Angel tilted her head to the side, studying the girl passed out in front of her with eyes that were both curious and distant. "Do I know you? Not Marni? Are you sure? You look like her." She felt she was missing something, something important. Ever since the fire smoke screaming darkness despair silence glow her thoughts were mostly fragments, sanity and lucidity things that came and went. When she actually managed to focus on something though, little could deter her.

A name came to her, an impossible name. "Shilo? But you can't be, she died, Marni died, Mag said…" Mag, oh god, Mag, eyeless and smiling as the blood ran down her cheeks, arms reaching out, free at last, and then the fall… Angel remembered standing in the street with the rest of the crowd, watching the Opera on a television screen in a store window. Screaming, she had been screaming, and had she run then? She must have run, otherwise how had she ended up in the graveyard?

"Focus," Angel mumbled, shaking her head as if to clear it, the name she had been thinking of already lost. "The girl. The girl is important." She knelt in the grass, lifting one thin, pale arm. Despite the girl's insistence that she wasn't sick, it was obvious to Angel that she wasn't in the best of shape, blood aside. A pulse beat under her fingers, steady and strong and a cursory examination made Angel realize that the blood the girl was covered in was most likely not her own.

"I don't suppose you could wake up and walk for about 15 minutes or so? No? That would be too convenient, wouldn't it?" Angel sighed, her lips twisting into a smirk as she tried to figure out what would attract more attention; carrying a bloodstained girl through the streets or wrapping the girl in her coat and revealing what she usually tried so very hard to conceal.

"People should be used to the sight of blood, after all the city is covered in it." Angel took the girl in her arms, surprised at how very little she weighed, like she was barely there at all.

"Just a slip of a girl, lost in the world," Angel sang softly as she headed for home. The streets were filled with people, their voices washing over Angel, a sea of words through which she swam. She could hear the undercurrents of tension, panic, noticed that there were more GenCops on the street than was normal.

"They'll be rioting soon," Angel muttered. "This can't be just because of Mag, can it?" She tried to focus on the voices around her, to make sense of the words slipping in and out of her ears, but the voices of the crowd were too chaotic to make out much more than a few names. "Blind Mag, Rotti, Shilo."

"That's who you are, isn't it? Shilo. Shilo, Shilo, Shilo," Angel chanted, as if that would help the name stick in her mind. She was still whispering the name as she entered the rundown apartment building that was her home, making her way carefully down the steps to her basement apartment. It was an easy task for her to shift Shilo's weight to one arm as she fished in her coat pocket for her keys, her fingers brushing a thin envelope as she did so. Angel wondered where it had come from for a moment before shaking her head. She'd deal with it later, what was important was taking care of the girl, of Shilo.

Angel looked around the dark apartment, eyes resting on an old beat up couch for a moment before she shook her head. It was certainly large enough for such a small girl as Shilo, but it just didn't feel right. Instead she headed toward her own bedroom, laying Shilo down on her very large bed, unlacing the girl's boots and peeling off her bloodstained clothing. She left the room for a moment, returned with a damp washcloth and scrubbed off the worst of the blood before she awkwardly dressed Shilo in one of her old button down shirts. Through it all Shilo slept, not offering as much as a whimper of protest as Angel tucked her into bed.

Angel gazed down at the sleeping girl with an almost tender expression on her face. "You do look a lot like your mother," she whispered. Her thoughts jumped again, from Shilo to Marni, from Marni to Mag, her sweet Mag…

Angel turned away, closing the bedroom door behind her as she left, her hand clutching the envelope in her pocket. With a sigh she walked down the hallway, shrugging off her coat and throwing it over a battered armchair as she went, tossing the envelope onto a glass coffee table clouded over with dust. With a groan she gave the aching muscles of shoulders and back a good stretch before sitting down on the couch, leaning over and unlacing her worn leather boots. Straitening up slightly she shifted her weight, trying to get comfortable without thinking about the reason why she was uncomfortable, the mistake she had been paying for every single day since— Fire, oh no, please no, gone, all gone, ashes…

Remote in hand, Angel stared at the dark television. The news was usually unreliable at best; outright lies at worst, but it would be hours before she could find out what happened at the Opera from more trustworthy sources. Frowning, she switched on the television and adjusted the volume to a low murmur before picking up the envelope, turning it over in hands. Her name was written on the front, the flowing cursive script familiar to her. Slowly she tore the envelope open, struggling to remember just where she had gotten it from in the first place…