AN: No, I'm not dead, in fact I'm very much alive. It's been a while since my last chapter, but I haven't given up! See, the problem is no longer the writer's block. I have everything here on out planned. I'm not even going to try to hazard a guess on how long it'll take, I am always significantly and humiliatingly wrong. But welcome to the latest installment of Niobe Drives Rex Stark Raving Mad. Please enjoy, and don't throw popcorn at the screen if I piss you off.


Last chapter:

I was finally getting into the groove of crawling when the alarm sounded.

BEEP BEEP. BEEP BEEP. BEEP BEEP.

We froze. The alarm blared around us, a jumbled and angry noise. For several seconds time seemed suspended, and I tried to convince myself that it was only in my head. Then we heard the grunts and yells of what I guessed to be the evo guards. It could have been something else.

"Shit," Liam serenely said.

Who was I kidding? My absence had been discovered. We were doomed.

BEEP BEEP. BEEP BEEP. BEEP BEEP.

And the dreaded alarm blared on without a pause.


"What do we do?" Liam asked. In the dark I could just see his eyes, fragments of blue flickering madly as he glanced around in desperate search for a solution. "What do we do? What the fuck are we gonna do?"

"I don't know!" I hissed back, the stress overwhelming me. "You're the one who got us into this damned labyrinth!"

"Yeah, but you… gah!" He was too frustrated to finish. There was an tense silence as we struggled to overcome the urge to strangle one another. He took a deep breath, held it in his cheeks, let it out in a puff of hot air. "Okay. We need to think of a place to hide before they find us, because the first place they'll look is the ceiling."

I nodded in agreement. " That's good. But where? That place you hid before… can we-"

"No, it's too far away. We need something close and accessible. We could drop down in an empty hallway… but I don't like those chances, it's too risky…" he trailed off and began humming tunelessly.

"Shh! Stop, you're making me nervous. Is that even just a song, or are you just making a random stream of noise?"

"Sh yourself, it helps me think! Gosh."

BEEP BEEP. BEEP BEEP. BEEP BEEP.

"Wait, what if we drop down in the midst of a herd of prisoners? They might not see us in the midst of all the chaos," I asked, when the idea occurred to me. He licked his lips and shifted around, causing the space to creak in defiance. I resisted the urge to snap at him. Arguing was counterproductive. We needed progress.

"I… I don't know! I don't know if we should drop down in a hallway, or what you said! It seems to me that the guards would notice two people emerging like ninjas from the ceiling! But what else is there to do? Should we just go for it?" he asked.

I took a deep breath. Breathe in, breathe out, and still the alarm blasted, and still my head hammered. "Ah hell, just go for it. Where's the nearest spot?"

"The cafeteria. But we'd better hurry the fuck up."

We scrambled through the narrow crawl space as fast as possible. The shuffling of our garments and our panting gasps seemed deafening in the relative silence between the screams of the siren. I wondered if they would ever shut the siren off, or if they'd just let it continue to blare until the problem was solved. Maybe it'd keep going for all eternity, echoing forever in my head. The thought made me shudder. Then, suddenly, there were yells from beneath followed by a giant static pop in the speakers. The blasts stopped, and the noisy silence rang in our ears. We both froze involuntarily. Neither dared to move for fear of accidentally revealing ourselves in the sudden quiet.

Voices beneath us that we hadn't heard before over the alarms. We looked at each other with newfound horror.

"Well, thank the lord somebody shut that racket up," somebody said. His voice filtered through the ceiling directly beneath us. "If it'd gone on for any longer, I'd-a pulled my eyeballs out. Stupid blasted noise. I'm about ready to quit. Can you believe he got away? Somebody'll get killed over this fuck-up. I'm just glad it didn't happen under my watch. You hear how he got away?"

"Yes, right through the fucking ceiling. Can you believe it?" a second voice said, followed by a gust of laughter.

"I know, right? Hell, he could be anywhere right now. Anywhere around this armpit. He could even be escaped by now."

"Haha. He could be right over our heads right now, how funny that would be."

Liam's breathe caught in his throat, but I felt insane laughter bubbling in mine. They could discover us right here and now, and how funny that'd be. Yeah. Funny.

