Dara's Arc

Chapter 8 of 10

The count was dead and the doors stayed open. Now three of them had to run. Dara half-carried Kael down into the stone room where the tunnel opened. Elara waited at the grate. Wren followed, her red jacket gone, her thin arms bare in the cold. Beyond the grate ran the tunnel, black and low and narrow. Kael saw it and stopped. His eyes went wide. "No," he said. "I can't." Dara turned. Kael was the man she had climbed towers for, the last real musician, the one who had heard her trumpet cross the city from inside his cell. Now he stood shaking at the tunnel mouth. His breath came fast and shallow. His hand gripped the wet stone. "I haven't seen out in a year," he said. "That's smaller than my cell. I can't go in there." Dara understood. If he froze inside the grate, his body would plug the only way out. All four of them would die behind him. She had picked that lock to reach him. He was about to seal it with fear. Elara stepped close. She took his face in both hands. "Look at me," she said. "Not the hole. Me." Her voice stayed flat and low, the way she talked to him through the grate every night with bread in her hand. Kael looked. His breath slowed a little. But his feet did not move. Wren knelt at the grate. "It's narrow for twenty feet," she said. "Then it opens. There's a cart on rails at the far end." She said it plain, no comfort in it. "I read the maps for a year. I know the numbers." Dara pulled the mask filter she had spared and pressed it to Kael's chest. "Hum," she said. "You told me you heard my trumpet from the cellar. So sing. One note. Keep it going and crawl to the sound of it." Kael stared at her. Then he hummed. It was thin and cracked, a bent note that dipped at the end, the same shape her old trumpet recording made. Dara went in first. "Follow my boots," she said. "Don't stop the note." She crawled. Behind her the humming came, ragged, breaking, starting again. Elara pushed at Kael's feet. Wren came last. The note wobbled. Twice it stopped, and Dara froze, waiting, until it started once more. Stone scraped her shoulders. The dark pressed close. Then her hands hit open air. The tunnel widened. Dara stood and pulled Kael out by the wrists. He came free of the grate and dropped to his knees on the rock, still humming, tears on his face. Ahead sat the pedal cart on its rails, waiting to carry them under the wall. Kael had not frozen. The way out stayed open behind them. But dawn was over the camp now, and somewhere above, a guard would soon feed Wren's false tape into a machine and hear her voice.