The night settled around her and seeped slowly into her pores. She didn't often come to this area of the City; there was nothing here for her - or so she thought. But as she perched and listened to the sounds of the nighttime streets, she began to wonder if that was true.
Life with Peter had been quiet and unassuming. She'd never lived in a place like this before. So often, living meant engaging in the near constant work to subsist - only the residence of her creation excepted. When she was first brought into existence, all her needs had been met. After her first hibernation, she woke to a world - Earth - that had no easy answers. There were priests, of course, who saw to what physical needs she had, but it was clear, even as she went about her duties, that the service came at a cost, that the clothes she wore and the food she ate while awake was forcibly pulled from the ground. It was a shock.
In die Festung, again she found the basic needs met by those around her - but still felt the cost of it. Then there was here - and it seemed that there was no cost at all. She'd been luxuriating in the simplicity of it for months.
But here, in the darkness of one of the darker parts of the City, she wondered if she simply hadn't seen what was necessary for others to do to survive. She still wasn't certain what she was seeing, here, but she was eager to learn.
Across the street, a man came into her peripheral vision. She turned her head to follow him as he rounded the corner of the street running toward her, and turned to walk parallel to the street with her wall.
"Hello," she said, not loudly, but enough to have made it to him, enough, if he were listening, to think it might have been for him.