“We need to keep moving if we don’t want to get caught.”

Neiman’s voice echoed in Terra’s head but it barely registered as she stood in the light of the cloud. Her mind had gone completely numb along with the rest of her body, but then again she never felt it in the first place.

“Alright, if you’re not going to move then I will.”

Terra watched from her perspective as her body started moving without her consent, turning her around to face the dusty plains and her elongated shadows that pointed towards the nearest city on the horizon.

“What are you doing?” Terra cried in alarm as she realized Neiman had somehow overridden her will to stand still.

“No, what are you doing? We can’t stay in one place for multiple reasons. One, there’s no reason to keep staring since there’s nothing we can do. Two, the longer we stay the quicker GreenHouse agents will catch us and need I remind you that we were the ones that did that? Three, there’s a reason why things went down the way they did and we shouldn’t take Indo and Petri’s sacrifice in vain.”

Terra’s body bent down and unzipped one of the bags and removed a set of clothes meant for someone shorter than a six-foot robot and clumsily put them on. As a finishing touch, the respirator with the skull painted on it was placed crookedly on her face as to cover her odd mask.

“Why can’t I just have a moment to take a breath? I haven’t had a chance to get my thoughts together since I was captured and forcefully turned off constantly.”

“You’re going to have lots of moments to think on our way to Onto. Oh, and four, we don’t run on unlimited energy like the Efficiency did, so we need a power source otherwise we may have all the time in the word when we shut down in the middle of nowhere.”

“What?”

Terra could feel Neiman sighing exasperatingly and suddenly felt self-conscious about knowing so little about how the world worked and about the body she was in.

“The Efficiency body you possessed had been modified to absorb any and all light and convert that into energy but that was because Indo worked his magic and Efficiency bodies use little energy and are small. Combatant bodies are meant to exert a large amount of energy in small spurts and have large, inefficient bodies that are meant to quickly subdue an enemy and then get recharged. I modified your body so you use half the amount of energy needed than others but it still means you need fuel cells, which are in the bag ahead of us.”

Before Terra could ask about what bag he was talking about, Neiman turned on her tracker display and began explaining how it worked.

“That red line in the far distance is where the bag is currently. We know that the end goal is Onto but we don’t have enough power to make it there, we have thirty hours maximum before systems fail. We don’t have any backup power, so when those thirty hours are up, they’re up, unless we can procure another cell along the way. Our best bet is to intercept the bag and replace the cells then. According to my calculations the bag should be twenty hours away if it remains in place, which I know it won’t, so we need to get moving immediately.”

Terra just wanted to give up and forget about everything. Where was Alter and her dark world when she needed it? The idea of simply staying still until her power drained was tempting but Neiman clearly wasn’t taking no for an answer and Terra disliked the thought of being forcefully moved around against her will more than the need to stay put.

She turned around one last time and said goodbye to her two companions and then ran towards the red beckon in the sky.

It was made clear very quickly that traveling at high speeds was exhilarating for a few seconds, and then boring the next hundred. Neiman wasn’t a very good conversationalist either as he spoke mostly in technical terms and was entirely too pedantic for Terra’s tastes. She tried finding ways to occupy her mind while she ran but there wasn’t anything other than the faces of Indo and Petri when she left them in the reactor room. After too long in silence and with the snapshot images of the death of the two people she’d known the longest in her short life constantly flashing before her eyes, she recalled the small notepad Petri had shoved into her hands right before she’d left.

While still running at top speed, Terra managed to somehow hook the two bags in the nook of her elbow while fumbling around in the interior of the bags until she found the notepad and drew it out. She flipped it open and zoomed in on the small handwriting, eager to learn more about Petri and Indo while they were alive than focusing on the moment of their deaths:

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

I hated Indo when I first met him. Not the sexual tension will-they-won’t-they hate, but actual I-want-to-burn-his-face-off hatred. He was such a cocky bastard when he walked into the Pharmaceutical division asking for some lab rats because he was running ‘important research.’ He put up such a fuss when his request was denied since everyone claimed they had important research they needed us on and he wasn’t going to be an exception. You should have seen his face! Priceless.

Well, he came back every day for the next week demanding he got test subjects and each time he would raise such a fuss that one of the newer lab rats would end up crying because they couldn’t handle the stress of a grown man screaming at the head lab assistant. I finally cracked and slapped him across his pretty little face and he stopped coming after that. Looking back it wasn’t my proudest moment since it turned out I was ten years older than him, but I felt pretty proud of myself.

