We’re running again.
Chapter 28: Dragon
We run. Or rather Myth runs, my sensor unit floats and my brain just comes along for the ride. She races through a maze of rusting metal and uncollected trash. I bring up a map of the island and zoom into the warehouse zone. I start directing her, gradually heading for The Port. I hope to lose our followers in the maze.
“Where’re the security vehicles?” Myth wheezes.
I don’t hear any sirens. “They must be patrolling the outskirts of this zone,” I suggest. Just in case, I tell her to enter an alley that is barely wide enough for the cart to pass.
“How’d they find us?” she demands as she pauses to catch her breath, huddling in the shadows.
“The sensors must’ve been reactivated,” I say.
She shakes her head. “I thought there weren’t any working sensors in the warehouse area. How could they’ve found us amongst all the buildings?”
I think about that. She’s right. If the security system is back up and working, they would’ve known we’d been walking towards the warehouse zone, but they couldn’t have pinpointed where exactly we were. “Is your cellphone still on?”
Myth fumbles in her jacket and pulls her phone out. She curses, turns it off and stuffs it back in her pocket. “Stupid, stupid, stupid,” she mutters.
“You’re anything but stupid,” I tell her and I mean it.
I still haven’t told her about contacting Griffin. Myth’s not going to be happy.
A beam of light cuts across the exit of the alley, searching the street. The light is accompanied by the sound of a motorcycle revving.
I locate us on my mental map. “Move,” I tell her. “Just up ahead there’s another alley we can go into.”
Myth pushes the cart forward. The wheels grind against bits of broken concrete and garbage. I hope I am the only one who can hear it. The motorcycle gets closer. I hear another one on the street behind us.
At the intersection with the other alley, Myth manoeuvres the cart, struggling to turn it. There isn’t much space for swinging it around and the metal wall of the cart scrapes against the corner of the warehouse. The sound echoes around us and someone shouts a warning. She starts running again.
I’m about to follow her when I see the albino at the other end of the alley. She’s perched on a motorcycle as she tugs off a black helmet. Her white hair is wild and straggly, her reddish eyes fixed on me. In the dim lighting she glows with a surreal beauty, her skin starkly contrasted against her black outfit and the night. She revs the engine and jerks the front wheel towards me.
I chase after Myth and direct her into another side alley and then another. I expect to find the albino waiting every time we turn a corner, but we don’t. The sound of motorcycles fades as we plunge deeper into the maze of smaller warehouses. As we approach the edge of the zone, Myth stops.
“It’s open land up ahead,” she tells me. I already know. “If they’ve surrounded this area, they’ll catch us when we try to cross the field.” I know that as well.
“We’re not going to cross over the field,” I tell her. “We’re going under.”
She stares at me, about to ask how. I shake my head and point down a narrow, dead-end alley. She enters it and at the end, I find what we need. I gesture to the manhole lid. She looks at it, her brow scrunched up.
“What is it?” she asks.
I smile. Of course she wouldn’t know. Sana Island’s systems of water and wastewater management don’t rely on the underground pipes and networks that the older cities on the mainland use. “It’s an access point to the old sewer system of the warehouse zone.”
“Down there?” she demands. “You’re kidding, right? We’re going to go underground and what? Walk through wastewater?”
My smile widens. “Don’t worry, you won’t get your shoes dirty. This system hasn’t been used in a long time. Use your crowbar and open the lid.”
Not looking convinced, she pokes the crowbar into a small hole in the metal and leans on it. The lid creeps up reluctantly. She grabs it and pulls it to the side with a grunt. It clangs against the side of a warehouse, the sound vibrating around us and skittering up the walls. She leans over the hole into darkness.
“It smells like rotting fish down there,” she grumbles. “Cold, rotting fish.” She stands up and rubs her arms. “Um… How’re we going to get your cart down there?” She crosses her arms over her chest. “And why can’t it float about like your sensor?”