"We could give the ceiling a good slap, see if it squirms!" Both of the guards burst out howling again. We gritted our teeth, and I dug my fingernails into the surface beneath me. But suddenly, miraculously, the garish laughter was cut short. But somehow, the silence seemed even more ominous and we didn't relax a muscle.

"What are you doing here?" a familiar voice growled.

"Oh shit," Liam muttered. I elbowed him, but I had been about to say the same thing, because Van Kleiss was standing directly beneath us.

"Erm… we were on our way to look for that escaped prisoner, that… uh…" one voice began.

"Rex," the other supplied.

"Yeah, him. We were gonna look for him, and try and catch him before he uh… got away for good this time."

"Yeah," the other voice added, rather unnecessarily.

Kleiss let them stew in their juices for a second, drawing out the awkward silence. "Well, get on it," he icily said.

"Yes, of course." And the guards scurried away. We waited for the sounds of his boot heels clicking away and leaving us but they didn't come. He remained in place.

Click, click. But instead of drawing away they sounded closer, uncomfortably and suspiciously close.

Click, click. He couldn't possibly know we were here. Right? 'course not.

BEEP BEEP. BEEP BEEP. BEEP BEEP.

And suddenly that alarm was back. Liam and I jumped in the darkness, but the responding creak was lost in the restored noise.

"Turn the fucking thing off already!" Kleiss screeched. His boot heels stomped away. Neither of us spoke until the sirens were turned back off and we were sure he was gone.

"We should keep moving," Liam breathed. We continued our scramble to safety, dizzy with relief.


After a breathless few minutes and a seemingly endless array of turns, Liam stopped, his hands scrabbling at something on the floor of the tunnel.

"Are we there?" I whispered.

He nodded. And focused the beam of the flashlight on a small seam. I listened carefully. Hushed voices murmured. It sounded as if a mass of people were crowded beneath us, all whispering at once. Liam got his nails hooked under the panel and started to lift it, but before it came all the way he lost his grip and it smacked back into place. We cringed at the noise.

"Careful!" I hissed. He nodded and tried again. This time he got his fingers hooked on it and lifted it up just enough for us to peek underneath. Beneath us, a crowd of prisoners were crammed into the cafeteria. The tables had been pushed against the wall to accommodate the horde, and several people were sitting or lying on them, sleeping or trying to. The rest sat or stood around. Everybody was uniformed, and the room was so stuffed with people you could hardly see the floor amid the mass of black and white.

A scrawny kid with wispy colorless hair and fair skin looked up and stared at us. Surprise crossed his face. Then curiosity. Liam held a finger to his lips and opened the panel the rest of the way. More people stopped and looked up from whatever they were doing. A hush fell across the room, but only a few people understood the cause of it. The rest looked around, confused as to why everybody else had stopped talking.

"I'm going down!" Laim announced to me, and rolled out of the opening. People's eyes widened as they realized what was happening and scuttled out of the way.

CRUNCH. He landed heavily, almost squashing the wispy-haired boy. Nobody spoke. They all stared at him in bemusement as he picked himself off the ground and checked for broken bones.

"You again?" asked a tall, tan-skinned guy perched on a table. His thick blonde hair was neat and perfect, even without a mirror to style it with or even basic hygienic supplies. "I thought I told you to fuck off." He got off the table and walked closer to my scatterbrained ally, the other prisoners making way for him.

"Yeah, well, something came up and I couldn't follow through with your orders, sir," Liam snarkily explained. "I almost got caught-"

"You're the one who started the sirens?" the tall boy asked, with visible alarm. "What the hell… You'll get us all killed."

"Well, I thought you might make an exception because-"

"What? No. Go back into the ceiling. We don't want you here," he snapped. The others murmured their endorsement. Their eyes flicked to Liam and back to one another, drunk on paranoia.

"Because I have Rex. With me."

Tense silence.

"Rex?" he hesitated. "He's gone, right? He woulda shown himself by now, helped us somehow."

