46. The Great Mistake

The crypt below the library was silent. Those who lived here were respectfully keeping their distance from the group who’d foiled the impromptu attack by the Redboots. Nox found herself alone in a quiet corner. She’d woken up with the feeling that something was missing. A little nagging something that tapped at her conscience mind. She remembered the disastrous attempt to show Fureva the spaceship and the entity created. From her own confusion, distraction and negative thoughts, an echo rose from the cypher and attacked Fureva. She wanted the thing dead, yet a thin connection still existed.
 
Nox sat silently in her corner, ignored by the growing activity around her, and started following that thread. Out of the library, across the smoke-filled city, back to the bar where they first appeared. She could sense the entity hiding under the cellar to the bar. She pulled out the handmade rope she had found. Far too short to get down to the station, the rope could be long enough to reach a level just below the cellar. Trask had found that level!
 
Trask, resourceful and alien-looking. Nox now wondered why the owner of the bar had kept Trask around. Marius had said Alric, the owner, had been keeping Trask safe for some reason. Would free labour alone be enough reason for Alric to go against the Redboots? Suddenly, Nox realised there must be something interesting below the cellar where her echo had gone to hide. Nox glanced across the room at the huddled form of Jaden still sleeping. She’d love to share what she’d discovered, but Jaden was still asleep, and the other had disappeared. For now, she would have to keep her revelation to herself.
 
Fureva-Yung was hungry. She hunted for tasty morsels in the dark corners of the catacombs under the old library building. There was little down here as Marius, who had followed her, discovered. These areas, water damaged and far from the hub of activity, had been picked clean of ‘shinies’. Fureva-Yung followed her nose and the sound of dripping water to a room where a lichen grew in abundance against a wall trickling with water. On the lichen, fat bugs crawled deliciously. Fureva-Yung did not waste a moment and started popping the bugs into her mouth like crunchy treats. When she’d eaten most of them, she tasted the lichen, finding it interesting and texturous. It wasn’t until all the bugs and most of the lichen were gone that Fureva-Yung was disturbed from her meal by a voice behind.
“Oh! Oh dear, who are you?” Said Trilly, arriving with a notebook in hand, “Have you eaten all my experiments?”
“What in the world could that be?” Marius joked as the cypher Fureva-Yung had used to disguise herself had worn off overnight, and she was back to her usual alien self. Fureva-Yung huffed, scoffing the rest of the bugs.
“Only joking. This is Fureva from last night. A device we used to hide her wore off.”
“Oh, okay,” Trilly adjusted her perception and shrugged, “Only, I don’t know if she should be eating those bugs.”
“It’ll be alright, “ Marius assured Trilly, “They won’t bug her.”
“Well, that’s the point. I have been feeding them a unique formula to make them stronger and smarter…”
“She often eats rocks and crystals…”
“How about mutagenes?”
“Urgh, should we sit back and watch?” Marius said, turning to enquire how Fureva-Yung felt.
Until that point, she had felt fine. The bugs had been excellent and crunchy, if a little metallic tasting. The lichen had the same taste, but all of it was sitting well on her stomach.
“Yeah, your digestion is a chemical weapon,” He laughed at Fureva-Yung’s discomfort at having eaten Trilly’s work, “Oh, to be Yung again!”
“Never mind,” Trilly sighed, “When you get back, stop by the lab, and I’ll give you the control group as well. They’re no use to me now.”
 
Jaden awoke to the sound of industry around her and the smells of breakfast. She arrived at the communal breakfast to find Nox picking over the thick gruel of grains, vegetables and the occasional grizzly meat chunk. Jaden was about to sit with the girl, but she looked more than usually preoccupied with something. Probably the attack on the jail, the tentative plans thus far relied heavily on Nox’s teleportation and reshaping. A lot was riding on her thin shoulders.
“Good morning, “ Nox said, not lifting her head from her bowl.
“Good afternoon, Nox,” Jaden corrected as Marius and Fureva-Yung appeared. Fureva-Yung was looking intently at patch of ground in front of a wall.
“There’s nothing there, Fureva-Yung,” Nox said, noting her friend’s behaviour, “What did you sense?”
“Smoke and darkness,” Fureva-Yung replied cryptically before turning back to the others, “I saw a creature with large ears hop across the space and through the wall as if it wasn’t there.”
“It wasn’t,” Marius answered with a cheeky smile, “That might be bug giving you hallucinations.”
“I suspect it is a Trilly thing,” Fureva-Yung agreed as Nox got up and scanned the wall indicated by Fureva-Yung. To her surprise, a patch of the wall near the ground seemed several degrees colder than the surrounding stone.
“Not a hallucination. Something interacted with the wall at that spot.”
“Well, it was nothing of mine, “ Trilly added, coming up behind Fureva-Yung with a container of bugs. Fureva-Yung took the bugs gratefully.
“How would I go about making a ghostly rabbit, do you think?”
“I’d make sure they liked the fruit off your wall-breaking vine. Imagine, they could phase through anywhere and scatter the seeds.”
“I wonder what it tastes like?” Fureva-Yung said through mouthfuls of bugs.
“Spirited,” Nox whispered in her ear.
 
