The blood of the Escaped

Collaboration

"Sawada-sama, we're here to collect them again." A man dressed in a white suit said.

Sawada sighed and nodded, lifting a box from under his table. The man opened the package, checked the frozen contents, and closed it.

"Is there anything else, Ratri? I'm sure you must have something if you came a week earlier than normal to collect the goods." He interrogated, his voice coated with hostility. Sawada leaned forward, his family's trademark amber eyes glinting in the dimly lit room.

The man gulped and nodded. Keeping the best poker face he could maintain, he then passed the man a vanilla folder. "Please keep this confidential. It is the list of children carrying the blood of Vongola."

Sawada furrowed his eyebrows in disgust and snatched the folder out of the man's hands. He flipped through the content, his hands now shaking. "Why are you giving me this? Isn't this data supposed to be viewed at your clan's discretion?"

The man paused and smiled. Sawada stepped back. Something did not feel right, but his intuition was not ringing. His tutor once said to trust this intuition entirely because it never went wrong. He could not help but think it could fail now, right?

The man leaned forward this time. "My boss, James Ratri, would like to work with you in regards to giving the cattle children a chance to free themselves from their horrible fate."

"What?"

~Timeskip~

The three best friends wandered to the gate. It was a moment of curiosity about the outside world that made them venture out and break the rules their mother had set.

"What's this?" The little girl asked, her hands gripping the metal bars that stretched from the top down.

The raven head accompanying them informed her. "It's a gate. It stops us from running out."

Her eyes darted around in the dark. "What is this place?"

"It's a corridor. It connects the inside to the outside," Ray replied.

Emma looked up and gazed at the ceiling. It was dark, but she could see a hint of sparkle reflecting in the dim light. They looked like the gears that she saw when Norman and Ray took the clocks apart.

"Well then. What do you want to do when you leave this place?" Norman's voice snapped her away from her thoughts. The kids thought carefully. A brief silence settled upon them until Emma broke it.

"Hmm... I want to ride a giraffe!" She exclaimed. Ray rolled his eyes and wished her luck. Typical Emma, his eyes seemed to say. Norman looked at the bars he gripped and wondered aloud.

"I wonder how the outside looks like."

The three of them now turned back to look at the dark corridor.

Emma stared, wondering about the same thing. At the back of her mind, something whirred, clicked and fell into place.