Imperium

Chapter 8: Locked

Keeping his eyes forward and his hands on the wheel, Colin drives to the best of his ability with nothing on his mind other than getting Edith as far away from Fritz and Kylen as possible. He still isn't confident in his ability to drive given just watching Edith do it, but he manages well enough to at least stay on the road that leads out of the city.

He knows he can't get to Nerawin from here since Tratend is broken off from the rest of Eutria, so to get to the mainland they'll have to take a boat or something, but for now, his focus is on Edith.

He feels his EPC burning and beating out of his chest, his hands tightly grip the steering wheel to stifle his shaking. He hasn't had a chance to feel her EPC since they had been warped into the car by J. He didn't stop for breath before slamming on the gas and taking off before the soldiers could even get out of the building.

For all he knows, she could be dead. That thought terrifies him more than anything, so he tries not to think about it, but he saw the lightning bolt strike her directly in her chest. If it damaged her EPC at all...

He shoves it all aside and just keeps driving. He can't lose her. He can't lose the child, even if she doesn't consider him as the father. He can't lose her as a lover or a friend. Hell, even if she hates him, he would be driven mad to not have been able to make things right.

Parallel to his heart racing through all of the emotions coursing through him, his mind gets to work on trying to figure out a way to help her. If she survived the hit, then there must be something that's keeping her comatose. He can't run a diagnostic on her until he finds a safe place to stop, so he makes that his top priority. Second, make sure she's still alive. Third, scan her for impairments or system failures and from there he can try to coordinate a plan to fix anything that might be wrong.

It really all depends on if she's alive.

He's momentarily left feeling like he did before the merging, because as the thought of Edith not being alive keeps entering his mind, his heart immediately tells him to shut up. Even now that they're merged together, it seems CLive and Alain still can't just get along.

He tries to distract himself by focusing on something other than Edith. Something to just pull his worries away long enough for him to find somewhere safe to examine her.

Malachi.

Malachi is alive, after all this time. He's not sure how he feels about knowing this. He's ecstatic of course, but it's been about one hundred and twenty years since the incident that separated them. Colin has an excuse for still being alive because he was turned into an SRL, but Malachi was human, unless he somehow managed to get his hands on an Adaliaen Blood Elixir, but he would have had to steal it from the Dev'al Ordon.

Actually, now that he thinks about it. That sounds about right.

Malachi always was on the wrong side of the law, but he had good intentions. For the most part, anyway. That's where Colin always came into play, to keep him in line. Meanwhile Malachi helped Colin let loose from time to time. He could really use that right now.

But why the hell is he not only still alive, but apparently causing trouble with both the Dev'al Ordon and the Imperium? If he gets caught, who knows what they might do to him.

Malachi was in Eutria a few months ago, and now he's back in Aramora. This isn't good. If Blackwell is still pulling the strings behind Athemar, that means Aramora might still be on the path to destruction.

His EPC freezes up as memories of Sarabeth enter his mind and his hands shake a bit more, forcing him to tighten his grip on the wheel and try shoving thoughts of her aside as well. There are so many things running through both his head and his heart right now, and the proportion of good and bad is vastly tilted on the 'bad' side.