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“Yes, you will.”
She grabbed me by the lapels of my shirt—at least, she would have if she could reach—and jammed her face in mine.
“No, I won’t,” she growled.
I marveled at her gumption.
And why couldn’t she come with me? So long as she kept up and didn’t slow me down, there was no need to leave her behind to be brutally raped. Not that dying beneath a baking hot sun would be much better if it came to it.
“Fine, I’ll take you,” I said. “But no whining. If you slow me down, I’m leaving you behind. Understood?”
She nodded but didn’t say a word.
“And you have to do everything I say when I say it,” I added.
“Quit talking and get us out of here!” Agatha said.
I led us down a corridor adjacent to the one we’d been heading down. We had to fight against a flood of prisoners moving in the opposite direction but we never had to engage in open combat.
All these months, I had been working on the guards in an attempt to bribe them into letting me outside. I tried subtlety, I tried manipulating third parties, tried bribing them directly. Each time, I failed.
And the bribery case almost got me sent to the isolation cells where the real criminals were kept. I managed to convince them I was joking and got off the hook.
The guards were incorruptible—quite a revelation at the time. I had never met a being I couldn’t corrupt before. It was almost like these guys were machines.
I worked with some of the other prisoners with certain skills that might allow me to get outside the walls. I only gave them enough information to carry out their part of my plan.
Unfortunately, they always twigged what I was attempting.
“So, this is for an escape, right?” they would say.
After I picked my jaw up off the floor, I would deny their insinuation but it never worked. They refused to do the work unless they were part of my team. “That’s my price,” they said. “Take it or leave it.”
I agreed to their terms and before I knew it, I had an entire escape team working on my plan. The part that always got their attention was my announcement of a shuttlecraft waiting outside the prison for me that my gang dropped off the moment I got slammed in here.
I was supposed to creep out, reach it, blast off, and I would be free and clear. I knew exactly where the shuttlecraft was and never shared the location with anyone.
The only difficulty was in getting out of the prison. Now the riot kicked off and made my original plan irrelevant.
Now it was onto Plan B.
“Okay, we’re here,” I said to Agatha.
I placed my back to the wall that looked out on an open stretch of space with a huge pair of doors on the opposite wall.
“What is this?” Agatha said.
“The entrance hangar.”
“But what are we doing here?”
“We’re getting out of here.”
“Where?”
“Through the door.”
Agatha peered around the corner at the huge door again.
