“Clear the way? Rune, the guards are armed. They will either shoot you dead or hack you up with bayonets.”
“I’ll fight them and I’ll win.”
He said it so matter-of-factly that Seraphina was at a loss for words. She wanted to contradict him but felt like nothing she’d say would get through to him. She knew he was unnaturally tough. There had been a few instances where that had been proven to her, but that didn’t make his idea sound less like suicide.
Maybe this was just wistful thinking because the situation was getting dire for her. And he seemed to care about her for reasons she couldn’t begin to divine. If it was just a fantasy to soothe himself, then she liked it. She could allow herself to entertain it for a few minutes or hours, just to distract her thoughts from the darker edges of her mind.
“We should escape together,” she said.
“No, just you. I will get you out, then return to my cell.”
“No, Rune. I’ll only go if you come with me.”
The scratching on the wall halted.
“You know I can’t.”
“It will be different this time. You won’t be alone out there. You’ll get me out of here, and I’ll teach you how to exist in the world, how to... deal with its vastness.”
She tried to remember what he’d said about the sky, the river, and the smells of the city, how they were too much for him. The bigger the outside, the smaller he felt, until he was crushed by it.
“I don’t think it’s something that I can learn.”
“Rune, I won’t go without you. You don’t deserve to be in here anymore than I do.”
In fact, she was pretty sure she deserved it to some extent, while he was completely innocent.
He was silent for a while, then he started scratching on the wall again.
“All right,” he finally said, in a voice so low that she barely heard him.
“Good,” she said.
She wondered if he might have lied to her for the first time.
When night fell and the cell was shrouded in complete darkness, they crawled back to their spots and slept like they had the night before, back-to-back, the unnatural heat of his body seeping into her flesh. She’d slept all day, so she lay awake for hours, listening to Rune’s regular breathing and the noises of the prison.
The sounds she’d gotten used to had changed, faded with the encroaching winter. Men didn’t have the energy to scream anymore. If they cried, their tears froze on their lashes, so they didn’t. The prayers weren’t as loud or frequent, or maybe they were thought more than spoken. There were still grunts and whimpers, too soft to disturb anyone. The sharpest noises the prisoners made was when they coughed violently and spat on the ground.
Seraphina listened for the wheezing of the old man in the next cell. For a few minutes, she strained to hear him, but her ears were only met with silence. She wrapped her arms tighter around herself, knowing what that meant. Now that she thought about it, she hadn’t heard him wheeze or cough all day.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. She didn’t want to wake Rune, but she also felt like the words needed to be spoken out loud. “I should’ve sung the lullaby when you asked me. I should’ve sung it every night.”
Morning came with banging, shouting, and guards turning over the cell next to theirs.
“Another one bites the dust. Or the frost.” Bauer’s gruff voice.
“Less prisoners, less work for us,” came Weber’s sage reply.
Seraphina trembled under the blanket, and she felt Rune shift and place a protective hand on her shoulder. She stilled under his touch. This was the second time he did it, and even though she hadn’t pulled away or admonished him the first time, and she wasn’t going to do it now either, she felt a tingeof discomfort. She knew it was irrational, as he wasn’t doing anything to harm her, but it felt intimate. As intimate as their backs pressing together at night, and his calves touching hers, and she wasn’t sure if she was ready for such closeness.
But she’d told him to escape with her, promised him she would be his crutch when he felt like the world was too much. How could she help him when she had issues with being touched?
No, that was just a silly dream. There was no escaping this rat hole.
The door to their cell unlocked, and the turnkey hurried about his duties.
“Creature, get up. The sergeant wants to see you.”
