Paper and Fire (The Great Library #2)(74)

The third High Garda soldier they’d expected was down by the time Jess and Morgan arrived. Santi glanced at them, but then his gaze locked on Jess and the blood. “Are you all right?” It was only half concern. The other half of the question had to do with the viability of their escape if he wasn’t.

“I’m fine,” Jess said, though he knew he wasn’t. “I won’t hold you back.”

“Stop chattering,” Wolfe said, his tone as cold and bitter as winter. “Jess. Locks.”

For a blank second, Jess didn’t understand his order, and then he fumbled for his picklocks and moved past the men to the door of the cell.

“Jess,” said a quiet voice from beyond the bars. It sounded rough and strange, somehow familiar, and when he finally looked straight into the cell, he saw his best friend, Thomas Schreiber, sitting on the floor of the stone room. He was shackled to a metal ring in the wall. The big, young man had lost weight, which somehow made him seem larger without that comfortable layer of padding. He no longer looked as young and innocent as Jess remembered. He’d grown a beard, and his hair was a matted mess down to his shoulders. He was dressed in a plain oatmeal-colored shirt and trousers that were much worse for wear.

Jess wrapped his hands around the bars, partly to keep himself from falling as dizziness hit him, and said, “Got yourself in a mess, haven’t you, Thomas?”

“Jess,” Thomas whispered. Even with the beard, the hair, the changes in him, his smile remained gentle and kind. His eyes had an odd shine to them, and it took Jess a moment to realize it was tears. “They took our machine. They destroyed it.”

“Never mind. You can build another,” Jess said. His throat felt tight and his eyes burned until he blinked his own tears away. No time for that nonsense now. “Let’s get you out of there.”

He bent to the lock, but his fingers felt clumsy and his reasoning felt suspiciously slow. I have to do this, he thought. I have to get him out.

And then Khalila tapped him on the shoulder and handed him a ring of keys. “From the last guard,” she said.

Maybe I do have a cracked skull, he thought, and almost laughed. Three tries before he slid the key into the lock, and then the catch clicked open with a crisp sound that seemed to echo around the stones. Jess heard his friends letting out held breaths, and grinned despite the ache in his head and shoulder. He swung the door open and rushed in to kneel next to Thomas.

He had to pause, because Thomas was looking down at him, holding out his shackled hand. “It’s good to see you, Jess,” Thomas said, and his voice faltered. It sounded different now. Tears blurred his eyes. “Mein Gott, I thought—I never thought you’d really come. I didn’t think any of you knew. They told me . . .”

His voice faded away. Jess ignored the hand and grabbed him into a hard, fast hug. Best Thomas couldn’t see his face. Then he went back to the work of freeing him from the chains.

Scholar Wolfe was still outside the bars, and Jess realized he probably couldn’t bear the idea of stepping inside ever again. Wolfe said, “They told you we were all dead, didn’t they?”

Jess felt Thomas nod wearily, and blotted moisture from his eyes with the back of his sleeve as he worked the stubborn lock. Until this moment, he’d thought of Thomas in the abstract, just as he’d last seen him. Unchanged. Seeing what they’d made of him brought things home in ways imagination couldn’t.

“They described it,” Thomas said. “For every one of you. How you died. I tried not to believe it, but . . . but it’s hard not to here. This becomes all you know.”

“They lie.” Wolfe’s voice sounded low and silky, dark as midnight. “It’s their favorite tactic—I know it well—to break your mind and your spirit. I’m sorry it took so long to get to you.”

“If we’d tried to come earlier, the lies might well have become true,” Santi said, just as Jess clicked the last shackle open. He winced when he saw how raw Thomas’s ankle was beneath.

“Can you walk?” Jess asked. Thomas, for answer, stood up. And even though Jess knew how tall his friend was, it surprised him to see him towering over them again.

“Of course,” Thomas said, and then tried to take a step and had to grab Jess for balance. “Slowly.”

Santi’s expression didn’t change, but it was clear slowly wasn’t an answer he wanted to hear in strategic terms. Their time was running out fast. “Then let’s go,” he said. “As fast as we can.”

“Wait!” Thomas turned to look at the walls of his room, and for the first time, Jess realized they were densely covered with small, scratched drawings in Thomas’s precise hand. Machines. Automata. He’d drawn what looked like one of the Roman lions, then drawn it as if it had exploded into pieces, each one shown in context with the skeletal frame. “I need to remember these! I have to remember. I didn’t have anything else to work with—they wouldn’t give me any paper . . .”

“No time, Thomas. We need to move,” Glain said. “They’re coming.” There was a note of tension in her voice that convinced Jess instantly, and he pulled Thomas toward the door. There would be no moving the young man if he really wanted to resist, but Thomas went, although reluctantly, still turned to memorize his drawings. Once out of the cell, though, Thomas turned to the front, put his back against the bars, and sucked down a deep, trembling breath, as though for the first time it was dawning on him that they were here, it was not a dream, and he was actually free.