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Just around the corner from where Nathan Darrow was fleeing from the long (but conveniently slow) arm of the law, the sidewalk opened up into a plaza, littered with storefronts. Giddy for the first few nights of warm spring weather, ambitious shopkeepers had lined the outsides of their stores with cafe tables and racks of merchandise; one vendor had even set up a ten-gallon machine dispensing free lemonade. Destiny City was bustling in the crush of the waning afternoon, its bright colors muting into dusky shadows that grew bolder as the sun lunged away westward in retreat.

Standing under the red and yellow awning of one particular store, a toy shop, was a teenaged girl named Laney Sutton. Normally a rather animated sort of person, Laney was currently standing tensely in one place, tightly frozen as though she had been pinched down into that spot and was stuck. She had a tendril of wintry hair looped around her finger, and was twisting it anxiously around again and again. It had formed into a slightly greasy strand, which made the whole business of twirling it a little bit easier.

She was staring almost directly downward with a look of focused dismay, and every so often she shifted her weight over to her left foot, and then back to her right again. To say that she was bothered by what she was looking at would have been redundant, at best: it was fairly obvious that she was bothered by what she was looking at. Less obvious was why.

Down at Laney's feet, several animatronic toys had been set up on display in a small holding pen, blocked off by a clear plastic piece of edging. One of the battery-operated toys -- the one Laney was staring at -- was a small, pink pig, covered in fur-like fabric. Every three steps, the pig was supposed to stop, emit two pre-recorded oink!s, and then resume walking. There were animatronic dogs that performed a similar feat, culminating in an impressive flip through the air, but presumably no one expected that sort of agility from livestock. The pig just oinked and walked.

Or it would have walked, except that its travels had taken it up to the plastic boundaries of the pen already. Instead it trudged haplessly forward and into the wall, its large pink nose pressing desperately against the plastic over and over again. The longer Laney watched it, the more the pig's loud oinks sounded like the lonely, plaintive cries of a soul crushed under the weight of futility.

It was unbearable.

After looking around to see if anyone was watching, Laney knelt down and pretended to be retying her shoe. Instead, she reached into the pen, lifted up the pink pig (it oinked, either in gratitude or protest), and set it down again just outside the fence.

It surveyed the open road that lay ahead of it and let out two satisfied oinks. Having said that, the pig set off.

Laney stood up and dusted her hands off on the front of her pants. She felt proud. It was a good moment. Wanting to see the Hamshank Redemption carried out as smoothly as possible, she moved away from the toy store and stood against the wall of the next building, where she could observe the pig's triumphant walk to freedom without making it too obvious.

What was unfortunate for Laney Sutton was that she had never been particularly good at not being obvious. It was only a minute or two of watching the pig walk off into the sunset before she felt overcome with emotion. Laney raised one hand to her forehead in a farewell salute, and sang out with considerable gusto, "BORN FREEEEEEEE -- AS FREE AS THE WIND BLOWS. AS FREE AS THE GRASS GROWS." Luckily, this drew attention to Laney herself, rather than to the runaway pig, and several heads turned in her direction.

"BORN FREE TO FOLLOW YOUR HEART!" she sang on, unabashed.

What was unfortunate for Nathan Darrow, on the other hand, was that a small, battery-operated pig was following its heart directly across the sidewalk, unseen, and that its warning oinks could not be heard above the belting voice of a teenaged girl's singing, or the pounding of his own footfalls as he ran.

"STAY FREE, WHERE NO WALLS DIVI-- " Laney broke off abruptly. While she was, if she allowed herself the confession, just the slightest bit of a ham -- and while she was, furthermore, something of a glutton for the spotlight -- at that moment in time, her attention was captured by the sad, sick crunch of a dying dream of freedom for one small pig.

It was also, a bit more particularly, the sound of a twisting ankle and of a high-speed belly flop into the pavement; Laney observed this with her mouth still gaping open in the middle of the word 'divide,' and with no small amount of horror.

She was not especially good at thinking ahead. Naturally somewhat impulsive and, according to her parents, "flighty," Laney had never really taken into account the possibility that someone might trip over the pig and hurt themselves. She hadn't really thought of anything at all outside of the initial plan, for that matter -- and the thoughtless stupidity of what she'd done made the rest of the lyrics stick in her throat.

Desperate to repair the situation, she shoved through a few people to get to the fallen runner and all but fell to the floor next to him in her rush to assess the damage. "Oh, God," she blurted out, "Are you okay? Are you okay? I'm so sorry! Oh God, I bet your ankle's broken, are you okay?!"

