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The world - this world - is confusing and strange. She feels like she knows it sometimes, and other times it feels so foreign that she doesn't know if it will ever feel like hers.
Sometimes she thinks about where she came from.
She asked Alex once, the words spilling out of her towards the top of his head, while he frowned over his next move on the chess board. It's the only question he's never answered for her.
So many people here are children, tender and vulnerable and full of playfulness. She wonders if she was a child, once. What did it feel like, she wonders. Did she have kind parents, who fed her sausages and cabbage and brushed her hair and sent her to school every day?
Or were they like Mikhail's parents, doing their best but not around as often as they needed to be.
Who took care of her when she was smaller? Or was she always this size, a grown body with strength far too great to fit inside of it.
She likes The Wizard of Oz the best.
Alex doesn't know that she reads it. She has a copy, bought with American money at a bookshop run by a smiling American woman who called her darling and asked her questions that forced her to lie. Oh, I loved this movie when I was a kid, didn't you?
She'd forced a smile back, only stumbled a little bit over the words and the accent. Да, я тоже - no - Yes, I did.
She holds the book to her chest and it feels like a secret, burning against the inside pocket of her jacket as she walks down the street to the L Corp building.
Alex doesn't find the book.
Not when they fight, not when Eve Tessmacher drags her away, eyes hard and her hand gripping against her forearm tightly, as if Eve could ever grow angry enough to match her strength.
She keeps it under her mattress.
She reads it all the way through, as fast as she possibly can. This book is a secret, she can feel it in her bones. It's a secret the way that - sometimes she just gets these feelings, like her whole chest is filling up. They're warm and happy, and they make her want to laugh. She's allowed to laugh when she's with Mikhail, and sometimes when she's with Alex. But she shouldn't laugh when she's practicing her flying, when she zips past another missile and the air rushes past her face, cold and clear and she feels like she can do anything.
She shouldn't laugh when she's eating chocolate, or when she wins at chess, or when Alex gives her something new to learn, but sometimes she wants to.
Having a secret book feels like that.
It's precious; a book just for her. A book that Kara Danvers wrote about in her journal with such longing, that phrase: there's no place like home.
She stands in her room sometimes and clicks her heels together, just in case. нет места лучше дома.
She doesn't go anywhere.
Her book is a secret the same way that she felt when she re-read the Great Gatsby for the fourth time. She found it, the message Alex had wanted her to see, but a private part of her still felt soft and light and full of wonder at the sparkle of that world.
She knows what Alex would say about this book. She can hear it in his voice, that edge to his tone that always makes her feel just a little bit stupid. Nonsense. Reading that kind of drivel will make you soft.
He'd tell her that it was a metaphor, the Wicked Witch of the West with too much power. He'd tell her that the lion and the scarecrow were idiots, that if they'd been stronger they wouldn't need silly talismans to feel brave and smart.
Even if that's true - and it must be - the story of them feels like a comfort. She wishes that she could have something like that, for when the night feels cold and dark. A silk heart stuffed with sawdust to hold in her hand, to help her feel loved.
Alex gives her a name. He calls her Red Daughter, calls her Linda when she's not wearing her suit.
It sounds strange when she says it to herself, her instinct to land on the first syllable in a way that's not quite right. Leenda. She'll get better. She'll learn it with time.
Alex gives her a name and it feels like something from that story, a gift from the wizard. She has a name and a purpose, now. Maybe that will be enough.
The Red Daughter can fly far away in her suit. She's strong enough to fly all the way to America, by herself.
Somewhere private, alone over the ocean, she lets herself laugh at the joy of it.