Kayin was roused from her uneasy sleep by the plastic rustling of the tarp they used to keep away the bugs. Groggy and disoriented, she took some time to reorganize her thoughts before gingerly moving aside the flap of her tent—it looked like someone was getting ready to go out.
Though she had been informally involved with the Resistance for maybe three or four years, she hadn’t been a sanctioned member until just recently, and even newer was the housing setup in which she shared a room with three women her age. She had been very much on edge about it, and requested that each night they all reciprocate her goodnight wish to them, because you didn’t really hurt someone whom you’d said goodnight to just moments earlier, did you? Either way it had made her feel better about the arrangement.
Phoebe—discernible in the dimly-lit room by the red color of her hair—was leaving already, so Kayin assumed it was earlier in the morning than she wanted to be up. Phoebe had a distressing habit of leaving the base early and coming back late, sometimes after everyone else was asleep. Kayin herself stayed up until everyone was accounted for and she had wished them goodnight. It was exhausting, but necessary, since more exhausting still were nighttime delusions that the missing person was standing just beside her, ready to drive a knife into its target.
Either way Kayin wasn’t planning to go anywhere just yet. She knew it would only make her day worse if she didn’t go out now, but it was of little consequence to her at the moment. She would wait it out and see if anyone needed her for something; they knew where to find her. Her role was usually helping out with odd jobs maintaining the base, or on a rare day when things were bad and Wendy was preoccupied healing people in her clinic, Kayin’s strange half-manual, half-Super branch of first aid was called upon on the surface where battles often raged.
Otherwise she spent her days passively, writing strings of words on any available surface in her small dwelling, or taking on the risky job of scavenging for spare parts or plants above ground if she was feeling exceptionally gung-ho. She usually worked alone, which was fine with her, though she sometimes felt like there was some duty she was not living up to, seeing everyone else with battle buddies, establishing connections and bartering.
Things were alright the way they were currently. Kayin took a ballpoint from the gym bag that contained her few possessions and sent faint blue writing down her thigh to pass the time.
"well, you
ripped all the flowers from my garden
and salted the soil
i’ve got my green coffins—
now i’m just leaving"