The Sovereign

Chapter 1

I'm running.
My legs are taking big leaps while my head is going in circles. My feet keep hitting the gravelly ground, scattered with debris and rocks and dust. The usual scenery you'd see in the desolated area I live in, really. It's like a huge mutant giant stepped on this area of land and left behind its trash of dust particles and ruined, abandoned buildings. And I'm crushing and stomping and crushing all that the giant has left behind, while my lungs and legs keep screaming at me in agony.

My breath keeps escaping me and my eyes dart from left to right. I'm being chased. The wind is chasing me, but it's not only the wind; the Hunters have found me. I've been scavenging for materials near a polished police station. I know, it was stupid, since I'm a runaway criminal, but I had my reasons. The police stations are always so renovated and stacked with so much equipment and materials and, most importantly, food rations. They are pampered, spoiled and filled to the brim with necessities I want greatly. But not for myself. For the people that are close to my heart. But of course, these police stations are patrolled like crazy. Even though the police stations are huge, huge buildings, they still manage to find and recruit so many security personnel that it's impossible to look at the police station without spotting a security guard.
Nonetheless, they found me. I'm still running, cursing at myself for being caught in this way. My panic is growing  and bubbling up inside of me by the second, and my breaths come in short gasps. The Hunters, a part of the police task force that spotted me, keep coming even closer, as I hasten to sprint through a dirt track of rubble.
I whip my head around and I find what looks to be an abandoned home. I don't believe in the unseen but at that moment I thanked God as if I was granted the ability to move lands and seas.
I dart to the right, to the abandoned house, and find that the door is locked. Oh, my god. I take back my thank yous. They're gonna catch me. I'm gonna get arrested and cuffed and thrown into prison and sentenced to dea-

The door hinges. They look loose.
I lunge at the side of the door and fiddle with it with my fingers and when that didn't work I just start yanking at the hinges until, thankfully, one by one, they fall off, and the door plummets to the ground with a loud thud, blowing a puff of dust from the dirt on the ground. I've never been this happy to open a door before in my life. I pushed myself inside the home and bolted so fast my eyes started to tear up. I don't know whether the Hunters spotted me or if they're right behind me, but I sure as hell am not looking back.

My eyes darted from left to right as I surveyed the interior of the house in a rush. Dust covered couch, cabinets, stairwell, curtains... the stairwell.
I quickly run up the stairs and darted into the first room I saw, and my eyes landed on a bed that looked like it belonged to a child. Small, made of wood, and covered with a dirty, greying pink blanket. As the interior of this room sank in,  I became torn between choosing whether to hide under the bed or under the pink blanket.

" GET IN THERE AND SEARCH THE HOUSE, SHE MUST BE IN HERE SOMEWHERE."

Uh oh. I hear their footsteps and shouts and their loud ruckus as they enter this house and decide to hide under the bed. The blanket was too small anyway. The gap under the bed is small too, but really it was my only option at the moment. I squish myself in there as hard as i can.

Just as I pull my leg under the bed, the door to the room opens. I hold my breath. The footsteps are getting closer, louder, and I grit my teeth in anticipation as my head floods with panic and dread.
My arm begins to ache. I had it under my stomach, and my body's pressing against it. The bed is crushing me from above, and the cold, splintered ground of wood is crushing me from below. Though I have to do something before my arm loses its blood circulation.

I squint my eyes closed in agitation, and slowly I start to move my arm.

Wrong move. I should have realized that those splinters from the wood floor would be such a setback. For when I moved my arm, a splinter caught on my arm and tore my skin apart. And before I knew it, I yelped in pain. I immediately regretted my whole entire existence. I held my breath as my arm screamed at me and dripped blood all over the floor and anticipated the Hunter's face to crouch down and look into mine, under the bed. I even start to hear the soldiers downstairs pause in their tracks and question who just screamed. It can't get any more obvious as to where I'm hiding. It really can't.
Surprisingly, even though I saw how the Hunter's scuffed black boots flinch at my yelp, he didn't move from his place. Instead, he completely froze. A moment of silence passed, and I just knew that this Hunter pinpointed exactly where I was.

My breathing was erratic, my simple dirty grey shirt was sticking to my skin from my excessive sweating, and my black stringy braid was clamped and stuck to the nape of my neck.  And the crushing bed plus the cut on my arm is not making matters any better. I was suffocating, and basically felt like dying right now is the most merciful thing that could happen to me.

I was close to just turning myself in to these lucky Hunters.

But the weird thing is, he just left the room and closed the door behind him. My mouth gaped open. And i hear him say;

" No one in this room, guys. It was me who screamed. I thought I saw a rat.  Let's keep searching on the dirt track she came from. Maybe she went close to another police station."

They all left with their laughs at that soldier echoing behind them.