As the oldest lab rat, I was given certain freedoms not granted to the others since I had such a high immunity to so many toxins and viruses that the scientists let me wander the buildings whenever I wanted so long as I get back in time for my testing times. Indo had peaked my interest since he’d been the most interesting thing to happen in the lab in a very long time and I really wanted some sort of release. I figured that if I riled him up I could get into a nice fighting match or something.

I guess it was then when our friendship started up. I ended up sneaking into the robotics labs whenever I had free time since I knew he was almost always there and we’d just talk. I apologized after the fifth time visiting him since I it was then I saw that the guy was just really passionate about his work and not just some asshole wanting lab rats for their own purposes.

I guess it just became second nature for me and Indo to be together since we were referred to as the ‘wonder duo’ around the labs. I even helped Indo try out his robotic remote controls, which people misconstrued and the rumor that Indo was transferring human minds into robots was started. There was no mind transferring or whatever they called it, Indo was just trying to remotely control robots out in the field. People will seriously make rumors out of anything.

Probably a few years into getting to know one another I was injected with a human-created super virus to see how I’d fare, and all I can say is that I survived, but just barely. I guess I was in a coma for two months but I don’t remember a bit. When I woke up, Indo was there and he looked even worse than me. I think that was when I knew I was in love with him, but I didn’t want to risk my friendship with Indo for something trivial like that.

Apparently, Indo had fought to keep me under until they found a cure since usually they just dispose of lab rats if something bad, like a coma, happened. Lucky me I guess. Indo was different after that. He was more distant and reclusive and sometimes didn’t say a word when I went to meet him. When I confronted him about it, he led me to the nuclear reactor and showed me how to operate it, and then explained that he had a plan to escape from the place since he’d learned its dark secrets.

He refused to tell me exactly what it was and only told me that GreenHouse is the enemy and should be stopped by all extents and purposes.

At first, I refused since I’d never even taken a step outside, but I could tell that he was completely serious and I had nothing to lose, so I told him I’d follow him.

It took us a year to get the necessary connections to leave, but we finally did, and it was dramatic. I’d talked with my fellow rats and learned that the majority of them wanted death over the medicinal torture they had to endure, so per my request Indo’s contact dutifully destroyed the lab rat facilities and incubation centers. Their deaths are on my hands, not Indo’s. We were never able to set off the nuclear reactor though, and I’m glad we didn’t. Lab rats are tortured and longed for death, and we didn’t want to kill people who weren’t ready to die.

We stole an untraceable Patrol vehicle and went on to explore the world. Or I thought we were out exploring the world since I thought that was our number one goal once we’d escaped, but Indo had other plans. I won’t bore you with the details and I’m running out of space, but we went out hunting the old world gas canisters. It turns out that GreenHouse hadn’t actually decommissioned any of them and they were all still armed and ready to explode at the push of a button. I think the button is at the GreenHouse Central Building, but that’s only a guess. It took us fifteen years but we disarmed whatever ones we had access to and marked them on a map. We ran into some problems along the way regarding the politics of border crossing between countries while being fugitives of GreenHouse, but we did find a few allies on the way.

Whoever finds this, whether ally of GreenHouse or not, GreenHouse will fall. There are people like Indo and me who will keep fighting to end their reign and bring about a new world. One where children aren’t brought up to be experimented on. A world where we can all breathe the air around us without having to get injections or wear a mask. One where---

Petri’s writing tapered off into a scribble although there were still a few pages left in the notepad and Terra guessed it was from when she burst into the room and took out the two guards assigned to him. She wished he had written more details about...well anything in general. After reading the excerpt she had more questions than before but now there was no one to answer them. Where had they traveled to? What other countries were there? Where was the map that they marked the gas canisters on? What were the canisters and why would they explode? Who were their allies? What had GreenHouse done that was so bad that Indo and Petri had died to destroy one of their facilities? How many facilities were there in total?

Her mind flashed back to Petri holding Indo in the darkened room and instead of the gaping sadness she had felt mere minutes ago, she felt a resolve build within her. She was going to finish what they started.

Dropping the notepad back into one of the bags, Terra set her sights on the red line of light in the sky ahead of her.