Perfect.
She walked downstairs, looking for a back door or window, but found none. She looked on the sides of the house and found none there either—just more brick and wood, stacked and neat in its unevenness, another kind of prison.
Even on the second level the only windows were on the front of the house. Every opening in the building faced the middle of Breach and the staircase. Kindred guessed it was because no one wanted a view of the outer wall rising behind the house, stark and blank.
Kindred looked again at the central staircase, imagining herself scampering down the stairs. The only thing between here and there, though, was Barque, who knew the house well enough to know the only way out, by window or door, was through the front.
She returned to the third-floor room and slumped onto the mattress, eyes drifting up to the place where a ceiling had once been.
Kindred supposed she could wait until Barque got bored, or some other warden responsibility called him away. Or she could wait for the captain or Little Wing to return with the hope that they had news of Ragged Sarah.
Waiting and hoping.
Waiting and hoping for things to be different.
No, she thought, holding the word like a small, hard rock in her mouth. She twined the fingers of her left hand in and out of the grass mattress as an idea knitted together in her mind. She would not wait anymore. Her hopes would be her own.
She stood and watched Barque for the space of thirty slow breaths—In the prairie wind, out the prairie wind—but he did nothing more than shift in his chair and let loose heavy sighs.
Scanning the nearby houses, she saw other structures similar to Cruel House: old buildings, beautiful and dilapidated, clearly fallen into disrepair and disuse. A few stood off on their own, distanced from the small path running before them, but one stood quite close by, two of its walls remained standing, the others crumbled away into hills of broken, tumbled brick. If she could just sneak over to it, she might be able to get away.
It would have to do.
She returned to the mattress and began working at it with her hands, the process slow and made slower because of her burned hand, though eventually she loosened the weave enough to begin sliding the great length of grass loose. At first, she imagined the mattress must have been made using several blades of grass all tied and strung together, and Kindred figured she would have to retie them once she’d managed to undo the weave, but no. The mattress was made from a single artfully worked blade of grass, wound around and through itself over and over until it took on form and depth, structure and volume. It was the work of an artist, and Kindred undid it.
The strand of green crinkled and curled around the room several times, like a wyrm skin recently shed, a memory of what it once was. Kindred took one end and tested its strength, and though it creaked, the grass held together, and Kindred marveled for a moment at the strength of the Sea. This blade of grass had probably been cut from the Sea at least ten years earlier—maybe more—and still it held power in itself.
Kindred tied off the end through one of the holes in the wall between this room and the next, looping it around twice before setting it in an under-under knot. For just a moment, she remembered pulling at the fire in the Trade as if it had been a fool’s knot, unleashing the flames and helping to save the captain. How long ago that time seemed; how at once strange and intimate those concerns felt now.
The knot secured, Kindred tugged on her makeshift rope, tentatively satisfied that it would hold her weight and hoping that she was not wrong. Bundling up the rest in her arms, she tossed it up and over the wall, out through the patch of missing ceiling. It took her a few tries, but finally she got it, and the grass cascaded out and down the back wall of Cruel House, opposite Barque, the grass chittering down the side like a rush of insects moving over skin. It was an eerie sound, one that tickled at Kindred’s spine and made her think of grasses shuttling about in the deeps.
And it was not quiet.
Kindred hissed in a breath as she leapt back to the window, looking down to see Barque turned back toward the house, his eyes no longer glazing over, squinting in through the doorway. She fell back as his gaze moved higher, dropping to the floor to avoid being seen.
“Just go,” she whispered. Her chance, if it existed at all, was quickly vanishing. She had to move.
Voices below filtered up to her, and, alarmed, Kindred recognized Barque’s voice.
“—going on? What was that noise?” she heard him say before Quixa’s low, steady voice responded with words Kindred couldn’t make out.
“Just go, Kindred,” she whispered to herself.
To reach the top of the wall, she had to pull in two more mattresses, rushing to other rooms on the third floor and dragging them through the doorway. Kindred stacked them up on one another, trying to be quiet at first and then, when that seemed impossible, simply focusing on speed.
The voices below raised in volume as Cora entered the conversation.
“We don’t want to be here just as much as you don’t want us here, warden-man,” Cora was saying as Kindred scrambled atop the mattresses. She leapt one, two, three, four times at the top of the wall, grasping at the edge with her unburned hand and failing each time. But on the fifth leap, she managed to hold on long enough to wrench herself up, resting one and then two forearms on the top of the wall, which harbored enough dust and grime in the cracks to make her sneeze several times.
And then it was the rest of her body up, pulled slowly, until she could swing one leg over, as if she were riding the top spar aboard The Errant, repairing a sail or untangling ropes, looking out over the Sea.
There were huge rips in the wall, each one an ingress for the Forever Sea. Plants of all kinds grew in through these tears: flowering vines and grasses and herbs and a thousand others, all glad to bask in the reflected sunshine. Some had clearly been trimmed or trained to grow back out into the Sea, but at least five tears gushed greens and reds and golds and blues into Breach; the plants ran along streets and swirled around structures, occupying much otherwise habitable space.
Kindred saw a rare fruiting vine that had woven itself into a tall, grass-built structure and bloomed violently bright yellow flowers at the building’s apex along with huge, bulbous fruits the color of blood, which hung out the windows of the building, weighty and strangely enticing.
In all of these ingresses, Kindred saw similar stories of the Sea’s reclamation: roads turned into rivers of green, open spaces choked and devoured by grey, drooping blossoms, structures housing families of bluestem and coneflowers and a hundred others.
Had the Once-City been moving still, had it not been anchored in one place for so long, these tears might not have been a problem. Bugs and some of the smaller furred creatures might have come in from time to time, but a steadily sailing Once-City would have meant none of the plants had time or opportunity to establish themselves.
But with the Once-City stopped—as it had been for years, apparently—the great gaping wounds in the wall had become a problem.