She blinked hard to clear her eyes of tears.  So stupid.  She needed to be able to see.  Any clue.  Any at all, to see a trap.  Crying was the worst thing she could do.

Yeah, better stay alert.

One foot in front of the other.

She stopped.  Her feet refused to go any further.  Trembling, she looked around.

Are your trap senses tingling?

…I just realized that these circumstances can absolutely qualify as a trigger event. For all we know, Hana might have just developed a power that is likely to be accidentally activated in this Interlude.

She might become the savior of the remainder of her village. Not that it’d bring the adults back to life (unless her powerset turns out to include resurrection, I guess), but still.

If she took one more step, she knew, she was going to die.

The thing that made me realize the above was the thought “What if she actually does have that sense?”

So, uh, what if she actually does have that sense?

There was no rationale for it, no reason or clue.  This patch of forest was no different from the rest.  A bed of red-brown needles underfoot, shrubs and trees pressing in around her.

But she knew.  Whether she took a step forward, to her right or left, she would be stepping into a trap.

I wonder if this power only works on traps or if it’s more like what Dinah has, but passive and less specific. A sense that detects outcomes where she dies? Or more usefully, where she gets hurt?

A hole like the one that caught Kovan, or perhaps an explosive device, like the one that took Ashti.  At least she’d gone quickly.

So that’s what happened to the first kid… Rest in peace.

Anyway, let’s move on from the pine facts, or we’ll be here until tree A.M.

She clutched the front of her dress, balling the fabric up in hands that were still covered in dirt and scrapes from her efforts to dig Kovan free.  One foot in front of the other.

And we’re back to the present.

Hana is currently being used as practically a minesweeping rod.

Every single one of her senses was on edge.  She was hyperaware of the rustle of dirt underfoot, the scrape of pine needles against the fabric of her dress.  She could feel the warmth of the sun heating her skin when she stepped into a spot where the light filtered through the pine trees.

Hm. Again the needles, and they’re now specifically pine needles. I think it’s time to check if I was off the mark about where pines can be found.

Oh yeah, I was completely wrong about that. Well… at least we know this chapter takes place in the northern hemisphere, I guess? Really narrows it down.

They had tried for a long time to dig the boy’s leg free, knowing as they uncovered more and more of his pierced leg, saw the injuries and the quantity of blood, that he wasn’t going to be able to walk very far.

Hm. Seems like the soldiers are more patient than I thought.

It was hopeless, they knew, but Kovan was someone they had gone to school with.  Someone they had seen every day.

Another victim, but this time to their own petards.

A soldier had put an end to their efforts with a bullet through Kovan’s head, making Kovan the second of the children to die.

Ahh, there we go. Rest in peace.

Hana was picked to go next.  To test the path.

Well, shit. Sucks for her.

Her eyes scanned the forest floor, but she had no idea what to look for.  A hump of earth?  Twine?  A dense patch of dry, brown needles?  She took another step forward, waited for disaster.  When it didn’t come, she stepped forward again, paused.

Better not pause for too long.

Only a short while ago, she had watched from a distance as Kovan, the fat older boy that had once called her names, stepped forward and had his leg fall into a hole.

Ah, shit. Lemme guess, the soldiers thought it’d be a waste of time to bother helping him get it out, and shot him instead?

He’d screamed, and when Hana and the rest of the children had rushed forward to try and lift him out, they had only increased the volume of his shouts and the ferocity of his thrashing.  With the Turkish soldiers watching silently behind them, Hana and the others had used their hands to scrape at the hard, rocky earth, revealing the wooden stakes that were lodged in the sides of the hole.

…? Some kind of animal trap?

Each was set in the earth so they pointed downward at an angle, with some at the bottom to pierce his foot.  Supple, the wood had bent enough to let the leg fall down deep into the hole, but attempts to raise Kovan had only pulled his leg and foot up into waiting wooden points.

Oww.

Maybe it’s not an animal trap, but a trap set out against incoming soldiers?

It was, she knew, one of the traps that had been placed by her village’s hunters or by the guerrilla fighters that defended their village.

Yeah.

