Matthew in all honesty wasn't entirely sure how long they'd been rolling on account of how he was able to disassociate behind the wheel, only rising up out of the vault of his own thoughts when he got his directions from Mira, stopped at an out of the way gas station when food or a bathroom break was demanded, and swapping out his drivers position whenever the need for sleep or the biting nausea of a headache became too much for him and he laid across the back seat letting the rumble of the engine carry him away to dreamland. 

As for what he spent most of his time thinking about, it was a mix. Sometimes it was FOE, a slow burning fear that he felt blossoming into full blown paranoia with every car he stared down in the rear view mirror. As the full implications of his new life as a fugitive began to bear down on him he felt himself tense up every time he saw a car coming toward them in the other lane or heard one speeding up behind him, his foot jittering on the gas pedal in case he had to counter a pit maneuver or suddenly deal with a tire being shot out from under him. He was a wanted man. He was hunted. Maybe if they were just looking for him as a mage he'd be able to deal with it better.

But he was also a murderer. 

He tried to keep his mind from going there but wherever his eyes wandered to the red and blue bands of string coiled around his wright wrist, so close together, he flashed back to the red spots blooming in the uniform of that cop. It was clear, too. His recollection was perfect, and though he'd spun away before he could see the end of it his imagination threw up helpful little suggestions for how the rest of that scene had played out. Of the guy flopping over, of a few wet coughs, of red soaking into the morning snow. One particularly frightful tableau even feature the centipede crawling over, fangs dripping, giving him a mercy that was anything but. After he'd thought up that one he'd had to pull over on the side of the road and spill his meager lunch onto the shoulder. Mira had taken over for the rest of that day. 

By far the worst, though, was when his mind drifted back to his sister and whether this was just...life, now. Whether she lived like this every day.

Their journey had ended at a portal of swirling blue that made him sick just to look at. As he'd climbed out of the car looking a little worse than he had when he'd first entered he shouldered his bag, shielded his eyes from the light, and stepped through when instructed.

[hr]

As the applause washed over the room Matthew felt himself get swept up in the collective relief of the room, clapping it up with the rest of them from his position in the back before letting out a sigh and rubbing his head with his palm. "Hahaha, seems like we were right on time. Look's like my delivery streak ain't broken yet." He smiled at Jan and Mira. It was the most jovial he'd seemed since they'd started their journey. It was amazing what a promise of safety and showers could do for a mans mood, but more than that he now had something else to think about.

The Violet Underground. A safe haven for mages of all shapes and sizes. He'd read rumors on the in internet about stuff like this, but whenever he'd imagine it it had always been people huddling in basements or meeting in the smokey backroom of a KFC. He didn't think they would be able to occupy a building like this, much less under the FOEs nose. Either these guys were much better at hiding mages than he'd imagined or the FOE wasn't nearly as omnipresent as he'd feared. Either gave him hope/ 

"Pretty niffy set up, don't you think?" he said to no one in particular. "I mean, when you're talking about places to hide out during a crisis the mall's a classic for a reason." He scowled slightly. "Oh please, god, don't let there be any graffiti."