Dejon hurried me into an interrogation room before we could draw too much attention from all the officers inside the building, though we, fortunately, arrived at a time when there weren't any in the hall miraculously.
This made it much easier for Dejon to bring me to his preferred interrogation room, and I soon found out why it was his favourite once he 'shoved' me inside and locked the door behind him. 'Camera's still on. Keep up looking lame while I go to turn it off,' he instructed telepathically, though his audible instructions were much harsher. "Sit down. This will take as long as it needs to."
I was pushed to a large raised chair, which unnervingly had dried stains of blood around the base. It was evident that many prisoners were viciously beaten here by their interrogators in the past and did not clean up the bodily residue produced by it. Left there on purpose, I was sure. Despite the dominating front, Dejon was putting on for the camera that was fixed to the corner of the room, he was gentle in unlocking my cuffs and removing the muzzle from my face, making my own muzzle feel raw now being exposed to air again.
Dejon silently pointed to the chair and I miserably situated myself in it while he worked a dark console positioned below a single monitor that consisted of three screens. After punching in a few codes on the bizarre-looking keyboard, the camera's little green light that signified its active status went dark before the whole unit retracted up into the ceiling. Dejon then let out a heavy, distorted sigh as he leaned on his console, shaking his head.
"Well, that's done…" he said, removing his mask. His relenting demeanour enticed me to lighten up as well.
"Are we safe?" I asked. I knew that we weren't safe being within enemy territory, but Dejon knew what I meant.
"For the moment, but we need to hurry," he said, finally allowing his natural voice to be heard as he turned around to face me. It was a light and trepid voice, like he was perpetually out of breath, and his face was thin and balmy, no doubt sweaty from all the stress. Despite all of that, he had a gentle face with baggy brown eyes, dark brown skin, and short curly black hair, resembling Sabrine in many ways.
"We don't have forever," he added. "We've got less than five minutes. Security allows for a brief video and audio feed cut for potential logging issues. They're not kept on record either. This will be our only chance to review."
"I'm all ears," I said eagerly as my ears naturally rose to the top of my head again. "How do I make my way to the airstrip?"
"Well, you gotta get out of here first, and we were lucky to land this room for that reason," Dejon said, pointing to a corner behind me. I turned and saw a latched maintenance vent up by the ceiling, though the latter in which to access it had been removed some time ago. "It can be a kind of a pain to shove some of my convicts up there with a lack of things to step up on, but I doubt you'll have trouble getting up there yourself.
"I will not," I reassured confidently. "Will that take me out of the building?
"It will if you follow it correctly, which is why I drew this up for you before we left."
Out from one of the pouches around his belt, Dejon withdrew a piece of paper that had been folded in at least nine times or so, which made it incredibly ridged and crumply once it was unfurled. All that mattered though was that the markings on the paper were still quite discernible, and it was a cohesive-enough map to the airstrip from this very station.
"Okay, this here is essentially the route I give to escapees to take to get out of the city unseen, though you're gonna have to take a detour here in the canals," Dejon explained as he traced his fingers along the crude illustrated ventilation track that eventually led to the sewers and the canal ways. I paid careful attention as he continued his review. "The canals are monitored to some extent, but it isn't as bad up on the streets. Scanners do occasionally go down there every so often, so be on the lookout."
"Understood," I said. "And I just keep following the channel until I reach the airstrip? How will I tell when I'm there?"
"There will be a big radio tower over there. You won't be able to miss it below street level. Maybe I'll just add this here…"
Dejon then pulled out a stubby pencil from his belt, which had been sharpened so often that there seemed to be more eraser than graphite. He drew in an admittedly adorable little framed tower around a section of the map where the airstrip was meant to be, completing it by making the tower say "Beep! Beep!" around its antenna. I was happy I managed to learn a few human letters to know what they translated to.
