It was an interesting time to be on Oed V, that was for certain. There were so many people here that it made some things more difficult while others were a lot easier.

Moving through the Plaza Exchange, her stomach rumbled. It had been all day and it was getting harder to ignore. At the moment, however, her attention was on her subject and said subject was moving faster than she could through the crowd. In a moment of sheer insanity she had thought about calling out to him, but her own words all those years ago rang in her head. ‘I hate you. Leave me alone and never talk to me again.’ And he never had. To be fair, she had made that rather impossible given he wouldn’t have known where to find her, or how, but now her regrets were numerous and included pushing away the last person who had still believed in her.

He turned a corner and when she hurried to catch up, it was too late. Peering around said corner, he was gone. She wanted to cry but shoved those feelings down as far as she could. Sadness wouldn’t help her out of her own mess and right now she had three days until she found herself losing her last bit of freedom.

Determined to change things, she moved back through to the other side of the Exchange, where things were a bit seedier and where she might be able to get away with her next plan. It was stupid, this much she knew, but what other choice did she have? She had no home and she wouldn’t be able to stay on this colony as a resident if she didn’t figure this all out. A part of her wanted to believe he would help (he was good like that), but the rest of her was far too skeptical to trust an emotional whim from the past.

She almost had enough to pay the fine, but she needed a little more. There wasn’t enough time to earn it legitimately and she had lost her job a week and a half ago.

Reaching out her hand as nonchalantly as she could, her fingers gripped the credit chip she had seen the man slip into his pocket. Stupid. Didn’t he know this was not a good place to be flaunting money around? Suddenly he turned and his hand grabbed her wrist hard. “Oh no you don’t!”

She cried out, but thankfully he grabbed her left wrist and she was right handed. She threw a punch and knocked him on his ass and then took off. People around them all watched the scene with interest but no one seemed to do much at the moment. “Stop her! Thief!” the tourist called out.

But she kept running until an arm shot out from the side and caught her. More accurately she ran into said arm and found herself falling onto her back, the breath knocked out of her. The credit chip fell out of her hand onto the ground as she found the wind knocked out of her and her vision going fuzzy. Her dyed strawberry blond hair partially obscured her face and she didn’t even have the energy to move it. Her right hand moved instinctively to her belly which was rather obviously swollen: she was pregnant. Quite pregnant.

~A Thief