Rogue Sloth

Amnesia [Suki & Summer]

Cas frowned as Iris seemed confused by his question. He could tell right away that there was something on her mind, but with Jay and Miles around, he didn’t dare ask her what it was. To his best guess, she was probably still dazed from the interrogation she’d gone through, and the drug that had been used on her was classified. Even though he trusted his friends, he couldn’t reveal its existence to them because it was a high-level military secret. Unfortunately, he had to draw boundaries in regard to what he could and could not talk to them about because of the repercussions that could happen if the truth serum was leaked to the public. It was one of Aspiria’s most potent weapons against their enemies, and it was most effectively used when a prisoner of war was unprepared to experience it. Though he was saddened and angry that the soldiers had forced Iris to endure it, he was still loyal enough to his country not to give away such detrimental information.

I’ll just have to try to talk to her alone later, he resolved, nodding wordlessly when she said that she was shocked. He wasn’t surprised by that at all. Yesterday, he’d told her that he was going to do everything in his power to keep her safe, but he hadn’t explained that he’d been planning to illegally break her out of the hospital. She’d had no time to process everything that had just happened. He was just glad that she’d been alert enough to go along with it, even though she hadn’t known what was going on the entire time.

“Cas told us you helped him when he was taken by the Scourge,” Miles said, pulling off his surgical mask and tossing it on the floor when Iris thanked them. “We had to help when he told us you’d been arrested. And besides,” a playful smile appeared on his lips, and he nudged her with his shoulder. “We couldn’t pass up the chance to meet the infamous Iris.”

Caspian blushed at his friend’s insinuation that he’d been talking about her a lot. Since he had only just gotten home the day before, it wouldn’t take much for anyone to put two and two together and realize that meant he’d told them about her long before he’d been abducted. He coughed awkwardly into his sleeve. “So how long do you think we should drive around before we go to Miles’ place?” he asked Jay, quick to change the subject. With nowhere else to harbor Iris, Miles had offered to let her stay at his house. His parents were especially wealthy and owned a mansion that was large enough to hide a fugitive without anyone knowing she was there.

“Maybe fifteen or twenty minutes?” Jay estimated, peering into his side mirror as he merged onto the highway. “I just want to take a few extra turns, so it isn’t obvious where we’re headed.”

“Okay,” the prince agreed, taking off the blue hairnet he’d put on at the hospital and making himself comfortable in his seat. One perk of sitting shotgun was that he had more room to stretch out his legs than he had in the back. He sighed softly as he extended his left leg, relaxing sore muscles as he recovered from the effort of running all the way from the hospital to the car.

In the back of the car, Miles, ever the social butterfly, had decided to make small talk with Iris. “So, you were part of the rebellion, right?” he asked her with intrigue, leaning into the side door and pulling one knee to his chest. Caring little about standard safety measures, he’d foregone wearing a seatbelt and preferred to sprawl out. “What was that like? And why’d you switch sides? Did you think the Scourge was terrible?”

Amnesia [Suki & Summer]

I already have a plan for how that will go down too, haha. I'm thinking Jacob will catch on pretty quickly and confront him about it. Cas will end up begging him not to say anything to Atlas, which will put him in the position to decide who he's going to give his loyalty to.

Amnesia [Suki & Summer]

As soon as Iris was on her feet, the group booked it for their getaway car. Cas gritted his teeth as the rapid pace made his left leg and lungs ache, but he didn’t allow his injuries to slow him down. The Aspirian law enforcement responded to calls within minutes after they were made. If his guess had been right and that nurse had realized that he and his friends weren’t actually doctors, they didn’t have much time to flee from the hospital. By his estimate, the police would probably arrive in about two minutes.

“Hurry!” Jay barked, swinging open the driver’s side door and practically leaping inside while Miles opened the back and helped Iris in. Unable to do anything to assist them, Cas took the front passenger seat and threw on his seatbelt. Winded from the short run, he ripped the surgical mask from his face and panted, pressing a hand to his chest where his fractured ribs had started to burn with each deep inhale. Luckily, the Accuparacin treatments seemed to be working there too, because the pain was already beginning to dissipate as the seconds passed. It was the gunshot wound in his leg that was going to hurt for a while.

Jay turned the ignition just as Miles closed the backseat door, having climbed inside after Iris, and quickly backed out of the parking spot. In the distance, they could already hear sirens, and he threw the car into drive, pressing the pedal to the floor and peeling out of the lot. “I’m gonna make a few detours,” he said, glancing at Caspian. “Just in case they catch us on any of the cameras. We don’t want them to know where we’re going.”

