“They said I went too hard,” he said. “Broke the guy’s jaw, which is true, it needed to be wired shut. I hurt his back, lifetime of pain, bullshit. I didn’t touch his back. His arm? No. Lung damage? Nah.”

I didn’t really have any time to spare. I knew he was probably playing it down. But if it wasn’t murder, was I really okay excusing that kind of violence?

It wasn’t lawful, right, or good to be the person who decided he got away for this crime. But if I didn’t do anything, everyone would get away, or everyone would be under Teacher’s control, which was worse than prison. It was having the mind shackled.

“I’ll check up on things after,” I said. “If you’re lying, I come after you.”

“I look after this Natalie as long as you look after me,” he said. “She knows how to get in touch with you?”

“Yeah. When the phones are back online.”

A monstrous thing to do, I thought, a continuation of my thought from earlier.

I could remember how scared I’d once been. When things had been worse than I’d ever experienced, when I’d been alone, more or less, or powerless.

Natalie was in that boat. I was going to lengths to give her the chance to do something, because she was one of only three people I could count on, with the protocols.

Monstrous, to put that on her shoulders, to demand something of her. But she was a teammate and the only other people we could lean on were a guy who didn’t know the protocols, talented as he was, and a girl who talked to mice.

Monstrous.

“Cryptid’s at the gate,” Lookout said, as I caught up with the group. The boys were already in the tunnel.

“At the gate? Near Teacher’s group?”

Lookout nodded. “Um. He brought company.”

“My sister,” I said, my voice tight.

“Oh, yeah, her,” Lookout said. “And Goddess’s missing person.”

Gleaming 9.13

The tunnel was a concrete tube, stabbing in the direction of the front gate of the prison, bright lights arranged on the sides at roughly eye level, each pair of lights spaced out from the ones before and the ones to come, all contained within protective cages, many of which illuminated the spiderwebs that covered them and the moths that had found their way down. The matching pairs of lights made Rain and Byron cast two half-intact shadows, where they stood a little ways down the tunnel. In the ring of lights that surrounded the short ladder down, I cast a half-dozen. That half-dozen shadows narrowed to two as I approached the boys.

A heavy impact elsewhere in the prison complex shook the ground, and the concrete walls absorbed it. The effect was muted, diffused through the tunnel.