Chapter 121: 121 Shed Your Skin, Part One

Angharad's life had shrunk down to a small room and sitting around in her pyjamas. At least there was an en suite so she could shower. Food would appear while she was asleep. And that was it, with no real hope for anything else. There were guards outside her door and security bars over her window.

She sat on the dove grey carpet, hands wrapped around her knees, and stared at the ceiling in the dark trying to accept her life.

What she didn't expect was for someone to fall through the vent in the ceiling.

She turned to look at her bed, where a figure lay sprawled. He pushed himself up on his knees and put a hand over her mouth when she gasped.

"Don't draw attention," Jin whispered.

She nodded.

"I'm going to get you out of here before anyone realises the security system is down."

"How did you find me?" she asked.

"If your stupid cousin didn't want people to know about his evil lair he shouldn't have bought it under his own name. Those records are really easy to track."

"Okay, I'm ready to go." The only thing she wanted to take with her was her mother's dress.

"Wait. There's a thing I want to ask you to do. I think I've found a clue that might lead us to who put us in Zapville. Will you come with me to find it? Your rescue is not conditional on this."

"Of course I will."

Thankfully, Jin didn't make her go out the way he got in. He broke open the lock keeping her room a prison, then knocked out the guard with efficient motions. Her hand in his, they ran through the quiet, dark corridors of the building with soft feet, careful not to cause any more trouble. The main difficulty was outside, with its security lights and wide open spaces, but he helped her keep to the shadowed spots. At one point they hid behind a hedge.

When they made it past the gates they ran full out until they found a car to hide behind. It didn't take much longer for him to break those locks, either. When they slid in fast, and finally drove off, Jin's feet on the pedals before she'd even put her seat belt on, only then did she feel like she was far enough out to stop measuring her breaths.

"I don't have proper clothes!" she realised, with a start, once they were far enough down the dark road for her deeper thinking brain to really kick in.

"I broke into the place you were staying at before your father died and took some stuff. Sorry I wasn't there for that."

The grief hit her over again. She swallowed it down. "It's fine. You didn't know. You have your own stuff going on."

"That girl you were living with is using some of your things."

Angharad shrugged. "Whatever. She can keep them."

"Tell me you have a plan to get revenge on that psycho who trapped you in his house."

"I have a plan now. I'm formulating it as we speak."

"Good. He needs to suffer."

Angharad looked out the window at the world going past. "I don't care if he suffers. I just want him to stop."

*

She fell asleep eventually, and when she woke up Jin was still driving but she was pretty sure they were in another state. The sun was bright over the car. She felt too hot in her pyjamas and winter hoodie but there was nothing she could do about that until they pulled over.

When he finally stopped the car it was to refuel and find a place to sleep that took cash. Something old-fashioned where nobody cared enough to ask questions.

She let him make all the arrangements, and when she got in the room he'd booked, with its ugly floral curtains and lumpy double bed, she slumped straight down onto the quilt and kicked her shoes off.

He threw a bag on a chair and said, "I'll take you shopping in the morning."

"Ooh, shopping." She got up again to look at the bag.

She was too tired to make much of a joke of it. But she was free.

The bag he had prepared for her contained socks and underwear and a couple of flimsy summer dresses. Jin blushed and looked away when she raised an eyebrow at him. But at the very bottom of the bag was a real prize, the leather jacket Tsuyoshi had given her in Zapville when she was thin and cold and tired. It was still warm and large and the leather still strong. She wouldn't look cool in it at all. Angharad couldn't be happier to have it in her hands.

"Thank you."

"You'll pull all the chicks now. You're a leather jacket wearing bad girl," he said.

"I'm a loser nerd who likes impractical shoes too much."

"But the lesbians will not know that until you've ensnared them."

"Ooh, ensnared. I'm ensnaring people now?"

