Captured and Captivated

Chapter 6

HARPER

My plan for freedom was close to nonexistent.

I ran blind. The alarms would cycle, blaring for a few minutes before stopping then starting again. They were so loud I could hardly think, let alone hear. All I could do was keep going. Keep pushing ahead and hoping that somehow I could find a way out of this nightmare.

My whole world dissolved down to a sequence of twists and turns and the false comfort from the stun baton in my hand.

Go right. Left. Left again. Up a flight of stairs. There were occasionally sounds of pursuit behind me, but then they'd fade to another direction. It seemed like they didn't know exactly where I was. That made two of us.

I'd decided to head in a generally upward direction. The Krynn had brought me down into a much lower part of the station, so it made sense to do the exact opposite of what they wanted from me. My panic took me to the base of a second flight of stairs. They had what looked like an emergency exit map printed on the wall. If I was any less frightened I might have laughed at how disturbingly familiar the concept was. Even the monstrous Krynn had mandatory safety protocols, apparently.

I assumed that my current location was the spot marked with a red dot. Plenty of other places on the map had unreadable writing or strange symbols, but a red arrow was leading to a higher level of the station. There a large section was outlined in green. It would make sense that the green zone was where the escape pods would be, right? Emergency map leads to emergency escape. Maybe they might even have a shuttle.

And I could fly. Sort of. Theoretically. Flight training was mandatory on Earth, but I could count on one hand the number of times I'd personally flown a ship. A human ship. The number wasn't zero, at least.

And that was it. That was the full extent of my plan. If I couldn't find Lily I'd steal a Krynn ship, fly it out, and then...

Truthfully there probably was no and then, but I'd die on my own terms. That much was worth fighting for.

I memorized the map as best as I could then hurried up the steps. They lead me to a higher level that was just as maze-like as the two below. No Krynn waited in ambush, and it didn't seem like this part of the station was used often. Unfortunately, there were no helpful glowing 'exit' signs. My luck wasn't nearly that good. The next hallway ended in a right-or-left split and I was trying to remember which one to take when the alarms started again. This time they carried a faster, more frantic pace.

Were the Krynn really kicking up this much of a fuss about me? Little ol' weakling human Harper? It seemed far more likely that something else had happened. One problem at a time. I knew for a fact that any Krynn I saw would shoot me on sight regardless of what else was going on.

The next left turn brought me to exactly what I'd been hoping to avoid: a very long hallway with a row of closed doors on either side. There would be no place for me to hide if a someone spotted me.

Okay, Harper, think. Go back to basic training. The first rule of survival was to do a zone of assessment. See what I had to work with. I knew maybe where the exit was, I had a stunner, I had the clothes on my back and not much-

I reached into the pocket of the Krynn jacket I'd been wearing and pulled out a keycard. After I'd escaped I'd been so focused on getting away that I hadn't even thought to check my clothes.

So panic made me an idiot. It was extremely unlikely that a janitor's robe would hold a passkey to a ship or anything like that, but maybe I could find something useful. All I would need is a little luck and for the thing to actually work.