It had been twenty years since she had last walked the streets Kerem HaTeimanim, and now she sat looking at the passing people of her childhood. The place had been gentrified and developed since she had been here. But it was still the old neighborhood. Unlike many Western cultures, the Jews tended to change less than their surroundings, not more, and many of these people looked shockingly similar to their parents and grandparents so many years ago, even as the buildings around them had evolved.

But there were many more unorthodox people here now than there had been in her childhood, and she was one of them. She sat in a café, outside. The dry, pleasant heat of the Israeli afternoon on her, and she allowed herself a rare luxury. She opened the many layers of her Matryoshka doll, and shed light on the very smallest core of her. A nine-year-old girl looked out on the surroundings she had once called home and smiled.

If her father had not passed away, she would no doubt still be here now. Married, probably with children. No doubt happy, but also completely innocent of the way the world really worked. She would think of herself as a woman, no doubt, but she would still be a child compared to the woman she had been forced to become. She would never have killed. She would never have known the horrors, or the power, or the fear, or the truth. She would never have shot a man in the face even as he leapt on her, knife ready, to have his head explode over her. She would never have allowed a target and his guards to rape her so they would eventually sleep, allowing her to wrap her legs around his neck and rip the life from him, killing his cohorts next as they slumbered, slitting their throats one by one with unparalleled satisfaction.

She shook her head. In so many ways she would still be that nine-year-old child. Ignorant even of how much she did not know, perhaps even longing for some adventure. She smiled coldly and sipped her coffee.