Waiting for Amber Skyy

Chapter 30

We slept the majority of the train ride, well, mostly I did. I was still recovering from the bullet wound in my side. I ate my peanut butter sandwich as Speck tapped away on the laptop, occasionally groaning and tapping even faster. I asked her what she was doing, and she told me she was trying to put up a protection wall to keep us undetected by ITex.

"And once you do that, they won't find us anymore?" I asked, nibbling on the crust.

She nodded, stretching her arms behind her head and yawning, "But we should still be careful."

I nodded back. They must be tracking us through the laptop... but how? It made me think. I rested my head against one of the boxes behind me and thought some more. How did they know we had it? Speck was holding the laptop when we ran into them, but how did they know where we were before then? I glanced at Speck furiously typing away. Is it because of her? My tail flicked a little, grabbing my attention. Or me? The more I stared at my tail flicking around, the more it started to make sense in my mind.

"Hey Speck-"

"Got it!" she cried happily. "Now we are free from their clutches!" She placed the laptop on my legs. It greeted me with a success sign that the firewall was up.

"Wow," I awed. "You did this? All of this?"

"Eyup!" she beamed.

I whistled, smiling at her and completely forgetting what was on my mind earlier, "You are a little genius." I quickly exited it out of the windows, and tapped on the internet browser. Google instantly popped up. I let out a deep breath I had been holding in, my fingers hovering over the keyboard. "Alright, here goes nothing," I started typing.

𓆩 ────── 𓆪

"This doesn't make any sense!"

Speck was fiddling with her knife, spinning it with her hand like it was a fidget toy. I was pacing the car, grabbing my hair and trying to make sense of what I found. Turns out, I didn't have a twin. But it also said I did. My parents weren't expecting twins. But it also said they did. It made zero sense, and the more I went deeper into the idea of how I was even alive, the more confused I got. The random numbers weren't making any sense either.

"If I even did go to them, would they even believe me?" I spurted out.

"Well you'd just have to convince them," Speck pointed out.

"How?" I scratched my head, "Say 'oh I'm that lost twin you once had that you expected but also wasn't expecting'? Or- hah, remember your son? That got kidnapped? I'm his twin, if you didn't know. I would tell you we look alike, but I've never seen him, have you?"

"Hey- don't be like th-"

"But will they? Will they see me? Will they ever see me as their lost daughter? Will they ever see me as somebody important?" Somebody not meant to be cooped up for a good heft of their life stuck in the cage and prodded like an animal?

"You are important Amber-"

"And that's not even my name!" I cut in again, throwing my hands up into the air. "I know that's not! I chose that name based off of my stupid experiment name. Is that all I am? An experiment?"

"You're not the only one, you know!" she shouted at me. I flipped my head to stare at her, her soft brown eyes trying to talk to me. I huffed and turned around, fingering my bandages.

"At least you had a purpose," I spat.

"You do too," she bit back.

"But at least you're not stuck in a lab."