singillatim | Я вернулся в деревню

“I was looking for food,” Chloe admits. “I didn't trust the stuff at the hall - no such thing as a free lunch, right? - and I didn't know how to hunt yet.”

Luckily even here it's usually pretty easy to get men to do things for you.

She nods. It's reasonable. Stealing for food is something that Svetlana has experience with. Not that she's done it herself, but that she knows what it's like to want to.

"I still don't know. But - do you know a man named - Cornelius Hickey?"

“I do, but I’ve got to admit I'm a bit surprised that you do.” He's definitely a strong personality. “That's my mate who got jumped, actually. If he's been offering you food it's legit no-strings stuff.”

"Why?" she wonders. "I - yes, he did offer to help. He was very kind about it." But strong personality? She didn't see it, but she's softer than Chloe. Maybe that meant he was softer, too.

“He helped me too, when I was new.” He’d given her some of the raw meat she’d caught him chomping on, but Svetlana doesn't need to know about that.

“A little rough around the edges, is all. One of the sailor men.”

"He said as much. But - I offered to help him if he needed it. Which was a strange bargain, since I would have done it anyway." She shrugs. "But he seemed to want to hear that."

Chloe shrugs again, gives an obscure smile. “Sadly, not everyone’s as sweet as you.”

Taking things for free can give people power over you in a way that both she and Hickey aren't big fans of.

“Thanks for offering anyway, though. Seems more likely now that he’ll seek help if he needs it.”

She frowns at being called 'sweet,' even though she knows it's true. She is sweet. Kind. She always has been.

"I hope he does," she agrees. "He seems like he needs it."

Sveta reminds Chloe of a friend of hers from home, one so sweet that she calls her Sunshine - it had started out as a mean joke but it's a fond one now.

“You think?” He hadn't seemed that bad off to Chloe, but that might be because they're so similar.

"I mean - that he doesn't seem the type to ask for help. Only give it, if it suits him," she admits.

Okay, yeah, she's got a point there.

“He's got…” Chloe doesn't want to out him if he hadn't already told her. “He's got a friend who looks out for him. But in this place you need everything you can get.”

"His roommate?" she wonders, using Hickey's word for him. But there's a knowing sort of look.

She isn't stupid.

"Well, I am willing to help him, no matter what. He offered to help me, too, even though he didn't need to. That's - important."

“Yeah. It's not easy, all those other guys from the same boat here. The things they used to do…” Lash you in front of everyone, Billy had said. Even here he’d been afraid of that.

"No. I wonder why that is," she muses softly. "Why there are so many of them. Why - none of my people or - or your people are here."

“Yeah, it's weird.” It’s hard to find a common thread between the lot of them. “Maybe their expedition’s just really unlucky, huh? Keep failing the coin flip.”

Coin flip. An interesting thought, but Sveta isn't so certain.

"Do you think there is - a choice in it? Or is it random?"

“If it's that woman picking us out, you'd think she wouldn't pick people who hate each other.” The boatman infighting isn't exactly conducive to defeating the Darkwalker.

"The woman?" she asks, sitting back. "The - oh, yes. That woman." But she isn't even sure that's the case. It's frustrating to not know.

"I suppose we can't exactly ask."

“Yeah. Seems like it's all one-way communication with that one.” And the weird stuff, the guilt and the pain, though it doesn't seem like that was on purpose.

“You think it's deliberate?”

It's a question that she had talked with Hickey about, too, and she doesn't feel any better about the answer she's settled on.

"I think that the - idea is terrifying either way. Either she is a mindless being who doesn't know what she's doing and can't be reasoned with or - or she's a thinking creature who - who won't be reasoned with."

“If she thinks she's saving the world, she might just be grabbing anyone she can get.”

As awful as this all is, Chloe can't really blame her for that. What wouldn't she do to save her own world?

"But what makes us - able to get? Be get? Getting? Eh, I don't know the word." She struggles for a moment, looking to Chloe for help.

Chloe smiles a little. There's a symptom of Sveta’s English class crush, maybe. “It sounds stupid but it's gettable.”

The other part is less straightforward.

“I don't know if it's something special about us, like we’re… susceptible? To being changed by the aurora. Or maybe it really is random. I was sitting with three other people and I'm the only one it took.”

It certainly is. And Sveta smiles, repeating the word and committing it to memory.

"What were you doing? Have we - asked any of the others? Is there a pattern to it?"

“That EMT asked me at the general store opening.” It had felt a little too much like an interrogation to Chloe, but maybe the man had just been jealous at the revelation that she’d been hanging out with his 'roommate' without him.

“I was at a party though, and some of these guys I'm pretty sure don't know how to have fun. So I don't think it's that.”

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