And then there were four.
Together, they ran. Darts rained down around them, mostly missing their targets. All except one.
Ollie heard the cry when he was almost to the wall. He turned to see Laszlo, yowling, holding his leg.
“He’s hit!” Leonard shouted.
Together, they struggled to help the limping acrobat out of the line of fire.
“It…burns,” Laszlo gasped through gritted teeth.
Tera, Leonard, and Ollie shared a grim look between them.
“The poison is spreading,” Tera said. “We’ve got to get it out.”
Ollie glanced over his shoulder. The flying crow army had almost reached the roof. More blowguns had already been hoisted, readied.
When he turned back around, Tera’s hand was on the protruding dart. She gave him a questioning look, and he nodded.
Tera gripped the wooden stick, took a deep breath, and pulled. The dart made a sucking sound as the tip ripped again through the flesh.
Blood spurted all over the shiny blue Lycra. Laszlo threw his head back and howled.
“C’mon! We have to go!” Tera shouted.
They half-pushed, half-carried Laszlo toward the doorway that was little more than a slit in the wall.
“No, no, no…” he moaned. “Not in there. Not again. I do not fit.”
“Sorry, buddy,” Leonard said. “It’s the only way down.” Then, without warning, he shoved Laszlo through the tiny opening, pushing until the blue suit disappeared into the darkness. Leonard squeezed in behind him. Ollie did the same and reached for Tera’s hand, but she waved him off.
“One sec,” she said. She looked around, found a loose pipe, and yanked it from its post. Then she entered the narrow doorway and wedged the pipe in behind her, sealing the passage—at least temporarily—against pursuers.
The stairway, as before, was impossibly tight. Leonard pushed Laszlo, and Ollie pushed Leonard, until they reached the section that began to widen. Finally, the group picked up speed.
Laszlo limped and groaned; the others tried their best to carry him. When they reached the hallway and the landing that led to the tower’s main staircase, they started to descend. Five steps in, Ollie held up a hand to stop them.
“What is wrong?” Laszlo asked.
Ollie pressed a finger against his lips. He pointed down into the darkness.
The others paused and listened. Distant voices echoed off the stone. Feet on stairs. The sounds were getting closer.
“They know we’re up here,” Tera whispered.
The four companions backtracked stealthily. Ollie looked left and right, feeling his heart pound. One direction would lead them back to the rickety platform over the open courtyard; the other would lead them back to the roof stairwell. Either choice would lead to certain doom. And right in the middle, he saw a single, closed door.
He swallowed and pointed. The others nodded.
Ollie turned the knob. It wasn’t locked. He pushed it open a crack and peeked through the opening. When he saw what was inside, he stopped, blinked, and then swung the door wide. The others peered around him.
They were looking at a dining room. The table in the center was extraordinarily long, covered with a tablecloth and dozens of serving platters filled with food. Twenty or thirty chairs surrounded it. And every single chair was occupied by the slumped over, motionless body of a Herrick’s End guard.
“It’s the mess hall,” Ollie said. He knew this, or at least suspected, because Derrin and Kuyu had told him about it as the group had crafted their loosey-goosey jailbreak blueprint. The guards had their own dining area at the top of the tower, far away from the riffraff. Cooks prepared the meals each day with food brought in by specially selected Neath providers—two of whom happened to be Tera’s roommates.
Leonard stepped inside the barren, rectangular room, which echoed the shape of the central table. He approached one of the slumped guards, picked up a limp arm, and let it fall. “Are they…?”
“No,” Ollie said. “Not dead. Just sleeping.” When Tera looked at him in confusion, he explained, “It was Derrin and Kuyu. They laced the food with…something. They never told me what.”
Her eyes grew large.
“How long to be asleep?” Laszlo asked, limping over to poke at one of the men’s faces.
“I don’t know,” Ollie admitted. “They said it would buy us time, but they didn’t seem to know how much.”
“That’s why there were no guards to stop us when we went to the roof,” Tera said, the sudden realization spreading across her face. “They were already asleep.”
Ollie nodded.
“That’s my girls,” she grinned.