“It wasn’t designed to be moved around very much,” I explain, “and there’s actually a ramp for this hole, where muck sweepers used to be rolled down when the system blocked up. That’s why I chose it instead of the other access holes. The others all have ladders. No ramps.”
“Well, thank you for small mercies,” she mutters. “But it’s still too dark down there.”
I brighten up, literally. The shadows recede as my skin begins to emit more light. I float ahead of her, so she can see the ramp. “Careful,” I warn. “It’s slippery. There’s a lot of dampness down here.”
She follows me down the ramp and along a narrow ledge bordering an empty channel where sewer had once flowed. The only sounds around us are the echo of a constant drip somewhere nearby and the slosh of the cart’s wheels along the damp floor. The air is humid and smells of seaweed and decay. At least, that’s what Myth thinks it smells like. We’re close enough to the ocean that she’s probably right.
The old system ends at an abandoned wastewater treatment plant at the edge of the sea. We take one of the branches leading us away from the shore and towards the city. Without light and sound, time distorts. I can track time to the fraction of a second. But normal people can’t do that so I stop tracking the time and very quickly feel disoriented. I watch Myth. She’s tired, her eyes are drooping and her feet barely shuffling.
As we continue walking, the ground and the air dry up. I look for a dry and relatively clean place for her to rest. She collapses against the wall, legs stretched out. I sit down beside her. For several minutes, we sit quietly side by side and a world apart. I look down at my holographic hands, useless things that they are. I study her hands, twisting a piece of her jacket.
“Griffin wants to speak with you,” I say.
Her hands stop twisting. She doesn’t move at all, except for her mouth. “When did she tell you that?”
I’m capable of lying, but it’s a habit Dr. Johansson strongly discouraged. So I tell her. “While you were sleeping, I went online.”
Her hands clench into fists and her breath comes out sharply. “Dragon, I told you not to go online. That’s probably how they found us. Ever think of that?”
“I don’t think so,” I tell her. “I would’ve detected a tracer.”
She glares at me. “Well, however it happened, while you were chatting with your new best friend, they found us.”
I shake my head. “Griffin is not my best friend, Myth. You are.”
“Whatever,” she grumbles and pulls her jacket tightly closed. “So how is this going to happen? I can’t exactly plug myself into a communication panel.”
I wish I couldn’t do that. It’s just another way of emphasising my uniqueness. Uniqueness is another word for strangeness. “She’ll call us an hour before dawn.” I check my inner clock. We still have a bit of time before we have to turn on the phone. “Get some rest.”
I can tell she wants to argue, but her fatigue wins out. Her eyelids slide shut and she goes to wherever brains with bodies go to. I know my dreams are not really dreams. They’re memories with a bit of fantasy thrown in. She sleeps and dreams, and I envy her.
Chapter 29: Myth
I turned on my phone, hands shaking. Not sure why they were shaking. Anger, fear, adrenalin crash. Maybe all of the above.
I waited, trying to decide if I should still glare at Dragon. His image stood nearby, within the circle of light he created. He was watching me. He looked lost and sad, which was not the Dragon I was use
d to.
I stopped glaring at the image of the young man. I knew it was just a hologram, a really powerful one. But he seemed so solid, so real, so rejected. I wanted to hug him. Instead, I smiled. His back straightened and he grinned.
I’d have preferred giving him a hug.
I lowered my head so that some hair blocked my view. I stared at my phone. Despite the fact we were underground, the reception wasn’t bad. Not great. But good enough. I willed the phone to ring before security tracked us down again. What was taking her so long, anyways?
When it did ring, I almost dropped the phone.
“Hello?” I sounded scared. I cleared my throat, stood straight, walked away from Dragon along the narrow ledge towards darkness. Focused on making my voice strong, confident. “Yes? Hello?”
“Hello, Myth,” a silky smooth voice answered. “I am Griffin.”
“Yeah, I gathered.”
