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A/N: Thank you for pointing out my mistakes GDeacur. I went back and corrected all the mistakes I could find.
The girl woke up, sweat soaking through her ragged clothes. She was panting, as if she had been running in a race. Her mind was trying to wrap around the nightmare, but she found that she couldn’t. She had a feeling that that nightmare was important, but it was already slipping through the clumsy fingers of her mind. In a few minutes the nightmare had faded beyond hope of recovery.
The girl shook herself like a dog and ran her fingers down her long, ragged, black hair, grimacing as her lean fingers snagged on knot after knot. She looked around her as she kept on dragging her fingers through her hair. She sighed in relief when she realized that she was in a place that she knew. She was underneath her…her mother tree, as she had decided to call her shelter. She felt the pockets of her torn jeans and was relieved to see that she still had her meager stash of cash that she had earned by doing chores here and there for pedestrians and shopkeepers. The next thing she checked was that her books were still there. They were articles of her forgotten past. They were written in a language that she knew was not known here.
She did not know exactly where “here” was. She knew little English and did not remember how she ever came to be there. It was a small town of some kind. There weren’t a lot of beggars in this town. They were mostly dragged off by men dressed in blue with bright star badges pinned on their chests. She always managed to escape from them at the last minute. It wasn’t as if the people in the town couldn’t pay up. The people lived here were wealthy and willing to stoop as low as to offer a penny or quarter to a poor little girl wandering the streets.
The girl did not beg for money but she accepted free money without a second thought. For some reason her pride did not let her to beg although she knew that she should. Otherwise there would be no way for her to survive the winter. She looked at the books and traced the cover of one with one of her idle fingers. She would never give those books up, she knew. They were too important. She looked at the tree on the cover one more time before she stuffed both books into her overlarge pockets. She stood up and began walking down the street, listening.
Something was bothering her. It was silent…too silent. The noisy kids were gone. The girl looked up at the sky and frowned again. The sun was too high up for all of the kids in this small town not to be up. They should have been in the corners drinking something that, the girl guessed by their shifty eyes and lousy concealment, they weren’t supposed to be drinking.
She stopped walking and shifted uneasily. Suddenly out of nowhere a bell shrilled. The girl whimpered and covered her ears. She crouched down, a whisper of a memory tugging in the back of her mind. It told her to be afraid and so she was. She struggled to hold back a scream. A few minutes after the bell had stopped sounding, she looked up. Seeing nothing she cautiously stood up straight. Before she knew it, curiosity got the better of her and she headed toward the place where the sound had originated.
After a few seconds of searching, she pinpointed the sound to a street. She could not pinpoint it any farther. Just when she was about to abandon her curiosity for a lost cause, the bell rang again. The girl could not hold back a scream this time around. She cowered and the memory came back slightly stronger. She thought she remembered spiked boots when the ringing stopped and the memory faded once more. All was silent.
The girl looked up. She had pinpointed the source. It was a big long building on the other corner of the street. She headed towards it. When she reached it she decided to take a peak. She looked through a darkened window. There were kids of about the same age, maybe thirteen summers, seated in rows. At the front of the room was one adult seated at a desk much larger than the others. He had red hair cropped so short that it looked like peach fuzz. He was looking down a long list, calling out words, names the girl realized. Each kid said something back. Once two students said something back at the same time and the whole class laughed. A couple of times, the man would call out a name and there would be no answer.
Finally the man finished and he stood up. He said something and the kids laughed. He shot a glance at the window.
The girl gasped and started to run. She didn’t stop until she had reached her mother tree. There she lay in her shelter, trying to breathe quietly. She knew she wouldn’t get any work done if she lazed around. She needed the money.
She forced herself to get up and she headed toward a shop owned by an elderly man that always accepted her work.
A few minutes later she was back under the tree, desperate. The elderly man had looked at her and pointed an angry finger out the door, yelling something that she didn’t understand. She had fled, not knowing what else she could do. She did not know what she had done wrong. Then she had gone to every other store that usually accepted her work to find that none wanted her help. The streets were all bear of people as well.
A few had seen her look of desperation because they had given her some coins and said a word that she was now becoming very familiar with. It sounded something like “skool.” She didn’t know what to do. She had planned to use what little money she had saved to buy a coat to survive the winter. She had also been hoping that if she had enough money left over, she would be able to buy some regular clothes. The ones she had were filled with a black powder that always surfaced up faint memories of fear and pain that she did not want to examine. She also felt an increasing need to buy a knife.
The girl did not examine this desire too closely. The only thing she knew was that she felt naked without one. That was enough for her.
The girl sighed, a haunted look on her face as she counted her coins. She thought she had enough for a knife and food if she kept her rations small. She got up and, with her coins, walked down a couple of streets until she came to a small shop that displayed all types of knives at its window. She walked in.
Ten minutes later she walked out of the store with a smile on her face, two knives held skillfully in her hands, leaving behind a very badly shaken shopkeeper.