Children's Games: A Story of Modern Consequence

Chapter 60

~Emilia~

It was dead silent on the train.

Florence sat beside her as she finished bandaging Emilia's arm. The vertical nature of the deep cut made it incredibly difficult to stitch. Florence switched between her arm and the stab wound without showing any emotion on her face. Their first five minutes on the train was spent rummaging through Joshua's bag to retrieve the first aid items and had found that Calico wasn't inside. He must have jumped out when she dropped the bag before the alley, and Emilia didn't have the heart to reveal that they had left a second being behind.

She thought through those last sixty seconds on the station platform as she drifted in and out of consciousness, and an hour later, she was still seething as the train travelled at 150km per hour. There was no emergency stop buttons anywhere to be found. She couldn't understand how she could've let this happen! How could Joshua have let this happen?

He had to have been cutting out her chip. Right? Otherwise, he would have just been trying to attack her... But Joshua would never do that. Why now? If he was really scheming with Dominik, everything being a set up... then he had heaps of time to deliver his final blow before that particular moment.

Dominik and Joshua had a special relationship. Dominik trusted him as much as he did with the pure Russians and gave him more responsibilities than Florence. Emilia had half a mind to assume that they knew each other before hand, seeing as though time spent training together could've caused Dominik's ignorance to Joshua's plots. And Joshua did seem to know a lot about Dominik personally, like his brother who lived in France.

She thought that escaping would make this kind of helpless feeling go away. She was wrong.

"Emilia, don't think about it too much. There's nothing we can do now," said Matthew. He had returned from scouting the other twenty-one carriages, trying to find another person, more resources, or any information that could help them in their next steps. "Whether he was attacking you or not-"

"He wasn't attacking me," she fired back. She felt lightheaded and dizzy. "He was taking out my chip. He had already taken out his own- I saw his bandage, and- and the kitchen was all bloody."

Florence stepped away after she secured the tight bandage, but it didn't stop the burning sting that remained along her arm. She was certain that Florence hadn't done it right but was in no state to do it herself. Florence exchanged an unsure look with Matthew. They both looked sad, helpless and had already given up on trying to figure out the motives of their fallen friend.

They took her to the hospital carriage where there was a strange device that Joshua had described once. It was supposed to scan an injury and replace the damaged tissue. Joshua had been impaled with a rod of some kind upon his arrival, and the machine had saved his life. Emilia was losing consciousness from the blood loss. One moment Florence was pulling the knife out of her gut, then the next she was waking up on their passenger carriage with only a mass of scar tissue where the knife was. She kept Anna's knife firmly in her hand, playing with it as if it was a fidget toy.

"I know you want to think that, but there isn't a logical reason to be cutting it out right at that particular moment..."

"But he got us here!" she said loudly. "He got us this far. There's no other logical reason!"

There was another round of uncomfortable silence as Florence handed out the small bottles of water, and small handfuls of dried fruits. Emilia brought out the medication she had brought for Matthew's nerves, but he refused, not trusting whatever chemical disasters Anna could have possibly hidden in them. But she didn't mind, and downed a comfortable amount of pain killers so that she could disappear without any thoughts for a few hours.