• Word from the author: Hello readers, if you're out there! I'm just using this divine oppurtunity to make the announcement that I have revised the most part of chapter one, as well as a minor (or major, depending on how you look at it) change to Chapter Six. So please, if you'd like to take the time, go back and take a look! Unless, of course, you've just popped into the story. In which case, please go back and take a look anyway! Also, sorry it took so long to get this chapter up; I typed it all out then had to redo practically the whole thing. Thanks for your patience! Anywho, on with the story! Love, Silver

    Chapter Seven


    Sprinting in the dark, my heart pounding in my ears and my teeth still clamped down on my finger, what I had formerly thought of as a pleasant meadow now seemed more like a hunting range—and I was not the hunter. I wondered if the people who had taken Viktor had made it to the first floor yet. Maybe they were already outside, running after me? Or… had they used the rope ladder to get down? That would speed up their progress considerably. They could be right behind me, ready to capture me and wipe my brain.

    Swallowing my tears, I risked a quick glance over my shoulder. It was too dark to see much distance, but from what I could see there was no one. I didn’t hear them, either, but perhaps they were being a little more professional than last time and keeping themselves hidden as they gradually closed the gap between us. A burst of fear blasted my chest at the thought, and I put on an extra burst of speed.

    I saw the wall looming up ahead of me, a long block of black against the night, and saw the tree Viktor had told me about. I adjusted my course and ran for the tree. As I drew closer to the tree and my escape route, I was unexpectedly blinded by a long line of billion-watt lights, all turning on at the same time, and I skidded to a stop, throwing an arm over my eyes and landing on my butt. The lights were so bright they had stung my eyes, and I literally couldn’t see anything. I spent a few precious seconds blinking the stars away.

    “Ashta?”

    I pulled my arm away from my face, still blinking. My eyes slowly adjusted enough to see a dark figure against the glare of the lamps.

    The figure ran up to me and crouched beside me. “Ashta, are you all right? What’s going on? Viktor showed up at my door and told me to meet you here. Tell me what’s happening!” She shook my shoulders a little too violently.

    I stared at her, dazed. “Claire?” I could see again, and I could make out her features. It was definitely Claire, and as my vision returned I regained the ability to think. I shot to my feet, adrenaline shooting through my body again. What was Viktor thinking? To get Claire involved in this was… ridiculous! “You have to get out of here.”

    “What?”

    I turned to her and grabbed her shoulders. She stared at me, confused and uncomprehending. “They took Viktor, Claire. They took him! They’ll probably erase his memory, everything that he is, and now they’re after me. You have to get out of here, before they get you, too!”

    “Erase his memory?” Claire was so shocked and confused she seemed almost slow. Her voice was quiet and her gaze unfocused. “How…?”

    This time I was the one to shake her by the shoulders. “It doesn’t matter! Now go!”

    Her eyes snapped out of that vacant look and she focused on me, her look saying that she finally understood. She nodded once. “He must not have wanted you to leave without being able to say good-bye,” she said, and she pulled me into a hug. “Good-bye, Ashta,” she whispered in my ear. For the first time I heard the quiver in her voice, and I squeezed her tighter.

    Pulling away and holding her at arm’s length, I said, “Now get out of here before they catch up to me.”

    Claire nodded again and took a step in the opposite direction. Then she turned around and fixed me with a steady gaze; I could see the unshed tears in her eyes, though, in the glare of the security lamps. “I haven’t been angry with you, Ashta. Not for a long time. I want you to know that. But I couldn’t… I couldn’t tell you… Because they…” Here her voice failed her and I reached across the gap between us and squeezed her arm. I smiled at her. I understand.
    She smiled back weakly, and again turned to the dormitories, when I heard a strange, quiet pop at almost exactly the same time I heard Claire give out a short, startled scream and saw her stumble forward, falling to her hands and knees, then to her belly.

    “Claire!” I screamed. Instinctively, I ran to her side and turned her over. A small dart was poked into her arm, and I yanked it out, throwing it aside. My brain didn’t yet grasp the fact that where there were darts, there was inevitably a tranquilizer, ready to anesthetise me and steal away all my memoirs. “Claire, get up. Come on, hurry up! You have to come with me. You have no choice now!”

    She was still breathing of course, breathing the deep, peaceful breaths that came with sedated sleep; but she was limp in my arms.

    “Claire, please wake up! They’re going to erase you…!” I started crying again.

    “What are you waiting for, sedate her!”

    I was snapped out of my trance of grief and terror by a male’s voice—a familiar male’s voice. I didn’t stop to think about who it was; I reflexively shot to my feet and ran for the tree. They couldn’t catch me, I wouldn’t let them. I wanted to stay me!