The prince nodded absently, craning his neck to peer out the back window as flashing blue and red lights appeared in the distance. For a few seconds he watched with bated breath, praying that the police didn’t notice them and take chase. However, it seemed like they had gotten far enough away not to be seen, because in the next moment, the cop cars disappeared from view as they turned into the hospital parking lot. They had gotten away.

“Oh my god, this is fucking insane,” Miles laughed nervously, pressing a hand to his forehead as he sank down in his seat. “I can’t believe we just broke into a hospital.”

“I can’t believe we got away with it,” Jay grinned, looking at the two in the backseat through his rearview mirror. Noticing that Cas was still quiet, he glanced at him again. “You okay?”

“Yeah,” the prince answered breathily. “Just recovering. I’m fine.” Like his friends, he was also shocked by what they had just accomplished. Even if the police tried to pursue them, they were too far away to catch up without calling for a helicopter to locate them. Because Iris had been a ward of the penitentiary, he doubted they could get approval for something like that before they called the warden to inform him that the prisoner was gone. Knowing the rocky relationship between the military and the police force in the capital, he predicted that the two groups would end up squabbling over the logistics and lock each other down rather than agree on a course of action. They were in the clear until the soldiers launched an investigation into the escape. At that point, he could only hope that they had done a good enough job covering their trail that they wouldn’t be found out.

Hopefully they assume she was taken by other members of the rebellion rather than anyone inside the capital, he thought, letting out a slow exhale as he caught his breath. Relaxing a little more now that he felt more certain that they were safe, he turned in his seat to check on Iris in the back. “How are you holding up?” he asked, his eyes sweeping over her concernedly. He’d been too caught up in the escape to realize that she was dressed in nothing but hospital linens until now. Running on asphalt with bare feet had probably been painful. “Are your feet okay?”

Amnesia [Suki & Summer]

Yep! That won't happen for a while though. Our closing date isn't until next month.

Amnesia [Suki & Summer]

“I didn’t think every detail through, I guess,” Cas shrugged when Iris teased him about having to get back into the bed. “Just the major stuff.” With only twenty-four hours to prepare, he and his friends hadn’t had time to work out every little piece of their escape plan. If they’d had longer to do their research and learn all the ins and outs of the hospital, they would have been smoother. Honestly, he was just happy they were doing as well as they were with just a master key and a scaled floor plan from the internet. If their luck continued to hold out, they would do just as well as they would have if they’d had an entire week to come up with a more thorough strategy.

He waited for her to climb under the sheets with help from Miles as necessary and then waved Jay over to join their other friend at the other side of the bed. While he had one stabbed arm and one broken wrist, he didn’t have the strength to help wheel the bed very far, so it was easier if they did it instead. “Keep your eyes closed like you’re asleep,” he told Iris, taking Jay’s place by the door to check the hallway one more time before they left. Fortunately, it seemed like the nurses didn’t spend much time around the patients in this wing, because there was still no one else around. He guessed they probably hung around the intensive care patients much more often than those who were stable on their own.

“Let’s go,” he signaled to the others and opened the door, taking the lead as he directed them toward the elevator near the center of the wing. Behind him, he could hear wheels turning as Jay and Miles pushed Iris’s bed into the hallway. For a while, they all fell silent, not daring to open their mouths while they were in the middle of the riskiest part of their rescue mission. If anyone caught them now, it would be apparent that they were smuggling a rebel.

Cas swallowed nervously, glancing down each adjacent corridor that they passed on their way to the lift. Twice, he saw a few nurses in other parts of the wing, but none of them seemed to notice him or his friends or even the whole bed they were pushing along between them. Apparently the practitioners all kept their guards very low when they worked in an environment in which patients weren’t regularly swiped out from under their noses.

When they got to the elevator, the prince pushed the button and stepped back to wait, shifting his weigh back and forth between his feet with restless energy. As soon as the doors opened, he allowed Jay and Miles to cart the bed into it first and then climbed in after them, pressing the button for the ground floor.

“So far, so good,” Miles exhaled once they were in the privacy of the lift.

“Don’t jinx it,” Jay chided him under his breath, shooting him a glare.

“Sorry,” Miles scratched the back of his neck uncomfortably. “This is the most illegal thing I’ve ever done. I’m both excited and terrified at the same time.”

