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She's a four-year-old girl, and people (especially her Dad) insist she's a boy.
Not that she isn't sometimes. She is. But not today! Today she's a girl. And Dad keeps saying that's not true, that God made her body perfect and she shouldn't second-guess God's plan for her. God made her a boy, so she's supposed to be a boy. And on the one hand that kinda makes sense. God doesn't make mistakes, right? So if she were really a girl sometimes, then she'd... what? Her body would change, she guesses. But on the other hand, she knows she's a girl. She's a girl with a peepee, that's obvious. She'd prefer not having a peepee when she's a girl, but it's not the worst thing ever. And if God doesn't make mistakes, God also didn't make her feel like a girl sometimes on accident, right? It must be part of His (because God is always a He, even though God made everyone, boys and girls, in His image, he's always a He, Dad says) plan.
She tells Dad that, today, and Dad gets angry, and yells at her, and she doesn't know why he's yelling. It makes sense to her! But he won't explain why she's wrong, he's just yelling, Dad's so mean, she hates him, and she's not crying, shut up, you're crying!
And now Mum's coming and she's talking to Dad, and that usually makes Dad stop yelling and go away but he won't stop now and Sadde's angry and afraid and hurt and she's running away. A part of her thinks that it doesn't make much sense to run away, the park is pretty open and she can't really hide anywhere, and she'll have to go back because she'll get hungry (not now, though, she just ate a sandwich).
So she runs until she finds some bushes where she can hide, and she hides there, and she doesn't cry, and she spends a long time not crying. Mum and Dad don't come after her, though, and after she's done not crying she doesn't wipe her eyes and her nose, and she comes out the other way of the bushes she was hiding in.
And she's pretty sure that's not the park.
"All the stuff we know about technology, the little things we developed or use like that and other traps or the dart blowers or guns or motion detectors or heat detectors, trackers and small cameras and earbuds and microphones, and we went out of our way not to actually plan anything yet with exactly this eventuality in mind but we weren't—paranoid—enough."
"Not motion—and heat-activated dart-blowing traps they haven't, at least not as far as I've been able to determine. Which may admittedly not have been much."
"It seems disingenuous to call a thing motion-activated if it is in fact activated by only the sight of motion. I think Thorn has automatic dart traps but that's not how he got me, I'm piecing things together."
"Humans can't become invisible, normally. And does invisibility even hold up in the mortal realm? It might also be possible to use radars, can sorcery make one transparent to air?"
"Sorcery in general shreds in the mortal realm. And that sounds like it would make it hard to breathe."
"Then radars would probably work." She tries to raise her hand to wipe her eyes and realises she can only do that slowly, then asks, "Can you relax my orders a bit?"
"You may, in ways I am unlikely to find surprising or inconvenient, minding that I would find being touched inconvenient, move."
"I wouldn't," she says, wiping her face with her shirt (her gloves still containing hidden sharp bits). "I've—I'm not running on sheer panic anymore. Maybe I'm too tired for or of panic, or you served as an effective enough way to arrest my ill-advised momentum. Probably both."
"Try to surprise or inconvenience you. For whatever unfathomable fairy reasons you're actually helping me instead of doing—whatever it is non-Thorn fairies do to their mortal vassals."
"Thorn's definitely worse than average but it is usually not very nice. And you had a lapse of judgment that lasted a few hours, it's not like Yellow who's had me, what, twenty years, and who if necessary I will handle much less politely than you."
"...thanks, I guess. What will you do with me? Not that there's even much point in my asking, I suppose."
"What do you mean, why? If it's just going to wind up with all of us in Thorn's court biting through our tongues and brute-forcing cube routes in our heads every time we have a disloyal thought I'm not going to do it, it's worth the risk assessment."
"No, why are you trying to help me. Why are you not, I don't know, flying away forever from the ter—from Thorn, turning me into a sparrow or a statue or—what's your angle? You didn't seem to think he'd use the kind of power getting access to human tech would give him."
"He might use some of it, I just don't think he'll obliterate several kilometers. You can't hurt me or oblige me to go about it stupidly so I may as well see if there's any hope to be had within the time window before he hears from someone that you caught Yellow. Anyway, I can't turn you into a sparrow, you have my name. I'm not sure that would even change if you wished to be a sparrow, it might still count."
"I wasn't gonna oblige you to do literally anything other than give me info which, well, it didn't occur to me that that might give you flashbacks, I'm sorry about that. And we don't actually have that much information yet, even, we need more."
"Look, do you want me to just step down your orders and leave you be? You seemed to have other priorities but I'm not holding you for my amusement."
She closes her eyes, trying to find words. "I've told you what I want, I'm trying to figure out what exactly I have so I can use it to get that. And at the same time I have to second-guess everything because you're still a member of a species of sadists. So I'm having a really hard time knowing how to begin explaining, because I don't know if I can even make you understand."