“That still leaves Glain and Santi,” Wolfe said. “And I’m not giving them up.”
Glain groaned sleepily and said, “Would you all just shut up and let me rest? We’re High Garda. We’ll survive. Chatter when the sun’s up, you wretches.”
“Do you want us to sing to you?” Dario asked.
“I swear to my gods and yours, Dario. Shut. Up.”
After that, it went quiet again. Some of them, Jess sensed, did go back to sleep. Not him. Not Thomas. Jess went back to a fingertip search of the cell, mind as white as a snowfield. His father had taught him how to look for hidden panels and triggers doing this, but the same principle served for anything you were looking to discover. It just took patience and focus.
From time to time, he glanced up at Thomas. The other young man hadn’t closed his eyes. He looked . . . dead. But Jess had no doubt that the mind inside that skull was whirring at top speed.
Jess finally paused his search. He’d covered most of the cell, and his back was on fire, his fingertips raw from scraping them over stone. He sat down on the floor to lean against his friend’s cot. “You all right?” He whispered it softly enough that it wouldn’t wake Thomas if he were asleep.
But he wasn’t at all surprised to get a reply.
“To be truthful, I’m glad you’re here, Jess.” He didn’t say the rest, but Jess could guess. Being trapped in a cell again, even surrounded by friends, wasn’t good for him. Thomas had endured torment in that dark hell underneath Rome; he’d survived unimaginable things, and it had taken a toll. Jess wanted to ask, but he knew better; there was a gulf between what they could say and what they would say. Best to keep things simple. Thomas was fragile, raw inside and out, and the ugly truth of it was they needed him strong if they were going to survive Philadelphia.
Thomas said, “Would you stay there while I sleep a little?”
Jess looked over his shoulder and saw that Thomas’s gaze had shifted to him. Neither of them looked away, and Jess finally said, “I’ll stand watch.”
It was, he thought, exactly what Thomas needed, and with a sigh, the big German closed his eyes and let himself finally drift away.
Jess fell asleep, too, despite the hard stones under his behind, and the chill. He dreamed he was a guard at a gate, and the gate was on fire, and he knew, he knew, that what waited beyond it was something terrible and monstrous and impossible to defeat. But that he’d have to fight it anyway. The hopelessness of it overwhelmed him.
He woke with a start when he heard voices, the dream still vivid and vibrating in his muscles. The sun was well up, and the sky a cloudy teal blue beyond the window bars. No one had arrived to wake them, Jess realized, and there was nothing to eat. His stomach was growling. He also had an urgent need for the toilet. Bucket. Well, he’d made do with worse, and he rose and made use of the thing.
“Wathen, what in Heron’s name are you doing?” That was Wolfe’s sharp, annoyed voice, and Jess buttoned up and angled a look over at the cell Glain shared with Khalila. Glain was, bafflingly enough, doing a handstand in the middle of her cell. Perfect balance, as steady as a rock. “Practicing to become Philadelphia’s court jester?”
Glain put her legs down in a smooth, perfectly coordinated move that Jess could in no way have duplicated, stood up straight, and stretched. “It feels good,” she said. “Blood to the brain. Helps me think.”
“Did you see anything useful from that position?” Dario asked.
“Did you, from lying on your oh-so-uncomfortable mattress, lazybones?”
The young man shrugged, which was a feat considering he was casually leaning a shoulder against the bars and had his arms crossed. “What do you want me to say? It’s a cell. There’s nothing in here.”
“Dario, you’re hopeless,” Wolfe said. “Jess. Tell him how he’s wrong.”
“Strip the netting under the mattresses. Braid it together, tie it to the window bars, and twist. The torque will unseat at least one of the bars pretty easily. You can use it for a tool, sharpen it up as a weapon . . .”
“The mattresses are flammable enough to make a decent amount of smoke,” Morgan added. “We’d need to be careful to keep it to a distraction. The air circulation isn’t very good. Easy to breathe in too much if it gets thick.”
Khalila held up her head scarf and unfolded it with a snap of her hand. “If I weight the two ends with pieces of stone, this makes a perfectly good weapon.”
Dario said, “Fine. You’re all much better at dirty fighting and jail survival than I am. But as the Scholar so wisely said, we need to think three moves ahead. Let’s assume that we’re out of the cells, we’ve saved our lives from the Burners, we’ve found a way out of the city. What then? I think we need a way to communicate with whatever allies we have left out there. I don’t suppose you’ve got that answer tucked up your sleeve.”
Jess said, “If they’re getting supplies, they must have a smuggling tunnel.”
“Explain,” Wolfe said sharply. “Because I’m not allowing you to run blindly out into unknown territory. We must—”
“They’re coming,” Santi interrupted him.
Jess heard footsteps then, and the scrape of the lock turning to the outer door, and was on his feet and at the bars so quickly he might have been spring-loaded. Thomas, by contrast, didn’t even move a muscle from where he sat on the edge of his cot—though it was an icy calm that Jess thought hard-won.
The door gaped open, and three men came in—different ones this time, but with a brawny look that said they were ready for trouble. Khalila, across the way, unhurriedly tied her scarf in place and tucked the edges in to hold it. How she could stay so perfectly clean in these conditions, Jess had no idea, but she wouldn’t have looked out of place in her own Library office, despite all they’d been through. Made him feel somewhat better.
Morgan, on the other hand, looked more like he felt—pale, tired, her hair tangled and badly in need of combing. He wanted to do that for her, run his fingers gently through that riot of silk and curls. Had they come for her? He was afraid that Thomas had been right—Morgan’s abilities were a valuable, vanishingly rare resource that the Burners would lock a collar around as sure as the Library had done.
But they didn’t stop at Morgan’s cell, which was a temporary relief that vanished as they stopped at Jess and Thomas’s barred door and pointed at Thomas. “You there. Come with us.” The clipped tone of the guard’s accent made the command sound that much more unfriendly. He had pale skin and straw blond hair cropped to a shimmer around his skull, and he’d been in more than one fight; noses didn’t get that distorted from just one punch.
Jess was caught wrong-footed, and it took him a second to realize what it might mean. He turned to look at Thomas, and one glance at the other young man’s set face was enough.
“He’s not going anywhere alone,” Jess said.
“Back up, boy.”
“Never happen. You want him, you take us both.”
The guard laughed. “You mean go through you? Not a problem.”
Jess was afraid that assessment was correct. He could fight; his High Garda training had made him efficient, fast, and deadly, and he was confident he could make them bleed. But there were three of them, and he couldn’t count on Thomas, who wavered between sudden bursts of violence and crippling fear at the strangest of times. Thomas would probably fight for others. Jess wasn’t sure he’d fight to save himself.
Jess was afraid, but it was a fear he was familiar with, after all the High Garda drills and the horror he’d already survived. An old friend, this kind of fear. Almost a strength.
“If you make us put you down, you’ll go hard,” the Burner said. He grinned and revealed an array of jagged teeth as battered and broken as his nose. “Your choice.”
“Gentlemen,” Santi said, from the next cell over, and leaned against the bars of the cell he shared with Wolfe. His tone was charming, which meant he was ready to do awful things. “If you want answers, come and get someone who has command rank.”