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Levi didn’t look back as he travelled down the gravel pathway to the street. Mansions lined the road, but he barely glanced at them. He couldn’t process what they meant, and they didn’t matter as much as getting away from the house he’d just come from. He walked in a random direction, feeling the moisture on his back gathering into beads of sweat. This was probably a bad decision, but he was walking now and found himself without the will to turn around.
Without a watch or phone, Levi had no way of knowing how he walked for. The mansions disappeared and turned into a steep cliff-side road. He could see the city below him to his left. The view was magnificent, but Levi was not in the mood to appreciate it. He tried to gauge how far away the city was. An hour? Two hours? Perhaps he would find something before that, but he didn’t know what he was looking for. There were shrubs to his right which he stayed close to and tumbled behind when he heard cars approaching.
Levi’s guestimates turned out to be somewhat conservative. For about an hour after the road began to level out, Levi followed it through a section of rocky moor. Without a view from above, Levi was petrified he would end up off course. He reached a junction and his heart sank. By the road, on a blue painted road sign, there were directions. They weren’t in English. And he was actually pretty sure they weren’t in Welsh. In fact, the characters looked Asian. He stared for as long as he dared to stay still.
If he saw Lekivan and Soriah again, they owed him an honest explanation. There was no way for Levi to decipher the sign, so he took the right turn and hoped for the best. After another hour, Levi was desperate. He saw a black car approach from the distance. His first instinct was to hide, but by then he was so sick of walking he didn’t even care if it was Lekivan behind the wheel. He flagged the car down and, mercifully, it stopped.
The car’s left window rolled down, and a dark skinned man appeared. He wore sunglasses and had close cropped hair.
“Hi, thanks for stopping,” Levi croaked. He hadn’t realised how dry his throat had been getting. He coughed before starting again. “Could you give me directions into the city?”
“You’re Levi, right?” The stranger smiled. His accent was strong.
Levi’s stomach dropped. He knew he should have hid.
“Hey! No need to look so worried!” He pulled a leather wallet out of his pocket and opened it up to reveal some sort of police badge. “I know the situation, right? Just gonna take you down to the police station, we’ll talk everything through, get you something to eat and drink.”
Levi didn’t reply. He trusted this man even less than he trusted Soriah and Lekivan.
“Or you can just keep walking down this road until you collapse of exhaustion. Whatever.”