For much of the afternoon, the group took up a table in the underground complex and devised their plans for the jailbreak. Marius was confident that Nox could teleport in alone, open a hole in the roof and teleport out with Trask in tow, no problem.
Nox was horrified.
Fureva-Yung wouldn’t hear of Nox going by herself, and neither would Jaden, but neither were sure how useful either could be.
“Shadow rabbit, you use it to see around the jail and find Trask,” Fureva-Yung suggested.
“And then what? I can’t teleport to a place I’ve only seen through someone else's eyes.” Nox lamented. She’d tried.
 
They looked at the map again, and Jaden pulled out a cypher she’d been holding onto.
“The roof to the south is certainly less overlooked. If you stay down low, there’s no reason someone should see you.”
“And it’s above the high security, so all you need to do is make a hole in the roof and teleport in, easy!” Said, Easy-Marius
“And you don’t need a rabbit. You can look through this, a remote viewer,” Jaden handed over the cypher, “Drop it down on a string to see when everything’s clear. It wouldn’t need much of a hole, either. Once you’ve found Trask, make a hole into his cell and drop in.”
 
 
 
“But…but…stuff goes wrong, it always goes wrong. What happens then?”
“Teleport out, simple” Replied, Simple-Marius.
“What if they knock me over the head?” Nox complained. There was a time she’d done everything alone. They had been the bad days. She knew she didn’t have to live like that anymore.
 
“Look, let me see if I can talk to someone who's been on the inside. Maybe Regina can think of a contact,” Jaden relented, ”No decisions made until after then.”
“Well, then we’re looking at a night extraction, “ Marius stretched and realised the time, “Probably better anyway. Nox still looks exhausted, and we can keep ourselves busy until then, right, Fureva-Yung?
 
Jaden found and asked Regina about members of the Patchwork Dream who had been imprisoned and would speak to her.
“I’ll see what I can find out Just don’t be too surprised if they’re cagey about who and where they are. We only keep all this going by being careful.”
 
Marius convinced Fureva-Yung to explore further into the passageways under the old library. As discovered earlier in the morning, much of it had been cleaned up by Trilly and others like her. They were finally stopped by a collapse blocking access to areas further down.
Fureva-Yung gave Marius a look and gestured for him to go first.
“Oh no! I’m not good at digging. I’m good at organising people to dig,” He grumbled at her growing smile. A movement in an alcove caught Fureva-Yung’s attention, and she spotted a bipedal creature with two bull horns growing from its forehead made of the same black smokiness, only this time with red glowing eyes. It walked behind Marius as he complained and reached out to touch his back. Marius stopped and shivered a moment. It looked at Fureva-Yung and walked off through another wall.
“Is it…?” Marius asked, but Fureva-Yung shushed him with a gesture and listened. There was nothing there disturbing the sound waves, no corporal body at all, but it did touch Marius and did leave a cold mark on the wall. She checked where Marius indicated the creature had touched him. No mark.
“A mystery,” Fureva-Yung whispered.
“Creepy!” Marius agreed.
 
Ragnia found Jaden with Tilly sometime later. He was carrying a small drawstring bag. He drew her aside.
“I’ve found someone named Silk willing to talk to you,” He said, gesturing for her to follow him. In a separate chamber, a device attached to a hoop and needle stood alone. Ragnia pulled an orange lozenge from the small bag and handed it to Jaden.
“You eat that,” He said, pointing to the lozenge. Jaden, who had consumed any number of odd substances in her lifetime, swallowed the tablet without question.
“If you were going to poison me, it would have been at breakfast.”
“Next, you have a passphrase, something to identify each other. Silk will say, “Many paths in the shadows, but are they friend or foe?” Your response is, “It is only in the shadows that friends can be found.” Have you got it?”
Jaden repeated both phrases, bemused at the dramatic subterfuge.
 