And I dove from the ceiling without preamble. The scrawny kid wasn't fast enough this time and ended up pinned beneath me, cursing his luck. I pulled myself to my feet and stepped off the boy I'd smashed, noticing how the people nearby stepped away. I looked the blonde guy in the eyes, struggling to ignore the sparks in my eyes and the wave in my ears as my head reminded me of its possibly volatile state.

"See! I told you, but you didn't believe me!" Squawked Liam, dancing from foot to foot with excitement.

The crowd watched me pull myself together with unease and mild confusion, uncertain of what conclusion to draw. "Ghost!" yelled a freckled redheaded boy, hefting a chair as is to chuck it at me.

"Jimmy! Put that chair down!" the blonde guy admonished. 'Jimmy' made a sulky face and reluctantly set the plastic chair back down. He turned back to me and looked me up and down doubtfully. "You Rex?"

I nodded. "Yeah."

He stared at me for a couple seconds, just long enough to make me wanna check my fly. "Heh. Maybe we have a shot at this." He shrugged. I decided not to bring to his attention that I was also concussed and with a questionable grip on my powers. "Good to see you finally, haha. I thought Liam was just fucking with us. Apparently not."

I nodded. We stared at each other for a couple seconds, with equal mistrust. "Who exactly are you?"

"My name's Anthony." He met my gaze levelly, with a bit of a challenge. Then he quickly introduced us to the other refugees, none of whom I'd seen before. The boy I'd landed on was Percy. Stupid name for a stupid kid.

"It was you who set of the alarm, though?" somebody asked.

"Yeah…" I admitted. "We needed somewhere to hide, and you guys were closest. We thought we could blend in if there were more people, too." I glanced around the room and knew that my assumption was wrong. My gaze lingered on the black and white uniforms. We'd stick out like Easter eggs. Anthony seemed to notice the problem as well, but didn't say anything.

"So they're looking for you?" a serious-looking dark-haired boy asked. I thought his name might've been Luke.

"Most likely," I said.

"We'll have a few minutes before they check here, right? I mean, why would we escape from one cell just to go in another?" speculated Liam.

Luke and Anthony exchanged a glance. Then Luke stated what we all knew. "There's no way in hell this will work. You guys aren't going to blend in when the guards check, and believe me, they will check. We need a better plan. A much better plan. And we don't have much time to waste thinking about it."

We stared at each other, disillusioned. How were we going to get out of this mess? A fresh throb of pain swelled behind my eyes.

"They could hide under the tables," Jimmy suggested, and took a step back when his proposal was met with mutters of "no," and "that's stupid". "What? It's a legit idea."

"No, it's a stupid idea. As if they aren't gonna check under the tables," snorted Luke. "There's nowhere to hide, they'll check everywhere.

"What if they go back in the ceiling, just while the people search?" asked a guy whose name was either Mike or Matt. This was met by murmurs of agreement, but Luke shot it down too.

"No, there's no way they'll get up in time, and they can't just stay up there either," he stated.

"Well, then what do you suggest?" Matt-or-Mike asked.

Luke shrugged. "I don't know." Everybody frowned and looked at each other. An idea had occurred to me, and I think Liam too, but neither of us wanted to say it. I sighed and took the bullet.

"If we can't hide, we gotta fight. Or we loose all chances we have of winning this," I said. The room fell silent, and I felt everybody's eyes burning into me. I waited for somebody to say something.

"I agree," Anthony said, and gave me a nod.

"Yes, definitely," Luke said. "There's no other option."

Liam turned to me and gave me a thumbs up. "Good idea. Yes. Genius," he muttered.

I looked to the other people in the room for their approval. Many were nodding, but fear shone in their eyes. None of us wanted this to happen yet. We knew we had to fight sometime, but now? It was too early. But the time had come, whether we were prepared or not.

"Okay. So how are we gonna do this?" Anthony asked, and the planning began.


And still the drama unfolds. I have the rest of the story planned, so saying, "Bring Six baaaaack!" or "Kill Holiday!" or "Hey... let's just kill them all! Wouldn't that be fun?" unfortunately won't have any affect.

Not saying you can't still try...

Coz some of you have very amusing/convincing arguments.

Drop a note in, what do you think? Next chapter, all heck breaks loose, and we'll see (some? most? all?) of what happens when The Resistance makes their stand.

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