Angel Of Clinia

17. No Way Out

I pull at the door again and it opens wide. "Smart idea." Taylor taps her finger on her head. "After you." I tell her, making a dramatic motion with my hand. "Why thank you." She laughs as she curtsies. The hallway is still quiet when we're inside. We don't have a key to the room so I just shut it, trusting those around me. It isn't like we have anything in the room for anyone to steal. I remain clutching the board with my left arm.

We tiptoe as to not disturb those in the rooms around us. "This hallway is still awesome." I whisper with a small squeal of excitement. "I know!" Her voice bounces along with her as she lightly jumps up and down.

When I get to the staircase that should lead us downstairs, there's a towering steel door. "Now that's a little more concerning." I take my voice out of a whisper. I do a whining dance. Taylor opens her mouth to speak but before she has a chance steel doors begin shutting all at the same time. We twist our heads towards the doors to see red eyed and angry clones of Necarians.

"Oh no."

A thud.

A louder thud.

A heavier thud.

A booming groan of a zombie like person echoes through the halls making the walls and floors tremble. A man as high as the ceiling, large, and cloned- stomps slowly towards us. "Uhhh Taylor?" I barely manage to cry. "Y-yeah?" She croaks. "What do we do?" I whimper as the clones and the giant leader grow closer. Taylor looks around. "Get to the vent!" She exclaims nervously. I'm basically frozen with terror but manage to twitch myself free of the trance to follow her. We were much tinier than the Necarian people. They were all bigger boned and tall. We slip into the vent. I hit my right knee on the border of the vent. It was on the floor by our room door.

My heavy breathing is louder than my thoughts. I can barely hear the clones above us. Fear is spiraling through me like an unstable tornado.

"Get them." It wasn't yelled, but a very loud and strong voice beams. Surely that voice belonged to their leader.

We keep trudging forward but my knee is still throbbing. Just enough to distract me from the other vent opening above me. A hand grabs at my hair. "Owowow!" I scream. "Let go!" Taylor crawls over and pulls the hand off of my now tender hair. "Thank you!" I yell quickly as I comically scurry away from the opening. "Any time, but I hope it never needs to happen again!" Her words were breathy as she tried to be a good leader ahead of me.

"Why can't we catch a break?" I whine loudly.

"I don't know. There's a turn here!" She tells me but I'm not aware until I smack my face into the metal wall. "Ow." Note taken.

The sound of bellowing clones fades and so Taylor peeks up from one of the vent openings we come across. "See anything?" I whisper. She squints. "No, I don't think-" a clone pops up in her face and her instincts have her punch it in the nose. It falls back with its wires popping out of its face. Small sparks radiate from the ripped open red and blue wires. "Good hit." I nudge her. By this point we're out of the way of the steel walls. "We must be beyond their reach."

We are lucky enough to have opened at the main entrance door so we can run as fast as we can to the outskirts. I think the clones have boundaries. Because if people are seen in places they wouldn't normally be, that's out of the ordinary and raises suspicions.

"The government is getting around really fast. We have to find James Cores. It's said he's lost somewhere in the outskirts of town and that he can defeat Cosmo and Renard. He could be the key to saving us all." I recite my history.

"He's been lost for years, Mar. How would you and I of all people be the ones to find him?"

"Because almost nobody dares go to the outskirts of the group that'd want to find him. The outskirts born and raised don't care nor probably know who he is in the first place."

"We're out here now but at what cost?"