Off in the distance lay a farm.

Besides a beat up old tractor, a barely holding together pickup truck, and a very well maintained Volkswagen Beetle, there didn't seem to be any sign of more than just an elderly couple living there.

The sun had started to set when I first arrived. I had used my power to coil up, and to give myself sharp claws, combining the two to climb up a towering tree which resided at the border of the farm.

I had settled on one of the highest branches which was thick enough to hold my weight.

From this vantage point I pressed down the branch in front of me to create an opening in the canopy.

The elderly man, having finished the last of his duties on the farm, had started to hobble back towards the farmhouse. He stopped on his way, taking off his hat and looking towards the forest where I was hidden.

Behind him bright golden light spilled out from the farmhouse kitchen into the growing dark.

The elderly man made a sign of a cross over his chest and then hobbled into his home.

The farmer's wife had made a roast dinner. I was too far away to smell it, but with my enhanced vision I could make out beyond the kitchen window the steam rising from the roasted chicken which was drenched in thick brown gravy.

The farmer and his wife said a prayer and then started eating their dinner.

My stomach whined and gurgled for something to eat.

I wasn't sure how much I needed to eat given how good my body was at staying alive even when, under any normal circumstance, it should've been dead.

Back in Lintern's Gym, after the nightmarish treadmill torment the Pied Piper officers had made us teenagers, AKA us 'mice' undergo, I had come out looking horribly sunburnt.

I had walked and jogged with bouts of mad sprinting for so many hours during that treadmill trial I should have died. One long sleep was all it had taken for my sunburnt state to be healed.

Surviving nearly drowning to death, on top of the wounds the Adam-George-Amalgamation had inflicted on me (notably three nasty slashes across my back carved out by the Amalgamation's claws, and severe mangling of my right shoulder with its teeth), had brought my body to a similar near-death state.

After a while of laying on the muddy bank feeling more tired than I had ever felt in my life, I had gotten up and, after a brief check of the sewage pipe I had fallen out of from high above, I had hobbled off into the nearby forest with the intention of creating as much distance between me and the Wedder Gorge facility as possible.

The first time I fell down it took me several minutes to find the energy within myself to climb back to my feet.

By the time I cleared the first patch of forestation I had recovered enough to stop falling over altogether.

The more I recovered the worse my body felt, as if every nerve and fiber of my body were punishing me for the damage I had let happen to it.

After clearing the first field I came to another patch of forestation, and carried on running from forest to field to forest throughout the day.

The wounds on my back and shoulder were bleeding and stinging something fierce. The wound at my shoulder was so mangled I was thankful my body was in such a numb state to prevent me from feeling the worst of it at the time.

I had stopped in the middle of one of the patches of forestation and knelt down. Using the power to heal the slashes across my back took nearly thirty minutes to heal fully. Not being able to see the wounds on my back made the whole process of healing them that much harder. Before, when I had healed the wounds at my stomach and near my right shoulder close to my chest, both wounds had already partially healed themselves by that point and I was able to look down at them and see what I was doing.

I wasn't able to heal my mutilated shoulder. I had tried for around an hour to make the wound close up and disappear as if it were never there to begin with, but was forced to give up because I had to keep moving. I had managed however to stop the shoulder wound from bleeding, closing it up all over with a hard scab-like crust. Running my fingers over the crusted hump was like touching a burnt batch of cookies.

So I continued on, with the new hump-like mass bulging on my right shoulder.

Heal it later, I told myself, for now just keep running.

With each hour that passed I was able to move faster, my staggered pace becoming a jog, which in turn became a flat out sprint. In my coiled state I was able to sprint flat out faster than the world's fastest athlete without worry of tiring.

The forestation peeled by like a blur. My worry of tripping on the abundance of thick roots, dips in the ground, and so on was lessened because my enhanced hearing and vision was able to spot these obstacles well ahead of time. The pain my body had felt eased away until I felt normal again, but my mind in turn seemed to race ahead, anticipating what may be up ahead and figuring out what might be the best course of action to take much faster than I was used to.

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This was scary, because it was different to how I had lost track of time before when staying in the coiled state for a long time. Back at the facility, in the exercise area, I hadn't realised I had run non-stop all night until Tiffany had come to find me.

Time was passing differently the more I allowed the power, in combination with my mind, to take the brunt of the decision-making when it came to avoiding obstacles ahead of me.

Deftly I leapt over the occasional fallen tree, or fence, or wide river. And yet as fast as I ran I knew I could make my body run even faster but, I understood, at the cost of losing more control of myself. A non-stop, flat out sprinter's pace was enough for me to feel comfortable enough distance was being made between me and the Wedder Gorge facility, and the Chellam / Pied Piper Officers there.

