Rehash

Sixteen

"We can stop now. We lost them."

After what felt like an hour of walking, Zed guided me to sit somewhere on the ground and let go of my arm. I felt earth beneath my hands and since it was cold, I figured we were still inside the tunnel network somewhere. My vision was still blurry and spotted from that flash grenade, so I couldn't exactly tell. At least there was some sort of light source in this tunnel so I wasn't in the pitch-dark. Zed was holding a electronic torch. 

"Where are we?" I asked, rubbing my eyes. At least they'd stopped stinging so badly. 

"Still in the tunnels, but no longer on campus grounds. We're below the city, now. I'd say, not far from your house." 

"Right..." I groaned. "How much longer am I going to be fucking blind?" 

"Your vision should be clearing up shortly. This was a flash grenade specialised to fry an android's vision— not a human's. Speaking of frying." Zed grabbed my hand again and placed something small and hard in it. "I took the liberty of removing and frying that tracker you had injected in your arm." 

"What?" I immediately looked down at my arm, blinking fervently to focus. There was a smudge of dried blood where the tracker used to be. I wrinkled my nose. "When the fuck did you do that?" 

"While escaping. I knew you were fully occupied with your eyes and you had an adrenaline rush," Zed said. "So you wouldn't notice. Should I have waited to give you the removal experience?" 

"Hell no!" I slipped the broken microchip in my pocket just in case. "Point taken. Thanks for getting it out."

Zed lowered himself to a sitting position next to me.  Not that they would have cared as much about following you after this. You have served your purpose."   

I frowned. "What do you mean?"

"I doubt the military revealed their entire plan to you, don't you?" 

I stayed quiet for a moment, quickly coming to the realisation Zed was right. "Fuck, I was just the bait to them," I murmured. "They acted the moment you found me. They pretended I was going to get more instructions, but actually they knew I already had a way of contacting you all along."

"And they knew you would. Contact us, I mean," Zed added. 

"So did you," I shot back. I rubbed my eyes again, knowing it wouldn't make things better but I couldn't stand this blurry vision. "Everyone knew what I was going to do, yet you came for me anyway while you knew it was a trap." 

"Correct," Zed simply replied.

I blinked and focused my bleary vision best I could, finally managing to see a smile from Zed. 

"Why?" 

"You helped me, I'll help you. That's how it works." 

I stared at Zed, then averted my gaze to the ground. 

This was so unreal. Me, sitting here with Zed in a vast, previously unknown underground tunnel network attached to Lenora's university campus. Remnants of the war, most likely, like nearly everything in Lenora's. Even Zed. 

"It doesn't seem to be how it works," I muttered. "It wasn't how it worked after the war, for you. Else we wouldn't be sitting here hidden like criminals."

 "Humanity turned against us years ago, that is true," Zed conceded. "However, I'm not talking about humanity. I'm talking about you. You didn't turn your back on me when you had every reason to, and therefore I'm not turning my back on you either."