I figured I'd be fine once I left Chicago City lines and make my way from there.

I really didn't know where I was trying to go. Sometimes I wander aimlessly. Sometimes I sleep in an abandoned old church. Sometimes I have to steal to keep clothes on my back.

You do what you have to do to survive.

Of course, some people were nice enough to give old clothes to me. I was given a really nice quilt and a warm sweater by an older woman in a small town just outside of Chicago. She said she recognized my face when I walked by her house the day before. She was a very sweet woman. I saw an ambulance outside her home almost a week later.

I thought of going back to that junkyard as I walked along the dirty back road. I thought of the amount of trouble I would be in with Drift if I went back. I probably scared him when they discovered I was gone.

Cade would be the one who would have an attitude with me about it. He's had an attitude with almost everyone. Even the Bots.

This was one of the moments that I missed them the most.

.....

Something about the alley peaked my curiosity. I'm not exactly sure what it was, but it definitely wasn't the homeless man throwing up in a dumpster.

It was surprisingly cleaner than other alleyways I've been down before in Chicago. It's probably because I was in a town literally on the border of Chicago City lines.

Chicago can be a nasty place to live in if you're not part of the upper class.

When I took the left at the end of the alleyway, I came into another one, only it was like an abandoned dock of some sort and there were garage doors opened all along the building across from the water.

All of them were occupied by homeless people.

I walked by a woman with a boy who looked to be eight, a teenager who looked punk as hell (probably why he's where he is now), and an old man in a grey camping chair, who had an old radio blasting music in a language I don't know.

I look out at a ferry blasting it's horn on the water, taking in the smell of salty air. The sky was a pale grey from the complete coverage of the clouds. Or the smog coming from the ferry. Probably the clouds.

"You lost, kid?"

I looked back at the old man in the chair, who had turned down his music. He just stared at me with a little bit of a crazed look in his eye. "You could say that."

He stared at me for a little bit longer as he leaned forward in his chair. I was starting to get really uncomfortable.

"Wait, I know you." He says, leaning back.

I raised an eyebrow. "You do?"

"Yeah... Yeah, you're that girl from the Chicago fight. And the Hong Kong fight."

I huffed a little. It's like I'm this huge wanted celebrity now. No thanks to the government in this country.

"Lemme guess. You're gonna shout that I'm here. Then the cops are gonna come and I'm gonna have to run again. Just like it always is." I cross my arms, looking down at my shoes, thinking that I had laces to tie when I wasn't even wearing lace up shoes. Just the black wedged velcro-sneakers that I was barely able to sneak out of the shoe store.

"Nah, too much work. 'Sides, them cops don't ever come down here. Mostly why drugs get sold down here with no problem."

"Sounds rough."

"Well, just stay away from them drug lords when they nearby, and ya should be fine."

"I'll keep that in mind."

"So what brought you down this way? You going somewhere particular?"

"If I was, I would be on the road. Not here." I felt my face heat up.

"So yer lost?"

"Not exactly."

He raised an eyebrow, but got up and grabbed a folded up chair. He opened it up, dropped it next to his, brushed it out and sat back down in his own chair, patting the seat of the one he pulled out. "Come on. Sit. Talk to me."

I was hesitant before sitting down, pulling the strap of my tattered blue messenger bag over my head and setting it down on the ground next to me. "This is how this works, I ask you a question, you get to ask me a question."

He shrugs. "Whatever you say, chica. You first."

I sigh slightly. "Why are you really not calling the cops?"

He chuckled slightly. "Little girl, when you get my age, you'll learn that some things aren't worth making a big deal about. Now it's my turn. What are you doing out here by yourself?"

"What do you mean?"

"That's two questions, little girl. So I get to ask another after this. And what I mean is that you are usually seen with one of your Transformers friends. Now you're out here. Alone."

I looked down at my dirty hands, fiddling with the pendant on my necklace. "I felt that if we split up, we'd be safer from the TRF. Our human friend and both of my caretakers said no. They said that we have to stay together. So, a few months ago, in the middle of the night, I wrote a note and left. I haven't seen or heard from them since."

"You want to keep them safe."

"More than anything. You humans have already killed off so many of my kind."

We fell silent, the radio and the punk kid next to us banging around being the only sound.

"Maybe you should go back." The old man says finally.

"Why?"

"Well... Little girl, besides all the hell that's raining down on you, you still have the ones that care about you. They still watch over you."

I shook my head. "I can't do that now. It's too late."

"If it was too late, you would be an orphan."

He doesn't realize that sometimes I feel like I am an orphan. Daddy's been gone for almost 3 years now. He hasn't contacted us at all.

Sometimes...

Sometimes I think he's dead.

The old man just sighed. "If ya ain't gonna go back, ya definitely plan on going back on the road soon. Go ahead and look around. Take what ya need 'er want. I got too much shit here an'way."

I nodded and stood up, pulling the strap of my bag over my head and adjusting it on my shoulder as I slowly walked around the small storage area, seeing what I could.

I grabbed a plastic bag and stuffed a headband, a bunch of quarters and a half a bottle of detergent in it. I was about to walk out when a white box caught my eye. I reached over and grabbed it, looking at it closely before opening the box.

Oh, yes! An iPod!

"Hey, you use this MP3 player at all?" I ask, holding up the box.

He turned around in his chair to look. "Nah. I found it on the street one day. Couldn't get past the password. You can take it if ya want."

I smirked and stuffed it in my messenger bag. I did another sweep, finding a pair of fake glasses with black and blue frames.

Then I decided that it was time for me to move on again.

I thanked the old man for the talk and the stuff, and started on my way for the service station on the other side of town, figuring I needed to make a stop to clean up my clothes (and myself).

I never learned the man's name.

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