Half Human, Half Xliez

Chapter 4

"Okay, now what?" I asked as we turned a corridor. We didn't stop, the Xliez from Drix's room would be hot on our tail, he lead us through a corridor with no doors. It was as if we were running in a three-legged race without our ankles bound.

"Now, you'll lead." He panted. "I don't know the layout of this place."

"Wait, what?" I faltered and then regained my footing.

"Lead." He urged.

I muttered, "But you're the sneaky one." And stopped, which forced him to do so too. Observing my surroundings through my pounding headache as I forces myself to remember the fake yet useful memories, I pointed forward. "This way."

He sighed in exasperation. "Of course that way. The soldiers are behind us and we're in an empty corridor. So it is our only one passage."

"The floor is inclined upwards." I tapped it with my foot, which made an unnerving sound of metal against another element, "This means we're going straight to the labs. And as for empty corridors..." I walked around him and ran my hand on the smooth wall. Turns out, Drix was standing only by my support, he slid down onto the floor, a hand on the wall for support. When I found the uneven part, I punched it with all the force I could muster.

I hissed in pain whereas Drix whistled, "That must have hurt."

Right then, we heard the sound of alarm blaring loudly and the air cracked with electricity with the smell of chemicals becoming prominent. I grabbed Drix's wrist and pulled him out of harms zone as he slowly stood on shaky legs. Once again, I wrapped his hand around my shoulders and my hand around his waist, supporting his weight and then we resumed running at a slow pace. There was a loud thud behind us, like a celing of a certain part of corridor falling down. The ground shook with the impact.

"You weren't the only one wandering." I said, and did not mention the fact that I did so for eliminating my occasional amnesia for the place.

In companionable silence, we continued going upward, sometimes dropping a section of celing or two. Drix looked gleeful enough that he'd forgotten this was a run for life. At least until we were at the doors of the labs, where his face dropped to something akin to sadness.

"This was it." He muttered. "The place of the memory alteration."

"You know," I stated. "I'm angry enough with this species, what with their hunting and brainwashing us. And spiking your food. But you're not helping with the matter."

"I did not eat anything." He said. That gave me a pause.

"What?"

"After two days, I stopped eating anything." He elaborated. "Except, this." He pulled out a transparent pouch filled with golden liquid.

"The Grind." I recognised (it was pronunciated as grr-n-d), "Where did you find this?"

"Remember the Xliez I accidentally lashed out earlier?"

I frowned, nodding. "Yeah, probably. When was that? Two months ago...?"

Truthfully, I did not remember.

It was another blow to my hot-head.

"We haven't even stayed for two months here-unless we were out for the first forty day."

"It felt like years." I shook my head. "We shouldn't linger."

There were many glass doors along the wall, each showing bizzare machines and blueprints of different types of machines named like 1257G, 1345F, etc. There were many blue 'screens' in the labs. With the amout of blueprints, I wonder how many deadly weapons they thought of?