I know it's short, but I am dead tired. Sorry…
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Kiley stared at the finished word processing document. It was complete, now, text, diagrams, tables and all. The finished project was huge, nearly a million words of text, plus hundreds of images she had cobbled together from encyclopedias and any media source she could access. It was as detailed as she could manage, as well plotted as she could devise.
Rubbing her eyes, she skimmed the document again, looking it over for any discrepancies, any glaring errors or anywhere that she might have glossed over some important detail. And she saw nothing. She ran her hand through her hair and absently noted that it no longer stood up straight after she did that. It was too long now to get fun and spiky. She rubbed at the back of her head and thought about the feel of the strands of hair under her fingers.
She sighed, realizing that her concentration was shot, and closed the file. It was done. She locked the file for a few days. That should be long enough to give her time to pack and leave, and a deadline. She would have to be gone before this file became active. Otherwise, there would be too many questions, leading to the wrong sorts of answers, and she would never get to leave.
It bothered her more than a little bit that she was going to leave before Ace came out of the bulb. While it was true the child had chosen to leave her in the desert, she was going to have been here and left before the child got a chance to see her. If their roles had been reversed, she would be immensely hurt, and didn't think that Ace would feel any different. She did plan on leaving a note, but it would be a pale substitute for actually being here. She sighed again, hating herself for leaving so soon, but knowing that it was necessary. Right now Knives harbored no suspicions that she was about to go; he was still entirely enamored with the thought of their relationship that the thought of her leaving would not even enter his mind.
Come to think of it, she hadn't even seen Ace since her first day here, and… her horrible reaction. She sighed and buried her head in her arms, ashamed of her reaction, afraid, and ashamed of her fear. She had made a reputation for herself of never running from things that other people feared, never lying. Lying is only admitting that you are too weak to handle the truth. That was her mantra. But the trouble with reputations is that they can trap you. She was known to tell the truth, known to face things that would send others running in fear, but she did so in part because she was known as a person who would. She was strong enough to face reality.
At least, she was when she could forget that she had been an assassin. When she could forget she was loathed. When she could forget that she loathed herself. Her entire life had been built around what was no more than a lie itself, that she could face the world head on and with no illusions.
And here, with a new start? She was doing it again. She should just tell Knives that she was a plant and get it over with, tell him and no longer have that sword hanging over her head. But she was afraid. Too afraid to be something other than human, to be a freak that looked like a monster to survive in an environment that would kill a human being in seconds. She couldn't admit to that. Instead, she wrapped the tattered remains of her humanity around her like a shroud, and hid under them.
If she pretended long enough, could she become normal? Would she ever be just another one of the faceless masses, no better, no worse, no different from a million others? She had never wanted to be special, had had it thrust upon her the moment she was conceived.
She moaned softly. What bothered her, what had always bothered her was how she was special through no great action or feat of her own. An intermingling of two bloodlines, and she was interesting as a breeding experiment. Daughter of an enemy, and she was worthy of enmity. A tool. And then, finally, someone that she felt she could be proud of, someone special through her actions. And that last person was destroyed because she had been a special object before learning how to be a person. And now she was a plant. One of four known wanderers on the planet. Yippee.
It wasn't fair, and she was so afraid that it was going to happen here, going to happen again.
