Capture (16 page)

The breath caught in my lungs.
Someone had hit him?

I sank down onto an empty cot beside Dad.
Would he be okay? Would he suffer any long term damage? Dad had always been the smartest person I’d ever known. The thought of him losing any of that brilliant intelligence made my eyes sting.

“
Can you help him?” I asked.

“
Give me a minute. Maybe I can reduce the swelling,” the woman muttered, her eyes still closed.

I felt every second tick by, could hear my every breath along with Hayden’s and the woman’s and my dad’s.

Finally, after what felt like an hour, the healer opened her eyes and smiled. “There. All patched up. He should come around in a few seconds.”

We waited, watching Dad’s face in the beam of Hayden’s flashlight.
When Dad’s eyelids began to flutter, I reached across the aisle and grabbed his suddenly too frail hand to let him know I was here.

Jumping at my gentle squeeze of his hand,
Dad opened his eyes and looked around. “Where—”

“
Shh, Dad,” I whispered. “We have to stay quiet. We’re in the prisoners’ building at the internment camp. Hayden’s breaking us out of here.”

Dad grimaced and rolled up onto an elbow, using his free hand to check the back of his head.
“Oh boy, that hurts. That’s what I get for refusing to join the mad doctor here. Feels like I cracked my brain pan.”

“
You did,” the healer murmured with a small smile. “You might have headaches for awhile as your skull finishes healing. Take it easy moving around, okay?” She slowly stood up. “I’d better go help the others.”

“Thank you...”

“Pamela,” she said, holding out a hand for me to shake.

“Thank you, Pamela.”

Dad smiled his thanks at her as she got up to go help someone else. Then he looked at me, blinked fast a couple of times and frowned. “Tarah, what are you doing here?”

“
Rescuing you, of course.” Well, minus the small hiccup of getting myself arrested and rescued first.

Dad sighed.
“Your mother’s going to kill me.”

I winced, realizing I’d forgotten to call her earlier and let her know where I was and that I was okay.
“Not if she kills me first.”

“
You feel up to getting out of here, Dr. Williams?” Hayden asked, offering my dad a strong hand.

“
I was ready to blow this joint the second I arrived,” Dad muttered. He let Hayden pull him upright.

The three of us were pretty slow in joining the group of detoxed adults at the dark end of the building
farthest from the door. Dad’s knees kept popping so loudly I worried the guards outside would hear them.

“
You’ve got a plan for how to get everyone out of here, right?” Mike whispered to me once we’d joined the others. “This whole prison break was your idea, after all.”

I winced. “Yeah, well, I was kind of hoping you guys would fill in the details.”

Hayden crossed his arms over his chest and frowned at Mike. “Can’t we just use your cloaking spell again to get them out a handful at a time the same way we came in?”

Mike cringed.
“Sorry, but no. We’re going to need a plan B. All this detoxing’s tapped me out. I’ve got five, maybe ten minutes of cloaking left in me tops.”

That wouldn’t be nearly enough time to get all these people out.

“
Can anyone else do a cloaking spell to get us out of here?” Hayden asked the group.

The answer was a whole lot of head shaking.

Oh crap.
I shared a worried look with Hayden.

Trying not to panic, I said,
“Come on, everyone. We need ideas here.”

Silence as everyone looked to everybody else in the dimly lit circle.

Finally a short guy at the back stepped forward.
“Uh, what about a freezing spell on the guards?”

“
You can freeze someone?” I hadn’t even known that kind of spell existed in real life.

The man nodded.
“The body’s ninety percent water. I just concentrate on that while using a basic freezing effect, and it locks them right up like a cryofreeze. Used to do it on my kid brother all the time when he was acting like a punk.”

A few men chuckled
quietly and were quickly hushed by the rest of the group.

“
Is your brother still alive?” Hayden asked, eyebrows raised. “We’re aiming for nonlethal stuff here.”

The man grinned.
“Yeah, he lived through it. Can’t promise he didn’t lose a few brain cells, though. I ‘might’ have forgotten to unfreeze him for a half hour or so once or twice.”

One corner of Hayden’s mouth twitched.
“Good enough...uh, what’s your name?”

“Harvey. Harvey Lansing.”

“Good to meet you, Harvey. Mike, can you cover him while he freezes all the guards?”

Mike nodded and walked with
Harvey towards the building’s door at the other end. When they were about ten feet away from us, they simply faded out of sight. A few minutes later, the building’s door eased open several inches, paused, then closed shut again without a sound.

“
Stay quiet and wait for the signal,” Hayden told the rest of the prisoners. Then he and I carefully picked our way through the rows of cots to the door, pressed close to the cold metal and listened.

We couldn’t hear a thing out there.

After a
couple of minutes of waiting in dead silence, Hayden turned off his flashlight and risked cracking the door open a centimeter. After several long seconds, he pointed to the left then the right and gave me a thumbs up, which I took to mean the guards at the door were frozen now.

