#billy squire

I’m picturing Biddy being kidnapped during a red circus protest, the perpetrators of the crime hidden under cover of the crowd, and taken to the lab.

Maybe she finds herself acting as a sort of an older sister figure to Anya whenever the two of them somehow manage to end up in the same place at the same time. (She likely acts this way with the other younger subjects, too.)

Maybe she helps Anya escape.

Maybe she was planning on escaping with Anya, but the scientists caught onto their plans and she had to distract them, all the while mentally screaming at Anya to run, run away from that facility as fast as her little legs could carry her and find a place to hide.

Maybe Anya waits in some agreed-upon meeting area the pair had chosen, waiting and hoping for hours or even days, that her big sister will outsmart the scientists again, against all odds, but she starts to lose hope that Biddy would join her after around a week of waiting.

Maybe the next time she hears anything about Biddy, it’s through the mind of her biological father, Billy Squire, who thinks his daughter dead.

Maybe Anya sees Biddy’s face in his mind, and realizes that this man loved her big sister so, so much. Still loves her, in fact, and joined the Red Circus to avenge her.

But Anya knows that doing something like this isn’t what Biddy would have wanted.

Maybe when Anya thinks back herself to what Biddy would have said in a situation like this, she finds that it’s really not that different from what Anya would have said as herself.

And when Billy listens to her and hears his daughter’s voice in his mind, maybe neither he nor Anya can entirely hold back their tears.

Billy cries because he used to warn Biddy of what the Ostanian government would do to her if she got too involved in the Red Circus, and Biddy would confidently reply that she had to do what was right, no matter what the consequences were or who she had to oppose. Now auddenly, this little pink-haired toddler is saying the exact same thing, except that “who she has to oppose” is Billy. Anya’s words have revealed to him that he has become the very sort of person he believes killed his daughter.

Anya cries because she feels for this man, whose daughter suddenly went missing without a trace, and because she can’t tell him where Biddy was because that would reveal far too many other secrets through the domino effect.