Sammy's escape
1253 Words
The first breath Sammy took outside the pod wasn’t clean, it was heavy with recycled air and antiseptic, laced with the lingering sting but it was his.
He staggered forward, hand pressed to the metal wall, dragging his fingers along the rough seam to ground himself.
No sedatives.
No static.
No voice in his head demanding compliance.
His ears rang with silence.
Real silence.
And for the first time in what felt like years, Sammy moved by instinct.
He was in a narrow maintenance corridor, dimly lit by failing green emergency strips lining the floor. Above him, exposed conduits snaked across the ceiling, humming faintly, like a distant lullaby. Somewhere behind him, a klaxon stuttered uselessly in a feedback loop.
They hadn’t fully rebooted the alarm system yet.
Good.
Sammy’s knees threatened to give out. He bit down hard on the inside of his cheek again his new anchor, the sharp edge of real pain and kept walking. Each step was a gamble. Muscles burned in strange patterns, like parts of him didn’t quite remember how to work together.
But he pushed forward.
Memory pulsed behind his eyes. Fragments rearranging.
The blanket from Sector 5.
Jake’s voice whispering wait for the pulse.
And the photo.
That photo.
Sammy had taken it without thinking, on the morning after the last time he saw Jake. He’d been sitting alone in the coffee shop, sunlight pouring through cracked blinds, a smear of cinnamon on the corner of the table. Jake had just left. The chair across from him was still warm.
He snapped the photo as if to prove the moment had happened.
And then everything unraveled.
Theta-7. Subject breach. Immediate recall.
They dragged him back before he could say goodbye.
Before he could ask if Jake had meant forever when he whispered it.
Sammy rounded a corner and nearly collapsed again but someone caught him.
Strong arms. Familiar scent.
Old leather. Disinfectant. Smoke.
“Easy, kid,” a voice murmured, low and urgent. “You really did it.”
Sammy blinked up into pale, sun-starved eyes.
Rin.
Her jaw was tighter now. Hair shorter. A surgical scar curved behind her ear new tech, maybe. But her presence still had weight. A steady sort of gravity that once anchored the worst of his induced episodes.
“You weren’t supposed to be here,” Sammy rasped.
“I know,” Rin said, guiding him into a side alcove. “Neither were you.”
She reached under her coat and unzipped a worn satchel. Inside: a compact med kit, a tattered map overlay of Red Site 17’s lower schematics.
A photograph.
Worn. Faded. Creased right across the corner where Sammy’s fingers had once held it.
He stared.
It was that photo. The one he thought he’d lost. The chair. The table. That exact quality of morning light, like honey just starting to crystalize.
“I thought they destroyed it,” he whispered.
“They tried,” Rin said. “I didn’t let them.”
His hands trembled as he took it.
“I didn’t remember until ”
“I know,” she cut in gently. “That’s how they win. They make you forget what matters. Who matters.”
He looked at her then. Really looked. The wrinkle near her left brow deepened. Her eyes were rimmed with exhaustion. But her gaze didn’t waver.
“You saved this?” he asked.
“I saved you.”
Sammy couldn’t speak for a long moment.
Then he folded the photo and tucked it into the inner seam of his shirt.
He looked down the hall. “We have to go.”
“I’ve got an extraction tunnel half a level below this one,” Rin said, already moving. “But there’s something else you need to know.”
They passed under a rusted security archway. Dust floated in the stale air. Every step felt louder.
“What is it?” Sammy asked.
“You weren’t the only one flagged during the breach.”
His chest went cold. “Jake?”
She nodded. “He got close. Too close. They fed him a mimic to stall him.”
Sammy’s stomach twisted. “He knew. He didn’t fall for it.”
Rin gave a small, proud smile.
“Yeah. He really didn’t.”
They ducked into a secondary access shaft. Rin crouched near a manual override panel and pried it open with an old-fashioned lever.
“You trained me to break loops,” Sammy said suddenly. “Did you know this would happen?”
“I hoped it wouldn’t.” Rin looked up at him. “But I always left you fragments. Anchor points. Something they wouldn’t catch.”
She touched her own temple. “Even if you forgot me… you’d still find your way back.”
Sammy looked at the door she was opening. A ladder led down into deep shadow.
“What’s down there?”
“Old exhaust tunnel,” she said. “Partially collapsed. No surveillance. Leads right into the Outer City dust zone. But we’ll have to move fast.”
Sammy hesitated at the ladder.
Then turned to her.
“Why did you stay?” he asked. “You could’ve left. Defected. Lived.”
She smiled again but this time, it was tinged with something sadder.
“You were just a kid when they took you, Sammy. The least I could do… was help you come home.”
He swallowed hard.
“I remember everything now,” he said quietly.
Rin nodded.
“Good. Hold onto that.”
Then: “Jake’s alive. But not safe. If you want to find him”
“I do.”
“Then follow the light trails past the dust zones. Use the scan marker I embedded in the back of that photo,it’ll ping his last pulse broadcast.”
Sammy blinked. “You embedded a marker?”
Rin shrugged. “I’ve been planning this a long time.”
He exhaled. “Why does this feel like the end?”
“Because it’s not,” she said simply. “It’s the first real beginning you’ve had.”
Sammy gripped the rungs.
Rin gave him a nod.
Then he began to climb down into the dark, into the dust, into whatever lay beyond this place that tried to erase him.
06:10 a.m. — Extraction Tunnel Mouth: Outer City Edge
The air down here was different.
Damp. Fungal. Real.
Sammy pulled himself out from under the broken grate and rolled onto the cracked stone. His lungs burned, but every breath felt earned.
Above him, the sun hadn’t risen yet but the horizon was bleeding.
He pushed himself up and looked around.
Trash dunes. Old metal. Collapsed housing shells half-swallowed by red ash.
But farther out, faint blue lights flickered.
Not military.
Not Order.
Flares.
Jake’s flares.
He recognized the color signal. Two long pulses. One short. A pattern they used during training runs in the ruins.
Sammy’s heartbeat stuttered.
He could follow it.
He would.
But first , he reached into his shirt and unfolded the photo again.
The same moment. The same warmth.
Now layered with something else:
A mark burned faintly in the lower corner , barely visible without infrared.
Coordinates.
Rin’s signal marker.
His hands shook, but he didn’t hesitate.
He scanned it into the busted comm unit he salvaged from the pod's base panel.
The unit chirped once.
Then displayed a blinking map.
And at the end of it:
Jake.
Still sending a signal.
Still searching.
Still waiting.
- Writer
