Dominion

Chapter Twenty One: Most Wanted

Chapter Twenty One: Most Wanted

"Gregor!"

The hunter's voice echoed down the corridor to me, sounding eerily similar to Bask. Maybe that was because he wanted me dead, too.

"Get back here!" A shot fired.

"Down!" Vera yelled from in front of me and I instinctively did as she said, pulling my entire body onto the floor of the shaft. I could hear the shot bounce off one of the walls, darting toward us. It raced just over our heads, bouncing off another wall and zipping down another shaft in the junction ahead.

"Wh-"

"Bullet and laser-proof," Vera interjected, glancing to the wall's surrounding us. "Any rupture could seriously screw with air circulation in the entire station," I glanced back behind us. They still hadn't made it into our shaft, but given their voices and that shot, they were only one junction behind. We needed to pick up the pace.

"They're on the hunt. Air circulation isn't even a concept to them right now." I replied. Vera looked up at the markings on the ceiling above us as we approached the next junction. J-19.

"I know," she said, her thoughts elsewhere. "That's why we need to get out of here." I shrugged.

"Ideas?"

"The nearest air tunnel is still pretty far off," she paused. "We'll have to go through Hunters Villa to get there." I sighed. Not the greatest idea at the moment.

"How about something more immediate?" I glanced around us as she climbed into the junction. "Can these shafts be sealed?" She just shook her head.

"Not without access to..." she paused again, looking to me as I entered the junction. I could see the makings of an idea on her face. "Do you have any more shockers?" Searching my belt, I located my last one and handed it to her. She was quick to place it on a small panel just beside the shaft we'd come out of. She stepped back and the shocker went off, sending waves of electricity across the shaft entrance. Sides of a door emerged from its left and right, closing the shaft but not completely. "That'll hold them off."

"But not for long," I commented. "We need to keep moving."

"This way," she replied, effortlessly. She knew exactly which of the two shafts we needed to head down. Climbing inside after her, I wondered if, in the past, I would've pondered these questions that raced across my thoughts. That wasn't a result of my going from hunter to hunted; that was a result of meeting Vera.

"You said you grew up here," I inquired as we crawled along. "I'm assuming that's how you know your way around these tunnels." She nodded.

"More or less." She glanced at another marking above us. J-21. "Remember I told you that my parents paid off a hunter to take me when we were brought here?" I nodded. "Well, he did take me, but only to the refugee slums at the bottom of the station. He left me there to fend for myself." That much I understood. As hunters, we do what we're paid to do. Nothing more. Nothing less. That was what Paxer taught me. It wasn't a lifestyle suited for concepts such as mercy or kindness. "I had to find my own food, water, clothes, but I was just a kid. No one down there had enough of their own to share. So I had to get creative. I started exploring the station, finding all the back doors. Most of them were through these tunnels."

"So you stole what you needed?" I asked. I wasn't judging. Paxer and I had done plenty of stealing when we needed something, and we weren't the only ones. In this world, you had to hang onto what was yours lest it very quickly become someone else's.

She nodded her head. "At first, yeah. But you can only steal so much." She hesitated, her voice becoming distant, a fractured memory. Something she didn't like to recall. "When I was older, I got a job - if you can call it that - in the Red Sector." The Red Sector - where decency goes to die. That was what Paxer used to tell me. The Red Sector was where the worst kind of people Star Hall had to offer resided. It was a place you didn't want to find yourself if you valued your morals. "Flirting with scumbags to make money. I never them touch me, though. I learned how to...scare them." She hesitated again. Even I could understand not wanting to recall a time like that. "Anyway, I saved up money and got myself a gun. Taught myself how to use it and how to fight. Eventually earned this," she patted her hunter's ID card on her belt. "I used my position to look for information of my parents location. And you know the rest - here we are." We were approaching another junction. We passed the marking J-22 just as a small explosion sounded from behind us, echoing down the shaft and into our ears.