She’d treat this hunt as a game, River decided. She knew the lie for what it was, but if she focused memories of childhood, the soft thump-thump of her brother’s bare creeping feet drowned out the heavy rhythm of her heart. Without entirely realizing what she was doing, her boots began to stomp out the cadence as she left building A. Clomp. Clomp clomp. She beat out the sound of the memory-feet with her own heels.
River was listening. There were too many people here, a tangle of voices and wants and fears, and she was having difficulty picking up Simon's thread among the sea of tangled strings. She let instinct float her along like a tide, following snippets of familiarity where she found them and otherwise just chasing her feelings. When she rounded past a building and hit the area with the chessboard, she looked a bit like a wild thing; hair escaped from a ponytail, skirt billowing around her like a kite. Then she caught sight of the stranger and stopped; River drew to a halt, head cocked slightly to the left, and promptly forgot how to smile. Her eyebrows drew together.
“How can you play that way?" She let the question hang for a second before she followed up with a perplexed observation. "The left hand already knows what the right one is thinking.”