Let Me Protect You (Sahyo)

Chapter 22.2

Sana ran as fast as her feet could carry her, a hand holding onto the laptop and the other clutched onto her wound. There was a knife tucked into the back of her shirt, ironically exactly how the man had done it. She was weaving in and out of the rows after rows of rooms, throwing open doors with abandon, hoping to find her girlfriend behind one of them.

There were an endless number of laboratories, each just configured slightly differently from the last. None of them looked anything like the room on the screen of the laptop.

Each trickle of blood both from her wound and the ones adding into the pool around Jihyo was like another sand in the hourglass falling away. With every step she took, she could physically feel her skin get clammier and clammier from the effort, but still she pushed on.

She squinted hard at the screen, and that was when she spotted it. On the far left corner of the room Jihyo was in, there was a stack of styrofoam boxes piled neatly. She couldn't be sure, as the video was far too blurry, but the labels on the boxes seemed to read " FROZEN GOODS ". Her eyes scanned the screen again, for the first time looking at anything but the girl lying in the centre of it.

A small rectangle was hanging on the wall on the right, and it took a moment of clarity to piece it together.

A thermostat. Boxes of frozen things and a thermostat.

She whipped her head around to where she remembered seeing a directory, tearing down the hallway in the direction she needed to go to. She let the signages lead her as she willed her body not to give up, dragging her feet behind her as she crashed into the first room she saw labelled " FREEZER ROOM " in an acrylic plaque on its heavy metal doors.

The laptop fell out of her hands, colliding with the floor, sending the broken keys flying everywhere.

Jihyo. Lying there, just as she was on the screen. But there. Here. Sana let herself go.

It felt like swimming against the current and just under the surface of the relentless waves, the chokehold that unconsciousness had on her. But a voice cut through them all like a proffered hand to grab onto, and Jihyo  did. She took that voice and pulled and pulled and pulled, and didn't stop until she surfaced again.

"Sha..." She gulped, feeling herself getting lifted into warm arms.

It was soft, barely a breath, but Sana heard her, and stilled immediately.

"Ji-Jihyo? Can you hear me?" She was in disbelief, watching as some focus came back into the other girl's blinking eyes. She shook away her tears furiously, not allowing any of it to blur her vision, when those dark brown eyes locked onto hers.

"Hyo, please hold on, I'm getting you out of here." Sana was amazed at how coherent she was, because she felt like her emotions were anything but.

The image of the bomb's remote appeared in her mind again, and she suddenly realised the predicament they were in. She hooked her arm under Jihyo 's knees, another slung around and supported her neck, and then she stood up gingerly, biting her lips to grit through the pain.

She tried to remember the path she took to end up at the freezer room, crossing the winding hallways and endless dark maze of identical looking doors. The signages were no longer helpful, since none of them seemed to point to a way out.

She was losing feeling in her arms, and Jihyo was becoming more and more of a deadweight in her hold, the hands that were gripping at her shirt losing its traction.

"Hyo, stay with me please." The words kept leaving her mouth in a chant, partially a plea to Jihyo , but also a prayer to Gods she didn't believe in. "Please, you promised me."