Stop there, come on. Come on.

He held a finger to his mouth, then indicated the office next door. Not the office of the assistant warden, but of the warden himself.

My heart sank a bit at that. It couldn’t be easy.

The heavyset deputy and officer both headed into the warden’s office.

The officer said something we couldn’t make out, his face not at an angle where the camera could see his lips.

“That makes no sense at all,” the warden said. “You left your post for this?”

“I’m doing as instructed.”

“Are you sure you saw this? Your eyes or imagination weren’t playing tricks on you?”

“No.”

“I’m letting Foresight know now,” Byron whispered, so as not to hamper our eavesdropping too much. I gave him a nod of confirmation.

“What did it say, explicitly?”

“To not trust phones, to make sure the bombs were disabled.”

“We could abort,” the deputy murmured the words to the warden. The camera did catch her lips, providing sharp text to clarify the muddy ‘could’ and ‘abort’, which the crummy microphone on the security camera didn’t pick up.

“The anklets?”

“Hold off,” the warden said.

Okay, not the biggest surprise in the world. Both warden and deputy warden were Teacher’s. Being Teacher’s, they were invested in what he was invested in. And Teacher, as far as we could figure, had every interest in using Cheit, his thralls, and his manipulation of the prison to capture Goddess and turn the entire prison into a barrel of fish he could then repeatedly shoot. A large number of high-priority targets with powers, with nobody able to interrupt or gainsay him.

There were situations where the ankle bombs factored in, ones where they eliminated target individuals or tried to get control of a failing situation with threats, but it made next to no sense for them to simply wipe prisoners out en masse, even now that things were sliding into chaos. I’d observed that there were three critical teams here. Two of them didn’t want to see prisoners blow up—Teacher’s and ours.

As for the third, on another camera, the assistant warden was picking up his phone. Foresight was on the other end, and they would be explaining their situation. They had two people in the prison. If our alliance with them counted, they had four total. Hopefully they would be convincing, because as the third person in the hierarchy of the prison, the assistant warden was number three—a man with a nice suit and tie, tousled hair, and eyelashes and eyebrows so thin that it looked like he had none at all.

Foresight would be outlining the situation and explaining priorities to him.

And Breakthrough would be dealing with the leaders of the thralls.

“This isn’t right,” the head warden said. He turned to his computer, circling the desk to get to it.

Kenzie hit a key.

Nothing happened.