Speaking it so much felt like wearing an ill-fitting gown. One she wanted to rip off.
Ben was silent for a long while. “Once while we were on the Astuto. Once here. This prison is . . . disorienting. And Gunnar—sometimes, he seems drugged. I think my father is giving him something to weaken his mind. The defensors insist I drink certain water to stay unaffected should I choose to work. It must contain the antidote.”
Lu looked at him out of a dread-laced shock. “When you came down here, did the walls move?” She hadn’t noticed that when the defensors brought her from the upper room, but—
Bloodshot veins reddened Ben’s dark eyes. “I thought I had imagined it.”
“No. It’s Emerdian.” Surely the Argridian prince had heard of Emerdian masonry. Argrid was neighbors with Emerdon on the Mainland.
The horror on Ben’s face said he had. “We can’t be in Emerdon.”
“Port Camden. The Emerdian syndicate’s territory.”
The city that sat in Grace Loray’s northwestern corner. Thanks to its prison, the revolutionaries hadn’t been able to wrest control of Port Camden away from Argrid until the war was won. The Emerdians had built it as their fortress when they first settled on Grace Loray, centuries ago. Masonry was a prized Emerdian skill—intricate brickwork made up every important building in Emerdon, its most feared penitentiaries being no exception. Walls moved to rearrange halls; doors disappeared into the bricks; whole wings could be cut off and reopened.
Three inescapable prisons stood in Emerdon. One was on Grace Loray.
During the war, the revolutionaries had intercepted people released from the prison. They spoke of a fraying place that made you question your own mind: “Magic. In the food, the water, the air—wherever it comes from, you can’t escape it.”
Lu knew Port Camden, the steep gables of the buildings that created knife-sharp silhouettes against the sky. The clopping of horses on the cobblestone roads. The tanneries on the northwest side of the city that coated the port in the stench of sour death when the wind blew the wrong way. She, Ben, and Gunnar could get out of this prison, and she could get them somewhere safe—through mildew-slick alleys like the one where she had first killed someone in self-defense. As Tom had taught her.
Her heart all but ruptured as she tried not to remember that night. But it led to other memories centered around Port Camden: the end of the revolution. The safe house two hours of travel into the jungle. The lace-edged quilt that hung over the bed where she and Annalisa had hidden as defensors stormed the building. Her nightmare, Milo standing over her. Hours, hours, of Lazonade and Awacia—
“Elazar isn’t drugging the other prisoners.” Lu tripped over her own words. “The prison itself drugs its inhabitants. There is magic, somewhere.”
Ben braced his hands on his temples. “To have a prison on Grace Loray use Emerdian building techniques is one thing, but did they put plants in the construction materials? Do the guards pump toxic air in? Where? And more—”
Ben turned, the instinctual flip of someone seeking the counsel of another—Gunnar. But when he saw Gunnar’s state, bloodied and half-conscious, Ben cried out.
“We’ll escape,” Lu promised them. Promised herself. She held up the metal tongs. “I can pick our locks. We’ll get out.”
Ben glanced back at her, tears streaking clean lines through the grime on his russet face. “How? He won’t make it far.”
“Go,” came a gruff bark. Gunnar looked through his blood-matted hair. “Get out.”
Leave me were his unsaid words.
Ben shot to his feet. “This”—he waved at the prison, the island beyond, the whole of the conflict—“has happened because I spent the past six years saving only myself. Don’t tell me that I should leave you here. I owe you your life. I owe Argrid and Grace Loray so much more. We’re not leaving without you. If it costs me my own life, I don’t care.”
He gagged on the weight of his admission, head dropping to his chest.
Ben didn’t understand what he was saying. Lu needed to escape before she shattered over these cold prison stones, pieces of a girl abandoned by her father, pieces of a murderer, pieces of nothing.
She needed to get out, to find her mother. To do anything, anything necessary to get Argrid off this island.
As if her desperation read on her face, Ben looked away. “Give him a day. Enough for his wounds to . . .” He swallowed. “If we leave without him, my father will kill him.”
Ordinarily, Lu wouldn’t have challenged him. They couldn’t leave Gunnar. “What if the defensors don’t let him heal enough to escape?”
Ben bit his lips together. He looked at Gunnar once more, then back at Lu.
He nodded at the single cot and an uneaten tray of food. “Just one day. Give him that.”
Lu hesitated. Ben insisted again. She relented, grabbing a chunk of stale bread and pulling herself onto the thin, lumpy mattress.
“A day,” she agreed.
The stomping of boots pulled Lu from a light, vacant sleep.
Ben stood at the cell bars. Across the way, Gunnar swayed against his chains.
Lu pushed upright on the cot, dreamlike, the world shifting.
Four defensors stopped in the hall. None had a whip. But one of them—the one Ben had fought on the Astuto, Jakes—cleared his throat.
“The Eminence King demands your presence, my prince. And the Mecht.” His voice was rough, as if he had been weeping.
“Why?” Ben demanded.
Defensors unlocked both cells. Lu was vaguely aware of them letting Gunnar down, muzzling him, while Jakes snapped manacles on Ben’s wrists. He resisted with a cry.
The defensors were taking Ben and Gunnar away. Lu would be left alone.
The horror of that possibility made her shoot off the cot as defensors relocked her cell.
“Wait!” Lu grabbed the bars. “You can’t—”
“Do you want to repent?” Jakes whipped to her as another defensor led Ben up the hall.
Lu said nothing.
“I thought so,” Jakes spat, and retreated up the stones.
Lu waited, seconds filling with her thundering heartbeat.
Tom could save her. He could swoop in as he had the night the war ended—
A sob ruptured out of Lu’s chest. No, no—she wouldn’t disintegrate. Elazar hadn’t tortured her yet.
But he had. Having her wake up to Milo in shackles, facing Tom’s duplicity . . .
How could Tom have done this to her? How could Lu not have seen his lies?
In the same way she had not seen the truth of the Council, and how they had ignored the poverty of the stream raiders and lower classes. She had been so blindly loyal that it had never occurred to her to question what she loved. What other foundations would prove to be rotten? What other truths that she refused to see were right before her eyes?
Lu cried out and dove for the cot. She had left the metal tongs under the blanket, and she grabbed them now in sweaty fingers. Her harsh breaths choked her as she braced the tongs on her thigh and snapped them apart. She had two metal rods now—the number needed to pick locks.
Rational thought leaked out with Lu’s sobs. Only desperation remained.
Tom had taken everything from her. She would not stay here, collapsing at Elazar’s feet, waiting for Milo to come. She would get out. She would make them suffer for ever setting foot on her island.