“These guys might be asleep, but the others aren’t,” Leonard pointed out, eyeing the hallway. “We’re about to have company. We need to shore up this door.”
Unanimously, their eyes roamed the room and fell on the largest object within it. Moments later, Tera, Ollie, and Leonard pushed the table the ten feet or so required to block the doorway while the unconscious guards flopped to the floor around them.
Panting, Ollie leaned forward to rest his hands on his knees, then looked over at Laszlo in growing concern. The acrobat was moaning and leaning against a wall. Had they removed the dart in time? Was the poison still making its way through his bloodstream? As if he could hear Ollie’s thoughts, Laszlo gave him a reassuring wink. “Is very good,” he said, pointing at the table.
“Oh yeah, it’s great,” Tera said, tearing a strip of fabric from the tablecloth and wrapping it around the wound on Laszlo’s leg. “We’ve just sealed ourselves into a room with no possibility of escape.” As soon as she tugged the knot tight, voices rumbled in the hallway outside. More guards.
Ollie glanced around the mess hall uselessly. Two colorful tapestries hung from hooks, each displaying a scene of underwater battle between human warriors and giant, swimming serpents. Two round windows overlooked the courtyard.
Tera jogged across the room to a small metal flap on the wall. She pulled it open and looked inside. “It’s a dumbwaiter,” she reported. “We could ride it down.”
Leonard approached the tiny opening. It was about the size of a dorm fridge. “What, one body part at a time?” he asked.
“I could fit, if I scrunched up,” Tera said. Then she sighed. “But yeah, you’re right. It’s no good for all of us.”
Ollie straightened. “So, you go, then! You can fit. Get the hell out of here.”
She shot him an incredulous look. “You really don’t listen, do you?”
“Jesus, Tera, please! Just go! The three of us…we’ll figure it out. Right, guys?”
Leonard and Laszlo nodded, though neither looked convinced.
“See? We’ll figure it out. Go. Please, just go.” He held open the dumbwaiter flap.
A jiggling sound came from the door; someone was messing with the knob.
“What are they even doing up here?” Ollie asked, his voice laced with desperation. “They’re supposed to be downstairs, dealing with the fighters. That was the plan! Upstairs guards, asleep. Downstairs guards, down the fucking stairs!”
“I guess they didn’t get the memo,” Leonard answered wryly.
Blood rushed to Ollie’s ears. They were out of time, and out of options. He hadn’t saved her. He had failed, and now they would all pay the price. What happened to the prisoners who attempted escape? Where did they end up? Not on the cushy fifth floor Labor Force—of that, he was nauseatingly sure. He had led them all into disaster.
His eyes flitted around the room in a wild canvas. Left, right, up, down.
The tapestries. They were huge, splayed end-to-end with cautionary depictions of underwater monsters and the men who foolishly tried to vanquish them. The woven cloths were identical in size; ten-by-twenty, if he’d had to guess. Big enough to be used as parachutes? Two tapestries, four people. Each person grabs two corners, they jump through the round windows, and voila: The four of them float gracefully to the bottom of the courtyard and land with a silent, gentle swoosh.
Except, of course, that they weren’t exactly a silent, gentle group. Also, Ollie was pretty sure that a parachute had to be made of plastic, or maybe nylon, to work. And that the fall, while terrifyingly high to him, might not be high enough for the wind resistance to kick in and slow their descent.
His friends were talking rapidly, debating; at the door, someone was starting to shove and fight against the blockage.
Ollie tuned them all out. He turned toward the enormous table. It looked like something he might have found in a North End antique store, with an old-world, European style and massive claw-foot legs.
He went still.
Claw-foot legs.
What had George Herrick told him? Tell Widow Hibbins zero. Lion’s feet will dig. As I am, so he will be.
Ollie’s head tilted to the side as he stared.
Lion’s feet will dig.
The table legs did, in fact, look like actual animal paws. Lion’s feet, perhaps, with pointed claws.
“The legs,” he murmured.
The others stopped talking and looked at him.
