Out there, I would be vulnerable.
Easy to see if anyone turned around.
Easy to shoot if they aimed.
Easy for my entire life to go up in flames if I tripped and fell.
Easy for someone to have lied and my device not to work as promised.
So many problems.
Everything had to go perfectly for me to escape.
But it wasn’t the first time I had the odds stacked against me and lived to tell the tale.
I was a pirate. We functioned on probabilities.
Still, this was one bet I would not take.
And neither would anyone else if they had a single ounce of common sense.
I nodded and sprinted into the open arms of the hangar.
I guess I didn’t have an ounce.
My strides were long and ate up space as if my life depended on it which, unsurprisingly, it did.
I timed my breathing to coincide with my legs’ long strides. I didn’t stop, didn’t turn to look back over my shoulder, didn’t dare to even consider one of the guards had spotted me.
I ran as fast as my legs could carry me and right now, right then, that seemed enough for me to focus on.
I threw my arms back and used them to drive my legs even longer. I intended on obliterating a few speed records while I was making my break from the prison.
In one hand I clutched my device, holding it to one side like a shield, and in a strange way, that was what it was.
In my other hand was Agatha’s hand. She didn’t collapse or struggle to keep up. She was right there at my side every step of the way.
I didn’t check to see if I accidentally tugged her arm out of its socket. I didn’t check to see if she had lost her breath. These things were in my thoughts but I couldn’t be concerned with them right now.
She either kept up or she got left behind.
There was no middle ground.
My boots were monstrously loud on the floor. I wished they were silent the way they were in my mind.
The sound bounced and echoed off the back wall, toward the front of the room.
In my mind’s eye, I imagined the guards turning to see what was making all that racket.
Still, as much as my senses were telling me to look, I didn’t.
I daren’t.
It could knock me off my stride, could make me see things that weren’t there.
I couldn’t take the risk.
And I kept on running.
How Agatha was keeping up with me, I had no idea, but she was.
Finally, after what felt like an eternity, we reached the closing door.
They were less than two yards apart now.
I had left it a little too late but hopefully, my device would still work.
I skidded to a halt and dropped Agatha’s hand.
I moved my device forward slowly, adjusting it again as the cajoling of the run had knocked it off-center.
I lined the cylinders up with the streaks of electricity, matching the grid pattern they created across the open door.
Once I was done with each side, I let out a breath and pressed the device into the latticework.
It hummed and crackled with power.
It sounded very dangerous—even to me.
I shoved Agatha behind me as a bolt of electricity splintered off the device and struck me.
It fried my shoulder in an instant and made my flesh burn.
I didn’t ease my grip on the device and shoved it further into place.
One by one, the shards of electricity lined up with the device’s cylinders.
Yes! It worked!
The device sparked, hurling another yellow bolt of electricity.
This one missed me and struck the rear thrusters of the shuttlecraft behind me.
“Is that it?” Agatha said between rasping breaths. “Now what?”
“I’ll show you now what,” I said.
I reached for the little lever and slid it across.
As it did, it opened up a small open doorway in the security field.
Was it safe? Would a random bolt of electricity strike me the moment I stepped through it? I didn’t know.
“Hey!” a guard bellowed. “Hey, you! Hold it right there!”
I planned on doing many things, but holding it right here wasn’t one of them.
I emptied my mind of all thought as I hopped through the tiny doorway and…
Emerged on the other side.
The air contained the same dusty dry “red” as it had inside the hangar but the air I breathed now was cleaner somehow, fresher.
The air only a recently-free man could savor because he was so used to living on the fetid stench of recycled air that’d passed through a thousand other lungs before reaching his.
But I was alone and Agatha wasn’t with me.
The doors were shutting one inch at a time and any moment, with less than a foot to go, they were going to crush my little device into oblivion and the doorway would no longer exist.
“Agatha?” I said.
She stood on the other side, the device forming a frame around her like a still photograph.
Even the expression on her face was frozen like a photo. It depicted a pained expression lacking certainty.
The only moving elements of the photo were the guards running toward her—toward the both of us—and the shrinking time she had to hop through that doorway before it was too late.
She had frozen, unable to move even a muscle.
I’d had months to decide what I would do once I met this situation. I had made up my mind a long time ago. And I still had a few last-minute concerns.
But that didn’t alter the fact I would jump through it.
She’d been thrust into this position for less than an hour and, although she no doubt had dreamed of escaping this hell, she probably never thought escape was possible, least of all that it would happen right here and now.
I didn’t know why she hesitated.
She had no more to lose than I did.
They wouldn’t confine her to solitary the way they would with me.
She had the opposite problem.
They would sell her to a pleasure house where she would be worked to death, first with the finest clients, then the middle-class ones, then the
