Chapter 4: The Vent

The vent was above the cot, a steel grille set in the stone and bolted from the inside.

Ten years of tea had made me weak enough that I had never tried it.

I stood on the frame of the cot, took hold of two bars, and pulled.

The bolts shrieked and came out of the wall in a little cloud of dust.

I stood there holding a piece of the lodge in my hands, and my arms were not shaking.

I had not felt that kind of strength since I was nineteen.

Sorrel was awake behind my ribs, slow and enormous and angry, and every breath she took went down to my feet.

The cuffs were hanging on the hook by the door, where Ramsay had hung them last night.

I left them there.

The shaft behind the grille was narrow, but I had lost so much weight that it let me through.

I scraped my hips on the way and left skin on the stone, and I didn't care.

It came out behind the kitchen, in a walled yard full of dead cabbages, with a gray dawn standing over the roof.

Somewhere inside a radio was playing.

I crossed the yard in my bare feet and went over the wall.

The land beyond it ran down in orchard rows toward a service road and the long fence of the Stonecrest border.

I had walked this orchard once with my grandmother, the autumn she taught me the old law.

Ada had held my hand against the bark of an apple tree and said: "If you are ever taken, don't beg them for anything. Ask someone who isn't theirs."

I ran.

My feet were cut up in a dozen places and my lungs burned, and I ran down the rows, through the wet grass, with the sun coming up gold behind me.

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