Lena wasn’t sure of why or even how she’d come up with that, but an errant memory had surfaced of a system of access tunnels leading off the main vein. “Old town,” she added.
“When? When do they meet?”
“Random,” Lena muttered the first thing that came to mind.
“You’ll have to do better than that.”
Again, she babbled the first thing that came to mind. “Last Friday of the month.”
“Tonight?” His voice was threaded with excitement now.
Fuck! But how was she supposed to have known that it was Friday? Realizing there was nothing she could do now to name a time that might have worked better for her, she nodded.
“If you’re lying to me, bitch, you’ll regret it, I promise you.”
She already regretted it, but she’d been beyond bearing anymore. She’d felt like she had to tell him something to get some respite.
Once he’d pitched her back into her cell and left her, she had hours to deeply regret that she’d been in no shape to think anything through. The underground she’d spoken of might well have worked in her favor if she hadn’t inadvertently left herself such a small window of respite. As the worst of the pain subsided, she knew why it had popped into her head.
People lived there--dangerous demented people. She and Nigel had been there when they were children, looking for a safe place to sleep out of the cold. They’d very quickly discovered that it was no safe harbor. The people who dwelt there were more animal than human, and extremely territorial. They were fortunate the denizens had been satisfied with just chasing them off.
Even so, it made her feel ill that she’d probably just signed their death warrant. Whoever it was that wanted the rebels so badly would almost certainly send an army of home guardsmen down to cleanse the area. Trying not to think of the bloody battle she’d instigated, Lena focused on the forlorn hope that they would be so busy fighting they wouldn’t discover they were fighting tunnel people, not rebels.
Retribution wasn’t nearly as long in coming as she’d hoped. An hour, perhaps two, dragged slowly past and her aches and pains had only begun to dull to a low roar when her cell door slammed open again. “You lying cunt! You made me look completely incompetent!” the guard yelled, grabbing her and dragging her off the bunk.
She was too busy trying to get her feet under her as he jerked her around and dragged her along the corridor to think up a response that might mitigate his fury. “They weren’t there?” she finally babbled as he hauled her into the tube lift.
Venting his frustration in an animalistic growl, he punched her in the face. She almost lost consciousness. She might have except that the pain was too intense to allow her that respite. As the moments seemed to stretch out before her, she began to realize that he wasn’t taking her to the interrogation room.
He’d promised her she would regret it if she lied.
Was he taking her to Dax, she wondered, feeling a faint twinge of hope?
Dax had promised he’d get her out if she’d help him.
Struggling to push the pain to the back of her mind, Lena tried to formulate a plan, some plan--anything. Panic threatened to overwhelm her when jogging her mind produced nothing helpful, but she barely remembered the trip to the cell before. She couldn’t remember any details with any clarity.
She was still completely unprepared when she reached the moment of truth and the door of the lift slid open.
She was supposed to be drugged and frightened.
Stumbling around wasn’t something she had to feign. She was dizzy and nauseated from the pain and she could barely see. Weakly, she flailed her arms--she discovered she didn’t really have to fake that either. Abruptly, she realized that the only real strength she had was her dead weight. With a conscious effort, she went perfectly limp. The grip he had on her arm wasn’t enough to keep her up. She sprawled in the floor, wrenching free of his hand. Still without any real clue of how she was supposed to divert the man, she lurched forward the moment she’d settled, trying to crawl away. Grabbing her by the back of her shirt, the guard thwarted her feeble attempt to escape, wrestled with her briefly and then hefted her from the floor and slung her over his shoulder.
The blow of landing on that hard shoulder was enough to knock the wind out of her. She didn’t have to fake that either. As she was struggling to catch her breath, however, she saw the rod strapped to his belt loop and, abruptly, everything fell into place.
There was one minor, insurmountable problem. She didn’t know how to work the thing and it seemed certain she wouldn’t have more than a few seconds to figure it out. He would feel it when she jerked it free.
She also didn’t know how to work the door of the cell.
One thing at a time, she told herself.
She allowed her arm to dangle just above the handle of the thing.
He reached back to grab it as they reached the cell.
She hadn’t thought about the fact that he’d used it before to make the men move back before he opened the door.
Shit!
