Where next?<span style="font-style: italic">What</span>next?  Santi had no idea... no idea about<span style="font-style: italic">anything.</span><br/><br/>She stared at herself in the mirror, gazing into those dark green eyes of hers.  Her black hair was as silky as always... there didn't seem to be any of Tim's stomach fluids left on it, as though the nanobots inside her could even clean her hair.  Hell, she didn't even look tired.<br/><br/>The life she'd gotten used to on the streets, and with her friends in that derelict building... living off the refuse or charity of others, or off the sale of her body... that was over.  She had been happy enough, even though she'd feared that someday those responsible for her nine missing years --- the ones responsible for putting these<span style="font-style: italic">things</span>inside her --- would find her.<br/><br/>And they had, as she had known they would.  Even though they had found her because they'd been tracking Tim, they would have found her, too, eventually.<br/><br/>She turned away from the mirror.  She was shaking a little as she headed for the shower, and turned it on.  She turned it up, hot, too hot, but she didn't care.  She stepped into water that was hot enough to scald her, and it did, and yet didn't; she felt stinging pain, but that was what she liked.<br/><br/>Pain.  She enjoyed pain.  That, too, was part of what they had done to her... but it was who she<span style="font-style: italic">was.</span>Who she had become.  She would never be able to get rid of the<span style="font-style: italic">things</span>inside her, so she had to learn to live with them... particularly now that she knew what they were.<br/><br/>That they would continue looking for her was<span style="font-style: italic">also </span>something she would have to learn to live with.  Something she would have to accept.  To deal with.  She would have to always be looking over her shoulder; no matter how far she ran, she doubted she would ever feel truly safe again.<br/><br/>She wouldn't feel safe until they stopped looking for her, and they never would, and there was nothing she could do to<span style="font-style: italic">make </span>them stop.  Nothing at all...<br/><br/>She found herself standing in the shower, her head bowed, quietly crying as scalding hot water coursed down her bare body, burning her and yet not.<br/><br/>She just wanted to be free... and Sam, mysterious though he was, seemed to be the only hope for that.