She couldn’t quite focus enough to get her scattered thoughts together. She couldn’t even really remember where she had intended to go, if indeed she had intended to go anywhere. All she was sure of was that she had to keep going, keep going, and that she didn’t want to die.

Shelter. She had to find some sort of shelter. Home was…home was nowhere, not now, not while she was weak. Realizing her own choice of words, she made a desperate little noise that was too rusty to be a laugh—it was more of a cackle. She, who so prided herself on never being weak. Brought down by rainwater and a note from the past. How the mighty fall.

It was no use, she realized at last, no use to keep stumbling along in the hopes that she would magically run into the place she was looking for. There was nowhere to go, and maybe that was for the best, maybe this was how it was supposed to end, out here in the rain and hunted down like some wild dying predator from the forest—

A soft hiss in her ear brought her jolting back to the present and her reverie was over, but now that she was conscious of her surroundings again, she realized that it was cold—freezing, even—still raining, and the heat she had been feeling was coming from herself. The fever, for that was what it had to be, was making her lethargic, letting her mind wander while her body did nothing.

And she had to keep moving.

“It’s okay, baby, I’m back,” she rasped to the snake. “Where do we go from here?”

At the moment, what she needed was a miracle. Picking a side street at random, she hurried along it—

And though she’d never know it, she became the “miracle” Kaleb had asked for when she ran almost directly into him. Stumbling backwards with a shocked sound, she stared at him with wild, feverish eyes. Her normally pale skin was so white, contrasted with the hectic colour in her cheeks, that it almost looked like poorly applied face paint.

“What—how—no—”

Her thoughts were scrambled, horrified, echoing no no no he couldn’t see her like this couldn’t see her weak she couldn’t allow it no no no—

If she had had the mental capacity to think outside of the immediate situation, which due to the fever she did not, she would have wondered how on earth she kept getting herself into these situations on this day, which was possibly the worst of her life.

Instead of considering it, she backed away from him a few steps, eyes fixed on him as though he were the wild hunted thing she’d been picturing a few moments ago in her feverish delirium.

“Go away,” she hissed, and then vanished into the closest alleyway she could find, winding among two or three before realizing that her shaking body and delirious mind could take her no further. Sinking into a sitting position in the shadow of a protruding brick wall, she shut her eyes and hoped, childlike, for it all to be gone when she opened them.