Without waiting for an answer, she looked over to see for herself, half-expecting to find that the boy's broken femur was popping out of his shin (which would be all her fault). Instead, she was distracted by the distant yelling of a very disgruntled man somewhere above her head and still some ways off.

"Somebody stop that boy! Don't let him get away!"

The general downside of being naturally impulsive and flighty was that Laney tended to get herself into a lot of trouble for lack of thinking things through. The upside, however, was that on certain, very rare occasions, she managed to be quick on her feet. It didn't take long for her to puzzle out which boy it was that wasn't supposed to get away, or to decide on a course of action. "Here," she offered a hand to help him to his feet. "Hurry, over this way," and pointed to some of the coffee tables set up outside the nearby Starbucks.

Laney cast her eyes downward at Nathan's shoes, where the splintered metal fragments and wads of fuzz that remained of the dessicated corpse of a pink robot pig were still awkwardly caught on one of his shoelaces. It was a gruesome sight, to be sure -- the blackened skid-marks and gaping tears from the collision and the concrete making the pig's cause of death fairly evident even to the greenest of crime scene investigators. But it wasn't a crime, of course -- Laney would classify this as involuntary manslaughter, if she had to. Or maybe Personcular Manslaughter: like Vehicular Manslaughter without the Vehicle. Well, without the man, either, for that matter: so she amended the charge to Personcular Robopigslaughter and felt satisfied with her classification.

"That's alright, I guess," Laney said as she slid sideways into her chair. She tucked one leg up under herself, ignoring the nagging ghost of her mother's voice (Laney, you're in public! Don't sit like you were raised in a barn). "There's this saying I know: Wouldn't you rather be a left-handed flea, a crab on a slab at the bottom of a tree, a newt on the root of a banyon tree, a fig on a twig in Galilee, than a man who never learned how to be free -- not till the day he dies?"

This was by no means actually a saying. It was actually a set of lyrics from the musical Pippin, but in Laney's mind, there were really two possibilities: one, that Nathan had never seen Pippin and therefore wouldn't know the difference; and two, that he had seen Pippin and therefore, in her opinion, ought to be impressed with how topical her reference was. A win-win situation, as far as casual white lies went. True, maybe he'd take a third option and decide to be thoroughly unimpressed even without knowing the reference, but considering what percentage of her life was spent being mocked because she believed in the true, tragic love between the Phantom and Christine, that kind of reaction from a stranger would really just be the status quo. No point in even giving it much thought.

"He may have died, but he finally escaped. I'll bet he's at peace," she went on.

In contrast to Nathan's bowed head, Laney craned her neck around and scanned their surroundings. It was a lucky thing she wasn't a professional mafia lookout: Laney had the unfortunate distinction of being approximately as subtle (at nearly any pursuit) as nails down a chalkboard. She was obviously either looking for someone -- in this case, Nathan's police officer -- or else attempting an impromptu transformation into a giraffe. It was a bit like sitting down at a coffee table with Inspector Gadget, all sincere effort and not a shred of finesse. Go Go Gadget Low Profile!

After a few long seconds of inspection, however, Laney hunched back downward and leaned over the tabletop, looking conversational. She rested her weight on folded arms, and said in a low voice, "So, hi, I'm Laney. I'm sorry about your foot, no, seriously, I'm really sorry about your foot. Really sorry. I hope you're okay." Then, after a single beat, with no hint that the lack of a segue was odd, "So, how long have you been on the lam?"

She laughed. "Oh, I'm not crazy," Laney reassured him, fiddling inattentively with her watch strap. "Just bored. I mean, weird, sure, I'll grant you that one -- in fact, I'm pretty sure my parents have signed statements in front of a notary public attesting to just how weird their kid is -- but not cuckoo-for-Cocoa-puffs crazy."

For all of that, the accusation still hit a little too close to home. Why can't you be more normal was the near-constant reproof in her parents' eyes, why can't you behave yourself. Laney was pretty sure, without asking, that they had both been disappointed when she hadn't come out of her year-long coma a little mellower than she'd gone into it -- and even though she hadn't woken up from the coma any crazier than she'd been before, they took advantage of the opportunity to put her into counseling anyway. To deal with the trauma, they said. She wondered if, really, she hadn't inconvenienced them most of all by refusing to just stay asleep forever. But that was being maudlin.