The elevator dinged as they hit the ground floor, and Cas peered over his shoulder to hush them. Heading the group again, he stepped out first and turned toward the hallway that would take them back to the parking lot, only to freeze after he’d taken just two steps. “Shit,” he hissed, heart racing as his eyes landed on a corridor bustling with doctors and nurses. In the few minutes between when they had gone upstairs and come back down, the crowds of people in scrubs had doubled.

“What do we do?” Miles glanced at him worriedly.

“Don’t just stand here,” Jay whispered sternly. “We have to get to that door, and this hallway is the fastest route. Act like we belong here. If we’re confident enough, they’ll buy it.”

Cas nodded. His friend was right. He’d learned the same thing about politics. Even if someone was completely clueless about something, he could come off as an expert if he carried himself with swagger. Dressed like surgeons, they could do the same thing at this hospital. The time for keeping under the radar was over. “Follow my lead,” he told them, taking a deep breath and breaking into a jog. As they approached the crowds of nurses, he called out, “Coming through!”

The other people looked up and immediately parted like the Red Sea, making way for what looked like three doctors with a critical patient. Nobody attempted to stop them to question what they were doing either. Silently, Cas was relieved that the idea had worked. As they passed by the nurses and rounded the last few corners, the door that led into the back parking lot came into view. They were almost out.

All three of them slowed to a stop just before they reach it. The bed was too wide to fit through. Miles stepped up to the side and offered a hand to Iris again, “Come on, we’re going the rest of the way on foot.”

“We might have to run,” Jay said suddenly, taking a step backwards as he stared at something at the other end of the long hall.

Cas followed his gaze and blanched as he saw two nurses looking in their direction and talking amongst themselves. In the next moment, one of them turned and ran in the opposite direction. She’s going to call the police, his eyes widened, and he inhaled sharply, pulling the door open quickly. “They know. We have to get out of here now.”

Amnesia [Suki & Summer]

No worries! I've been taking phone calls and emails all morning for the house again lol

Amnesia [Suki & Summer]

“Nice to meet you too,” Miles said sarcastically, to which Caspian elbowed him in the side. They didn’t have time for formal greetings when they were racing against the clock. As soon as Harry got to the mansion and discovered Jacob had never left nor given him a call to leave the hospital, the whole building was going to be swarming with soldiers. They had to get out before that happened and put enough distance between them that the city guards wouldn’t be able to catch up. None of them were safe until they were long gone.

“We’ll be fine as long as we move fast,” he assured Iris when she voiced her concerns. Everything she said was valid. If they were caught, his friends would be charged with treason, she would probably be executed, and even he most likely wouldn’t be immune from the consequences just because he was royalty. His father might even be livid enough to have him sent to the penitentiary for a while as punishment for trying to rescue a member of the rebellion. However, he couldn’t think about any of that right now. He had to believe that they were going to get away and that their efforts weren’t all for nothing.

“I’d better be sure, because it’s too late to back out now,” he smiled at her lopsidedly. “We’re already here, and we’re not leaving without you.” At his side, his two friends nodded their agreement. Even though they didn’t know her as well as he did, they had committed to the plan the night before. They were all in it together, no matter if they sank or swam.

As Iris climbed down from her bed, Jay stepped back over to the door to keep watch, and Miles placed himself by her side in case she needed someone to lean on while she was still shaky on her feet. Cas would have done so, himself, if he wasn’t already unstable too. All the running around they were doing was making his injured leg sore, so he simply stayed close by instead. “Then it’s a good thing we’re not real doctors,” he joked in response to her comment, pulling his mask back up over his mouth and nose.

“Someone should go get that gurney,” Jay reminded them as he peered through a thin crack in the door. “There’s no one in the hall right now. Want me to do it, Cas?”

The prince glanced toward him and opened his mouth to respond, then paused as something else caught his attention. Dropping his gaze to the floor, he noticed belatedly that the bed Iris had been laying on had wheels. He lifted his hand thoughtfully to his chin, supposing he should have realized hospital beds were mobile. Nurses needed to move patients around all the time. “Actually, I don’t think we need one,” he mused, looking up at his friend again and then turning to Iris. “Lay back down and get under the sheet. We’ll wheel you out to the back door.”

“I can help if you need me to,” Miles offered to her, the corners of his eyes turning upward slightly as he flashed a friendly smile behind his mask.

“Just move fast,” Jay advised them from the door. “I don’t know how much longer this hallway will be clear, and we don’t want anyone to see us take her from this room.”

