When they’re satisfied I understand how fucked I am, the guards file out with my gear.
There isn’t even a chair or a cot. Furniture might cast enough of a shadow for me to escape. All I can do is sit on the floor.
My first thought is that I might be able to stretch enough tape over the bars to create a shadow on the floor. I hold up my hand, trying to figure out some angles.
Nothing. I could use up the whole roll, but with the way the lights are set up, all I’d get is a dim spot on the floor. Nothing good enough for me to shadow-walk.
I take off my coat and drop it on the floor. I’m bleeding under the cling wrap, so I wrap tape around my arm, body, and leg. The skin on my right hand looks like it’s about to slough off, so I wrap that too. I’m more tape than man at this point. You’d think there would be a tipping point where, if you’re wrapped in enough of this stuff, it would give you super tape powers or something. I could cling to the wall like Spider-Man or seal leaking pipes with a single bound. But nothing happens. I put the tape back in my coat and sit there bleeding.
MAYBE THE TRANQUILIZER wasn’t completely out of my system after all because the next thing I’m aware of is someone whispering my name.
I open my eyes and Marcella is right outside my cell.
I get up and go to her.
“If you’re here to gloat, I can’t stop you. But if you’re here to read me the gospels, fuck off.”
“Neither, you idiot,” she says. “And keep your voice down.”
“Why?”
She holds out the evidence bag and pushes it through the bars of my cell.
I look at the bag but don’t touch it.
“Is this Wells’s trick so he has a reason to shoot me?”
“No. You’re as stupid as the marshal said. Listen: You helped me when you didn’t have to. And I don’t think you’re quite as bad as the marshal does. So, decide what you want to do right now. They’ll realize the cameras are off in a minute and we’ll both be finished.”
I take the bag and start filling my coat with gear.
“What about the lights? I still can’t move.”
“Leave that to me.”
She takes a metal strip from her pocket and goes to a lamp by the side of my cell. Slips it into the back of the lamp. There’s a spark and it goes out. She does it to one more lamp.
“Is that enough shadow?” she says.
“Yes. But what’s going to happen to you?”
“Don’t worry about me. Just go.”
“Come with me.”
She shakes her head.
“I can’t do that. For good or ill, this is where I belong.”
I start for the shadow at the back of the cell.
“If they catch you, say it was my fault. Say I used hoodoo on you.”
“Go,” she says.
I take out Abbot’s gold coin, drop it on the floor, and crush it under my boot. Then I’m gone.
I COME OUT by Hijruun’s tower. He’s still facedown on the trail, his bones broken and splintered by gunfire.