“Let me tell you how it works. There’s no way out. It takes two keys, one from the inside, and one from the outside. Every last prisoner could get out of their cell and still never get nowhere. No weapons down here, nothing to fight with, nothing to threaten us with. Do you see, girl? Besides, even if you got out that main gate, you’d be dead. You’d come out right in the middle bailey, and the full force of the Guard would come down on you with steel. You die, you simply die. You mean to kill yourself? Dash your head against the rocks and be done with.”

“That’s fine advice, coming from a gord.”

“Girl, I’m looking at a noose, same as you. I know these prisons. If there were a way out, I’d take it myself.” There were some scraping sounds then, nothing she could understand. “There isn’t.”

Elena closed her eyes and focused on the last moments she’d had with Will before they separated. But already the details slipped away. She didn’t remember how long his hair was, or what he had been wearing, or where the bruises on his face lay. She hadn’t looked at him long enough to watch him smile, or memorize the lines on his forehead. She couldn’t picture his nose quite well enough. She put her hands to her own face, feeling her every curve, imagining it was his.

At some point later, maybe an hour, maybe a minute, she remembered. “The staircase up, that leads to the cage in the courtyard…”

“The Rabbit Hole,” Morg answered quickly. “Takes two keys, same as the front.”

“Never mind that. There are cages at its entrance. There’s an old man named Baynard in the second one. The key is broken in the lock, the door can’t open.”

Morg’s head nodded. “I’ll tell them Derby boys about it. They’ll see to it.”

Elena held herself tighter. “Thank you.”

It was the last thing she could think of to do. Now there was nothing but the wait. It was there, of course, that unspoken nag at the back of her mind, but she put it away.

There’s no escape from this prison. That’s not how real life works.