Lost and Left for Dead <THIS HAS BEEN REWRITTEN>

Chapter 1- The Irony of Situation

Meredith Wayne stood in the lobby of the local Autoshop, which she renamed 'Auto-Boredom' after she couldn't quite get the actual syllables of its Bialyan name to roll off her tongue the way she wanted them to. She gave a tight, closed lipped smile to one of the two siblings that sat at her feet before she started shifting the card deck in her hands, pretending not to know exactly what she was doing.

By "the lobby", she meant the outdoor dust porch shaded by a hanging piece of candy-striped cloth that had three plastic lawn chairs under the moth-eaten awning. The woven straw mat made a crunching nose anytime she stepped on it with her combat boots, which were muddy with sand stuck in every crevice and a size too big.

"Is this your card?" Her voice still sounded foreign to her when she spoke in their tongue.

The children's brown eyes sparkled as their mouths opened. They giggled.

"No! Silly lady, you're not a real magician!"

Meredith cast her eyes to the ground and shuffled her feet, pouting. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to disappoint,"

She turned her head to the side, and one of the children gasped. "Look! Look! Behind your ear, silly lady! Look!" He pointed, and Meredith turned around, "Where? Where is it?"

The child's eyes widened in anticipation, and his deep brown wells shone with the knowledge that he knew something she did not. Meredith kept the ruse up for a minute or so before she let the 8 of Spades fall to the mat.

Meredith squatted, picking it up and showing it to the child. "Is this your card?"

The boy snatched it and examined it, turning it over and over in his chubby fingers than were too thin. The girl next to him gasped. "It is! I swear it is! How'd you do it, silly lady?"

Meredith just smiled and took the card out of his hands, brushing off the sand that got on it. "I believed I could. So I did."

The girl's chocolate eyes widened, before narrowing again. They gave her a small, copper coin and left, but the girl kept glancing back at her. Meredith smiled and waved until they were gone.

Her shoulders slumped, and her cracked lips fell into a frown. Meredith pushed her palm across her cheek, smudging the dirt across her face. At least the dirt hid the bags under her green eyes. Maybe it even detracted attention from them, if she was lucky.

She turned on her heel and walked into the autoshop when she saw a couple of adults holding a newspaper in their heads. She stood in the open doorframe, peering at the lettering on the newspaper as they passed.

Meredith grunted, pulled the dull rag that served as a burka farther over her forehead, and shrank back into the clay structure of the autoshop.

"If you see your card tricks from a different angle, you can tell they're tricks," Ah. English.

Jon stuck his head out from underneath the frame of a rustic and failing pick-up truck. His face looked more black than his midnight hair with all the oil smeared over it. His eyes, a clearer shade of blue than the sky, gave away everything- kryptonite was the weakness of his body, and eyes were the weakness of his secret thoughts and hidden feelings.

They spoke to her- the slight droopiness of the eyelid, the slow blinking, and the persistent twinkle- Tired, they said, but too prideful and too much of an example to show it.

Meredith shrugged. "I play to an angle, not to the world."

It felt wrong to speak English, the syllables felt blocky on her tongue, even though she spoke English at home before she ever came here. Meredith pursed her lips and glanced away.