Chapter 24: The Roof Again

The four guards had already dropped Jonas and run for the barracks.

He stood alone on the platform with his wrists bound in front of him, and the dead were forty yards away.

I vaulted the steps and grabbed the zip tie with both hands.

"Knife," I said.

"Boot."

I dug the maintenance ring out of his left boot, found the little steel key with the saw edge, and sawed the plastic until it parted.

He rolled his wrists once.

"Where are the nineteen?" I said.

"Under the lodge."

"Then that's where we're going."

He took my hand.

We ran.

The square had broken into screaming knots of people.

The turned ran through them, fast and silent, drawn to the noise and the light.

I saw a woman with a child on her shoulders running toward the infirmary.

I saw the camp physician at the barn door, waving the sick in with both arms.

I saw Lana, free of her guards, sprinting for the lodge steps with the ledger gone from her hands.

She looked back at me once, and the look was not a plea.

It was a promise.

We hit the lodge from the side, down a service stair Jonas knew by heart.

The cellar door was a plank hatch bolted from outside.

He had the bolt off in two seconds.

Below us, in the dark, I heard voices.

Dozens of them, thin and cracked.

"Don't be afraid," I called down. "I'm Nina Hartwell. The wall is down, and we're getting you out."

A lantern swung up from the dark, and an old woman's face looked up at me.

She was gray, and hollow-eyed, and there was a bandage taped inside her elbow.

"Is it true?" she said. "What you said in the square?"

"Every word."

"Then I'll walk," she said.

They came up the stairs in a slow line, nineteen of them, holding each other by the sleeves.

The young guard who had given Jonas the keys met us at the top, with a stolen rifle and a face wet with tears.

He found his mother in the line and did not say anything at all.

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