michonne, who holds the baby tight on her hip, and takes the package of powdered Pedialyte she salvaged from the thrift store out of her pocket. She hands it over as others watch on, silent and lacking moral.

Devil blue eyes find hers, and she wonders what to do. What needs to be done, if anything at all.

She licks her lips, working out the sounds.

"Keep going."

Same as always, she thinks, but the first time she says them to anyone but herself.