CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

LOGAN

I pace my cell, willing the blood to flow into my legs fast enough for me to leave before a guard decides to investigate my conversation with Eloise. The dungeon is full of the sounds of dripping water and heavy sleep. I’m chilled without my shirt, but I can’t yet put on my cloak.

I need to dismantle it first.

My legs still tingle, but they’ll hold me when I need to run. Approaching the far right corner of my cell, the one with the draft seeping in through the cracks, I run my fingers along the damp, craggy stone, judging distances and looking for a weakness I’m not convinced is there.

It doesn’t matter. I’m about to obliterate the whole thing, weakness or not.

Turning to my cloak, I remove the five buttons lining the front flap. They come loose with a soft pop and reveal the plain steel fastenings underneath. Ignoring those, I flip the face of the buttons over and smile. The back of each holds one of my most destructive inventions to date—the gears of an ancient pocket watch attached to two tiny vials of liquid. One holds acid. The other holds glycerin. All my experiments have proven the combination to be explosive.

I hope it’s enough to turn the back half of my cell into rubble.

I slide my fingers along the bottom of my coat until I feel a tiny knot of thread. Pulling on it, I rip out the extra seam I painstakingly installed just days before the Claiming ceremony and remove a length of wire already spliced into five pieces at one end. Finally, I sit down, tug my left boot free, jiggle the sole until it comes loose, and remove a tiny, copper-sheathed detonator.

The buttons attach to the wall with ease, the same gluey substance that stuck them to the plain steel fastenings on my cloak easily clinging to the wall like a second skin. I carefully wrap the loose wire ends around the central gear in each button, and then back away to the cell door, taking the thin straw palette of a bed with me.

Pulling my cloak over my shoulders, I fasten the toggles, flip the hood over my head, and crouch beneath the palette, my back to the wall. With steady fingers, I wrap the other end of the wire around the coils on the detonator and take a deep breath.

Time to show the Commander which of us can truly outwit the other.

I press the trigger on the detonator and hear a faint clicking sound as the pocket watch gears engage and set the vials on a collision course with each other. Then the entire dungeon shakes with the force of the explosion at my back.

I don’t give the debris time to stop falling. I can’t. The main door at the end of the row is already opening, and a guard is shouting an alarm. Keeping the palette over my head to protect myself from the worst of it, I stand and face the destruction of my cell.

The back corner is nothing but crumbled bits of stone and dust. A slippery pile of dirt is sliding in through the hole, but above that pile, the night sky beckons. I race forward, scramble over the debris, and dive through the hole as someone rattles a key in the door of my cell.

The straw palette wedges against the opening as I go through it, and I push as much dirt as possible against the back side of the hole while climbing my way toward level ground.

From the main compound, an alarm bell peals, disturbing the darkness with its insistent clamor. I scan my surroundings, take in the distance between me and the iron fence surrounding the compound, and start running.

I’m still ten yards from the fence when someone shouts behind me. I don’t bother looking. It would just slow me down. Instead, I reach inside my inner cloak pocket and remove what look like two slightly thick Baalboden coins. A quick toggle of the tiny switch embedded in the ridges of the coins releases the spring-loaded mechanism inside, and they become a smaller version of the handgrips Rachel tried to use on her disastrous escape attempt.

More shouts echo across the yard, and I catch guards with NightSeer masks running along the fence line, primed to intersect with me if it takes me longer than twenty seconds to scale the iron poles.

I lunge forward, slam my hands onto the metal, feel the magnets latch onto the iron like they’re soldered to it, and start climbing.

My rib screams at me, even through the pain medicine I took, but I ignore it. I won’t get a second chance at this, and I refuse to fail.

The top seems impossibly high, and my arms tremble with the effort of ignoring the weakness on my right side, but I reach it just as the guards converge below me. One grabs at my foot, but I slam my boot into his forehead, wrap my hands around the top of the fence, and vault over to the other side.

I don’t wait to see who’s following me.

The compound is located in the eastern quarter of the city. I turn north and run, hoping the guards take note of my direction and report it back to the Commander. Let him fortify the North Wall. Let him comb the city streets. I won’t be there.

Once I’m sure I’m out of sight, I change my trajectory and head southwest, trusting the magnetic field of my hand grips to block my wristmark from any Identidiscs being used to find me.

The only way out of the city is over the Wall or through the gate. Over the past week, thanks to Rachel’s prodding, I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time thinking of another way to escape.

Most of the ideas I came up with had one fatal flaw: They were obvious choices, and the Commander isn’t a fool. I discarded them all and decided the perfect solution is the one no one would be crazy enough to try. The one that could end with me accidentally calling the Cursed One to devour me in a single, fiery gulp.

I’m going out under the Wall.

I enter North Hub, avoiding the street torches by using backyards and alleys, and circle Center Square in favor of moving west. When I’ve gone far enough to be sure I won’t be seen by any upstanding citizens, I cut south and hurry toward Lower Market.