    “Sedate her!”

    Driven purely by adrenaline, I sprang off the ground at the closest branch. My breath was forced from my lungs with an Oof! as my belly slammed into it. I lifted a leg over, stood balancing on the branch, and scrabbled up to the next.

    “Oh for the love of-“

    “All right!”

    I heard another pop, the sound barely reaching my ears, and a thunk right by my head. I squealed in fear and ducked my head, a futile reflex. Then I scrambled even higher, with even more urgency. Another pop and a dart whizzed by dangerously close to my hand. I reflexively yanked my hand away, lost my balance, and slid off the branch. I just barely managed to catch myself on the same branch, and pulled myself back up. I looked up at the wall. If I could just get a few branches higher; then I could make it. I clambered up to the branch above me, and to the next. I cringed at another impact between dart and bark above me, but I kept going.

    “Are you even trying to accomplish anything, Noah?”

    I faltered at the name and fell forward, my chest crashing into the branch I was about to place my hand on. Noah was the culprit? I shook my head. Did it matter? The fact was, someone was aiming to capture me. My body suspended between two branches, I looked below and to the side at the two figures illuminated in the light. For hardly a second, I met Noah’s eyes. The horror and pain in his eyes was visible even from a distance. It made me wish things could go back to the way they were. It made me wish I could still trust him enough to believe that look was real. Then Li snarled something I couldn’t hear and Noah slowly raised his tranquilizer in both hands, pointing the barrel at me. I immediately broke contact and shot onto the branch I had fallen onto and scrambled to the end, towards the wall.

    The branch swayed and bowed under my weight; I clung to it for a heartbeat then pushed with all my might towards the top of the concrete wall in front of me. Just as my feet left the bark I felt a sudden sting in my shoulder. I cried out in surprise and reflexively curled into a half-ball in the air, grasping for the dart and pulling it out. I hoped not too much had gotten into my body, but I didn’t have time to check, because all too quickly, my other shoulder crashed onto the top of the wall. The rough surface ripped through my shirt and tore at my skin painfully, and I gasped.

    I staggered to my feet, still holding my dart-shot shoulder, as if I could suck out the anaesthetics by sheer willpower. I looked back towards Li and Noah to see that Li had shoved Noah aside and was taking aim himself. I didn’t think I was going to avoid Li’s aim quite as easily as Noah’s. With nowhere else to go, I stepped over the edge of the wall without so much as a glance at the distance I had to fall. I had no time to check.

    ~*~


    “What in the—what on earth was that?”

    “It’s impolite to yell, you know.”

    “You don’t miss. And yet, you managed to miss every single time.”

    “I hit her.”

    “Not in time. Now we’ll have to search the whole forest out there, find her before she wakes up, and goodness knows what Brent’s going to do to you now.”

    “She’s got a tracker.”

    “The tracker only works within a certain range. You know that! You also know that the average anaesthetic has nowhere near the same effect on her as it has on everyone else. Who knows how far she’d have been able to get, or how long she’ll even stay under!”

    “Bad luck, I guess.”

    “You know darn well luck had absolutely nothing to do with this.”

    ~*~


    I sat with my back against the wall, eyes closed and breaths shallow. I knew I needed to get as far away as possible, but I couldn’t bring myself to move anymore. The adrenaline had worn off almost as soon as I got up off the ground, and I could feel the sedatives beginning to kick in.

    When I jumped off the wall, I’d landed brutally on my right shoulder. I heard a horrible sound, something between a snap and a pop to my ears, and excruciating pain shot down my arm and across my back. I didn’t know what I’d done to myself, but whatever it was, it hurt.

    I slowly pulled my hand away from my shoulder and looked at it, not sure what I expected to see. Of course, nothing looked different, and even if something was different, the wall at my back blocked out any light from the lamps.

    I felt so tired. All I wanted to do was give in to the soft, caressing comfort of sleep. My eyelids drooped. It was like the darkness was softly whispering into my ear, calling my name, enticing me to forget the world and its troubles, urging me, give in and come to me. I was so tempted to listen to that little whispering voice nagging at my brain, making everything seem distant and fuzzy. Fuzzy… like a caterpillar. I giggled softly to myself, closed my eyes, rested my head on the cool stone wall. I’d always loved caterpillars, especially when I was little. I used to pick them up and let them crawl on my hands, laughing at the tiny little feet tickling my palms.

    Suddenly, I longed once again for a fuzzy little caterpillar wriggling around on my hand. It had been so long since I’d watched one scrunching its body and stretching out again, felt its miniscule legs tapping their way across my skin. All of a sudden, I seemed to remember the predicament I was in, the urgency and fear shoving its way through the crowded muddle of my tired mind overwhelmed with pain. I heard Viktor’s voice through the fog. Follow it eest and you’ll find the nearest city. I fought my way out of the bog of drowsiness, forcing my eyes to reopen, forcing myself weakly to my feet, I staggered off in a generally Eastern direction.

