Shortly after the fan mail incident, I had my first performance of the month. In the audience, one man was waving frantically, trying to catch my attention more than anyone else there. I glanced up at him, but couldn’t see what, if anything, he was gesturing to. When I timidly stepped forward a step to try to see better, Krim violently pulled back on the chain leash, pressing my collar to the front of my neck and causing me to reel back. I looked to Krim, as perhaps I was missing an instruction while being distracted from the crowd, but he gave no indication of having said or done anything. The man was still in the crowd, but something inside me stopped myself from trying to look again. At the end of the performance, Krim dragged me back inside quicker than usual. Most days I would be led around on stage at the end to be gawked at some more, but today he took me straight back to my room.
Another strange incident followed that, as a younger woman stumbled into my hallway after dark. She was dressed in a semi-formal outfit, but more along the lines of high-class maid than any other type of outfit. When she looked into my room, she frowned. I jumped down from the perch. Her eyes lit up.
“Oh! Perfect. Do you know where the exit is? I seem to have gotten lost. I was running an errand in here but now I can’t find my way back out.”
I stared at her, trying to understand why she thought that the bird freak in the cage would know how to get out, but answered to the best of my ability, “I don’t, uhh, get out much, but when I’m performing they take me down the side of the hallway that you just came from. Then I think it’s the second left, the second right, and then straight down that hallway until you get to the stage door on the left.”
She approached the bars, “Thank you so much! Hopefully that’ll at least get me closer to an exit!” she held out her hand. I stared at it, wondering what she was doing and what type of crazy person outstretched their hand to what was arguably the most deadly creature in the world. I stepped closer to the bars, to look at her hand, then looked at her, perplexed. She looked at her hand, then back to me, then shook her hand in the air a bit, as if reaffirming that she insisted on something. I stretched my wing forward, slowly and carefully so as to not touch her skin on accident, and she delicately tucked a piece of paper into an edge of my feathers so that I could look at it. Then she hurried off, notably in the opposite direction as I had described to her.
I carefully untucked the small piece of paper, ripping it with my teeth a bit in the process, and all it said was, “I can still help you if you need it.”
Smart enough not to keep a piece of paper around that I didn’t want Krim or the owner to see, I crumpled it up and placed it on the floor of the room in a place that could logically be where it landed after someone tossed trash at me. It wouldn’t have been the first time someone had thrown trash at me, so I figured it was at least a semi-reasonable excuse, especially since it would undoubtedly be discovered otherwise. The note was useless to me however, as even if I wanted help at that point, I didn’t know for certain who was offering to help me or how to contact them if I needed help.
Later that same month, one of the workers that helped take care of me accidentally let slip that I was still receiving letters from “John Jones” but that they were being intercepted by Krim. I was confused what was happening. It didn’t make sense for Kairen to still be trying to help me, as he had lost any power that he had had while he was my trainer, and even if the owner hadn’t fired him, just changed his position, he wasn’t close enough to me to help. Yet Kairen was the only person I could think of who ever expressed any interest in helping me, and whoever “John Jones” was seemed to have inside sources.
At my second show of the month, I recognised a face in the audience. One of the front row audience members was the maid who had “gotten lost” before. She smiled and waved at me calmly. I glanced at Krim to see if he was acting any different, but he didn’t seem to notice anything was odd. I performed like normal, but in the middle of the performance, suddenly the woman pulled out some sort of device, looked at Krim, and with a deafening noise he was immediately hunched over. Bodyguards restrained the woman before she could do anything else, and Krim dragged me off stage with him as blood dripped from somewhere on his body.
The next time I saw him was only two hours later. He came to my room solely to show me what had happened. The “bullet” had only managed to bury into a leg very shallowly, and he told me that in mere days he would be fine. In the meantime he was limping, but I made a mental note that even when he had been hit by a “bullet” he had still maintained a firm grasp on the leash and did not stop being wary of me for even a second even while in at least a small amount of shock.
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