More forestation, more farmland, and lots of bad weather followed throughout the day.

The overcast sky had darkened and then thick sheets of rain fell everywhere, lasting for several hours. Cold and wet, I didn't care much, and was actually grateful for the bad weather since that would only hinder any search from the Pied Piper officers were they to look for me.

The rain stopped about an hour before the sun started to set.

Around the same time my heightened hearing had picked up the approach of a helicopter.

I was left with a quick decision to make.

Keep running and hope not to be seen, or find a place to hide.

I opted for the latter.

Back inside yet another patch of forestation I came to a hard stop. I powered down from the coiled state and laid myself down among the thick roots of a large tree.

I remembered back to the police chase shows I had seen on TV and recalled that in those shows helicopters typically had cameras which could pick up the fugitive's heat signature.

I didn't even know if the coming helicopter was searching for me as part of, or on behalf of, the Pied Piper officers; even so, I decided the best way I could hide any potential heat signature of mine was to reduce the temperature of my body.

Laying on my stomach, I used my heightened sense of touch to better understand the temperature of the wet grass and roots and fallen leaves beneath me.

It took about a minute for me to find the unlocking sensation in my mind to successfully make my body cool down.

A strange euphoria took hold of me once my body was in perfect unison as far as temperature went with the forest.

I knew if I wanted to I could just fall asleep and be perfectly comfortable in the forest despite how soaked I was from the rain and my lack of clothing.

All I had was the bottom half of my shredded overalls; the top half had burned away when I had bulbed up my body to prevent the Amalgamation from sinking its teeth any further into my shoulder. I had also lost my plimsolls somewhere on the third floor.

The helicopter neared, forcing me to reduce my enhanced hearing because the sound of the helicopter's spinning rotors were simply too harsh to listen to.

For about twenty minutes the helicopter roamed nearby.

Why won't it go away? I had thought, Can they see me?

When it started to rain again the helicopter moved away. I followed the sound of it flying off, enhancing my hearing the quieter the rotor blades became.

With the helicopter gone I returned my body's temperature to normal and then entered the coiled state again. I had run full-tilt passing through more forestation, more farmland, across roads, over hedges, making sure to avoid the towns and parks with people on my way.

At last, when the sun started to set, I came to be at the farm where the elderly couple were.

And I had a decision to make.

I needed to eat, but it could wait. What I really needed was clothes, because I definitely looked like someone who had escaped a facility which kept superhuman teenagers captive.

What was the world like now? Did people know what powered teenagers like me could do? Or had what happened at the facility been some kind of exceptional, out of the ordinary ordeal?

You could always wait until they're asleep and steal what you need, I thought.

I nodded.

Yeah, that did seem like the easiest option. With my enhanced abilities, sneaking in and out of an elderly couple's home, taking what I could get my hands on, and leaving seemed easy enough. Maybe the farmer had a gun, but even then it wasn't something I feared; the Pied Piper officers had guns, and Sophie, Walter and I had managed to hold our own against them.

The old couple would do a lot more damage with a phone call to the police should they find you, I thought, they'd let the Pied Piper officers know you made it out of the facility alive, and which direction you headed. You really want to give them that kind of advantage?

My stomach gurgled again, followed by a familiar acidic burn.

It hadn't been that long since I had last eaten. The previous night had been Robert Hoffman's special dinner, where he had laid out his design for the British branch of the PUNCH program. That meal had been good. Real good. And it had almost been my last.

I decided quickly that I wasn't going to steal from the elderly couple. Not so much as a chicken egg. My parents had raised me better than that.

In the end it wasn't hunger or tiredness or a need for clothing which brought me down from the towering tree to the ground. It was a different kind of desperation. It wasn't something I could form into a coherent thought even as I walked out from the forest towards the farmhouse.

I walked past a cow which watched me cautiously. I gave it a little wave and it started to move away.

The path was muddy on the way to the farmhouse. My bare feet squelched in the mud with every step.

I wasn't in any condition to go knocking on a stranger's front door, yet I simply couldn't find the rational part of myself to think better of doing so.

The sun had set and the night had become ink blue.

A soft glow, not as bright as the light pouring out from the kitchen window, was behind the front door glass.

The doormat felt rough against the soles of my feet as I stepped up to the door.

I cleared my throat, patted the shredded remains of my overall bottoms, ran a hand through my mud-caked hair, and then knocked three times on the door.

Knock. Knock. Knock.