“You don’t,” the man said, which was true enough.
“Let’s give it a try,” I said. There was, after all, nowhere else to go but back the way we’d come.
Emma looked torn, her gaze traveling from the stairs below to the beds around us. I knew what she was thinking, but she didn’t even ask—there was no time to go bed to bed, unhooking everyone. We’d have to come back for them. I just hoped that when we did, there would be something to come back to.
*
Emma lowered herself onto the metal stairs and descended into the dark hole in the floor. Before I followed, I locked eyes with the madman and raised a finger to my lips. He grinned and copied my gesture. I hoped he meant it. Guards would be there soon, and if he kept his mouth shut, maybe they wouldn’t follow us into the hatch. I started down the stairs and pulled the door shut after me.
Emma and I huddled near the top of a narrow cylinder of spiraling stairs and peered down. It took a moment for our eyes to transition from the bright room above to this mostly lightless dungeon walled in rough rock.
She gripped my arm and whispered in my ear.
“Cells.”
She pointed. Dimly it came into view: the bars of a prison cell.
We crept down the stairs. The space began to reveal itself: we were at the end of a long, subterranean hallway lined with cells, and though we couldn’t see yet who was in them, I had a soaring moment of hope. This was it. This was the place we’d hoped to find.
Then came a sudden slap of boots in the hall. Adrenaline surged through me. A guard was patrolling, rifle over his shoulder, pistol at his hip. He hadn’t seen us yet, but he would, any moment now. We were too far from the hatch to escape the way we’d come, and too far from the ground to easily leap down and fight him, so we hunkered and shrank back, hoping the stairs’ spindly railing would be enough to hide us.
But it couldn’t be. We were nearly at his eye level. He was twenty steps away, then fifteen. We had to do something.
So I did.
I stood up and walked down the stairs. He noticed me right away, of course, but before he could get a good look I started talking. Loud and bossy, I said: “Didn’t you hear the alarm? Why aren’t you outside defending the walls?”
By the time he realized that I was not someone he took orders from I had reached the floor, and by the time he’d started to grab for his gun I had already closed half the distance between us, barreling toward him like a quarterback. I hit him with my shoulder just as he pulled the trigger. The gun roared, the shot ricocheting behind me. We sprawled to the ground. I made the mistake of trying to stop him from squeezing off another shot while trying to give him the finger—I had it now—which was stuffed deep in my right pocket. I didn’t have enough limbs to do both, and he threw me off him and stood up. I’m sure that would’ve been the end of me if he hadn’t seen Emma running toward him, hands aflame, and turned to shoot her instead.
He squeezed off a round but it was wild, too high, and that gave me just the opportunity I needed to scramble to my feet and charge him again. I tackled him and we fell across the hallway, his back slamming into the bars of one of the cells. He hit me—hard, in the face, with his elbow—and I spun and fell. And then he was raising the gun to shoot me, and neither Emma nor I were close enough to stop him.
Suddenly, a pair of meaty hands reached out of the darkness, through the bars, and grabbed the guard by his hair. His head snapped back hard and rung the bars like a bell.
The guard went limp and slid to the ground. And then Bronwyn came forward inside the cell, pressed her face to the bars, and smiled.
“Mr. Jacob! Miss Emma!”
I had never been so glad to see anyone. Her large, kind eyes, her strong chin, her lank brown hair—it was Bronwyn! We stuck our arms through the bars and hugged her as best we could, so excited and relieved that we started babbling—“Bronwyn, Bronwyn,” Emma gasped, “is it really you?”
“Is that you, miss?” said Bronwyn. “We’ve been praying and hoping and, oh, I was so worried the wights had got you—”
Bronwyn was squeezing us against the bars so hard I thought I might pop. The bars were thick as bricks and made of something stronger than iron, which I realized was the only reason Bronwyn hadn’t broken out of her cell.
“Can’t … breathe,” Emma groaned, and Bronwyn apologized and let us go.
Now that I could get a proper look at her, I noticed a bruise on Bronwyn’s cheek and a dark stain that might’ve been blood spotting one side of her blouse. “What did they do to you?” I said.
“Nothing serious,” she replied, “though there’s been threats.”
“And the others?” Emma said, panicked again. “Where are the others?”
“Here!” came a voice from down the hallway. “Over here!” came another.
And then we turned and saw, pressed against the bars of the cells lining the hall, the faces of our friends. There they were: Horace and Enoch, Hugh and Claire, Olive, gasping through the bars at us from the top of her cell, her back against the ceiling—all there, all of them breathing and alive, except poor Fiona—lost when she fell from the cliff at Miss Wren’s menagerie. But mourning her was a luxury we didn’t have right then.
“Oh, thank the birds, the miraculous bloody birds!” Emma cried, running to take Olive’s hand. “You can’t imagine how worried we’ve been!”
“Not half as worried as we’ve been!” Hugh said from down the hall.
“I told them you’d come for us!” Olive said, near tears. “I told them and told them, but Enoch kept saying I was a loony for thinking so …”
“Never mind, they’re here now!” said Enoch. “What took you so bloody long?”
“How in Perplexus’s name did you find us?” said Millard. He was the only one the wights had bothered to dress in prisoners’ garb—a striped jumpsuit that made him easy to see.
“We’ll tell you the whole story,” said Emma, “but first we need to find the ymbrynes and get you all out of here!”
“They’re down the hall!” said Hugh. “Through the big door!”
At the end of the hall was a huge metal door. It looked heavy enough to secure a bank vault—or hold back a hollowgast.
“You’ll need the key,” said Bronwyn, and she pointed out a ring on the unconscious guard’s belt. “It’s the big gold one. I’ve been watching him!”
I scrambled to the guard and tore the keys from his belt. Then I stood frozen with them in my hand, my eyes darting between the cell doors and Emma.
“Hurry up and let us out!” Enoch said.
“With which key?” I said. The ring held dozens, all identical save the big gold one.
Emma’s face fell. “Oh, no.”
More guards would be coming soon, and unlocking every cell would cost precious minutes. So we ran to the end of the hall, unlocked the door, and gave the keys to Hugh, whose cell was closest. “Free yourself and then the others!” I said.
“Then stay here until we come back to get you,” Emma added.
“No chance!” Hugh said. “We’re coming after you!”
There was no time to argue—and I was secretly relieved to hear it. After all this time struggling on our own, I was looking forward to having some backup.
Emma and I heaved open the big bunker-like door, took a last look at our friends, and slipped away.
*
On the other side of the door was a long rectangular room cluttered with utilitarian furniture and lit from above by greenish fluorescent bulbs. It was doing its best impression of an office, but I wasn’t fooled. The wall was spongy with foam soundproofing. The door was thick enough to withstand a nuclear blast. This was no office.