Izzy placed a hand on my shoulder. “Are you okay?” she repeated the question.
“I’ll be fine, I just want to get to Six.”
She nodded, grabbed my hand, and led me away from the wall. As soon as we turned the corner, I noticed a couple of guards standing by the entrance to D-Block. These were the first people we’d come across since the Warden died, and I wasn’t’ sure how it was going to play out. Sanchez was already ahead of us, though, so I hung back a little and watched, but prepared myself to act.
“Howes…” Sanchez said to one of the guards, trailing off like it was a frosty greeting.
“Sanchez,” he said, turning his nose up. He was taller than her, and his limbs were longer, giving him that lanky, scarecrow look. “Is it true?”
“It’s true. Warden Wright is dead.”
Howes glanced over in my direction. “And who are they?”
“They’re here to collect a couple of prisoners and extract them from the facility.”
“Extract?”
“That’s right. Do you have a problem with that, Howes?”
He looked at her again. Glared at her, almost. I thought for a moment he might reach for the baton around his belt—his hand made a slow move toward it. But rather than grabbing it, he slipped his hand into his pocket. “I guess not, since this means you’re in charge.”
“That’s right. So, are you going to step aside, or not?”
The air was tense. I feel it. Whoever this guy was, he seemed reluctant to comply with Sanchez. Doing so meant he acknowledged her as not only his superior, but also the facility’s administrator. Declining her, though, meant risking a confrontation not only with her, but with the two strangers she’d been accompanied by.
I didn’t know who this Howes guy was, but he seemed to have a little more brains than his looks suggested, because he stepped aside and pressed the button on the wall to unlock the cellblock door. A loud buzzer blared, and the large, vault-like door marked D-Block slid open with a metallic clunk.
Sanchez gestured toward me with her head. Izzy and I made our way over, being watched the whole time by the guards who had stood by the door a moment ago. I knew they could smell the Outsider on me, because I had just as much of an instinct to bash their teeth out as they probably did toward me. The disdain, the anger, it was instantaneous and difficult to control.
Lucky for me, I’d had plenty of years of experience under my belt dealing with mages that I could easily keep what we lovingly referred to as the murder urge in check.
I almost couldn’t believe where I was as I stepped through the door into D-Block. It was a huge, multi-level, hexagonal chamber with doors, upon doors, upon cell-doors lining the walls. Concrete support pylons held up the metal gantry that ran above our heads, and on the first floor, a little way inside, I spotted the guard post.
A single guard watched us from inside.
No sooner had Izzy and I entered the block that a clamor of voices began to rise. Inmates, prisoners, they were rushing up to the doors to their cells and wailing at us from behind them. I couldn’t tell what any individual inmate was saying over the sound of the other in the cell next to it, but they looked desperate, tired, and a little malnourished.
“What’s happening?” I asked.
“They want to get out,” Sanchez said. “And I don’t blame them with the way things have been here over the last week.”
I had been told about the deaths. About the monster that killed inmates in their dreams. It was one thing to know such a thing was happening in this building that rarely saw the sunlight, it was another to see the faces of the people living through the nightmare.
They were poor, sorry things, many of them pale, their eyes red and sunken. I couldn’t tell which of them were dangerous and which were simply here because the Coalition had decided to pick them up and incarcerate them, so I felt for all of them. I couldn’t help it. Any one of them could’ve been like Six, a victim of manipulation and abuse.
“What’s gonna happen to all these people now that the Warden’s dead?” Izzy asked.
Sanchez, who was leading us through the cellblock, stopped and turned around to look at us both. “I hated the way that man ran things,” she said.
“So, why’d you do what he told you to do?”
“I didn’t have a choice.”
“We always have a choice.”
“Have you never been in a situation where someone more powerful than you had leverage?”
Izzy paused. “There was this one time a crime boss kidnapped me and forced me to steal from the Magister of New York…”
“Then you know why I had to do what I did. There wasn’t a single second of this job I can say has fulfilled me in any way. In fact, I’d say this job has cut me all the way down to the bone on more than one occasion. I have scars I never would’ve gotten anywhere else if not for this place. This inherently sexist place.”
Pausing, Sanchez looked around and seemed to listen to the cacophony of voices, all begging to be released, pleading their innocence.
“I know there are people in here who deserve to be set loose,” she said, “I know how to tell the difference between a dangerous criminal, and someone who shouldn’t be here. You can trust that I’m going to make those changes.”
“Why not just tear this place down?” Izzy shrugged. “It’s a terrible place, and it’s an eyesore.”
“Terrible, sure, but necessary. We have a lot of dangerous people in here. If I were to tear it down, I’d have a tough decision to make about the criminals that live here. I’m not going to release them, and I’m sure as hell not an executioner.”
“I understand that,” I said, “But what about the Coalition?”
Sanchez nodded. “As of this moment, Harrowgate Prison has officially separated from the Coalition. We are our own entity, governed by our own rules—and we’re not at war with your Order.”
“Thank you,” I said, “Really.”
“This way,” she said, “The cell is over here.”
I hurried after her, rushing over to the door to Six’s cell. When we reached it, Sanchez radioed for the door to be opened, and a moment later, it buzzed, and slid aside. In the cell, there were three people. The first I noticed was a small, thin woman with black hair and pale skin. The other had dark skin, red lips, and curly black hair.
The third was Six.
All three of the women in the cell were lying on their backs. It looked like at one point they’d been sitting in a circle, only to fall onto their backs. They were unconscious. Sleeping, I thought. But as I stepped into the cell, I noticed immediately something was wrong with Six.
The entire left side of her face was covered in a deep, deep bruise—purple, blue, and run through with violet lines at its darkest points, fading into a kind of sickly yellow at its edges. The bruise started at the temple, then wrapped around her face stretching all the way to her chin.
“Oh my God,” I said, and I threw myself to my knees at her side. “Six!” I yelled, “Six, wake up!”
I checked her breathing.
She wasn’t breathing.
I checked her pulse.
Nothing.
Frantic, scrambling, I pinched her nose shut, pressed my mouth against hers, and blew into her throat. Then, placing my hands on her chest, I started pumping, administering CPR the best I could. “Check the others!” I yelled.