Chapter Three:
Just by a few words he had said to me four months ago, I had come to the conclusion that Xavier Grey knew or thought he was going to die in the Battlefield. Yet, he could be lying or trying to make himself seem inferior to everyone else. I have no idea what he could have learned these past four months, and if it's most of what i've learned, who knows what he's capable of.
Xavier Grey is a lot of things, but stupid has never been one of them.
I forgot my entire train of thought when I felt a sharp needle being injected into my forearm by some man in a white jumpsuit. I look around in complete confusion to see if I'm the only one being drugged, and I'm not.
Maybe this is some drug to make to sleep for when they take us to the Battlefield for privacy reasons and Elliot just left out this part to not scare me. Maybe.... I started losing consciousness and forgot my train of thought again, but there's something, something that's making me feel all wrong.
I hear a man's cry for help coming from the distance as I start drifting away. I try to think if I heard glass shatter before I was injected, but I was lost in my mind again. I thought Elliot was only joking around when he told me I could get killed for spacing off. This time, he could be right, and I could die in a matter of seconds.
I look at Xavier and his face is red, or covered in something red. He's smiling, laughing, crying, and screaming all at once, but he's falling down right as I am too and he looks at me with such focus. We stare into each other's eyes, almost like he's telling me he loves me, and then I wearily fell asleep.
***
"Come on Av, wake up! Hurry, those drugs aren't even that bad to shake off, now get yourself up! We need to get to the meeting. We're late!"
Elliot's the only one who calls me "Av".
"Elliot? Where are we? What's going on?" I say, with a hint of studderness in my voice from the injection I was unwantingly given. My vision is blurred, but it quickly comes back to me, and I begin to see his face.
"We're in Station X.' He says while trying to drag me up.
"Station X doesn't even exist. E's the latest one. A, B, C, D, and E, right? Did you get shot up with drugs too or something? Cause you obviously aren't thinking clearly. There are only five stations."
"That's what the Apostasy wants you to believe." He says to me with a straight face. I shoot up out of bed now, realizing he isn't joking, or intoxicated. He grabs my arm and we start running down this dark hallway.
"I'll explain everything in a little bit but we've wasted more time than what was more than likely allotted." He says to me in between breaths.
"How long has it been?"
"Two days."
Two days? Two days to recover from whatever was put into my system by God knows who?
I start panicking and my mind starts circling, making me dizzy. Elliot looks at me and knows I'm quietly going insane. Sometimes I wonder how he's come to know me so well.
We slow to a mild jog to catch our breath. There's still a long ways through this tunnel that Elliot just called a hallway. I feel like I'm in one of those dreams where you're in a hallway that never ends, and you know there's something good at the end of it, but you can't reach the end. Unfortunately, I'm almost sure that this is where reality and that dream differentiate. I have this feeling that there is nothing worth running for, but running from. Honestly, I'm afraid that we're running straight into death.
