Athens

Plausible deniability…

The man simply raises his hands, and shakes his head, as he steps back around the corner out of view. It wasn’t him that had attacked you. It was these dogs… his dogs…

His quick exit shows that his gambit had failed, whatever it was that he had been planning to do with the young Caroline. You could chase after him and shoot him in the back…

The young girl has one hand held against her chest, holding up the small kitten she had been cradling on the back of Billie-Faye’s bike. She takes you each in in turn, with one hand still in her pocket.

You suspect she might still be handling her small knife in there, just in case.

"Don’t know!" Caroline says with a shrug, seemingly pouncing on the opportunity to have the focus on the cat and not herself… or her strayness.

She presents the cat’s rear end up to everyone, as if that would answer Shayna’s question, and the thing meows with agitation. It clings to anything it can get its claws into at the indecency it was being subjected to… including Billie-Faye’s jacket.

If the girl understands exactly what is being said between Billie-Faye and Richard, she at least pretends not to. She does hold on to the beef jerky a moment too long, as if weighing just how bad it would be to scarf the thing herself, before Shayna offers up more rations for her to have.

"Thanks!" she says, her dirty face creasing into a polite smile. You’d maybe seen a small handful of children her age or younger in Athens while Richard was on the mend.

She looks at the beat up old police cruiser, and the blonde with her shirt off on the back of the bike. She swallows hard on the food she had been offered before saying:

"Are you… the police?"

Like any child with something to say on anything at all words start to fall out of the girls mouth full of confidence.

"Those are the men with the big trucks! We were told to never go with them!" she says, with a tone that allowed for no dissent.

"Some of the other kids said they’d eatus if we got caught!" she says, but she’s old enough to know that that wasn’t true. Well, it wouldn’t be true in a normal world. A child her age would know that in a normal world. Now… Well…

It was a dog-eat-kitten, walker-eat-man, man-sometimes-eat-man world out there.

"Caroline!" she says, with a little more fanfare, now that she had broken her silence on the big trucks.

"Out… yonder?" she says, squinting into the wind in the direction that Shayna points. "There’s no one out there! We haven’t seen anyone in months!" she says with that same childish assuredness.

"I’m not supposed to tell! We don’t tell people about the safe house!" she says, and for a moment you imagine that she could be talking about a treehouse or pillow fort or any other childish imagining.

"Maaaaybe I can tell you, after I see what you’re really like!" she says, with a shrug of her shoulders and a bite of her apple! There was clearly some child left in there. Not like Boone Barker, who had been dragged up by his lousy father through all this.

"You’re going to Juru… J… Juroo…" she says, clearly not having had the time to read long words just yet. The thing tapers off with a question sound in any case!

The girl fumbles with her hand in her pocket; very obviously trying to drop the knife she had been holding in a subtle way. She can’t help but smile as she shakes Owen’s hand, maybe on account of it being real grown up stuff!

Shayna warns of the noise on the upper floors of the hotel. Loucilla had specifically called the rooftop of the place out. Maybe she’d know what could be inside…

You climb back into your vehicle, thankful for the temporary reprieve from the wind. The cat is passed through an open window, as Caroline keeps her place on the bike. The thing meows and clings terribly to whoever’s hand is unfortunate enough to receive the small feline.