Once the guard leaves after banging a hand on the glass door and smirking, like he’d been trying to scare her, she looks around and finds the two security cameras inside of the room quickly disabling them with a trick Michael taught her the last time they had had to deal with the Fleet Soldiers. She pushes the bed from one corner of the room to the other, and stands up on it, reaching up with her hands and hitting the metal, which sounds pretty solid until she gets to about the middle of the space, and then it sounds hollow. The vents, just like Alex had said.
She closes her eyes, pressing her hands hard against the metal above her head and she concentrates, willing it to flow like water, leaving nothing behind.
She feels the metal, cool and with an almost jelly like consistency, covering her hands, and when she opens her eyes and looks above her, there is a hole in the roof the perfect space for Isobel to fit through.
Isobel reaches up, straining as far as she can go, and pulls herself into the small space.
Her feet have just cleared the space when she hears the door to her cell opening and a voice cursing.
“Where is the princess?” someone asks, but Isobel doesn’t wait.
She looks down at the faded drawing in the palm of her hand and squinting in the dark space, and moves forward.
There is a loud sound like someone is attempting to crawl after her, but Isobel hasn’t spent five years on the run for nothing.
She turns, and finds the head and torso of one of the guards as he tries to go after her, not pointing his phaser at her since she’s supposed to be taken alive and unharmed no matter what.
Isobel pulls off the bracelet from around her wrist, and sets it down on the floor in front of her before she closes her eyes again and concentrates on the molecular structure of the gold bracelet and then she expands it.
She opens her eyes again and sees the way the bracelet has turned into a sort of fence.
It might not hold up too long, but it will be a nuisance, and Isobel only needs a few minutes anyway.
She turns back around and follows the path marked on her hand.
She drops down into an empty hall, and barely looks around before she’s running down the corridor, taking the turn too fast, and stumbling a few steps before she keeps going.
The escape pods are where they always are in these Fleet Cruisers, which is something that they should change if they want the Renegade Troops to stop escaping through their fingers when the Renegades have a former Fleet Officer in their group spilling all of the secrets.
Isobel skids to a stop right in front of the pods and is about to input the code that Alex had practically forced her to memorize when there is a phaser blast blowing apart the circuitry of the keypad and very nearly taking Isobel’s hand with it.
She whirls around, hands lifting up immediately, and she’s pushing backwards before she even sees who it was that shot at her, pinning the person to the wall.
It takes her two seconds to notice that it’s Jenna, and she lets go.
Jenna inhales sharply as the pressure to her lungs disappears, and slides down the wall, looking at Isobel like she can’t believe that she’s actually here to help her.
“They have a tracker in that one,” Jenna gasps out. “Take the third one down.”
Isobel licks her lips, and she wants to cross the space between them and fall to her knees in front of Jenna and hold her close, because she misses her, and this sucks. Sucks that in this war being raged between a megalomaniac with the Elite on his side and the rest of the galaxy, they’re on opposite sides.
She takes a staggering step towards her, and there is the sound of running footsteps too close for either of their liking.
Jenna pushes herself to her feet, and gives Isobel a look that says so many things and yet not enough. Isobel wishes that when Alex decided to go AWOL, he had dragged Jenna with him.
“Go,” Jenna says. “I’ll distract them.”
Isobel nods her head once and turns to head towards the escape pod that Jenna had said to take, when there are fingers wrapping around her wrist and tugging her, and Isobel turns back immediately, hand coming up to cup Jenna’s face as she leans up and presses a hard kiss on Isobel’s mouth, fingers tightening painfully around Isobel’s wrist.
“Be careful,” she whispers harshly as she pulls back.
Isobel nods her head, “You too.”
Jenna just lets her go, pushing her towards the pod and turns and runs down the hall, reaching just in time to cut the others from coming her way.
Isobel inputs the code into the keypad and is inside of the pod before someone can look down the hall for her.
She lets the door close behind her, and she doesn’t strap herself down into her seat, even as the escape pod starts preparing to eject. She pushes her hands on either side of the small space she’s in and shuts her eyes tightly and pulls her bottom lip into her mouth, where she can still feel Jenna’s mouth against hers.
She feels the pod shoot out of the Fleet Cruiser, the coordinates she needs to go to already set into the navigational system thanks to another trick she learned from Michael.
She just stays sitting down on the floor, and tries to keep her breaths even, and hopes that this will all be over soon.
Jenna climbed up the tower, falling down five times, once even when she had just managed to touch the solitary windowsill that was apparently the only entrance to the tower.
She manages to hook her hands against the sill, and pulls herself up, straining with her weight because she's so fucking tired and then she drops into the room, and lets herself fall back against the cobblestone floor and tries to catch her breath back.
She stares at the lofty ceiling and the long wooden beams and she can't believe that she actually made it up here.
"Finally made it up the tower I see," she hears a voice say, sounding bored and unimpressed.
Jenna sighs, she had known that Isobel would be testy but she hadn't expected her to sound like Jenna was doing them a great inconvenience by managing to get up here.
She opens her eyes and turns her face towards where the voice came from and finds the princess.
Jenna doesn't spend much time with Isobel since she's in the royal guard and Isobel spends most of her time indoors.
Ever since the death of their first born, the King and Queen treat both Prince Max and Princess Isobel like they were made of glass.
The only reason Max was allowed to join the knights in training was because they were one charged conflict away from going to all out war with King Noah, who is determined to make Isobel his Queen, much to everyone's consternation.
Hence the kidnapping attempts.
Jenna would hate to have something in common with that asshole, but she can admit that Isobel is one of the most beautiful women that she’s ever seen, and she’s kind of a bitch.
Which Jenna actually really enjoys, especially when she’s cutting down people who think that just because she’s the princess and she’s pretty that she doesn’t know anything.
Isobel raises an eyebrow pointedly, since Jenna is staring, so she looks away and spots the coiled rope in her hands.
“Is that-?” she starts sitting up, and Isobel just cuts her off.
“Yes,” she says simply, getting to her feet.
“And you didn’t think to throw it down while I was trying to climb up here?” Jenna asks getting to her feet as well.
Isobel just gives her a sharp grin at that. “I like making you work for it.”
While Jenna processes that, Isobel walks to the window, brushing past her and then throws one side of the rope up to wrap around one of the wooden beams.
She grabs on to one end, and then throws the other one at Jenna.
“Hold that,” she says, and Jenna catches it, opening her mouth to tell Isobel that she’s not her servant, when Isobel just jumps up on the windowsill and then before Jenna can say anything else, she’s jumping out the window.
Jenna holds on to the rope, and feels it tug hard as Isobel’s weight pulls against it, but she can’t find it in herself to be too mad when she hears the whoop of joy that Isobel gives as she falls.
Jenna can tell when she lands, cause the rope loses all of it’s tension and almost sends her falling backwards.
She goes to the window and sees Isobel getting up from the floor and dusting herself off.
