The familiar knot in the back of my neck, from sleeping on a bed as soft as rocks for months, aches. A clanging rattle and muffled footsteps somewhere above us urge me to my feet. We have minutes, no more.

Breakfast Lady drops food at the same time every day. The sun twinkles through a fissure in the cavernous ceiling. The lunch and dinner meals come heavily provisioned, flanked with armed Patrol on either side. But she’s always alone and never armed from what I can tell. Still, she’s nice and all, letting us borrow books. But today she’s my ticket to freedom. If I can take her unawares and convince her to give me the key to this cell, we’re out of here.

My fingers reach almost instinctively for the blade I fashioned from a fork the Breakfast Lady gave me weeks ago. I had to swear I’d never received one. I thought for sure a guard or the Chancellor himself would come cut off my head right then. But she believed me. And turns out, rubbing it back and forth against rock works well to sharpen it.

I scurry up and press into a wall of the cell so that she won’t be able to see me right away.

“Over here, hurry.” I wave at Jhamal. “Before she comes.”

“Jelani.” He pinches the bridge of his nose.

“Shut up.” I’d told him this plan last night before we fell asleep. He laughed then and I see his opinion of it hasn’t changed.

Black moons hang beneath his naturally sculpted brows. So beautiful they put mine to shame. His cheekbones push up, his lips purse in a smile. “We will not get out of here this way.”

“It’s going to work.”

“It will not. The server is not as naive as you think, Jelani. She might sneak us a spell book or two, but she won’t let us out of here. I—”

“I thought I was your Queen?” A joke. I’m no one’s royalty.

“You are.” He sighs, pressing into the shadow behind me. He’s a wall at my back.

“Mhmm,” I say, turning backward to look at him, and he does this thing with his lips and something below my navel twinges, but I shove it away. We’ve been close. Together. Alone. Relying on each other in this destitute cell for months. He sleeps next to me, his smiles start each of my days, and we rehearse my magic. I’ve watched lines hug his eyes that were never there before. His frame is leaner than it was months ago. His hair has grown out. But what’s grown the most is the longing in his eyes. We are all we’ve had… for so long.