Paper and Fire (The Great Library #2)(75)

All of Jess’s pulling wouldn’t move him.

“Thomas?” He kept his voice quiet, firm, and calm. “We can’t stop here. The Garda are coming, and they will put us all in those cells. We have to go.”

“I know,” Thomas said. He closed his eyes and then opened them, and they’d taken on a blind, hard shine. “It isn’t an illusion, is it? You’re here. This is real.”

“Yes. It’s real.”

Thomas was silently weeping, and Jess wanted to hurt someone responsible for that. Badly.

“Keep going,” Jess called to Santi, who was taking the lead with Glain. “There’s a round metal plate in the floor that used to be a drain. Find it and burn through. That puts us in the sewer underneath. I’ve marked the way for once we’re down there. Oh, and there’s a lion. I hope it’s still stopped. I took care of it last night.” Strange that it seemed the least of their worries at the moment.

“Another one?” Khalila turned, eyes wide. “How long have you known how to do that?”

“Since the night Dario almost got me killed at Alexander’s tomb,” he said. “Ask him.”

She whipped around to do just that, but Dario held up his hand to stop her. “Later, desert flower, for mercy’s sake,” Dario said before she could begin the interrogation. “I know your curiosity is stronger than your sense of self-preservation, but I still don’t know how he did it, by the way. I ran for my life like any sensible person.”

“Jess didn’t run!”

“And that proves my point.”

Wolfe turned on them in a storm of black robes and bitter, angry eyes. He was, Jess thought, all but shattering down here, in this place where he couldn’t shut out the memories of his time behind these bars. “Do you think this is a game?”

Even Dario fell silent at the vicious tone and, more than that, the way Wolfe’s voice broke in the middle. He was trembling. Sweat shone hot on his face, though it was cave-cool down here. Santi—still on alert—reached back and put a hand on his arm, and Wolfe dragged in a tortured breath and nodded.

“Are there others?” Jess asked Thomas. “More prisoners here?”

“Yes,” Thomas said quietly. He was watching Wolfe as if he understood him perfectly. As if he was watching himself. “A few. Most don’t stay long. They—they’re taken away.”

“Released?” Morgan asked.

Thomas shook his head. Jess didn’t want to ask any more.

They were hurrying along now and keeping their voices low. Jess heard nothing behind them yet, but he was sure pursuit would be coming fast. The prison was larger than he’d thought and stretched in a long, straight hallway of cells, some occupied, and he couldn’t look inside, couldn’t, for fear he’d see the face of someone he knew staring out. Khalila had, just ahead of him. She’d stopped, grabbed the bars of a cell, and was looking inside. When she turned to Jess, her eyes were blind with tears. “We have to let them out,” she said. “Please. Help—”

He took out the keys, but his hands were trembling. Nearly useless. Focus, he told himself, but he wasn’t sure he could. It was all too much, too fast. Dario silently took the keys and tried them, one after another. The desperate person behind the bars didn’t seem to care. It was impossible for Jess to tell the gender or age; it was just a dark shape huddled in a corner against the wall, chained as Thomas had been.

The keys didn’t work.

“Maybe they’re on one of the other guards. I’ll get them,” Dario said, and went back the way they’d come. He didn’t get far before he reversed course and came back fast. “No time,” he said. “They’re coming. Go. Go!”

“But—” Khalila looked absolutely tormented. Dario took her by the arms and pulled her away from the cell. “No, we can’t—”

“We must.” He held on when she tried to yank away. “Khalila. Querida. Look at me. We can’t help them if we’re all dead!”

He was right. It hurt, and he was right, and Jess finally dared to look into the cell, into the face of the one they were leaving behind.

He didn’t know the man. That was a terrible relief, and then a terrible guilt, too. “I’m sorry,” he said, and helped Thomas as they followed Dario and Khalila down the hall.

He didn’t look in any of the other cells. Wasn’t sure he could stand it.

The left turn ahead dumped them into a large, circular room with age-scrubbed frescoes on the walls. It was lined with . . . What were these things? Mechanical devices. Jess tried not to think what they were intended to do, but the spikes, straps, wheels, gears made it all too evident once he focused on the evil things.

It was a torture chamber.

There were no exits.

Jess froze for a moment, thinking, What did I just do? But then he pushed past the others into the center of the room. This was the right place; he knew it was. This chamber was a perfect round replica of the one below their feet, off the sewers. But there was no sign of any metal plate in the floor.

It has to be here, he thought, and pushed aside the thudding headache to concentrate. His eyes fixed on a device in the middle of the room.

“Here! Move this!” he said, and pushed at a particularly large construction that looked like a bed, but with gears and ropes and straps stained with old blood. The stench of it—of the whole room—made his throat close up, but he gritted his teeth and shoved, and Santi and Dario joined him. The machine moved with a long, agonizing screech of metal on metal—because it had been partially blocking the round metal plate set in the center of the floor. The plate was stamped with the screaming face of a monster with snakes for hair—a Gorgon. Ancient work. It had been sealed for a very long time.