"All right," I nodded. "And once I'm there, I locate a pulse cannon on one of their idle vehicles and steal its gun's pulsar receiver. You are confident it is small enough to fit in my pack?"
"Definitely," Dejon assured. "I haven't seen a completed one, but I've seen the frame of one. The most basic ones are no bigger than a textbook, though I can't tell you how heavy a complete one might be."
"I will manage regardless," I promised. "Oh, and by the by, where might my pack and all its essentials be…?"
"Still in my cab," Dejon said. "I will take it to confiscations upstairs shortly after indefinitely jailing you, and I will 'accidentally' throw it down the trash chute."
I smirked. "And the chute will lead to where?"
"Not too far from where the vents will lead you," Dejon said, getting a bit roused by our devious plan himself. "You'll find a few old dumpsters down below; your things will be deposited there."
"Brilliant," I said with confirmation, taking that map from Dejon's hand, folding it up and putting it into the pocket of my jacket before zipping it shut. "I suppose the show must go on at this point, right?"
"It sure does," Dejon agreed, getting a little shifty in the eyes. The dread of latterly putting his façade back on manifested clearly in his eyes. I could hardly imagine the kind of stress he regularly put himself through in trying to sneak people out of the city without getting found out. Because not only would he most likely be killed for it, but so would all the people he helped if they hadn't fled the city quickly enough. I could not speak for most citizens in City Three, but I wagered that I had a better chance at holding my own against the Combine police should I receive my essentials, and I tried to at least give Dejon some kind of relief during this particular smuggling mission.
"You just return to your rounds," I encouraged, rubbing his patted shoulder. "They will not trace me back to you should they discover me."
I knew that I could not guarantee this given how little insight I had on how the metro police operated, but Dejon seemed appreciative that I said this anyway. "I got a feeling they wouldn't somehow," he humoured with a modest smile. "Just try to not blow up the place like you did that depot, okay? There are people around."
"I'll be light on my paws," I promised, which was true seeing how I got 'captured' in bare feet. Should any rough climbing come into play, having claws on my feet to dig in with was going to be incredibly helpful.
Wasting no more time, I got up from the interrogation chair and made my way to the maintenance shaft of the ventilation system. It was only a matter of disconnecting the small latches on the two corners that weren't hinged to the wall and opening it up, revealing a confined but otherwise manageable opening that I could fit into with some room to spare. I managed to jump up into the shaft with no issue.
Once inside, I could see that my shaft opened up into a much longer one that ran from left to right before, both passages leading into perpetual darkness. After a few awkward attempts to shimmy myself around, managing to crush and twist my poor tail in the process, I managed one last look at Dejon inside the interrogation room. 'Wish me luck,' I said telepathically, giving him my little two-fingered salute.
'I'll give you all that I can spare,' Dejon answered back with a closed smile, returning my salute before fixing his mask back onto his face. I reached out and closed the louvred hatchback up again behind me, closing me off from the room entirely as Dejon returned to his console to likely forge a fake report. I wasn't quite sure how he was going to handle the situation with me going missing, especially after the dramatic ordeal that occurred before my official interrogation, but he seemed certain of what he was doing, so I was going to leave him to that as I moved forward down the shaft in the planned direction.
It was a good thing I wasn't prone to body cramps because this phase of the plan would have been unbearable otherwise.
I could not comprehend just how the staff was meant to navigate these shafts while barely able to move on their hands and knees, let alone haul an assortment of tools while doing it. Regardless of the possible intended method of locomotion that I just wasn't getting, I shuffled on, being careful to make as little noise as possible, for I sensed people all over the building I was sneaking through. I was currently moving in between two floors, and I was able to pick up the many thoughts of officers and prisoners alike as I used my telepathy to make sure no one heard me moving through the vents, which thankfully they did not.
