A couple hours later, Justin climbed out of a random vent grill.
The scenery hadn’t changed at all. For a moment he was terrified that all that crawling in a straight line had somehow gone in circles. It was just hard to swallow that this place could really be so big.
He felt like he had been in there all day, but at least now he was certain that NK-525 no longer had a clue where he was. Now all he had to do was keep a low profile, and not set off any more alarms. That eerie silence— a silence he would never fully trust again— cut through his thoughts, and a stressed-out anxiety made it hard to concentrate.
Still he knew he needed to make a plan, and fast. He wished he knew where Max— or even Bandit— was. As much as he worried about his new friend, even being able to find the hole in the wall would be helpful.
Then again, now that he thought about it, even if that mysterious hole hadn’t vanished again, he was strangely certain there was no other way out of that cave. Just thinking about his current position, relative to the pond back in Paradise (above?), hurt his mind. There was some piece missing from this puzzle, and he wished he knew what the hell it was.
Strangely, he found himself hoping Max was doing better than he. And he couldn’t help but wonder now many of those supply rooms there were, and if there was one nearby. Perhaps he could organize more supplies without that damn NK-525 breathing down his neck.
Of course, there was no way he could know that the black, glassy-looking panel he just walked past at the corner of that particular junction was a wide-beam infrared scanner— originally used to measure traffic, but now turned to other purposes— whose snare was invisible to the unaided human (and many other species’) eye.
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Chapter notes: Justin emerges