The Mercenary Queen Strikes Back novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Prison Break
Astrid kills the guards between her and the gate of the prison nobody ever escaped, and Vaughn Garrow swears to drag her back. A boat light blinks a signal only a dead man knew.
The two guards at the east checkpoint were still arguing about the Queen of Mercenaries when the prisoner stepped out of the dark behind them.
"Six months since Cinder vanished," the older guard said. "Now every thug on earth thinks he's a king."
"Nobody's scared of anything anymore."
The younger one laughed. "Maybe somebody finally killed her."
Neither of them knew she had been in cell 5081 the whole time.
Astrid Swinton was twenty-three and looked nineteen.
She wore her hair in a high ponytail, and the cuffs on her wrists hung open.
She had rigged both locks with a sliver of spoon handle, three weeks ago, and waited for tonight.
"Excuse me," she said.
Both guards spun around.
She smiled at them. "Would you two mind dying quietly?"
They went for their guns.
She was faster.
She took each of them by the collar and cracked their heads against the iron door frame, once apiece.
They hit the floor and did not move again.
Astrid took a pistol from each body and checked the magazines.
Then she walked on, down the corridor, toward the main gate.
Two days ago, a bread roll on her dinner tray had held a folded note.
Your name is Astrid Swinton. You were stolen as a baby. Your mother is alive in Zoria City. Come home.
It was signed with one letter: M.
She had spent twenty-three years with no name and no family and had told herself she did not care.
She had been lying.
So she was going home, and nothing on Devil's Isle was going to stop her.
The prison had held every legend on earth for sixty years.
It had seen 1009 escape attempts and lost nobody.
She stopped at the stairwell vent and pulled out the submachine gun she had hidden there three nights ago.
She slung it across her back and kept walking.
The main gate stood at the end of the hall, and a man stood in front of it.
He was big, with a broken nose and his arms folded.
Vaughn Garrow, chief of the guards.
The cook who sold her the shift roster had sworn Garrow was off duty until midnight.
It was ten o'clock, and he was here.
"Prisoner 5081," he said. "Stop where you are."
"Evening, Garrow."
"Go back to your cell. Now."
"And if I don't?"
"Then you leave this hall in a bag."
Boots pounded behind her.
A dozen guards poured in from both sides with their rifles up.
Garrow did not even look at them. "All guards," he said. "Kill 5081."
Astrid smiled at him again.
She dropped flat and rolled into the narrow gap beside the pillar, where no barrel could reach.
The submachine gun was in her hands before the first guard found his trigger.
The corridor filled with noise.
When it stopped, twelve men lay on the tile.
Every one of them had taken a single bullet in the forehead.
Garrow stared at the bodies.
He had trained half of those men himself.
Nobody had ever walked this far, and he had never seen anyone shoot like that.
Then his face changed, and he drew his own pistol.
The first shot burned a line across her shoulder.
The second one missed her ear.
Astrid shot the gun out of his hand, and it spun away across the tile.
Garrow did not stop to look at his fingers.
He came at her with both fists clenched.
He took two steps.
Astrid pulled a pin with her teeth and threw something small and black straight at his face.
Garrow threw himself sideways.
The grenade sailed past him and hit the main gate.
It tore a ragged hole in the steel.
Wind and salt poured through it.
Beyond the gate there was only a hundred-foot drop and black water.
Nobody had ever been fool enough to jump.
Astrid pulled the sealed survival suit from under her shirt and zipped it up in one swift motion.
Garrow was on his feet, bleeding from the forehead where the floor had hit him.
"You can't," he said.
"Watch me."
She grinned and stepped through the hole in the gate.
The wind took her, and she was gone.
The last thing she heard was Garrow roaring down at the sea.
"I will find you, 5081! I don't care where you hide! You will go back in that cell!"
The sea was freezing, and it knocked the air out of her.
She kicked hard, surfaced twice for breath, and swam until the prison lights shrank to a smear behind her.
Her arms were numb when a boat light blinked in the dark.
Three flashes, then a pause, then three more.
It was the signal of Cinder's quartermaster.
Duncan MacNab was supposed to be dead.
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