S a l e t é I I

XI - Yeux - Deux

Everything had happened so fast.

Cassie continued to mull over the string of events that had brought her here, to this...

Where was she?

She'd only tried to find her way back to the others. That was all it had taken to set things off, one simple accident. She'd gone the wrong way, in the underpass, and she'd ended up at the... At the...

She replayed the events, over and over. The officers, the blow she'd taken... Why had they been so heavy handed? What had that girl done to agitate them to such a degree?

At least that girl had actually bothered to help her. What would they have done, if she'd been left behind on the platform entirely? Would they have hit her again? For something she hadn't even done?

Her predicament, whilst extreme, seemed to have a fairly obvious solution, and it was one she had considered many times already; she'd arrived by train, and therefore she could leave by train, even if she had to sneak back onto one that was heading up. Once she was up, all she had to do was find someone, anyone, and she wasn't going to take any ignorance.

Why hadn't she made a fuss? If she'd made a fuss, if she'd perhaps screamed or cried, someone would have paid attention to her, but no, she had to be her usual, reserved self.

And she'd thought of herself as confident... She was useless, that much was now blatantly clear.

Beating herself up wasn't going to help, and yet at the same time it was impossible not to; it was her own, stupid fault that she'd gotten lost, and it was her own, stupid fault that she'd ended up on a train to someplace she'd never even seen or heard of.

She was still in Merveille though, she was... Maybe not sure of that, but... Things could have been worse, and she took some comfort in that knowledge, however minimal it may have been.

She looked at her hands again and again, at the lines, at the ball joints. She touched them, she felt them, and she felt her touch as well. The initial shock had passed, but she was left with that terrible chill, and the sight of her own body left her feeling deeply uncomfortable. Moving to sit on the side of the table, she could see more lines on her legs, and she found that her knees were, in fact, also rounded joints.

It made her feel queasy. Deeply, deeply queasy. That hollowness in her gut had started to accommodate a great deal of sickly aching.

If she really was supposed to be one of these so called Jouets, why hadn't anyone said anything?

Adeline had never even so much as acknowledged anything different about her. Nobody at Deering House had. If she was a Jouet, then what sense did that make? How could they not notice something that would have apparently been visible to them?

Unless...

She almost had to shake her head to push aside that particular line of thought for now. There was certainly no dispelling it entirely; it had roots in the back of her head, ensuring that it wasn't going anywhere in either the near or distant future.

Reality was twisting into unusual, unreadable shapes. She tried to follow, only it was so... She couldn't do it. She just couldn't. It wasn't even about whether she wanted to or not.

In Monet's absence, and with a near silent air surrounding her, Cassie was slowly starting to regain something resembling weak focus. The fire continued to burn gently, contained within that rusty old drum of sorts, and she could see bits of wood - broken up planks of some description - within, serving as fuel. The drum itself looked as if it had seen a fair bit of use, too.