Chapter 62: Focus.
Flare failed to grasp what had occurred in the past few seconds. The floor beneath her suddenly disappeared, and before she knew it, she was in an entirely different location. The first thing she recognized about it was the cloaked woman who called herself Delta and the four gunmen who came into the brightly lit hexagonal room with her.
The instant their eyes fell on her, Delta pointed in her direction and shouted a command. Flare didn’t wait to hear it and rushed to find cover from the rain of bullets that would inevitably come.
The nearby platform was the best hiding place she could ask for, and though it wouldn’t take long for the enemy to follow after her, the seconds she bought herself should be more than enough to reorganize her thoughts.
What mattered right now was that she had made it out of the hexagonal cage. Recognizing it as her chance to escape, Flare knew she couldn’t afford to waste it.
Taking in the surroundings gave her the impression that she was near the center of an arena. Rows and rows of seats surrounded her, bathed in the faint light coming from the center. Stripes of staircases separated them, each rising toward a double-sided door from which the audience could enter.
A thought flashed in Flare’s mind and she turned to look at the small platform she was hiding behind. Inside was a cart she recognized almost instantly. It was the same one her captors had brought into the hexagon shaped room earlier, and on it was what remained of the feast she had just indulged in.
The temperature jumped up all of a sudden. As it turned out, the hexagon cage was the stage at the center of the arena and the walls were made out of one-way glass from the start. The thought of being watched without her knowledge plunged Flare into the depths of despair then ignited the fires of shame. Her mind went through everything she had done since waking up in the bright room, but she found nothing that could be called embarrassing except for the way she had eaten her food a few minutes ago.
"No! Focus!" She slapped her cheeks and tore her mind off that line of thought. "I need to get out of here first!"
So what if people had watched her eat without her knowing? The situation could have been much worse. Right now, her first priority was to escape. Everything else didn’t matter.