“Where’s Lark?” Briar asks as we head outside.
“She said to go on without her and get to the meeting point,” Silva says.
“What if she doesn’t make it?” Luna asks, her eyes filled with panic.
“She’s gonna be just fine. She will make it. Come on. We don’t have much time,” Silva says.
I don’t waste time, I just follow after my sister. I trust her with my life and will always follow her lead.
We take off running, the darkness of the night and the trees offering us enough cover to sneak away undetected. The guards are between shift changes, and this is our best chance.
Once we make it to the property line, we look back to see Lark off in the distance.
“Thank fuck.” I blow out a breath.
“Over here,” Silva says, waving us over, deeper into the tree line.
She leads us to where she has slowly been stashing things for the past few months.
We grab as much as we can carry.
“We gotta go,” Lark pants out. “We have maybe an hour tops, before the dumbasses are done with their meeting and realize I have the video footage going on a loop.”
Lark grabs some things too, and we start our hike through the Colorado mountains.
With only a few flashlights, it’s not easy to get around. Lark was able to steal a few things, like a GPS, to help us get to where we’re going.
It feels like we’ve been walking for hours before we stop. I’m out of breath, sweating like a pig, and my legs are killing me.
“How long will it take us to get where we need to go?” Silva asks, taking a drink from one of the water bottles.
"It's about a two-day walk. Four if we stop to sleep,” Lark says.
“Fuck,” I groan, letting my head hang.
“What do you expect? It’s an abandoned town in the middle of the mountains. Even if we did have a car or something else to get us where we need to go, we can’t risk it. We need to stay in the forest, away from any marked trails or roads. It would take us longer to get to them anyways. By going this way, we’re cutting our time in half.”
“Thank fuck we have sneakers,” I grumble. “And that it’s summer. Or we’d be dead.”
“Enough,” Lark mutters. “What’s important is we got out of there. Gideon is probably losing his mind right now, but he’s not going to find us, okay? If anything, he might think we ended up dying out here.”
“Are we?” Aries asks. “Going to die, I mean.”
“No,” Silva sighs. “We’ll be fine. We have food and water.”
“My guy brought everything we needed to get to Widows Peak. Food, water, supplies. It’s the best he could do. The town isn’t very accessible anymore. Most of the roads have been washed away or buried by fallen trees.”
“We will make do with what we have,” Silva says. “We just need to remember that we’ll be free. That's what matters.”
“Free,” I whisper. “Anything is better than being sold off to one of those fuckers,” I mutter.
“We’re going to be okay,” Silva reassures, giving my arm a squeeze as we continue on our journey.
“I know.” I give her a hopeful smile. Even though my body is exhausted, knowing that we’re about to start over, just the six of us, gives me the push I need to keep going.
This isn’t the first time we've had to run, but hopefully it will be our last.
Two days. It took us two days to get here. We’ve been running on hardly any sleep. None of us felt safe enough to stay still for too long. So we stopped to get three hours of sleep, enough to keep us from wanting to collapse to the ground, before moving on.
