[I]I figured that you were a soldier, yes,[/I] Kay thought, still feeling less than confident that she could trust Enn not to present a danger to Eighfour, not with the kind of information he had just requested of her. Judging from his equipment and behavior, it was quite evident even to a civilian with virtually no experience with militaries to realize that he was a soldier, this was true, but almost everything else Enn told her was hardly something she could have – or should have, for that matter – been able to determine just by looking at him or listening to the few sentences he had spoken until then. For that matter, was he really front line infantry? His comment on even basic troops having the equipment to make a difference if they saw their chance to do so explained his some of his gear, including that with the ability to process thermal imaging, but she still was not sure. His gun did not seem like the type that would fare well in the thick of battle; indeed, just by looking at it, it seemed more suited for mid- to long-range engagements than anything. She could be wrong, though; she would have to take it apart and examine how it worked in order to be sure.
	But even beyond that – while it was indeed quite evident that this man, for all the intriguing abilities granted to him by his equipment, was not an air force – she had had no way of knowing that he did not command any forces... not beyond the deductions she had already made in regards to his loneliness, at least. And even if he did not command the “Anderekian” forces, [I]someone[/I] almost certainly did, and that commander usually acted upon intelligence gathered by “common soldiers”. Reporting strengths and weaknesses of the enemy to one’s commanders was certainly a way to make a kind of difference, as she saw it... She did not think this guy was in a position to do that, which was one of the reasons she had been so indulgent in chatting with him up to that point, but she did not want to divulge potentially dangerous information on her faction to a stranger based solely on gut feeling.
	That said... as much as the part of her that simply wanted to protect Eighfour wanted to implicitly distrust everything Enn told her now, it was pretty hard to convince herself that he was lying, or even just omitting details such as him intending to report what she told him to his superiors. The way he spoke seemed frantic, almost desperate, and it struck her as slightly odd how hard he was trying to explain that he was just a pawn. A “gun”, whose purpose was apparently solely to follow orders, and whose orders consisted primarily of instructions to kill others.
	Still, being a professional killer was hardly something that made her trust him more...

	But then he kept talking, moving on from trying to describe his own role in the Anderekian military to explain his current situation, which appeared [I]not[/I] to be in the Anderekian military... or any military, for that matter. Indeed, from the sound of it one of her guesses from before had been spot on: he was indeed a deserter, which apparently also made him factionless by the rules of his own – or old, rather – faction. The circumstances under which he had become so, however, were something that were quite simply beyond her to deduce on her own, at least with what she had known beforehand. His side lost, overwhelmed by the “Trenians”, and everyone was killed... and, since he realized that he had no chance of surviving, much less making any significant difference in the battle, if he stayed and kept fighting, Enn had fled. He had become a deserter and a factionless only because doing so was the only way for him to survive.
	Kay’s posture relaxed some during his eager explanation, and her expression softened from one of steadfast dismissal to one of sympathy and pity. It was one thing to not want to put your faction at risk, another to follow orders blindly, and a third, completely different thing to throw one’s life away for practically no potential gain for anyone. If what he said about how thoroughly they had been defeated by the Trenians was true – and from what she had seen last night through her drone, it may very well have been; the bit about extraordinary anti-air certainly seemed right – then she did not think that she, nor anyone, should fault him for leaving the battle.
	Besides, what did she know about how it actually felt to be in that position, anyway? To be in the thick of things, with gunfire, explosions and the screams of the dying and wounded everywhere around you? To point your gun at someone and pull the trigger, only to put a bullet in another person rather than a soulless target? She had never actually been in combat, and did not think she could even begin to imagine what it could feel like. Actually, it was easy for her to decide that she wanted to be brave and defiant before a threat to her faction, but would she have been so if Enn had actually made an effort to break her? Would she still have had the courage if he had shot her in the leg, or just hit her with the butt of his rifle? Or even just shot next to her, or aimed at her with an explicitly stated intention of shooting? Making decisions like that was easy as long as one felt relatively safe and calm, but how much pain and stress would it really take for her to break?

	Offering the man she had named Enn a compassionate smile, she drew a quiet sigh, taking a moment to wonder whether she could trust him... and ended up deciding that no matter how much she wanted to stay wary of him potentially betraying her, she could not ignore her instincts telling her that he was being sincere, and that she should try to help him. She only had to think for a couple of seconds to set aside her suspicion and regress back into naively trusting this man.
	“So you need a place to hide,” she stated softly, lowering her gaze to the ground in front of her regretfully. “We have people that take turns keeping an eye on the walls around our settlemet, but we don’t really have a functional military, or any soldiers. Almost everyone has a gun, but there’s no one who are ‘just a gun’. We have some flak-turrets for anti-air, but they aren’t usually manned unless we expect trouble.” She sighed again. “Usually other factions don’t notice Eighfour since it’s hidden among the trees, and because people are afraid of the forest, so there isn’t usually a lot of danger for us when we’re at home.”
	She bit her lip, arguing with herself on whether to continue talking for a second. Nervously kicking a tuft of grass with the tip of her boot, she spoke without looking up. “It’s not just me that’s bad at naming, eh? It’s a tradition in Eighfour; we’ve always been really bad at naming people and stuff. Even the name of our faction has no imagination in it whatsoever.” She chuckled to herself. Oh man, if Enn was lying, she was going to be in so much trouble for telling him this.
	“Eighfour is an abbreviation of eighty-four, because that’s the number on the ‘monument’ our settlement was built around.” She finally looked up, nervously and almost pleadingly. “It’s the yield in kilotons of the nuke inside it.”