I don’t need to relive my fears anymore. All I need to do now is try to overcome them.
I know from experience that confidence alone can get a person into a forbidden place. Like the cells on the third floor of Erudite headquarters.
Not here, though, apparently. A factionless man stops me with the end of his gun before I reach the door, and I am nervous, choking.
“Where you going?”
I put my hand on his gun and push it away from my arm. “Don’t point that thing at me. I’m here on Evelyn’s orders. I’m going to see a prisoner.”
“I didn’t hear about any after-hours visits today.”
I drop my voice low, so he feels like he’s hearing a secret. “That’s because she didn’t want it on the record.”
“Chuck!” someone calls out from the stairs above us. It’s Therese. She makes a waving motion as she walks down. “Let him through. He’s fine.”
I nod to Therese and keep moving. The debris in the hallway has been swept clean, but the broken lightbulbs haven’t been replaced, so I walk through stretches of darkness, like patches of bruises, on my way to the right cell.
When I reach the north corridor, I don’t go straight to the cell, but rather to the woman who stands at the end. She is middle-aged, with eyes that droop at the edges and a mouth held in a pucker. She looks like everything exhausts her, including me.
“Hi,” I say. “My name is Tobias Eaton. I’m here to collect a prisoner, on orders from Evelyn Johnson.”
Her expression doesn’t change when she hears my name, so for a few seconds I’m sure I’ll have to knock her unconscious to get what I want. She takes a piece of crumpled paper from her pocket and flattens it against her left palm. On it is a list of prisoners’ names and their corresponding room numbers.
“Name?” she says.
“Caleb Prior. 308A.”
“You’re Evelyn’s son, right?”
“Yeah. I mean . . . yes.” She doesn’t seem like the kind of person who likes the word “yeah.”
She leads me to a blank metal door with 308A on it—I wonder what it was used for when our city didn’t require so many cells. She types in the code, and the door springs open.
“I guess I’m supposed to pretend I don’t see what you’re about to do?” she says.
She must think I’m here to kill him. I decide to let her.
“Yes,” I say.
“Do me a favor and put in a good word for me with Evelyn. I don’t want so many night shifts. The name’s Drea.”
“You got it.”
She gathers the paper into her fist and shoves it back into her pocket as she walks away. I keep my hand on the door handle until she reaches her post again and turns to the side so she isn’t facing me. It seems like she’s done this a few times before. I wonder how many people have disappeared from these cells at Evelyn’s command.
I walk in. Caleb Prior sits at a metal desk, bent over a book, his hair piled on one side of his head.
“What do you want?” he says.
“I hate to break this to you—” I pause. I decided a few hours ago how I wanted to handle this—I want to teach Caleb a lesson. And it will involve a few lies. “You know, actually, I kind of don’t hate it. Your execution’s been moved up a few weeks. To tonight.”
That gets his attention. He twists in his chair and stares at me, his eyes wild and wide, like prey faced with a predator.
“Is that a joke?”
“I’m really bad at telling jokes.”
“No.” He shakes his head. “No, I have a few weeks, it’s not tonight, no—”
“If you shut up, I’ll give you an hour to adjust to this new information. If you don’t shut up, I’ll knock you out and shoot you in the alley outside before you wake up. Make your choice now.”
Seeing an Erudite process something is like watching the inside of a watch, the gears all turning, shifting, adjusting, working together to form a particular function, which in this case is to make sense of his imminent demise.
Caleb’s eyes shift to the open door behind me, and he seizes the chair, turning and swinging it into my body. The legs hit me, hard, which slows me down just enough to let him slip by.
I follow him into the hallway, my arms burning from where the chair hit me. I am faster than he is—I slam into his back and he hits the floor face-first, without bracing himself. With my knee against his back, I pull his wrists together and squeeze them into a plastic loop. He groans, and when I pull him to his feet, his nose is bright with blood.
Drea’s eyes touch mine for just a moment, then move away.
I drag him down the hallway, not the way I came, but another way, toward an emergency exit. We walk down a flight of narrow stairs where the echo of our footsteps layers over itself, dissonant and hollow. Once I’m at the bottom, I knock on the exit door.
Zeke opens it, a stupid grin on his face.
“No trouble with the guard?”
“No.”
“I figured Drea would be easy to get by. She doesn’t care about anything.”
“It sounded like she had looked the other way before.”
“That doesn’t surprise me. Is this Prior?”
“In the flesh.”
“Why’s he bleeding?”
“Because he’s an idiot.”
Zeke offers me a black jacket with a factionless symbol stitched into the collar. “I didn’t know that idiocy caused people to just start spontaneously bleeding from the nose.”
I wrap the jacket around Caleb’s shoulders and fasten one of the buttons over his chest. He avoids my eyes.
“I think it’s a new phenomenon,” I say. “The alley’s clear?”
“Made sure of it.” Zeke holds out his gun, handle first. “Careful, it’s loaded. Now it would be great if you would hit me so I’m more convincing when I tell the factionless you stole it from me.”
“You want me to hit you?”
“Oh, like you’ve never wanted to. Just do it, Four.”
I do like to hit people—I like the explosion of power and energy, and the feeling that I am untouchable because I can hurt people. But I hate that part of myself, because it is the part of me that is the most broken.
Zeke braces himself and I curl my hand into a fist.
“Do it fast, you pansycake,” he says.
I decide to aim for the jaw, which is too strong to break but will still show a good bruise. I swing, hitting him right where I mean to. Zeke groans, clutching his face with both hands. Pain shoots up my arm, and I shake my hand out.