Another figure, not the red of guards or the blue of our hostages, but a yellow-green, could be seen in their company. After second, more silhouettes appeared.

Cryptid. Silhouette one, the fastest one the system had recognized.

Crock o’ Shit. Silhouette two. The lie detector from the prison raid.

Coalbelcher. Silhouette three. The heavyset man who’d been something of a crime boss on the men’s side of the prison.

It couldn’t be easy. I couldn’t trust Chris to play nice.

No.

I nodded to the others.

Getting us our distraction.

The commotion drew hollers and alarms. Guards broke into runs, diverging from their paths at the tops of the wall to hop down or use ladders to descend into the prison. Some hurled canisters, producing gas.

We retreated back to our side, as the guards in our company thinned out. There were still some stationed at exits, but we didn’t need an exit.

Rain looked to me, and I nodded, touching the wall.

He produced a silver blade, and he stabbed into the surface. Not a line, but a hole from a thrust. He backed off, then struck the wall with his elbow. The silver flared, and the material of the hole broke, a thin crack.

Vista expanded it until it was large enough for us to enter.

We slipped through, into empty hallways.

-He’s changing-, the text in the corner of my vision told me.

I looked, and I saw Chris’s distant silhouette morphing. He was here to be their enforcer.

He broke into a run, and so did we.

Breaking 14.12

The tech Kenzie had provided me wasn’t perfect. Cryptid flickered in and out of view as he passed within the view of the facility’s security cameras and then entered the blind spots.

The guards in the hallways ahead of us were the same. Major points were watched, but there were a few who retreated to places the cameras didn’t see and stayed there. If this were Gimel I might have guessed they were smoking, but I hadn’t seen or smelled a single cigarette yet.

The gaps meant I had to focus, devoting attention to tracking every single person who stepped out of sight, remembering that they were there, and accounting for the places they could be. I was reasonably confident in my ability to do that, I was good at memorization, I could wrap my head around who was where in a conflict and not be too surprised at any point.

Except the Cryptid factor required a whole other degree of my attention. His focus was us, by the looks of it, as he pushed forward and even pushed past guards to make his way to the shower area, then from there to the plaza. I could see glimpses of the scene through the mess, the blur of regular prisoners blocking him off. They even pressed him back, to the point he retreated a few steps.