Wordlessly, Liya got up. Helly let her, remarking absently, "He did not always sleep here. Only when he was not well. Liya?" ne said, as Liya was now halfway to the curtain that served as the little house's door. She turned to nem, her face flushed with either embarrassment or anger or both. "Perhaps I should have said."

"Why din't you??" Liya demanded, drawing herself up. "I knew you knew him, but--n-not--" here she stumbled over her words, trying to find the right ones to voice the sudden mixed emotions, "Not that you're, like, h-his mom, or his dad, or, or whatever--"

Helly placidly smoothed the starry covers in the place where Liya's sitting had wrinkled them. "I did not think it mattered," ne said quietly. "Mari has only ever tried to help you."

"'Mari'??" Liya repeated derisively, pulling back the curtain over the entryway to the grey courtyard outside. "God. I don't want his he--" and then the anger seemed to go out of her with a sigh, replaced by a deep resignation. "...Why din't they just leave me in Violetta?"

She said this last part quietly, and perhaps she meant it rhetorically, but Helly answered anyway. "I think," ne said slowly, "It is because you are a child, Liya. And I think that Captain Marinos could not bring himself to leave a child alone with the dead bodies of her family."

Liya was standing quite still with the curtain gripped in one balled-up fist. She did recall, then, in the heat and orange light of that last night in Violetta...as she screamed with rage, sweat and tears pouring down her face, her bloody hands held back by a pair of monsters that even so struggled to keep her still, that their captain--snake-necked, rooster-beaked, scaly and feathery at the same time--was not looking at her. He instead was looking away, back towards the fire, where the burning truck and the bodies of her brothers would have been.