It unnerves her that she might care for anyone. Anything. Caring means getting hurt. Something that has become more of a habit lately than she’d like to admit. She’d cared about the Falls, had slowly grown to like it, maybe almost even love it. Only to have it snatched from her. She cared about Kiada, would protect that girl with her life as she has done with Bathsheba as well. Since when would she give her own life for someone else’s? Since when had she accepted that her own life was something to be given now? No longer capable of immortality, of using the lives of others to sustain her own. Yet how had she turned to the other side of that coin? Willing to give her life to sustain someone else’s.

Well, willing is an overstatement. But still. She would do it, kicking and screaming. But she would do it.

“In the forest?” she asks, a little confused. “Is your mother not in the Basin?” She thought that’s where the girl is from, though she wasn’t entirely sure she was right. It never really crossed her mind that maybe her mother dumped her there, or maybe it was only her father now. That maybe something bad had happened to Sheba’s mom and Syrena was being an insensitive ass. But then again, that would be more like Syrena, and less unnevering to everyone involved. Syrena was an insensitive ass, though not on purpose, but just because some things never even crossed her mind.

The girl goes on to say she got lost in the forest, and Syrena can do nothing for a moment but stare into the forest. It’s a place she does not go, not farther than the outskirts where the trees are still thin enough to let light through. From here, the forest doesn’t look like much, but Syrena knows its an easy place to get lost. She nods toward the edge of the forest, encouraging Sheba further out – further away.

The girl, for her part, admits to missing Syrena. It stops Syrena in her tracks for a moment, that she might be missed. She was nothing here, no one. How could anyone miss her? And in truth, she cannot say she missed the girl, because she has never really missed anyone. No one has ever been in her life long enough for her to miss, and she’s always been the love-em and leave-em type until recently. “I’m glad you are safe now. I’ll make sure you get home.” Because it’s not like she was going to just up and leave the girl here.