Kara was oblivious to the fact that her own uniform, which consisted of a lot of bare leg, a red cape, and near-thigh high boots, was attracting a lot of attention. If she had known, it was very likely that she wouldn't have cared. The suit was all that she had, her only piece of home, a soothing reminder of her family. Fear of her mother scolding her for wearing it when she wasn't yet eighteen and therefore not ready for it, had passed into the very back of her mind. Her mother wasn't here. Neither was her father. She was alone and if the man who claimed to be her cousin was telling the truth, her mother was never going to see her wearing the family's crest.
She spent a week exploring a world that was still just as strange to her as it had been when she'd crawled out of her pod in Siberia. For seven days, she did not sleep, ate very little and found that she wasn't hungry but still energized, as if she had been eating three meals every day. She was not tired and didn't dare try to go to sleep. First of all, she didn't have a place to sleep, and second, she didn't trust closing her eyes long enough for somebody to notice her and get too close. Not only were the people strange to her, but the animals as well, and the plants and the customs. Everything.
If Kara had not been raised by her father to be brave, to stand tall and to always fight back, she would have broken down in tears days ago. Probably when a middle aged man whistled at her, leered disgustingly and shouted out to her, words that she now understood and hated him for saying. She had nearly hit him, but had thought better of it once she remembered the strength that would be behind that punch. Enough to knock his head off.
In this weather, Kara should have been shivering, and she knew that she should have been shivering. But she wasn't. She wasn't the least bit discomforted by the cold. It didn't bother her at all. The wind was almost nice, comforting.
Just as he was walking out the door, she was stepping out from behind a bush that was nearly bare in the winter, dead maybe, or just asleep. Her blue eyes flashed in his direction. A road separated them and there were other people, but he had been the one to catch her attention. He was the one she was looking at.