Revolution- Runaways 3 [EDITING]

Chapter 11: Luke

I walked beside Daniel and Micaiah as we exchanged stories from the night before. It hadn't been as stressful as I was expecting, but that didn't mean it was easy. Images of smoke and panic still flooded my recent memory.

Micaiah was in the middle of telling us about a hysterical girl who had shot herself because she was so scared of what she was when his phone rang. I was grateful for the interruption. The memory was obviously haunting him, and I was afraid it would start to haunt me too. I'd witnessed one too many suicides in my life, well, exactly one suicide, and I didn't wish to relive the experience.

"Hello?" he said, confusion etched in his voice. We rarely needed our cellphones, but he carried his around just in case. He had whoever was calling him on speaker.

"Hey, come back inside with Daniel and Luke. We have to show you something," a female voice that sounded like Michelle replied. She sounded worried.

"Okay, we'll be in in a minute." He hung up, sliding his phone back into his pocket. "What now?" he complained aloud. "I don't know how many more surprises I can handle."

When we arrived inside, everyone was clustered in the living room just as we'd been this morning. I lowered myself to the floor with Daniel while Micaiah took the open seat beside Reese.

"What's going on?" a strawberry-blonde boy named Dawson asked.

Michelle held up a finger to silence him. She flipped the screen of the laptop she was holding and pressed play. We all watched as a familiar scene unfolded, except that it wasn't familiar.

It was another camp just like Kamiah or Apopka, but it wasn't either of them. The quality was poor and shaky, like it was filmed on a cellphone, but you could clearly see kids running out just like they had before. Michelle turned up the volume, and I realized that something was playing over the loudspeaker of the camp.

"Everyone needs to exit through the South Gate. Buses are waiting to escort you to freedom." The message repeated constantly as whoever was filming shoved through the crowds of people to get to the gate. Once they reached the gate, we could see buses lined up along the street. Then the footage cut off abruptly.

Michelle closed the laptop. "What you just saw was the camp in Zephyr, Texas. We think this breakout was administered completely by whoever has been trying to sabotage our breakouts, which means that we just lost an entire camp to these people." She looked defeated. "The footage was sent to us from one of our older Zephyr contacts, and she's agreed to spy for us as well as she can, but she said that she can hardly send anything through the firewalls surrounding her Wi-Fi network, and they confiscated her phone when she got there."

Part of me was wondering how she even had access to a cellphone in the first place, but maybe she had been able to keep it hidden when she was in the camp.

"Can you play the footage again?" Eli questioned.

"Sure." She reopened the laptop, punching in the passcode before she flipped the screen again. I scoured the screen for any clues as to who these people were, but I couldn't find anything. Eli, however, was leaning so close to the screen that I though he would fall off the couch. His intense focus almost made me laugh, despite the less-than-ideal circumstances.

When the video finished, he asked her to play it one more time. "I'm sorry," he said. "I just feel like I'm missing something. There's something about it that seems either totally off or really familiar and I can't place it."

"It's okay. We need to figure this out." She pressed play again, and the video still looked the same to me. Eli was obviously seeing something I wasn't.