Ragnia gestured for Jaden to approach the device and place her arm through the hoop. Instantly, the dark little room under the library of Urend disappeared, replaced with a bright fog. She could hear the crunch of gravel under her feet and the fog's dampness on her bare skin. From ahead, she could hear the crunch of gravel under other feet and could just make out the outline of a person through the fog.
“Many paths in the shadows, but are they friend or foe?”
“Now, really, wouldn’t I have the line if I wasn’t in a secret base?”
“And yet, you don’t speak it,” The figure started to fade away.
“No, wait. It is only in the shadows that friends can be found.”
The figure returned.
“It is best for both of us that you don’t know where I am, and I don’t know who you are.”
“Very well, I and my group are travellers, new to these lands. We need to get a friend out of the Redboot prison, and I understand you have some insider information.”
“Reboot?” The voice was hesitant, but the figure didn’t disappear.
“Yes, you visited?”
“I…was interned there.”
“Nice stay?”
“Less than pleasant.”
“Three meals a day?”
“If you could call them meals, but yes, three.”
“Delivered or in a mess hall?”
“In my cell.”
“On time?”
“Oh yes, always on time.”
“How about exercise breaks outside your cell?”
“Yes.”
“Private or shared?”
“Shared, but I was in the General population. High security went out alone with maybe four guards.”
“Know anything about High Security?”
“No, just saw the front door.”
“Night activity?”
“Not much, just a few guards walking the floors. Sporadic, but somewhere on the floor, even if you can’t see them.”
“About High Security. Anything else you can remember?”
“They were taken out for exercise during our lunch. We’d see the guards forming at the door to High Security, then four guards lead out a prisoner to the exercise yard.”
“How about the locks? Keys or a device or something else?”
“In General, keys to each cell. For High Security, they had a device that fitted into an alcove to the right of the door.
 
They talked back and forth like this until Jaden ran out of questions to ask.
“Well, thank you for your time. Would I be about to contact you again in the future?”
“The lozenge you took now gives you access to me on this network. You can always leave a message.”
Jaden raised an eyebrow, realising just what a privilege she’d received.
“Thank you.”
“Good luck,” Silk said, and the form, barely recognisable as human, disappeared.
 
Removing her arm from the hoop, she returned to the small, dark room. Making her way back, she stopped off at Trilly’s lab.
“Can you explain the workings of that device?” She asked after explaining where she had been.
“Yes, Ragnia has suggested you have plans to make your own,” Trilly replied, showing Jaden how to make a needle to draw off blood and the hoop that made the connection. Testing the device worked, Jaden, Ragnia, and Trilly all made lozenges and shared them. Besides knowing how to build the device when she got home, Jaden had a small directory of contacts tucked away in the back of her mind.
“What should be the passphrase?” Trilly asked, making a note.
“Oh, something like…”Passwords are…?” with the response whatever swear word I can think of at the time.”
 
Later that night, the underground had settled down to evening activities as Nox organised her group for the big push against the jail. She made them all lie flat against the ground, with their hands touching in the centre.
“Don’t jump up as soon as we arrive. They will see you,” She said, looking at each of her friends before continuing, “ What are you each doing when we arrive?”
“I’ll keep an eye on the watch towers for snipers,” Jaden said.
“General lookout. No good being caught by surprise guard on the roof.” Marius replied.
“You and me go inside,” Fureva-Yung pointed at the two of them and for the first time while discussing this plan, Nox allowed herself to relax.
“Good.” She took her friend's hands in the centre, ensuring she touched everyone before…
 
…they were on the black-tarred, windswept roof of the prison. It was quiet and dark, with only the long, slow sweep of searchlights below the lip of the roof to illuminate them. They had come out just where they’d wanted, above the southern wing of the prison block where the High Security were said to be.
 
Fureva-Yung gestured for everyone to lay still as she listened to the prison below. Directly below, she could hear two sets of footsteps going away north, then the creak and slam of a metal door. Footsteps disappeared to the north. She could hear the light snoring of someone below. Trask, as an invertebrate, didn’t snore, Fureva-Yung was sure. She pinpointed the position of the snorer and listened. They weren’t far away, directly below.
 
Fureva-Yung pointed out a likely place between the two sets of prison cells, and Nox scanned the roof and what space beyond she could reach. It was a hallway, empty and silent. Nox made a small hole, large enough for the remote viewer to pass through, then let it down on a string. The hallway was dark and empty, with four barred prison doors facing it. As the remote viewer twirled on its line, it caught sight of the snorer, a middle-aged man, well-built but not their target. There was no one else in the cells.
 
“Maybe he’s in the medium security below,” suggested Marius, who gained a baleful look from Nox. It wasn’t his fault, but it was just the type of screw-up she’d been worried about. Now, they all had to sneak around inside.
 
“Get in here or in the guard’s restroom?” She whispered back, retrieving the remote viewer. Their information from the captured soldier had told them there was a restroom on the top floor in the northwest corner of the building. They could drop into the silent High Security, which was empty but be trapped behind the door, or drop down into the guard’s room, which could have a guard turn up at any minute. The guard’s room was chosen as the easiest for access to the rest of the prison.
 
