Wren studied the prison yard again, the guard towers, the chattering inmates, the rotten stench of old cafeteria food, and steepled her fingers beneath her chin. “Don’t worry. If Anders or anyone else interferes, then like I said before, I’ll rip their intestines out through their eyes.”
“That really isn’t possible,” Elio said.
“Maybe, maybe not.” She reached over me to take Elio’s plate. “You done with that? I’m starving.”
I sat at the table, eating day-old bread and peppering Wren with questions about her half-baked escape plan (which she deftly dodged) until a horn blared, signaling the end of the lunch hour. As we lined up and were handcuffed and led back to our cells, a realization struck me, sending a sour wave of nausea lashing through my stomach.
Devious little Wren had more in common with Evelina than I ever did.
And, for some reason, it made me kind of jealous.
6
Back in the murky dampness of the cell, I slammed the piss bucket down at the foot of Anders’s makeshift bed of blankets. “How do you feel about vomiting on command?”
He blinked up at me, frowning. The big guy had his jumpsuit unbuttoned and shoved around his waist, and his bare red torso was streaked with dirt from his outdoor training session. Once again, no aura surrounded his head or beefy shoulders, and I was filled with the overwhelming temptation to smack him, just to make him feel something.
I kicked the bucket closer to him. “Do it. You’ll thank us later.”
“He might kill us later,” Elio muttered.
Anders’s eyebrows bunched together, making the tattoos on his forehead wiggle. Then he picked up the bucket and launched it at the opposite wall.
Wren ducked out of the splash zone before it could hit her. “Easy there, Andy! This is a clean jumpsuit!”
Anders only growled.
“Hey!” a gruff voice came from the cell beside us. “Shut up over there! I’m trying to sleep!”
I pounded the cinder blocks with my fist. “You shut up over there!”
So much for an easy start to the plan. I went to retrieve the bucket, fantasizing about shoving Anders’s head into it. Wren tried slapping my hand in a joyous show of camaraderie, but I ignored her.
I dropped the bucket at Anders’s feet again. “Get to it. When the guards come to take a head count, you need to look sick.” I didn’t know if it was a mistake to tell him the truth, but I figured it was the only way to get him to unclamp his jaw a little. He would crack a tooth or something if he didn’t loosen up.
Not that I cared.
“We’re breaking out of here. And you’re going to ruin everything if you don’t vomit in the star-forsaken bucket, Andy, so do it.”
The darkness in his eyes seemed to recede a little. For a moment it looked like the spark of an aura surrounded his head, like a happy golden halo, but it was gone before I could really be sure of what I was seeing.
Anders grabbed the bucket, turned his back to us, and then the sound of his gagging filled the cell.
“We have about ten minutes,” Wren said, taking up her post beside the door. I didn’t know how she knew that without a window or a clock to look at. Maybe it was Earthan intuition.
The minutes passed slowly, accompanied by the echo of Anders’s retching and the bitter odor of his regurgitated dinner. When we finally heard the guards’ footsteps outside the cell, the four of us slumped to the floor, faking exhaustion and despair—complete with a few authentic-looking tears from Wren—just as the door opened with a hiss.
“We had a bit of an issue,” Wren said to the guard who poked his head inside. She pointed to the bucket, which Anders had overturned with his foot so that some of the contents spilled out in a puddle.
The guard barely gave it a second glance as he looked us over. He marked something on his comm before shoving the device into his back pocket and turning to leave. My stomach did a nervous flip.
“Wait!” I shouted. The guard whirled around, reaching for his blaster, and I backed against the wall, hoping to appear unassuming.
I nodded at the bucket and Anders. “You’re not going to leave us in here all night with that, are you? He might have an infectious disease or something.”
The guard holstered his blaster, reaching for the holopanel to close the door.
“Wait! If he is infected, you might have already been exposed to it. Shouldn’t you, I don’t know, test him or something?”
The guard only frowned. Stars, my stomach felt like something was burrowing in it. If this plan didn’t work, then my dinner was definitely going to join Anders’s on the floor.
But to my immense relief, the guard took a hesitant step forward, the door sealing shut behind him. Phase one: complete.
He wrinkled his nose, then leaned over Anders.
“S’ichas?” he asked. Sick? Anders looked up though half-lidded, watery eyes and managed a small nod.
A laugh threatened to escape me. Who would have guessed that the big guy could act?
Groaning, the guard took another step closer to the bucket, making the mistake of putting his back to us. Wren sidled up next to him. Before I had a chance to worry that he might turn and murder her right there, she slipped her fingers into his back pocket, replacing his protruding comm link with a square hunk of cement that she’d smuggled in from the yard.
She tossed the comm backward. Elio caught it just as the guard wheeled around. Wren innocently held up her hands, nodding to the bucket.
“So, what do you think? Are we all going to contract some mystery virus that’ll burn our eyes out of our sockets?”
The guard examined the bucket. “Your eyes, no. Your ears … perhaps.”
“Good to know. It’s not like I need those things anyway.” She glared over at me, huddled in the corner. Elio had pulled a wire from a compartment on the side of the guard’s comm and connected it to a second one that Wren had swiped from the kitchen staff. I was hiding the second comm beneath Wren’s blanket, waiting for the two devices to connect.
Just hack into the pass codes for the hangar doors, she’d told me before we started this madness. How long will that take you? A few seconds?
Yeah, sure. If the two comms she’d given me were actually compatible and the net access on the kitchen comm wasn’t as slow as dirt. I’d broken through the encryption on the pass codes, no problem, but transferring the data—and doing it in a way that the guard would have no idea what happened—well, that was a different issue.
Wren gave me another hurry-the-hell-up look, as if the net connectivity issues in a cinder block prison cell on an isolated, barren planet were somehow my fault.
I motioned for her to stall while Elio grabbed the kitchen comm. He held it up to the ceiling, hopping up and down to get a better signal. I snatched it back. He was three feet tall. I appreciated his hustle, but he wasn’t helping.
“It’s, uh, it’s really good to hear that our eyes aren’t going to burn out,” Wren said warily. The comm finally beeped, the pass codes starting their agonizingly slow download, and the guard turned toward the noise. Wren hastily slid in front of him, beaming.
“You have very nice eyes, you know,” she said. “So black and … uh … shiny. Just like a lump of…” She gulped. “Coal.”