As far as torture goes, it’s a solid three out of ten. Tops. I don’t know, I just expected more from literal hell.
I’m escorted back to a cell not by a demon but by a human. I’m having to force myself to take notice, to catalog the details, to dothe things that usually come so naturally to me. A man in his mid-forties. Fifties? Does he have wrinkles? Is his hair thinning? He’s vaguely see-through, so he’s alive. I blink and forget what I’m doing. Right, the man. Um. He’s got a map, so he’s new?
His clothes, his clothes…
There’s something about his clothes.
His clothes! They’re solid. They exist here.
Nondescript uniform. Practical shoes. Uhhh…weapons? No weapons. Keys? No keys either.
Was it the keys I was supposed to take?
He brings me to a smaller, much dingier cell. Private but no view. The door is already open. I blink a few times and take a deep breath, gathering my bearings, and try to remember the plan. But whatever they did to me makes me too slow, and I’m in the cell before I can act. The door shuts behind me.
Instinct kicks in. I lunge through the bars, grab the guard by the arm, and pull him into the splintered bones. They apparently work on the living just as well as the Dead, because his body goes rigid just before he starts to convulse. I shove a mist mask over his mouth.
This was the one thing they didn’t find while searching me. It had been packed into a hollowed-out portion of the sole of my left shoe. Because I’d been searched on the way in, no one thought to check me again once I was in the cell. So by the time I was brought to the interrogation room, I already had the mask tucked up my sleeve.
Most masks have to be hooked up to something to transfer mist, but this one has a small tank built in filled with Force Ghost. You know the one? The botched Kykeon mist that sends your soul into limbo, halfway between the Afterlife and the Beforedeath?
I’m breathing heavily as, just as I planned, the guard’s body fades, leaving behind a crumpled pile of clothes. The map lies next to it.
Just out of reach.
This could have gone better.
I have a map but can’t get to it, a plan but can’t enact it. I’m locked in a cell with no limen stone and no clue of the others’ plan—if they even have one—and I’ve cut off my only escape.
At least my mind is starting to come back. I’m retroactively panicked by just how out of it I was. Yes, things could have gone better, but they also could have gone so much worse. It’s just now everything’s at a standstill while I try to figure out the next step.
No matter what, I have to get out of the cell first.
Fighting got me out last time, but there’s no one to fight here. I could touch the bars, get zapped, and lure a demon, but I don’t know where they keep their keys. Maybe I could get a scythe away from one and use it to threaten my way out.
I’ve decided to risk it when I hear footsteps headed my way. Best-case scenario: They’re bringing in another prisoner. Okay-case scenario: It’s a demon. Worst-case scenario:…Really, things are pretty bad already.
I’m poised to act first, think later, when a figure steps out of the shadows, and it’s the last person I expect.
A scrape of a key against the lock, and the door swings open.
A see-through Ezra grins in the darkness. “Miss me?”
Thirty-Two
The first recorded jailbreak in Western history took place in 1244, when a Welsh prisoner named Gruffyd Ap Llywelyn Fawr crafted a makeshift rope out of bedsheets and used it to climb from the Tower of London. Unfortunately, the rope broke, and he fell to his death.
More successfully, in 1621 Dutch author Hugo Grotius escaped imprisonment by hiding in a book chest that was smuggled out by his accomplices.
In 1933, John Dillinger escaped prison with the help of his gang. He escaped again in 1934 by using a carved wooden pistol blackened with shoe polish.
A Japanese man, Shiratori Yoshie, broke out of prison four times: once by picking a lock with wire from a washroom bucket, once by methodically loosening a ceiling vent over the course of a year, once by dislocating his shoulder and slipping through the food slot, and once by digging a tunnel with a spoon.
Most escape attempts never get off the ground, and a good number of the prisoners that succeed are immediately captured or killed. You can have the most airtight plan ever, but if you can’t think on your feet, you’re finished before you even begin.
“What are you doing here?” I gasp.
Ezra tilts his head and gives me a crooked grin. “Rescuing you. For thesecondtime, I might add.”