"Weird is a choice," she went on, looking at her fingernails and thinking about how she ought to paint them like dominoes sometime. "Crazy isn't. And believe it or not, there are advantages to being weird. Weird's just recreational -- I can give it up any time I want." (Probably an exaggeration.) "Crazy, on the other hand -- " She looked up and grinned. "Well, you'd just about have to be crazy to run from an armed cop."

Laney wasn't a fan of violence, even tazer-violence. She was glad Nate hadn't gotten tazed. "So, what're they chasing you for? Did you, hmmm. Did you shoot a man in Vegas once just to watch him die?"

Laney grinned in response, half relief and half genuine interest in his point of view. She was an outgoing girl, and spent a lot of time wandering around outside, so she'd inherently had a lot of opportunities to meet people so far in life. She hadn't met many like this one, though. Something about the restlessness with which he sat in his seat, or how he spoke about it, nestled under her skin and stuck there. There was something different about a person like this that she felt like she could relate to. Not belonging. It was a feeling she woke up with every morning, and the last anxiety that bled out of her head every night. It was a feeling that made you wander, made you restless, made you run. She could understand that.

"So hi. Have you got a name, Desperado? Do you live around here? Go to school?"

It was always best to start with the basics when meeting new people. Those weren't always the most interesting questions, and the answers about equally dull, but they were fairly easy pitches to hit: softballs lobbed underhand across the plate, as it were. Many people liked starting with questions they didn't have to think too hard about, and that weren't too invasive. Later, you could move on to things that were more interesting, but -- having embarrassed herself too many times with her lack of social graces -- she was attempting to be a bit smoother. She'd seen it work for other people, and it was worth a try -- even if her opening salvo was a bit on the rapid-fire machine-gun end of things.

Cowardice is the last resort of a dying man. Sentiments like that had been spoon-fed to Laney by her parents for as long as she could remember. They'd hoped they would stick, at some point. They hadn't. Instead, what Mom and Dad had gotten was a coward with an especially abundant supply of neuroses -- someone who frantically and frightenedly threw herself into tasks just to not be called a coward, but ended up finding some other way to embarrass her family no matter what.

She'd never been able to get past that mantra. Even now, she found herself ready to blurt out an affirmative response. Familiar dread sat like a heavy dinner in her stomach.

Try new things, she reminded herself gamely. You're turning over a new leaf. Well, maybe saying 'yes' to Nate would've resulted in her trying something new -- petty crime -- but then again, saying 'yes' definitely wasn't something new for her. She forced herself out of her comfort zone a little and -- instead of agreeing right away -- laid down a question of her own.

"I'll go with you sometime," she told the injured boy, "if you can tell me that you actually think it works. Does it make you feel any better? You know, about, like. Life. Or the world. Or anything." She laughed, chalky and empty-sounding. "Actually, I'd just take pretty much anything at this point. Just something different than everybody does every single day. I've just got to get out. Just tell me it'll be awesome."

She imagined her parents' reactions, if she did something like this. Their faces, in her mind, were blank and bland and still, somehow, excruciatingly disapproving. Laney wondered what Nate's parents thought about his troublemaking -- if he had parents, really -- and whether or not he had a better reason than she did for the things he did. Maybe he wouldn't really understand at all. She wondered if she was just wasting his time.

Ah, well. Cowardice was the last resort of a dying man.

"I sure do!" Laney rebounded with enthusiasm. "Should I give you my number? Can I program yours too? I promise not to spam you with phone calls or anything, it's just I just got this phone recently and I want to make it look broken in."

Laney dug in her back pocket and produced a small touch-screen phone that she was still getting the hang of. She'd had it for several months now, with her parents having given it to her as an excuse so that they could fade into the background of her life again. Still, she hadn't managed to figure out many of its functions, and it didn't see much use. The subgroup she'd happily labelled "My Friends!!!" only had one person in it so far.

"Okay," she said, biting down on her thumb, "let me find where my number is. I know it starts with, uhh, 287." She used her other hand to flick through several screens on her phone, backtracking once or twice when this didn't yield the correct result. "Doop de doot doot doop," she narrated her activity helpfully. "Doop. Doot! Aaaand doot. Ta-dahhh. There, okay, you ready? Because I am just going to lay down some mad digits on you, bro." Trying to sound cool was probably a terrible idea on Laney's part, but terrible conversation was pretty much her stock-in-trade. It was about par for the course.