She flopped back on the bed. There were various remotes on top of the birch veneer drawers by the bed, so she turned on the TV and flicked around, just to have noise. Eventually she found something long to marathon through the streaming options and let it start.

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Jin got up from his chair and sat next to her on the bed. He didn't look impressed by their entertainment options.

"You know, China isn't actually like that," he said, gesturing at the screen.

"Yeah, I mean, I know people aren't actually flying around on swords." She rolled onto her side and looked up at him instead. "It's enough noise that people won't overhear us."

"Tell me your plans for taking down James."

She sat up. "He's sloppy, just like you guessed. He was definitely embezzling. I'm... not entirely sure daddy died of natural causes. But James underestimated me. I underestimated him, too. I actually didn't think he'd sink that low."

Jin's face looked serious in the patterns of light from the TV. "That's why he pressured you into dating him. So he could take your money and your proper place in the company and take over."

"Yeah, probably. Anyway, I installed surveillance equipment in all his cleaning bots. As long as that data went where it was supposed to I can take him down."

Jin handed her his phone. "Use this to check."

The back ups were exactly where she expected them to be. She selected a random video and watched some of the footage. Seeing it was even worse than she thought. She made even more copies of everything she had and sent them to different addresses while she tried to figure out the rest of her plan.

"If I do this, if I take him down with this, I take down his wife and kids, too," she said.

"They're better off without him."

"I don't trust that he won't destroy them on his way down. He had someone rub my hair in my own vomit. That's what he does to people he claims to love but can't control. If I release this, I'm complicit in that."

"You're still going to do it."

"I am. I just thought I should say that first."

Jin wrapped an arm around her, and she curled into his side. She couldn't stop shivering. He moved away to wrap the entire blanket around her like she was a burrito, but came back to hold her again.

"We'll find this clue and we'll figure out where Zapville is and we'll get them all home," he said.

"You promise?"

"We got this far."

"Hold me tighter than that," she said.

Her body shook harder until he dragged the quilt up over both of them and squeezed her close. Her hands began to sweat under all the layers but she pulled them closer to her body as she curled into a smaller ball. And when she started to cry she pushed her face into the pillow to muffle the sounds.

Jin had the sense to not ask if she was okay.

*

In the morning she put on that leather jacket over a summer dress, with her feet shoved into a too large pair of Jin's shoes.

Jin drove them to a large second hand store. Nothing fancy but she didn't mind. She grabbed a pile of cardigans and a bunch of scarves and any pair of shoes that would fit.

Jin looked more suspicious than she did as he constantly looked around the room instead of at her. Checking to see if anyone was following them, probably, and Angharad could see why Freya said he was no good at subterfuge.

The woman at the counter, wearing a volunteer badge and a bright smile, asked them what they were doing in town.

Jin froze. His eyes filled with clear panic. Angharad watched the fear wash over his face and thought, I can use that.

She laughed, affecting a rueful tone, and then sighed like she was about to give up a big secret. "Okay, it's no big deal or anything. And I mean, we know we can't run away forever. But, like, our parents kind of banned us from dating so we've run away for the weekend. I mean, only for the weekend." And Angharad tried to make herself look like the kind of good girl who would feel bad for doing that sort of thing.

"Oh, young love, that's so sweet, and he's buying you so many pretty things. I remember my college boyfriend was exactly the same," the woman said.

"Oh, was he? Tell me more," Angharad said.

Perfect distraction as she rang up their purchases.

*

In the car after, Jin looked like he was lost. "How do you do that?"

"Oh, you want to know how to tell convincing lies. Okay, first of all, the secret is that you have to believe it while you're telling it. But only while you're telling it. It's not about fooling yourself. And secondly, I just thought, okay, Jin looks super paranoid, what kind of reason can I give for that so she won't freak out? It's about knowing your audience and knowing how you're presenting yourself."

"You are good at that," he said, and he sounded so awed she was going to take it as a compliment, whether it was one or not.

"I come by it honestly," she said.

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