Back To Krypton

Chapter 36

Her feet aren't particularly accepting of the rough stone floors as she gets to the ground floor of the building. At that point, she's forced to put her heels back on because of the pain from the constant jabbing of the sharp edges of the rocks. It means that her sneakiness levels just plummeted but there's nothing she can do about that, she can't run if the soles of her feet are bleeding.

She starts off running but has to give up on that pretty fast because the second she's out of the building, the streets are really quite bustling and it would only serve to draw a lot of unwanted attention to herself.

Now that she is in public though and she's being immersed back into the culture that's so far into her past that she barely knows how to absorb it all, she's very aware of every glance in her direction and it makes her a little self-conscious of her make-up, afraid that it's obvious that she's not well-practised the way she should be as a woman of her age.

There's music playing, a jaunty tune that makes her want to forget what she's doing and just stop and dance along to it, her body conducting her into moves that her mind has long since forgotten but her soul has not.

Kara keeps her head moving, her eyes darting in every which direction to keep tabs on anyone following her, getting so distracted that she barely stops to think that she needs to look at her notebook for the map of the city so she can figure out which way she needs to go to get to the labs.

With a good glance around her, she spots a shady corner beneath some stairs leading up to the second floor of a building and ducks beneath them so she can open up her notebook with sweaty palms. The adrenaline is making her shake slightly, the fear that her parents are going to come after her and stop her before she can get the blueprints for the team.

Of all the people she's been expecting to have to go up against, her parents are the last on that list. She's known for quite a while now that they aren't the amazing people she was led to believe they were when she was younger, actually learning more and more dark secrets about them as the years have gone by, but this takes the cake, well, not in terms of terrible things they've done, but in terms of the thing they have done that has caused her the most pain.

It's a pain that she can genuinely feel in her chest. It's one she can feel sitting there heavily and with each motivational speech she gives herself to get her moving to complete the mission and leave them behind, she's chiselling away at the weight but it's far too large, it helps but barely, a band-aid on a stab wound.

It's hard for her to decipher the map when her mind is moving so fast and her hands aren't steady. She had marked very clearly where the lab is before they left on the mission so she knows where she needs to get to but she never marked anything other than the major monuments and buildings directly around it and leading from the part of the forest she assumed they would have been travelling from, nowhere near where she is now.

She knows she's on the North side of the city. That's something. She just has to head south-west and she'll be able to spot some of the buildings she has marked on the map. That shouldn't be too hard to figure out since Kandor has a special feature in its architecture. The city is built with The Great Temple of Rao in the centre of it and every building faces the temple so that everyone can pray towards it should they so wish to and that means that Kara knows where the centre of the city is. She can get to the temple, which is on her map, and from there she can get to another monument closer to the labs and from there, the labs themselves.

"Come on, Kara. You can do this. Do it for your family." She hypes herself up, glancing out of the shadows out into the street she was walking through just a minute ago.

She's about to step back out but stops when a small collection of guards start making their way through the streets, their heads turning left and right as they walk, clearly looking for someone. She can't help but wonder if they are really after her because she can't imagine that she's all that important enough for so many people to be looking for her but when her mother and her father walk out and join the guards, worry and barely subdued anger written across their faces, she knows.