The blonde woman allowed her head to be turned by the chin quiet easily (literally no resistance in her relaxed muscles), and her eyes remained blank as he spoke to her face. She stared into his rather intense emerald eyes, the thick locks of brown hair temporarily shifted to the back of his head, and she couldn't help but feel that his face seemed rather... haunted. She had never really seen someone hold a state of feeling or emotion as actual features, but if such a thing could ever be, this man seemed to have it. Maybe it was the deep setting of his eyes or the sort of drawn look that he claimed, but that was how she felt it. Before giving her a chance to speak, he started pulling -not away from her, but rather dragging her along as well- away from all of the commotion. She found herself taking only a few steps before her heels dug into the snow, the back of her neck suddenly stiff and unforgiving to the push of his shoulder.<br/><br/>"I will leave when everyone leaves." There was no more emotion in that statement than there had been in any of her vocalizations. There was no sense of nobility or self-righteousness, no passion or even a rise and fall of casual emphasis. It was simply a statement of fact. Her knees locked, as though to lend a sense of finality to the statement. He told her to hurry, and she heard a difference in the tone; it was as though half of his voice were coming through a barely-working radio. A flicker of curiosity rose in her chest, but she had no time.<br/><br/>Viktor turned to her with his response, and she mentally shrugged. Good. If "we" included everyone. The leader of the group of hunters promptly turned around and lifted the slip of a child as though she weighed no more than a bundle of feathers -Liliana wasn't sure that she did- and the hunters tailed him as though drawn to him by a magnet. Her gaze shifted to the giant man to make sure that he was on his way out as well, but what she saw was Dziecko being hastily shoved into her grasp by a surprisingly gently, although massive hand. She instinctively accepted and cradled the little beast as he scrambled desperately into her jacket, burrowing deep into the folds and forming a warm and slightly trembling ball of bristles against her stomach. Her face turned up to say something to the behemoth, but she had no chance before she, too, was airborn: lifted as easily as the child.<br/><br/>For the first time, emotion showed on her face. Her eyes, usually a murky teal, suddenly adopted a very bright color and more resembled the shallows of the ancient Bahamas as they widened, thick eyelashes plastered against her pale skin for a second. Her mouth parted in surprise rather than speech, giving her a surprisingly innocent cast to her face. Her hood rocked back onto her shoulders with the sudden and totally unpredicted movement and her short mop of hair tousled in the wind. The surprise was mild at best, as though her face were not accustomed to such movement was was unable to show more, and there was decided hint of "flustered" in there somewhere.<br/><br/>Her back lay in a half-supine position in the crook of the giant's elbow, her legs curled up beneath her against the wide expanse of his inner forearm. Her fingers immediately latched onto the first thing that they could, in this case being a bit of uncured and old dog-hide fur, and sunk into it with a strength she had not been aware they possessed. She had traveled on something that was not her own two feet only a handful of times in her life, and more than half of those times had been on the back of a tortoise; a slow, steady and almost gliding movement through which no gait was even really detectable. This... this was not that. This was a man in a dead haul driven by fear, who gave no thought to the grace of his movements on the best of days. In her head, she repeated over and over again to get a grip, to keep her cool, to relax her muscles or even to just<span style="font-style: italic">breathe</span>, but her body refused to listen.<br/><br/>He spoke, asking for guidance. Something about that brought her back. There was something that she needed to accomplish. There was no time for her be... whatever she was being. Honestly, she could barely remember what being stuck in this state of emotion really was. With a single deep, cleansing breath, her face relaxed into its normal state of unreadable emptiness, her heart slowing to a more normal rate and her lungs evening out. She could just shout for him to follow the hunters, but she knew even without looking that he would pass them in a few seconds; they may have all been driven by the same instinctual fear, but they did not have his muscular legs. With a pulse of clarity, she lifted herself from her curled position and into one that was more akin to kneeling, one hand releasing the old dog fur and latching onto a bit of fresh bear fur by his neck in the space of one of his massive paces. She was able to lean upward, her body still pressed against her new transporter, so that she was much closer to his ear.<br/><br/>"Bear left past the tree with two trunks," she said clearly, her monotone voice raising to be heard over the whistling of the wind and the thudding of his huge feet. There was a sort of path to follow, which lead back to the entrance to the Moscow underbelly. They were likely to run into the harvesters if they headed that way, and if not them then<span style="font-style: italic">someone</span>. Even if no one was around to add firepower, eventually they would come to a well-guarded entrance of the underground city... whether the men that guarded it would deign to help was anyone's guess, but if they couldn't see them then they definitely wouldn't help.<br/><br/>In the back of her mind, Liliana wondered why every single decision she made was between "bad" and "worse".