"So, uh," she begins to ask, with an idea of what the answer's going to be, "if there's only one of us at a time.  What happened to her."

"She died," Giles says.  Baldly, bracingly.  "I'm - sorry to say that - many of you do not live very long."

"Small comfort though it is, you do tend to live longer if you work with us."

'Why's that."

"A prophecy is - vague, sparse in meaning, but very definite.  Unchanging.  Ordinarily causality moves in one direction, the past causing the future.  When a prophecy is made, a true prophecy, that flow reverses, future events causing the details of the prophecy to be what they are.  If that future could be averted, the prophecy could never have been made."

"Prophecies often say where the Slayer will be, when.  They may say some of what she does; they rarely say what happens to her.  They do not say why she is there.  If a Slayer works for the Watcher's Council, then she is there because we sent here there, and prepared her for whatever she must do.  She is there because she succeeded.  If a Slayer tries to run from her destiny, she is there because she failed."

She sighs again, a full proper sigh this time.  She runs her fingers through her hair.

"I am sorry, Sylvia.  It isn't a fate anyone deserves."

She snorts, a little, really just exhaling harder through her nose.  "I haven't had a lot of those."

"You wanna hear something fucked, though?"

"Ah.  Sure."

"If you can be, like.  Not a shit about it?  I really think I might prefer it to another year of public fucking schooling."

Very very extremely bad not good idea to be out after dark in Sunnydale, is her understanding.  But she's new in town and she got lost and she doesn't have a cell phone.

She's sticking to the more well-lit streets.

Is she sure, because apparently this street isn't so well lit that there's not a mugging going on right in the middle of it, in plain view, all of a sudden!

Okay yeah let's duck down an alley!

She should do something, she should - find someone with a phone to call the cops, she can't go over there and stop him she's just a kid but -

There is a man standing at the entrance of the alley, now, watching her.

She's going to walk quickly the other way.  (Is that the guy who was getting mugged?  It looked like him but he is not emanating the energy of a guy who just got mugged.)

Actually she's going to be lifted up off her feet by a man twice her size appearing behind her and looping his arms under hers.  He clamps a hand over her mouth, hard.

Well she can't scream but she can closed-mouth squeal as loud as she can, and try to kick his shins -

That doesn't do much.

He turns around.

The other stranger is approaching, swiftly but calmly, and producing something like a bike pump from the inside of his jacket.

She squeals and kicks and tries to bash her head backwards into her captor's nose.

"This will go easier for you if you don't struggle," the man says.

Her mouth is free, briefly, before the other man slips his fingers inside and pries it open and begins to force the hose of the bike pump into it.

"For you.  Not for us."

Something cold and metallic comes out of the bike pump.  She chokes, spits, swallows.

After a moment of this he pulls the hose out -