I mean seriously, who else would be calling me? I was a fugitive, didn’t have any close friends apart from a bodiless brain and my mom was locked away on a floating prison. And wow, she had a lovely voice, the kind that must’ve been attached to a gorgeous model. Why would a bodiless brain need such a great sounding voice?
I glanced back at Dragon. He mouthed the words, “Be nice.”
I stuck my tongue out and kept strolling farther away, as far as I dared. The darkness ahead was absolute. I paused at the edge of it.
“Are you alone?” Griffin asked.
A sarcastic response almost tripped out of me. I bit it back. Almost bit my tongue in the process. “Yeah, pretty much.”
“Good,” she said in a tone that didn’t sound good. “We’re running out of time.”
We?
“Uh-huh,” I said, waiting for some explanation.
“Myth,” Griffin’s smooth, beautiful voice trickled through the phone. Why couldn’t she have the voice of an ogre? “They’re going to move your mom and if they do, she’ll be out of our reach.”
I almost dropped the phone again. Dragon must’ve heard me gasp.
“Myth?” he asked softly.
I turned slightly to face him. He started to approach me. I waved him back and moved farther down the dark ledge, only stopping when another step would take me into the complete absence of light. I huddled in the shadows. I was as alone as I could be.
“When?” I whispered, not sounding so confident. Not caring what I sounded like.
“Maybe tonight,” she replied. “By tomorrow definitely.”
She waited, let the implications of that announcement set in. I didn’t need her to spell it out. I knew where my mom was right now, more or less, but if they moved her, would I see her again?
I almost started crying, but I stopped myself. There wasn’t time to cry. I needed to find her, then we could cry.
“I can get you off the island if you reach me before sunrise, Myth,” she continued after that weighty silence. “We can find the floating mansion where she’s being kept. I can help you get her out.”
I nodded my head, breathless. Yes, that was what I wanted. Get my mom, keep her safe. Griffin stopped talking. Something about this silence told me there was a catch. I was afraid to ask.
“Okay,” I said. Anything to crack open that soundlessness.
“There’s just one problem.”
Yup. Here it was.
“I have space for you,” she said.
I waited.
“Only the two of you.”
She let more silence fill the space between us. A part of me remembered that each second I stayed on the phone was another second I could be tracked down. The rest of me was waiting for her to finish her sentence. She didn’t.
I coughed through the tightness in my throat. “Well, there is only Dragon and me…”
“No,” she interrupted. “My ship is packed full and it has room for you and your mom, Myth. Dragon’s brain and support system will not fit without being detected. And it’s easier for you to avoid security at The Port if you’re on your own. We can’t afford for him to be caught. Hide him, for his own safety. He’ll be safe as long as he stays offline.”
Go without Dragon? I couldn’t remember life without him. He’d always been here, near me.
“I can’t leave him,” I whispered.
“It won’t be for long,” she reassured me. “Once we rescue your mom and get to the mainland, we’ll find a way to go back for him. And we can tell the authorities what’s really happening.”
I chewed at my thumb. Bits of jagged nail scratched at my tongue. I didn’t dare look behind me, at Dragon with his golden brown eyes and his halo of light keeping back the dark.
“Why should I trust you?” I demanded, trying to sound like I had another option.
“You have no reason to,” she replied. “But I assure you I am as anxious to get the proof against Grogan Ltd as you are. I remember who I used to be, before they killed me. I remember the life that was taken away from me. I don’t want that to happen to anyone else.”
Good answer. I still wavered.
“You need to decide quickly,” Griffin murmured. “Security right now is fairly light around The Port. Most of them are asleep. You can make it.”
“Okay,” I mumbled, biting my nail extra hard.
“Good. But don’t tell Dragon until you’ve found a place for him to hide,” she warned. “He won’t be happy.”
Dah, no kidding.
“Okay,” I said again. Like I didn’t have any other vocab words at my disposal. Truth is, I couldn’t think of another word to indicate my reluctant acceptance. Any other word would either be overly enthusiastic or betray my dismay.