They were all over, set throughout the woods, around her village, near roads and other important places.  She had overheard one of the fighters describing this very trap to her father.  She had been told, over and over, that she wasn’t to play in the woods for much this reason, that if she had to travel into the woods for any reason, she needed an adult to guide her.  The full reality of it hadn’t registered until she saw what had happened to Kovan.

She needed an adult who knew where the traps were. The soldiers didn’t.

She hurried to take another step forward and flinched as a twig broke underfoot.  The smallest of whimpers escaped through her lips.

When the enemy soldiers had found her in the cellar, dragged her into a group with the nine other children of her village, she’d known that her parents were already dead or dying.

😥

As the soldiers had marched them through the village and into the woods, she’d stared hard at the ground, tears streaming down her cheeks, unwilling to look at the blood, the bodies, that littered her hometown.  People who she had seen every day of her life.

Rest in peace.

Also, a thing I probably should’ve mentioned a couple posts ago: There is the possibility of Hana’s people being Kurdish, but it seems odd for me that she wouldn’t be fluent in Turkish then, unless her part of Kurdistan overlaps with a different country than Turkey.

She had been hidden in the cellar beside her house.  She had heard the screams and gunfire.  Too much gunfire, considering how few working guns the men and women of her village had.

😦

…maybe the A-Team showed up.

Guns and bullets were too expensive when you lived off your garden and what you could hunt, and a trip to the nearest city to buy such things was dangerous.  What they had were the leftovers, the handful of weapons taken off enemies by the guerilla fighters and left behind or traded in barter when they passed through the village for supplies and medical care.

Makes sense. At least it’s better than nothing.

Those who had the guns lacked the skill or training to use them.  The fighters were supposed to defend them against people like this, stop them from getting this far.

Evidently, they failed.

<Walk!> the soldier barked in Turkish.  He jammed his gun between her shoulderblades, hard. 

…

I have a feeling we’re getting curveballed.

He was twice as tall as her, far stronger than her, so there could be no fighting or resisting even if he wasn’t armed.  She stumbled forward into the shrubbery and trees, and branches scraped against her forearms and face.

So is this a Turkish soldier in the U.S., or is “she” in Turkey? Or something in-between?

One foot in front of the other, Hana told herself.

Hana. Nice name. Have we heard it before in this story? I don’t think so.

Her feet were like lead weights as she trudged forward.  The needles on the trees and shrubbery scraped against her skin.  Even the twigs were coarse, almost thorny, catching on her dress and socks, biting through the cloth to scrape her skin and stab at her shoeless feet.

This doesn’t sound like what I’d imagine Turkey to be like, but I’ve never actually been there, so what do I know.

Well, I do know trees with needles are more typically found in colder climates. Y’know, like the one I live it.

<Faster!> the soldier threatened.  He said something else, longer and more complicated, but Hana’s Turkish wasn’t good enough to make it out.

She’s at least somewhat competent in Turkish, but not fluent. Turkish ancestry but raised in the U.S., maybe?

She looked over her shoulder and saw the man back the way she’d come.  He made his meaning explicitly clear by waving his gun toward the other children, who were corralled in the midst of a half dozen other soldiers.  If she didn’t move faster, someone else would pay for it.

…damn.

Besides the obvious meaning here – that there are at least seven of these soldiers and at least three victims, including Hana (probably more) – “other children” tells me that Hana views herself as a child too.

Seven years had given her village false confidence, let them believe that they were far enough away, secluded enough in the valley and forest, that they could escape the worst fighting of the ongoing war.  That illusion had been shattered just hours ago.

Ahh. Well, we’re definitely not in the U.S., then. I feel like Taylor would’ve mentioned it if there were an ongoing war in the U.S.

I’m going to guess the Turks are on one side of the war. But where is this village, and who’s on the other side?

I’m not going to assume the world’s conflicts since the 1980′s have remained the same as on Earth-Aleph, by the way.

…huh. Now that I think about it, Parahumans started showing up during the late stages of the Cold War, assuming history is otherwise approximately the same between the universes. I wonder if it caused an incident, due to one of the sides thinking the first parahumans were experiments meant to be weaponized by the other side. If I recall correctly, Scion was at least implied to show up in American waters or saving Americans – I’m curious about Russia’s reaction to that.