By the time twilight came, she had managed to calm her mind and racing thoughts enough to really think again. She’d gone over it in her mind. The man had tried to forcefully mate with her… rape. She shuddered thinking about what could have happened, glad her imagination really had no true concept of what that might be. Among her people, males never did such things. In fact, the few instances of rape that had occurred in her people’s history had been of a female raping a male. During the elogium, the time when an Ocampan woman felt a strong need to mate and produce a child, a woman’s physical strength, already usually significantly superior to a male’s, was heightened further, as were her emotions. In rare cases, when the woman desired a mate who did not return her feelings, she would force herself on him. The punishment for that was that the woman would never see her child after it was born and would be kept in confinement for the rest of her life. There was little crime among her people. The occasional theft or rare instance of fighting were the only crimes that happened with any regularity. Once, two generations ago, there had apparently been a murder, though Kes didn’t know any details about it. In any case, the point was, that she was coming to the conclusion that her own people were remarkably kind by comparison to the people she’d found here on the surface. And that was sad, but there was nothing she could do to change her situation, no choice left to her, nothing she could see at least. She couldn’t stay here… so she’d have to go home. Maybe… maybe she could even find someone… not Tae of course, but… maybe she could find someone else? It made her feel cold inside and bereft to think about it… to think that Tae might… shun her, when she found out… Before, she hadn’t even allowed herself to think of that possibility… but now…

The trouble was, of course, before she could even really consider that, she’d have to get home first, and she didn’t really know precisely which way to go to find her way back. She was turned around in the city, which looked different during twilight than during the day. And besides that, retracing the way she’d come, if she could do it, might be dangerous. Better to keep to the alleyways and shadows. Once she got out of the city, she would have the position of the mountain cliffs in relation to the city to give her the general direction from which she’d come. Once she was out of the city and on her way, she would just have to find familiar landmarks that she’d walked by on her way here, which she was confident she’d be able to do. The only problem was retrieving her supplies. She began to formulate a plan for that though – she’d make her way out of the city by the safest way that she could find, then come back around and enter the city the way she had the first time, bypassing the interior public areas and streets as much as possible. No one had seen her entering the city the first time, they wouldn’t a second. She could collect her supplies and leave. It would be a risk of course, but one she had no choice but to take – without those supplies, the desert would mean certain death for her.