One thing that you learn, when you live like Isabelle, is that there are many different kinds of silence.

There's the quiet, absolute silence of night - when all you can hear is the thrum of the air conditioning and the rustle of your sheets as you turn your head. Now some people - other people, that is - might also hear things like traffic, nightlife, passers by or the occasional spacecraft making for orbit - all the sounds of the wider world. But that was not true for a Lozano. No, not with so many layers of soundproofing and security screens in between their rooms and the outer walls. And not with the distance between those outer walls and the edge of their estate.

The fact that their residence stood so separate from all others was itself a feat worth mentioning, given the relative density of a Terenian capital world. But a lady like Almira Lozano would have it no other way.

Another type of silence was the awkward one - where something a person has said is left to echo into a void of self-conscious panic. Isabelle was intimately familiar with that one from many less-than-successful attempts at public speaking. It didn't happen often, but when you had to make as many public appearances as she did, pure statistics made them inevitable.

Her brain particularly liked to replay the time she'd been greeting Adan Davalos (the CFO of Davalos enterprises) and mistaken his bodyguard for the man himself. It wasn't her fault that the man was built like seven feet of muscle and had a dark sense of humour in his hiring processes.

[i]I still think he only hired that bodyguard so that he could joke about how scrawny they were.[/i]

And then there were the dangerous silences. 

The ones that came about in the later hours of the night and the early morning - when those who didn't have an unhealthy relationship with caffeine had gone to sleep. When all that was left to distract her were screens and printouts. Statistics and references. 

She'd tried calling up an expert on Zaldarian culture - but all it had been good for was an hour of conversation that had been proven useless after five minutes of signing with Quar. In the end, she'd set guards and given instruction that if Quar gave any indication of needing or wanting anything outside of food or drink, that she be informed at once.

She hoped she was doing it right - that the Zaldarian might open up to her at some point. Otherwise it was going to be amazingly disappointing when she released her with nothing to show for it.

[i]Can I even do that? Just let her go? Or is that some kind of insult? [/i]She'd thought, before groaning in frustration.

She'd tried reading up on the other competitors and their mechs - but after forty minutes of reading the same page over and over again, and comprehending nothing, she'd shoved the whole stack down one end of her table to deal with later.

She'd tried firing up a remote training drone - to practice her fencing - but her eyes kept slipping away, towards the projector that rested accusingly on her bed - and, consequently, all she'd had to show for the hour of exercise was an embarrassingly large number of welts from the drone's practice blade.

Tired, sore, upset. Those things summed up the Isabelle that had returned to her desk. Turning her back on the projector. 

At least, that was how she would have appeared to any outsider. She was good at putting up a front, after all.

Inside, Isabelle was at war with herself. She knew she should watch the message that the other woman had left her. She knew that ignoring it was - well, it was rude at best - and hurtful at worst.

But ... listening to it?

At least, while this silence lasted, she could still convince herself that everything was okay. She could pretend that Asil was out there, working happily at the hangar. Doing things with her drones that defied convention and dared people to dream bigger and better. Being productive, being useful, being ... good.

She could pretend that she wasn't going to be chewed out by the woman she'd sponsored. That she'd insulted. [s]That she liked[/s]. That she'd [i]hurt[/i].  

She could believe that she wouldn't have to see her face - as she patiently, kindly perhaps, tried to talk to her - as if she wasn't just some piece of shit that had lashed out at her just because she'd been having a bad day.

As long as the silence lasted, it meant that she could pretend that the punishment that awaited her was still a long way off. That she still had a lead on it, and as long as she kept running she might never get caught.

She knew she was being a coward. But that was just who she was - all the holo interviews, the promotional pictures, the clips from her fights - they were all lies. Carefully crafted by her mother and their PR team to tell a story that benefited the Lozano brand.

In truth, she was what she was: A coward. A liar. Cruel. A Bad Person.

Worthless.

She rubs her eyes with the palms of her hands. Squelching the tears away. 

She must just be tired, she thinks. And she tries to believe it, as she pulls out another sheaf of paper in a fruitless, desperate, search for a distraction.

She's always been good at putting up a front.