「Dreaming For Stars」TPNxReader

11] Traitor, Part 1

Mom has a source of information... among my siblings.
{ Who? How many? Anna... Nat? Thoma. Lanni. Mark. Don... }

"What are his scores? Do you remember?" Ray asked me.
"What? Phil?" I asked, snapping out of my thoughts.

"Let's see. Average of the last seven days is about 203," I answered.
"That's high. He was one of the last five remaining when we played tag with Sister. He's always looking for you, Norman, or Emma with Sherry," Ray told me.

My eyes widened, "No. No. No!" I told him.
"That's scary! Scary, scary! Shut up!" I told him.

"Idiot. You need to be more suspicious! Even if you don't want to suspect everyone," he said.

Book 2} Chapter 11
Traitor, Part 1
裏切り者パート1

"Thank you for the food!" we said in unison.
"I'm still not convinced," Ray muttered.

Flashback

"We'll carry out the escape plan ten days from now, on November 8," Norman said.
Emma grabbed Norman's shoulders and I grabbed him from the back.
"Wait! Wait! Wait!" We said in unison.

"Isn't that too soon?!" I exclaimed.
"Well, it's fine but--" Emma got cut off by Ray who chopped her hands away from Norman.
"It's not fine! Mom's objective is to control us. That means if we don't make a move, she won't either. Doesn't that mean we have time?" Ray said.

"Yeah, that's exactly why I want to move quickly," Norman told him.
"What do you mean?" Emma and I asked in unison. We've been doing that a lot lately...

"If it looks like that to us... Mom sees it that way too. I want to outwit her. Either way, I want to escape before winter comes. And it's not like we're doing this that suddenly. We did prepare a lot in a hurry, including training, because we couldn't read Mom's strategy. So we just have to take care of the necessary things in the remaining ten days. Mom has no intention of hiding the existence of her source of information. I'm sure she has various strategic reasons for that, but if she really wanted to hide it, she'd have Sister watch us, even if it was just pretend," Norman paused.

"Making us think that we have time is a trap. As soon as we break the tracking devices let's execute our escape plan as quickly as possible," he finished.

Flashback End

"But seriously, isn't it reckless? In ten days?" Ray asked Norman.
"You'd think so, right? That's why we're doing it, or else there's no point," Norman replied.

Even if it's a bit reckless, we have ten days. The things we have to do by then is... The first of those is... getting Don and Gilda on our side.

"If we have more teams, our mobility to run away will go up. So first, we have to win over Don and Gilda. Even if they are Mom's source of information," Norman said as we followed him up the stairs.

"So? How are we going to talk to them?" Ray asked. "Even if it's the truth, we still need to word it right. Or else they'll reject the idea, blow it off, and it's over," he said.

He then leaned over to Emma, "Listen, don't think that everyone will easily believe you like I did. Got it?" he asked, his eyes serious causing Emma to sweatdrop.

"I talked about it with Emma, but..." Norman paused.
"We won't tell the truth," Emma finished.

"What? You're going to hide it?" I exclaimed, taking the words out of Ray's mouth.