As I slowly moved down the shaft, illuminated only by faint red lights that sparsely lit these narrow, galvanized steel corridors, I received many of the internal thoughts of the officers who were doing their work around the station, festering quite a flurry of differing dispositions that varied from each individual. I found that many officers produced self-serving thoughts, holding ambitions to ascend the ladder of their workforce for better perks and would stoop to any act of cruelty just to get them, while many more simply wondered when their next meal would be. I found that many of the officers seemed to be as disillusioned as the citizens and were trying to simply make it to the next day.
While it had not been directly told to me at any point, I was piecing together that perhaps many who joined civil protection simply wanted better living conditions than the average citizen had, though I knew there was a heavy, unseen price to pay because it had been mentioned to me in passing earlier in the week that the soldiers I had fought were most likely former officers that got promoted. Truly evil in its design; the better work a willing officer did, the better their quality of life, and would most certainly be conscripted into an emotionless drone down the line, removing any hindering traits like empathy and compassion. How was humanity meant to break free from this on its own?
I unwittingly received a more thorough insight into this dilemma as my vent came across a line of open louvred covers along the right wall, which allowed soft beams of light in the space ahead of me, highlighted by floating dust particles. As I passed through, I sensed officers in the room just outside these covers down below, so my progress came to a near-painstaking crawl so as not to make a sound, enabling me to hear an unseen conversation that was taking place between two officers while they were eating together.
"Are you going to use that packet there?" one of them asked; a man, currently not wearing his voice-distorting mask.
"The desiccated water flavour bar? Be my guest," the other said; a woman and she sounded quite unimpressed, something her peer didn't take too well.
"They don't give these out for free, you know," he warned. "You need to stay hydrated; makes you a better cop."
"It's a thin wafer that tastes like soggy lint, it won't hydrate anything," she complained, suppressing a level of frustration that I could tell was getting harder and harder to do. "Dammit, Eddy, what are we going to do? We were promised real food and they give us this slop on the regular. This isn't quite what I had in mind when I signed up."
"Yeah, but anything beats that civvy shit, don't it?" Eddy offered.
"You would think so," the woman lamented with a weighty sigh. "Seems more of the same shit to me…"
"Hmm. Maybe. But at least there's more of it," Eddy considered, though somewhat indifferent to the lack of better food they had been promised. I felt like this showcased how quickly some people had become conditioned to accept this landscape of autocracy much more than others. Most likely not by choice, but I wasn't so sure with a lot of the officers here in this building.
Eventually, through much patience and persistence, I finally arrived at the back end of the building where an immense amount of foliage was growing. I had confirmed that there were no officers or personnel anywhere nearby outside, so I seized the opportunity by punting the louvred latch open forcefully and slid out, finally freeing myself from the cramped passageway. While certainly an effective escape route, I was not left unscathed.
My suit and jacket were caked in dust that had dwelt in the shafts for who knew how long, and such particles were not doing my nose any favours as I began to sneeze violently, though I thankfully managed to get a handle on it soon after now that I was embracing cleaner air. After relieving myself a moment to dust myself off, I quickly remembered to check around the side of the building for a row of dumpsters. It only took an easy peek around the corner to see what I was told to look out for, and only one was positioned underneath a hole in the wall that had a metal slide going up into the building.
Double-checking my auditory, visual and telepathic senses to make sure nobody was a witness to my presence, I hurried over to the dumpster beneath the chute and anxiously took a look inside, finding that my backpack was right where Dejon said it would be. Unphased that it was lying on a heap of old garbage, I leaned over hauled my backpack straight over the rim and quickly opened it up to reveal my retracted staff, a canteen of water, and a couple of compact firearms and their appropriate magazines.
I put my hand over my heart as a welling pressure that had been persisting in me finally subsided at the sight of these things, particularly my staff as I reached in to grab it, deploying it to its full length. "All right, old friend," I told it, planting its hilted end on the ground, "let us start inciting some more mischief upon tyranny once again."
Closing up my pack, I then slung it over my shoulder before disappearing into the overgrowth just beyond this backlot.