Petra Vane's Arc

Chapter 5 of 10

Twenty chips filled the tin cup now. Petra counted them twice. Each one still pulsed. The last group had emptied their trackers onto her table, and every fugitive slept in the tunnel behind her. Five chips over the wall had worked. Twenty would not. She knew it the moment she lifted the cup. Too many signals inside the prison, all at once, and the guards would stop chasing ghosts. They would start counting cells. Then they would look outward, at the grate, at her. "I can't throw all these," Petra said. "The yard fills up. They notice. Five was already a risk." Lior sat on the damp stone with the three-legged hound. The dog rested his head on her knee. She was the barcode girl from the prison, the one who could not speak but who had saved Petra twice with her hands. Lior stared at the cup. Her small face went tight. Above them, water dripped from the pipe. Then the dripping stopped. The whole tunnel went still. Petra felt the cold press of it. The girl was scared, and when she was scared, even time seemed to hold its breath. Petra knelt. "Hey. Look at me. We'll find another way." Lior breathed. The dripping started again. She pushed the hound gently forward. She pointed at the dog, then at the tunnel mouth, then made a wide circle with her arm, far away. She pointed up, past the ceiling, toward the surface. She held up her hands and mimed water rising and falling. Fountains. Petra understood slowly. "You want the dog to carry them. Out of the tunnel. To the plaza fountains." The polished square near the Regime's own spire, where clean water sprayed all day. A live tracker in that water would read as a signal deep inside the capital, far from the prison and far from her. Not twenty chips in one yard. Twenty chips scattered under the noses of the regime itself. Lior nodded once, hard. Petra tore a strip from her apron and tied a small cloth pouch under the dog's belly, near the crutch leg. She dropped the chips inside, four at a time, and knotted it shut. "Five trips," she said. "He limps slow. Nobody looks twice at a stray." She scratched the hound's ear. His tired eyes blinked up at her. Lior led the dog to the tunnel mouth. She crouched, touched his crutch leg, then pointed down the dark passage toward the far grate that opened near the plaza steps. The hound swung the crutch forward and dragged himself after it. Click. Drag. Click. He went into the dark alone. Petra waited. An hour passed. No siren rose from the prison. No patrol turned toward the grate. When the hound came back, the pouch was empty, and his tongue hung out. She untied it and set the tin cup down, clean at last. But the plaza sat under the regime's own tower. And a fresh signal there would not stay ignored for long.