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A large shadow loomed over me. As my eyes had long since adjusted to the darkness, I could make out the details of the Lead Guard’s uniform. Ohara gave me a nod and then turned to leave the room.
I climbed from the bed, already fully dressed from the night before, and sneaked across the room behind him. I paused only once at the door to peer back at my girls.
I might have been strict, maybe even harsh, but ultimately, it had been for their benefit. I had looked after them — and others beyond counting who had already come and gone from this place.
And yes, I was sure I had made a difference in their lives. I had made things better for them. But now it was my time to leave.
I thought about how they might cope without me and was convinced they would be successful. After all, they managed to survive one-on-one with powerful Champions each night. That was all them.
I turned to leave when my breath caught in my throat.
A single figure lay in her cot, eyes wide open and staring at me. She didn’t make to get up but just stared openly at me with a perplexed expression on her face. It was Erishia.
Maybe she understood what was going on, maybe not. Still, I was glad someone had witnessed my leaving and that a small piece of the truth would remain.
I smiled at her and her look of confusion remained plastered to her face. I pressed a finger to my lips. I had taught her its meaning to try to get her to be less of a gossip, and her expression eased… a little.
I followed in Ohara’s wake through the Prize Pool.
“Here,” Ohara said, draping a cloak over my shoulders and arranging the hood so it covered my face, “wear this. Say nothing, do nothing that gives away who you are. I assigned the guards to a new rotating pattern. There are gaps that we will exploit. So long as we get our timing right, we never have to worry about bumping into them. Follow me and soon, we’ll be as far from this place as it’s possible to get.”
He leaned down and stroked my cheek. I was too stiff to respond in kind.
As we passed through the endless prison hallways, I heard the loud snores of the inmates that made the bars of their cages rattle.
I had a good but not exhaustive knowledge of Ikmal’s layout as it was one simple pattern duplicated over and over again. I’d had no cause to wander the hallways in a long time and felt more than a little anxious at leaving the only part of the prison I felt comfortable.
I focused on Ohara’s muscular back. It was all the reassurance I needed.
Finally, we came to a door marked “AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY”. Ohara ran his gauntlet over the scanner and it bleeped. It hissed as it slid open.
We were about to enter the restricted section, the underbelly of the prison where no inmate and certainly no Prize had ever been before.
I glanced up at the cameras, crouched like vultures, watching our every move.
“Don’t worry about them,” Ohara said. “They’re disabled right now but the engineers will come to fix them soon. We need to hurry.”
I noticed then that the usual blinking red light that signaled the cameras were active were now black and dead.
The door shut behind us and automatic lights illuminated the gangways. They consisted of the same metal grating throughout the rest of the prison. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t disguise my footfalls. They always seemed to crash and reverberate throughout the empty space.
Ohara didn’t move quickly and took his time leading me through the gigantic maze we found ourselves in. Pipes and clutches of cables thicker than my leg ran like vines across the ceiling and floor below us. If I’d been there by myself, I would have been lost for months.
It was crazy to think that beneath the precision of the prison’s systems there was nothing but this chaos to support it.
We came to a room at least ten times larger than all of the Prize Pool areas combined. Big metal crates as tall as Ohara and twice as wide formed stacks that stretched up into the impenetrable darkness overhead. They were dinged and dented from their time of use.
In the distance, bouncing and echoing off the walls, I could pick out heavily-accented voices.
“Okay,” Ohara said, taking me to one side. “What happens next is going to require you to trust me completely.”
Even with the electronic distortion of his voice, I could hear the anguish.
“You need to believe that I will get you out of here, that I would never want any harm to come to you, and that after this, our lives will completely and totally different.”
The churning in my stomach made me feel sick. If I hadn’t already shown him that I trusted him completely by following him into the dark like this, how bad was what came next going to be?
“What… What is it?” I asked with a voice as shaky as my nerves.