Ollie lifted himself to his full height. “We can’t go down the stairs, right? They’re all over the place out there. We can’t make a parachute. We can’t use the scoreboard to go down because, well, we already smashed that into a million pieces. Mrs. Paget is gone, and she can’t come back. And we can’t go down in the dumbwaiter because we don’t fit. Obviously.”
“Is this your idea of a pep talk?” Tera asked, raising one eyebrow.
“What I’m saying is, we can’t jump fifty stories all at once,” Ollie continued, his voice getting louder. “But we can jump them one at a time.”
A look of real concern passed over Laszlo’s face. “I think I am not understanding the English,” he said. “What are you saying we do?”
“I’m saying we make a hole, in the floor,” Ollie said. “Right there. And then another, and then another, until we’re all the way down.”
“Now I think I’m not understanding the English,” Tera interrupted, hands on her hips. “Are you nuts? We’d need a jackhammer for that.”
Ollie smiled. “Or a mallet.” He turned to look up at Leonard, then crouched to touch the floor. The dirt crumbled in his hand. “Look at this stuff. It’s like dried-out Play-Doh. It’s a wonder this place is still standing. You can get through that, right, Leonard?”
“Using what?” the big man asked.
“One of those.” Ollie pointed to the claw-foot legs.
More shouts from the hallway; more shoving at the door.
Seconds later, Leonard, Tera, and Ollie were struggling under the weight of the table, trying to lift a corner off the ground. Once they did, Leonard stood on one foot and kicked out with the other, smashing into the leg until, finally, the screws came loose, and it clattered to the ground. Leonard pulled it out of the way, and Ollie and Tera let the table drop with a thundering crash.
Puzzled, Leonard stared down at it. “Now what?” he asked.
“We’re going to break through that floor. Well, mostly you’re going to break through the floor. But we’ll help.”
“That will only get us one floor down,” Leonard pointed out.
“Yes, but they’re not expecting us to be one floor down,” Ollie said. “They’re expecting us to be in here.”
Laszlo lifted his hands. Sweat was dripping off his forehead. “But, my friend, when they get in here, they will see hole, and they will know where we went, yes? They will just follow.” He looked sad to be sharing this news.
Ollie had no response. For a moment, no one spoke. Then Tera’s finger shot into the air. “No, they won’t,” she said.
“What?”
“You guys go down, and I’ll cover up the hole after you leave. With the tablecloth. And I’ll put a few chairs in the way, and maybe a few of these guys—” she pointed at the sleeping guards—“so no one falls in. It will just look like a mess. Like there was a struggle. They won’t even notice the hole. Then I’ll go down in the dumbwaiter, and I’ll meet you at the bottom.”
Ollie tried to argue. The last thing he wanted to do was leave Tera behind. But even he had to admit, it was their best chance. Maybe their only chance. “Fine,” he said. “We’ll work on the hole. But you need to make sure that dumbwaiter works before we leave.”
Tera nodded and ran to the wall. Leonard and Ollie took turns using the thick claw-foot leg to pound a spot on the floor near the center of the room as Laszlo looked on, clutching his wound.
The lion’s foot was, in fact, digging. The floor was thin and brittle, as Ollie suspected it would be. And then, faster than he would have dreamed possible, the solid floor gave way to a startling, gaping hole.
Ollie looked over his shoulder at the door. Any minute, the guards would be through. Then he noticed that Tera had returned from tinkering with the dumbwaiter. “It works?” he asked.
She gave him a thumbs-up. “Ready to go.”
He removed the tablecloth and handed it over. “So, you’ll cover it? And—”
“Go,” she interrupted. “I’ve got this. I’ll see you at the bottom.”
Ollie nodded, feeling a sharp pain in the pit of his stomach. “You’d better,” he said. He reached out to touch her cheeks. And then he kissed her, hard and desperate, trying to remember her lips, her taste, her smell, even before they were gone.
By the time he turned around, Laszlo had already disappeared down the hole.
“Land on the good leg!” Leonard called after him, then looked at Ollie. “You coming, Mr. Butcher?” he asked, winking, before following Laszlo with a leap.
Ollie gritted his teeth. He didn’t bother to look down before he jumped. What would be the point? He didn’t care what was waiting for him. He only cared what he was leaving behind.