S a l e t é I I

XI - Yeux - Huit

The sound of the fire as it burned away, and the warmth it provided in the process, served to lull Cassie into a sort of haze. The state wasn't quite comforting, but also not quite unsettling. Instead, there was just...

Just...

She looked at one of her hands, the other keeping Polina in place on her lap. The sight of her, illuminated in the orange glow, as unmoved and innocent as she always had been, was something that provided her with a little more solace.

Even then...

Her hands... The lines... The little joints... Her knees...

She just couldn't determine how it all worked. If there was some kind of chance that she really was one of these so called Jouets, then...

No, it just didn't make sense, no matter how she looked at it, no matter what angle she approached the possibility from.

She'd been at Deering House. No one - not a single person - had commented on her being a Jouet. No one had acted as if she was different, and even if that thing - the chip that Monet had shown her - had been a part of her somehow, it only would have stopped her from seeing the truth, right? If that was how it really worked? The others would have still seen her for what she was.

The truth... Describing it in such a way left her feeling queasy all over again, renewing all of the negative energy that had spiralled in her gut, rising and falling, rising and falling... Ugh...

There was no way that Adeline wouldn't have pointed out such a thing, if she'd been able to see it for herself. And Esmund was an engineer! Surely, he would have been fascinated by her being a Jouet, if she was one? A doll that walked and talked like an actual person was quite a feat, was it not?

But...

She'd been brought to Deering House to be with Adeline, to be her friend. She'd moved in, without a hassle, without any complicated process, without any prior knowledge... It was all so easy, from a higher standpoint.

Why was she even considering these things? She was a person, an ordinary person. Why even bother entertaining such bizarre ideas? Living dolls? Or doll people? Something like that couldn't exist. Polina was a doll, and she didn't do impossible things.

So then... Why couldn't she remember?

She'd been trying, again and again and again, thoroughly wracking her brain in a desperate bid to remember her mother's face, her mother's name, her mother's voice, but there was nothing, absolutely nothing.

She couldn't recall even the most basic information, qnd that spawned a rapidly gnawing a hole in both her heart and her mind, to the point that even dwelling on the matter seemed suicidal from a mental position. How could she not dwell upon it? How could she just ignore that she couldn't remember her mother's name?

And Monet, she'd known that she'd been adopted, but how...? It played into the line of thought that Cassie had been contemplating as some ludicrous possibility earlier. She'd been brought to Deering House for a specific purpose, for a specific reason... Perhaps, for a purpose she had been -

No no no. No. Every time she thought about it, her mind rebelled against her, almost as if it was trying to save her from something awful.

"Um... Do you mind if I sit here, or...?"

Cassie looked up at the individual who had joined her, her movements sudden, the unexpected voice spooking her slightly.

"It's okay if you want to be by yourself, I won't get in the way."