Amnesia [Suki & Summer]

Hopefully my computer doesn't double post. The first time I tried to upload it, the tab crashed, so I had to do it again.
That'll also be my last one for the night, haha. I'm super tired

Amnesia [Suki & Summer]

Once Caspian and his friends got inside the hospital, their first order of business was to find better disguises than what they were currently wearing. Luckily, since they had entered from the employee’s side of the building, they found themselves close to the nurses’ break room. Cas and Jay hung back while Miles scoped it out to make sure it was clear, only entering after he waved his hand in a silent signal that meant the coast was clear. Relaxing slightly, the prince stepped inside and looked around, locating the lockers and closets off to the right.

“Over here,” he indicated his finding to the others and walked over to open up one of the doors. Inside, he found sets of hospital scrubs and bins full of other equipment that the staff needed access to for their jobs.

“Jackpot,” Miles said, pulling down one of the garments from its hanger. Cas and Jay did the same, layering the nurses’ outfits over their black clothes. The scrubs were a start, but they were going to need something more to disguise themselves than just baggy shirts and pants. The prince would especially, since they couldn’t risk letting anyone in the building recognize him while they were moving Iris. If someone realized who he was, it would compromise their entire operation, since his stolen clothes would give away the fact that he wasn’t supposed to be there.

After a little more digging around, they found an unopened box of surgical masks and mesh hairnets. “This should be more than enough, huh?” Cas mused as he pulled the elastic loops of a mask behind his ears and looked up at the others. With a covering over his mouth and nose and a blue net concealing the color of his hair, the only parts of his face that were visible were his brown eyes. That wouldn’t be enough for anyone to recognize him unless they knew him well.

“You look like a doctor to me,” Jay confirmed.

Once all three of them were masked up and ready to go, they headed back out of the break room and down the hall that they remembered would take them to the stairs. There were a few other people around, but fortunately, it seemed like their disguises made them practically invisible to anyone else. No one paid them more than a passing glance as they rushed around the building, performing various tasks for their patients. It was a relief that the hospital was so busy all the time, and the nurses didn’t seem to have the seconds to spare to question who they were. When they made it to the stairwell, they only had to stop once to drag Miles away from a pretty blonde nurse that had caught his eye.

“So how should we get her out of the room without anyone noticing we’re stealing a patient?” Jay asked as they climbed the steps up to the third level of the building. “We blend right in, but it would look weird for a girl in a hospital gown to be taking a walk with three doctors.”

“Gurney,” Cas glanced at him as he replied. “I bet we can find one upstairs in a supply closet. That was why I wanted you two to come with me too. I can’t maneuver one of those things around with this on my wrist.” He held up his right hand, which was still held in place with the silicon cast. “We’ll make it look like we’re escorting a patient who just got out of surgery.”

“I like it,” Miles nodded approvingly. “It’s a good thing we found surgical masks too. Now we can really sell it.”

When they reached the right floor, they exited the stairwell and examined the room numbers along the corridor in search of 311. Caspian held his breath anxiously. They were so close to getting Iris out of the hospital, but they weren’t in the clear yet. He wouldn’t relax until they were all safely inside Miles’ car and driving out of the parking lot. At least there aren’t many workers on this floor, he thought optimistically. As long as they continued to only see one or two practitioners around, it wouldn’t be too difficult to slip Iris out of her room unnoticed and put her on a gurney to bring down the elevator.

“Found it.”

He was drawn from his thoughts by Miles’ voice. Turning his head, he saw that his friend was pointing at a plaque labeled “311.” It was Iris’s room.

The prince nodded and took a steeling breath as he stepped forward to open the door. However, when he tried to turn the handle he found that it was locked. Of course they wouldn’t leave her alone without trapping her inside, he rolled his eyes, reaching into his pocket to get the master key. Fortunately, the device worked on every door in the hospital, so all he had to do was wave it over the keypad on the wall and wait for the ‘click’ that granted them access.

As soon as he heard it, he tried the handle again and pushed the door open, letting himself and his friends inside. In the corner of his eye, he caught sight of Iris, and his heart fluttered involuntarily. It took everything in him not to give away their relationship to the others by rushing toward the bed to wrap her up in his arms. Forcing himself to maintain a cool exterior, he closed the door behind him and approached the bed with subtle urgency. “Iris, it’s me,” he said in a hushed voice, tugging the mask down under his chin, so she could see his face. He gestured to his friends next, “This is Jay and Miles. We’re getting you out of here before the soldiers take you back to the penitentiary.”

Amnesia [Suki & Summer]

Sorry that one took a while! I got distracted for like an hour xD