Confusion

"Find anything interesting?" Lucy asked as Dawnie appeared next to her. She was leaning against a wall, idly buffing her fingernails on her shirt.

"Mm, yes, I did," Dawnie agreed, nodding. She glanced around curiously. "Were you waiting for me?"

"Well, Don and Aarti decided to make a play for the hat, Carol and Leilani wanted to see if they could find the cylinder room, and Cassidy took Rena with her to fetch some things." Lucy shrugged. "I'm waiting for Cassidy and figured I'd wait for you, too."

Lucy straightened up. She glanced around the hallway. Like many of the hallways in the creches, it was a long bare length of wall and floor, resembling a tube. The lighting came from some source embedded in the ceiling and along the floor.

"I'm worried for Court more than anything else. He went with Aarti and Don because he wanted to see the tech they're using on the hat. If they know he's here…" Lucy paused and then huffed out an angry noise. She shook her head. "We have to go, but we can't without Cass."

Dawnie arched a brow at that. Cassidy and Lucy had declared an uneasy truce to all intents, but they'd once been best friends and knew how to poke each other's buttons. For Lucy to decide to wait before moving out…

"Just what is Cassidy bringing?" Dawnie asked. "This isn't exactly off the beaten path."

"That doesn't matter much," Lucy said with a shrug and shake of her head. "It's Cassidy, 'kay?"

Dawnie nodded in agreement. Cassidy only needed the open sky to render distances moot. She rather envied that fact. Cassidy wasn't like most of them; her biofamily loved her but let her do as she liked the older she became. Cassidy lacked boundaries but didn't need them. She'd always been like that, especially since the Liberation. That day had done something to all of them, but she'd been the most extreme.

She'd slowly warped from the sunny, slightly introverted Cassidy they knew to the current driven version, surrounded by her inventions and snappy to any attempts to contact her. Dawnie was still amazed that Lucy got her to come out of her snug little hideout at all.

"Do you have an ETA on Cassidy, at least?" Dawnie asked, absentmindedly stripping the wrapper off of an IWA bar. She'd found a fresh stash in her bag after she'd left the hidden lab.

"Five minutes or so," Lucy started strolling back towards the entrance. "This place is built very strangely. There are entrances everywhere." She paused by the doorway Dawnie had used. "The doorway I used put me just a little bit further in, but there was no one guarding it."

"They're probably fighting outside," Dawnie replied. She ate in quick, efficient bites. "There's still a lot of chaos going on. I think some of them found a way inside,"

Lucy perked up at that. A small smile appeared, brightening her surroundings.

"Do you think there's bloodshed and the like going on?" Lucy asked, peeping out. She frowned a little. "Is that a gorilla out there?"

"I've given up on following what's going on by this point," Dawnie honestly said. "I just followed your signal."

They both paused at that. Then Lucy looked at her communicator that had surfaced on her wrist, its color a stark, unrelieved black.

"We've got to go," they both said at once even as paralysis beams started filling the corridor.

*****

"I don't like this new place," Leilani whispered to Carol as they walked down the long hallway. She glanced around at the almost organic structure of the walls and floor.

"It reminds me of the inside of someone's intestines," Carol agreed with a wrinkled up nose.

They arrived at a door. All the ones they'd found so far had been similar to this one: a giant oval that irised open with a touch. The hallways they'd been traveling had had several set at regular intervals. Most had been unoccupied laboratories and research facilities. Most of them had thin layers of dust.

"Let's hope," Carol said before touching the door.

The door irised open, but Cartol paused, her eyes on her arm. Her communicator had surfaced at some unknown time, the color an unrelieved black. She frowned at it, and it slowly turned back to its usual fiery red, vibrating slightly as if unwilling.

Carol looked at Leilani who checked her own communicator. It still looked like a blue rubber friendship bangle, though it was spotted with black instead of white. Leilani put her free hand over it and concentrated. When she removed her hand, it was back to being a plain light blue spangled with yellow and white.

"Let's move," Leilani said, dragging Carol away from the door and back the way they came.

They ducked into the second to last lab they had checked. As the door closed, they heard a cacophony of footsteps going by. Carol and Leilani exchanged looks.

"They won't get Court and them," Carol assured Leilani. "Do you really think that his communicator would even dare?"

Leilani's lips curled into a delighted smile.

"It's not alive, you know," she told Carol. "It's just a piece of equipment."

Carol shook her head at her. Then she looked back at the abandoned lab.

"Have you seen Court around electronics? He's a scary guy," Carol said, walking deeper into the lab. "Come on. Usually these places have two or three entrances, and maybe a hidden lab as well."

Leilani looked at the door. She could still hear muted noise on the other side. The people searching would soon start backtracking their trail if they had been alerted by Carol's communicator. The fact that they were out there showed that they were indeed looking for her. She wasn't sure if she was also on the list.

"Coming," Leilani said, quickly hurrying after Carol.

***********

Author's Note: Went to Biloxi! It was fun even though I only went to The Palace and Island View. Rating The Palace 6 out of 5 stars. They kept up with the disinfecting and were serious about keeping things clean! I didn't worry at all. Now, Island View...saw ONE lone custodian disinfecting their yards and yards of machines and there were some banks that had no distancing going on at all - the machines were all on, and you could sit wherever… So they get 1 out of 5 stars and only because they opened their buffet (which was served cafeteria style by grumpy cooks).