Together, they crawled to the north corner. Once more, Fureva-Yung asked for silence and listened as two guards talked, opened and closed sheet metal doors on personal lockers and left. Nox made the small hole again and let down the remote viewer. The room was well-lit and lined with lockers, a small kitchenette, and stairs heading down to the ground floor. She widened the hole, and they dropped down into the room one by one.
“Close up this hole,” Marius said to Nox, “Good or bad, we’ll teleport out of here.”
She didn’t mention that she could teleport and leave him behind but did as she was told.
Fureva-Yung listened.
 
Two guards were on the top level, walking around a metal walkway. Another two were below them in a second guard room. She also noticed a fifth on the ground floor in what they had been told was the Observation room. She would not have seen them except for the quiet shuffling of papers.
 
Nox, blending into the shadows and trying to be as quiet as she knew how, crept down the stairs. She saw the two guards relaxing, mugs in their hands. They looked relaxed, unconcerned that armed and dangerous people were already sneaking around their prison. She let the others know telepathically.
They look like they’re about to head out onto the lower floor as well, She said as the guards started putting away their mugs and jangling their keys.
 
Upstairs, Fureva-Yung was tracking the two on the second floor. When she felt they were in a good position, she stepped out, chain raised, and charged them with her Fleet of foot. She smacked into one, knocking him prone as Marius ran in behind her, his stolen baton sparking. Hitting the second guard, they swayed on the spot, stunned. Jaden, searching the lockers, missed the others breaking cover and scrambled out after them. She tripped as the solid ground gave way to the metal catwalk and crashed with a clatter. Grabbing the stunned guard's baton out of his hand, Marius stunned the second guard again. He convulsed and fell to the catwalk.
 
The guards below yelled out in alarm. Nox could see where they were heading and silently positioned herself to intercept them. Above, Jaden was not letting her pratfall deter her. She stretched out with her staff and touched the guard Marius had stunned. Electrocuted for a third time, he wasn’t getting up again. Fureva-Yung did the same for her guard, only substituting her fists for the paralysing effect of the batons. Below, the two guards with batons drawn, ran to a lever on the wall marked ‘ALARM’. As they ran past Nox’s hiding spot, she touched one, taking control of his mind. The guard now her weapon, she slunk back into the shadows.
 
Upstairs, the two guards were ‘subdued’, and Fureva-Yung set her sights on one on the ground. Leaping the three metres down, she missed making a paste out of one of the two, falling prone in front of them. The surprised guard aimed to strike Fureva-Yung with his baton, but his Nox’s Commanded Friend reached out and electrocuted him before he could. While Jaden finished ensuring the guards would never wake up again upstairs, downstairs NCF opened the guard's room and looked for the device that opened the Medium security wing. Marius walked the general catwalk, taking note of the prisoners and who they were. A few were Patchwork Dream, and their cells were quickly opened and batons placed into their hands.
 
NCF gave her the device that unlocked the Medium security before heading down the corridor to the Observation Office. Looking through his eyes Nox watched as he opened the door on guard going through paperwork.
“Hey, I heard a little commotion. Are you guys alright?” The guard at the desk asked, looking up to see the sparking end of a baton. Between NCF and Marius, the office guard was soon down. The prison was theirs for the time being. NCF and Marius left the Observation room, and Jaden searched through the paperwork.
 
His job done, Nox sent NCF into a now empty cell to strip down to his underwear and close the door. There, he would be safe and unable to get into trouble. With a click, she placed the device into a recess beside the medium security door, and the door swung open. The block was empty. Where was Trask?
 
Jaden had worked out the answer to that one in the Observation room. Amongst a pile of files marked transferred, she found Trask. By the notes in the file, he’d transferred from the Redboot prison to a place called Rockspire Overlook the day of their arrival. On the wall, a map showed Rockspire Overlook, further into the Imperium, two days travel away.
 
“You left you’re guard in his underwear and socks?” Marius said, looking into Medium Security over Nox’s head.
“Yes, it’s funnier that way,” She replied, “But where’s Trask?”
“I have the answer to that,” Jadens said, tucking the file into her waistband and leaving the office, “He was transferred the day we arrived.”
Fureva-Yung physically deflated. They had been so close to finding her old friend, only to be thwarted by bureaucracy.
 
The group spent a little time freeing the prisoners and handing out what weapons they could find. The two Patchwork Dream members from general and the one from High Security (confirmed by Jaden’s paperwork) were gathered together, and the group of seven teleported out.
 
From the dimly lit prison one moment to the darkness of the empty soup kitchen site the next. The three ex-prisoners gave their thanks and slunk off into the night. The four friends looked around each other, their mission a failure. Silently, they turned and headed back to the library.