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“It’s not, is it?”
“Rys—”
“Leannán, there’s no time for this. We can discuss this later if you must. We have to go.”
Damn it. He’s right.
“Later then.”
He nods, then starts to move again. It’s not quite a jog, though it’s easy to see that his long strides are just itching to turn into a run. “Stay right behind me,” he tells me. I immediately pick up my pace. “The back halls should be clear, but we have to be fast. I’ll open the doors. Do whatever you can to make it through them.”
“Gotcha.”
“Let’s go.”
I was right. As soon as he gets the chance, Rys basically flies down the halls. It takes everything I have to keep up but I do because the alternative is unthinkable. When we hit the first shuttered doorway, Rys throws up his other hand and snaps out a word.
“Díreach.”
The door vanishes in a shower of golden sparks.
I dash through it seconds before it reforms.
I lose track of how many we run through. My eyes are glued to Rys in front of me. His strides are big, his long legs eating up the ground as he races ahead of me. Well, no. Races isn’t exactly the right word for it. I know from experience that he can move way faster than this, only he’s being careful not to so that he doesn’t actually leave me behind.
He keeps tossing worried glances over his shoulder, checking to see that I’m right on his ass. I’m as excited as I am scared shitless and it’s all I can do to shoot him a thumb’s up so that he knows that I’m with him.
Rys has to be in the lead. He’s taking us through a part of the prison that I’m not familiar with. I know instinctively that it’s toward the entrance. I mean, that’s the plan, but there’s also this sense of anticipation that grows as we run through another door.
Siúcra is waiting to see if we can break out, too.
Just as I have that thought, Rys opens the next door with the same command. He bursts through, then pauses. I have to squeeze past him, making it out just in the nick of time. I’m more than a little on edge and I want to snap at him, ask him what made him stop short, when I look up and realize that we did it.
We’re outside.
Outside of the main building, I quickly correct, but not outside of the prison.
Siúcra is surrounded by a gate. I already knew that. Weeks ago, Bram drove his locked caravan through the other side of the prison so that he could leave me inside. I managed a peek at it through a slit in the canvas and I remember the high points on the gate.
What I don’t remember?
The wide gap standing between two sides of the open gate. It’s like a portal, but not. The space is wavy, shimmery, like how the air seems to move when it gets super hot out. I can see the trees through the space in the fence’s rails. Peeking through the gap? Nothing.
It’s a big blank, and it glows.
Oh, boy.
I really don’t want to go through there.
“Is there any way to go over the rails? I think I can climb it.” I gauge the distance from the stony road to the tops of the crystalline bars that make up the fence. No chance, unless… “You can give me a boost,” I suggest. With Rys giving me a leg up, I’m betting he could just pop me up and I could make it the rest of the way over. “Do you think you’d be able to follow behind me?”
If he can’t, I’ll have to come up with another plan. We either go together or we don’t go at all. It’s as simple as that.
“We’d never make it.”
“We can try—”
Rys shakes his head. “It’s warded. In the human world, you have barbed wire. In Faerie, the magic keeps us from breaking out. You can’t see it, but there’s a block that extends the length of the gate. There’s only one way out.”
