I didn’t know, so I stayed quiet.

“It’s like, you could scream the edges, yell the borders, clench at the height and width, but there is no way inside the thing with words.” The last part of her sentence was hissed, and she pushed her legs straight until her feet were flat on the opposite wire wall. The cage rattled as she pushed at the top with her palms.

“Easy, Wab, easy. Try to breathe through it.” Rania’s eyebrows were arched now.

After a full minute of very deliberate breaths, she bent her knees and rested her hands on her hard belly.

“You okay?” What a stupid question, but it was all I had at the moment. All I could think about in the moments between her screams was the potential of Recruiters. Would they take us back to the school? Truthfully, I wasn’t sure it even mattered. Either way, we were as good as dead. Maybe it just came down to who would do it quicker.

“I can tell you one thing for sure, French,” she said through closed teeth. “It hurts less to lose a fucking eye.”

I felt like I had to pee, I was so stressed, and I was just a witness, a useless, inexperienced witness. God, I wished I could have traded spots with Rania. She could at least say the right things in that soothing nurse voice while keeping a close eye on what was going on instead of trying to twist around and only getting half the picture. And here I was, just trying not to piss myself.

It was terrifying, but there was also something darkly sacred about this work, about the excruciating turn and pull that threatened to knock Wab unconscious. I watched her fight against blacking out, wanting in spite of it all to truly live in each minute, to be present for the ordeal. She was having a hard time getting her muscles to relax, which Rania kept reminding her to do; it looked like she would sever her own fingers with the grip she had on the little bars. But she tried, flexing each one then letting it go, pushing her breath out as evenly as the spasms would allow. And when she could, she locked eyes with Chi Boy, who had barely blinked since labor began. Silent and out of reach, he told her everything she needed to hear. I avoided looking his way, it was so intimate.

On the other side of me, Tree was holding his bound hands out behind his back, twisting them in opposite directions at the wrist, back and forth, back and forth.

“What are you doing?”

“Creating slack,” He answered.

“Why?”

“If I can get the rope looser, someone can use their teeth to start pulling on the strands.”

“That works?”

He glanced at Zheegwon, and they both nodded. I thought about them before they’d come to us, captured and held in a barn. If anyone knew how to get out of a rope, it was them.