Vista started to create another pinched-off space. It turned out to be unnecessary. The people were staff in the high-rise section of the prison, and they weren’t entering the prison section. I saw their shadows mixing in with the shadows from light filtering through the portcullis gate, before they moved on to wherever it was they were going.

“You didn’t see those coming?” Ashley asked.

“Lookout’s camera only tells me what the cameras see.”

“Great.”

“Cryptid is getting close. Let’s figure out where we’re going. Can you pantomime for Darlene and Candy? They have no audio.”

Ashley gave me an unimpressed look, but she nodded. I stepped back so she was in my full field of view.

She mimed taking a photo, then mimed Kenzie’s height, before motioning like she was holding a phone to her ear.

The text appeared in the corner of my eye.

-Her phone?-

I nodded.

-Have to ask her.-

“They’re figuring it out,” I said. I didn’t love that we were at an intersection of three hallways, or that Cryptid was getting closer.

“Say we alert him,” Vista said. “What does that change? Can he escape on his own?”

“Or we alert Natalie,” I said. “It means he can find an escape route. If they want to frame us for his death then that probably means they want to be able to account for my whereabouts and have a plausible explanation for his whereabouts at the same time. Sending him to go talk to Sveta, maybe, and then intercepting him. Probably with Crock o’ Shit.”

“That’s a hell of a name,” Vista said. “She’s strong enough to pretend to be you?”

Cryptid had reached the point where we’d gone through the wall.

The message appeared from Kenzie’s team.

-down hall with gate. basement of that part of complx-

“Yeah,” I said. “Open the way, get us through there?”

I indicated the portcullis.

“The building without enough cameras for us to know where everyone is?” Ashley asked.

“This part of the prison doesn’t have enough cameras for me to know a hundred percent. That building’s worse.”

“Great,” she said. There was a terseness and tension to her that I knew was because she was worried about Armstrong and insecure about our ability to help him.

It was easy to be cool and collected when you didn’t care about anyone or anything, but the guy had earned a place with her.

Vista parted the bars. While she did, I looked ahead, finding the cameras and focusing on them, watching the little circle lock onto each, before giving me a view of what the camera saw. There was a stairway to the basement but cameras had too tight a view from within the stairwell, of that stairwell.

“We go for what I’m pretty sure is a storage area. Stop at the end of the hall, check, then run for it on signal.”