    ~*~

    With hardly any strength left and no way to know if I was wandering in a big pointless circle—I couldn’t think far enough to find it—, I staggered and stumbled between the trees, tripping over roots, bushes, and rocks. I fell forward several times, and with the sleepiness tugging at my muscles, I wasn’t able to catch myself when I did. Soon I realized that all I could do was focus on not landing on my road-burnt shoulder and willing myself to get back on my feet again. This was one of the hardest things of all, because all I wanted to do once I was down was lay there and rest, fall asleep under the trees listening to the sounds of the forest.

    As the sun rose over the treetops, the full impact of the events of the morning finally hit me. Viktor was captured. Claire was captured. Both were probably going to have their brains wiped. There were people determined to wipe my brain clean chasing after me. I was covered in dirt, mud, and pine needles, and the anaesthetics were pumping strongly through my veins. The part that hit me hardest, though, was the horrible fact that my two closest friends were both dead, figuratively speaking. All their memories would be gone, everything that happened in the past that made them them. They were gone. I would never see either of them again, and even if I did, they wouldn’t have a clue who I was. A terrible, gut-wrenching image of Claire, eyes closed in peaceful sleep, being carried away to be injected with some mysterious substance that would mess with her mind in ways I would never understand, sat like a transparent hologram over the rest of the world. It was like someone had paused a movie at the worst, most horrific part, and then lost the remote, leaving me to stare at the gruesome scene. I tried to blink it away, but it wouldn’t go. My heart felt like it was going to explode with the grief that came with the knowledge of what would happen to my best friends. Tears welled up in my eyes, clouding my vision, and spilled over. I didn’t bother lifting my arm to wipe them away; I just kept on staggering and zigzagging, almost drunkenly, through the woods.

    After a while, I had no idea how long, my grief morphed into anger and hatred. I needed someone to blame. Brent and Noah were the cause of this. Brent had threatened Claire to keep her away from me. Then she’d ordered Noah to bait me into obedience, and he willingly, probably eagerly, obliged. When that plan fell through, she resorted to wiping my memory as well as Viktor’s. When I’d still gotten away, she’d ordered Noah—my ex-boyfriend; the irony was definitely intended—to capture me and Claire. It was Brent’s fault that Viktor had to sacrifice his own cherished memories for mine, and both she and Noah were responsible for Claire’s mind-wipe. I swore to myself that someday, when the time was right, I would repay them for these favours with my own.

    I kept going until the sun had passed overhead and sunk back down, leaving me in dark shadows once again. The steady bird song dissipated and was gradually replaced by crickets chirping and leaves rustling in the breeze. My tongue was dry and my mouth parched from thirst. My stomach felt empty and almost as angry as me. I was practically sleepwalking. I felt dizzier than I had this morning, I couldn`t see straight at all, and my arm had been in pain so long I hardly felt it anymore. I was tripping and falling more and more, and each time it got harder and harder to get back up again.

    I was a mess.

    I didn’t care.

    I just wanted to live long enough to carry out my oath of retribution.

    As if in answer to that thought, I tripped again and all my weight landed on my scraped up arm. It had scabbed over by now, but it still hurt at the impact. I closed my eyes and opened my mouth, letting my breath out in a silent scream of pain. As soon as I landed, I knew this was as far as I was going for a while. Rolling painfully, tiredly, onto my back and staring up at the branches, I could just see the stars through the leaves and needles. Was it just me, or were they gradually disappearing into the inky black of the night sky? Or was the whole world around me melting into the inky black of the night sky? Everything around the edges of my vision was turning black. Like the night sky. It was the most comforting thing that had happened to me all day. I could finally relax and submerge myself into that lovely, painless space of the subconscious.

    Already I couldn’t feel the pain that came from falling on my injury. I spread my arms out from my sides like wings and turned my head to look at an arm through the ever-narrowing circle of vision. I frowned, confused. My arm was… flickering? It was flashing in and out of existence in rapid, irregular intervals, kind of like a fluorescent light bulb that was running low on juice. A hallucination? Tricks of the light?

    Currently satisfied with my explanations, I smiled carelessly and turned my head to watch the stars melt again. But instead of the branches and sky, I saw a worried, panicked face. A very familiar worried, panicked face. Eyes the colour of the sky on a clear day set in an oval face, framed by rippling blonde hair draped over one shoulder. It couldn’t be. “Y… You got out, too…” I croaked through my desert-dry throat, before the dark pulled me in.