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Was it safe? Would a random bolt of electricity strike me the moment I stepped through it? I didn’t know.
“Hey!” a guard bellowed. “Hey, you! Hold it right there!”
I planned on doing many things, but holding it right here wasn’t one of them.
I emptied my mind of all thought as I hopped through the tiny doorway and…
Emerged on the other side.
The air contained the same dusty dry “red” as it had inside the hangar but the air I breathed now was cleaner somehow, fresher.
The air only a recently-free man could savor because he was so used to living on the fetid stench of recycled air that’d passed through a thousand other lungs before reaching his.
But I was alone and Agatha wasn’t with me.
The doors were shutting one inch at a time and any moment, with less than a foot to go, they were going to crush my little device into oblivion and the doorway would no longer exist.
“Agatha?” I said.
She stood on the other side, the device forming a frame around her like a still photograph.
Even the expression on her face was frozen like a photo. It depicted a pained expression lacking certainty.
The only moving elements of the photo were the guards running toward her—toward the both of us—and the shrinking time she had to hop through that doorway before it was too late.
She had frozen, unable to move even a muscle.
I’d had months to decide what I would do once I met this situation. I had made up my mind a long time ago. And I still had a few last-minute concerns.
But that didn’t alter the fact I would jump through it.
She’d been thrust into this position for less than an hour and, although she no doubt had dreamed of escaping this hell, she probably never thought escape was possible, least of all that it would happen right here and now.
I didn’t know why she hesitated.
She had no more to lose than I did.
They wouldn’t confine her to solitary the way they would with me.
She had the opposite problem.
They would sell her to a pleasure house where she would be worked to death, first with the finest clients, then the middle-class ones, then the working class, and then finally to the lowest of the low.
And that was if she or one of her clients hadn’t already taken her life from her.
That was the future awaiting her if she kept on staring and didn’t even try to escape.
That was the future awaiting her if she stayed in this prison that she belonged in even less than I did.
She needed a helping hand.
Less than three inches remained before the door would crush the device and the window would shut forever.
I didn’t know why I cared so much that she should be on this side of the door than on that one, but right then, it seemed like the most important thing in the world.
I did something crazy.
I reached through the temporary doorway for her hand.