“Look for the crate with the mainland flag on it,” she said. “I’ll have someone there to help you.”
I didn’t dare repeat ‘okay’ again, so I said, “Fine. Thanks.”
“It’s going to all work out for the best, Myth,” she said in her soothing, beautiful, model’s voice. “Don’t you worry.” With that, she hung up.
“Yeah, sure, okay,” I said into the phone and turned it off.
“Myth?” Dragon approached me. I didn’t hear his steps, obviously, but I could tell. The shadows faded away as his light surrounded me.
“We have to go hide somewhere, Dragon,” I said and gritted my teeth against the sob squirming in my chest. I’d never lied to him before, never had to.
“What did she say?” He was standing right behind me on the narrow path, enveloping me in light that couldn’t touch my shadow-filled heart.
I didn’t turn around. “She said we should hide and she will organise another ship for us.”
Silence. He must’ve known. With all his training in reading body language and his sensitivity to small changes in a person’s breathing and heartbeat, he must’ve figured out I was lying. But he didn’t say anything about it.
“Where do you suggest?” he asked. His voice was quiet, resigned.
I clasped my hands in front of me, squeezing them tightly, squeezing the tears and the rage that wanted to burst out. “I think I know a place,” I whispered in a ragged voice.
Without meeting his gaze, I turned around and slid past him, my shoulder going through his upper arm. Shouldered my bags, gripped the bar on top of the cart. Took a deep breath, looked up and tried to smile. It came out wobbly.
“Lead on,” I gestured.
Dragon studied me. His brown eyes were more golden in this light, a bright golden-brown, just like his dragon’s eyes. He nodded, turned around and led me through the darkness.
Chapter 30: Myth
When we exited the old sewer system, we were at the edge of Sana Island. The city huddled before us, dark and quiet, floating in the early morning hours between the end of the late shift and the start of the morning shift. A damp ocean-scented fog swirled around us as we walked through a park.
“You need to tell me where we’re going if I’m going to map a route to avoid the sensors, Myth,” Dragon said. The fog glowed around him and his
hologram looked more ghost-like than solid.
There was no way to avoid sensors completely, but I knew what he meant. The more we avoided the hot spots, the better. Security didn’t pay as much attention to the quieter streets and neighbourhoods. And without Dragon to assist them, the guards would be even more pressed to check the sensors. It would take time for MindOpS 2 to be fully onboard and integrated.
“My old school,” I replied.
He glanced at me, his eyebrows raised, but I ignored him. Kept my eyes fixed straight ahead. The school was in a housing zone close to the outskirts of the city, with access to a long, narrow strip of beach. We didn’t have to pass through city centre with its multitude of sensors at all.
Dragon must’ve realised that. He smiled. “Good choice.”
We altered our course, cutting through the park which led into the green belt that bordered most of the city. Under the broad canopy of trees, the dampness and darkness increased. If anyone would’ve been there, they’d have sworn they’d seen a ghost of a young man floating along the forest path, followed by a hunchback troll.
I shifted my bags and wished I could go back to sleep. The silence pressed down thicker than the fog. As if from a great distance, the murmur of ocean waves brushing against pebbles drifted along the light breeze.
I so wanted to collapse.
The sound of the waves increased. I frowned and rubbed my eyelids, shook my head. Was that what waves sounded like?
“It’s the motorcycles,” Dragon hissed, gestured for me to get down. He shut off his glowing skin.
The darkness and the noise crowded in. There were several motorcycles, a couple of them very close, racing along the road that looped around the island, following the shoreline. The others faded away as they headed in another direction.
“They must’ve figured out we’d left the warehouses,” Dragon whispered beside me.
I kept quiet. What if they figured out about the school as well? The two motorcycles roared past the trees where we hid. A few minutes later, I heard them stop. I knew where they were, what they were doing. They were sitting on the small bridge located near the end of the green belt. The forest path left the trees, went under the bridge and reappeared on the beach as a walkway that continued until close to The Port.
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