Don't Forget About Me (Previously, Keith Isn't Dead)

Chapter 7

 

Keith's cell was freezing when he woke up. He forced his eyes open, looking around the room for the first time. He began to pace the room, running his hands along the cracked stone walls. There were many things about this room that made the hairs on the back of Keith's neck stand on end. The scratches marking days or weeks, cold air of the room, the fingernail scratches on the walls, floor and edges of the door, but most disturbing of all was the smell. It didn't just come from Keith's room, it seeped from other rooms too. Keith couldn't quite place what the smell was right away but by his third day of imprisonment, he knew it was the scent of death. It was a mixture of burned human hair, rotting flesh, rotten eggs, and thanks to Keith's poor reaction to the stench, vomit.

The teen sat in the cold and damp room for hours, the screams of other prisoners kept him awake all night and he never got any sleep. He had been fed some mysterious slop which he refused to touch. With the combination of the smell and the terrible shrieks, his appetite had evaporated. There was one bright side he supposed; no one had hurt him yet. The screams were evidence enough to tell Keith he was not safe. The way other prisoners cowered in fear from seemingly nothing scared Keith even more. The only way he could sleep at night was by imagining he was back at the castle drinking hot cocoa with his friends, swaddled in blankets. Oh, how he wished they would save him.

*

"...Pidge? Hey, are you ever going to leave your lab? You need to eat and sleep you know." Hunk's soft voice was the thing that finally made Pidge tear her eyes from the screens. "I guess I should stop huh?" She slipped off the chair, walking towards her best friend. He slung an arm around her shoulders, "We've all been really worried. Kolivan said you just ran off after he gave you some code. What's going on?"

Pidge looked up owlishly at Hunk, "you don't-Kolivan didn't-he didn't tell you?" Hunk was looking at her as if she had just grown four heads. Leading Pidge toward her room he started talking to her in a stern voice. "Pidge, you need sleep. Go to bed. I'll bring you food when you wake up okay? Just sleep. You need it. You're really scaring me." "Wait!" She had no idea how to tell him, "I think I know how to find Keith! That's why-that's why I've been in my lab! You don't know? Get everyone together now! Meet me in the common room in five minutes." And with that she ran off screaming something about needing her laptop, leaving Hunk standing there, still as a statue, with the most bewildered expression on his face. "I don't get girls." He muttered as he started off to get Shiro and Lance.

After everyone assembled in the common room Pidge began explaining. "Okay so-Lance shut up this is about Keith-so Kolivan and I were talking and I was trying to find out if he had anything that could help us find him. He gave me this." She held up the flash drive, "it contains a signal code from the Blade's master database. Every Blade member has a small tracker in them. It's kept secret so that it can be used to check if anyone is spying on them, or to find injured members during a mission. So every member undergoes a small surgery and it's implanted in the base of their neck."

Lance raised his hand innocently and Pidge rolled her eyes but pointed at him anyway. "How do the Blade members not know they have a tracker in them if they go under surgery? Isn't that like, illegal?" "They're put under and don't remember Lance." She sighed, rolling her eyes once more. Lance was quiet for the remainder of her explanation.

She pulled up the large map of every one of Keith's possible locations. "This tracker is not especially powerful, so I'll have to search the universe in sections, we'll have to fly to different galaxies and try for his signal in each one. Once I pick up the signal, which is hard because it will be so distant and faint, we will have narrowed down his possible locations to one galaxy. Then we can narrow it down to sections, then planet groupings, and finally the planet he's stuck on. From there we can get his exact location."