Curious to know just what a frozen person looked like, I slipped in between him and the door and peeked out through the tiny sliver of an opening.
The guards at either side of the doorway weren’t moving. They weren’t breathing either, but were still standing at attention, which seemed a good sign. From what I could see of the nearest perimeter guards, nobody else had noticed yet.

I couldn’t see the freeze team.
They must have moved away so we weren’t included in Mike’s cloaking sphere. At first, I couldn’t even tell which perimeter guards they’d frozen so far. The guards didn’t move that much anyways. But after a few minutes, I could detect one difference. Unfrozen guards turned their heads an inch or two from side to side as they scanned the perimeter beyond the fence.

Three minutes passed.
Then five. Then seven. How much longer could Mike keep up the cloaking spell?

The flap on the tent building rustled.
The wind, or an outcast?

The crowd at the far end of the building began to get antsy.
Someone whispered “did it work?” too loudly and was hushed by several others.

The guard building's door opened a few inches and stayed open.
Two more minutes passed. I glanced at Hayden in time to see a bead of sweat slide down his temple despite the cold before he reached up and dragged his hoodie’s sleeve across his forehead.

Suddenly, our building’s
door moved out of Hayden’s hand. At the same time, Mike and Harvey reappeared before us.

Mike grinned, his eyes tired but relieved.
“Done.”

I blew out a long breath.
“Good job, guys.” Maybe we’d actually get out of this place alive after all.

Hayden turned towards the rest of the group
and gave the thumbs up.

Muffled whoops and whispering broke out as parents rushed to find their children and remove the drugs from their systems.
I hurried to the back end to find my dad intently watching Pamela, the female healer who had fixed his concussion, as she bent over a tiny blonde version of herself. When the little girl woke up and said “Mommy!”, Pamela’s teary smile brought tears to my own eyes. Dad grinned too, but his eyes still looked worried.

Pamela
wasn’t the only happy parent as more kids were detoxed. But the relieved parents’ smiles didn't last long.

“
What's the matter with Mommy?” one little girl asked as she joined the group.

She was the kid who had been leaning against her mother while her baby brother or sister died.

Pamela, who held her hand now, froze then crouched down beside her. “She's still asleep, honey.” Then she looked to Hayden, her eyebrows raised.

Wanting him to decide whether to wake up the girl's mother into a living nightmare.

The hint of Adam’s apple in his throat worked as he swallowed hard, and my chest ached. No one should be forced to make this decision. Who would want that woman to ever wake up and have to deal with such a loss?

“
Detox her only enough for her to be able to walk,” Hayden said, his voice gruff. Then he glanced down at me and caught me staring. “It’ll be safer and easier on everyone if the mother doesn’t have to be carried out completely. And this little girl needs her mother at least semi-awake too.”

But there was a haunting tightness around his eyes.
Was he worried that he was making a mistake?

I slipped my hand into his.
He stared at me for several long seconds, then squeezed my hand.

Pamela touched her sister’s wrist
. After a couple of minutes, two men helped her sister to her feet. She was obviously woozy, her eyelids only half raised, her eyes unfocused. And yet she still never let go of the bundle in her arms, even as she reached out to take hold of her daughter's hand.

Hayden’s jaw muscles clenched and unclenched as he took a few deep breaths and seemed to assess our group.
“Everyone ready to get out of here?”

Nods all around as families joined hands with their loved ones, all of them looking to Hayden to lead the way out.

“Then let's get out of here.” He opened the door wide and stepped out into the lights that flooded the camp like a football stadium, blinding me and forcing me to raise my free hand to shield my eyes until they could adjust to the radical change in light. He continued to hold my hand, guiding me while I couldn’t see. My dad shuffled behind me, the heel of his left shoe squeaking with each step in a reassuringly familiar way.

After a lot of blinking, my eyes finally started to adjust.
As we walked across the rocky, hard ground towards the gates, I looked back over my shoulder at the massive exodus of people following us to freedom. There must have been at least a hundred people in our group, maybe more, and every single one of their faces was so eager and hopeful. And all because of Hayden. In that moment, I had never felt so much pride for someone as I did for Hayden.

Again he caught me looking.
One corner of his mouth hitched up as his eyebrows rose in question.

“
You did it,” I told him, wondering if he had any idea just how huge his actions tonight were, what they meant for all these people here.

One corner of his mouth tightened in a half grin
. “Nah. It was really Mike and John who got us in here. And then all the healers helped out once they were awake. Not to mention how that guy Harvey really saved our butts with the freezing spell. All I did was buy a few flashlights and some bolt cutters.”

I shook my head.
He was just being modest. If not for him, I knew without a shadow of a doubt that we would all still be drugged out of our minds in that building, prisoners here until either the government changed its collectively crazy mind about descendants and outcasts or found a way to stop their magic. Or maybe killed all the outcasts instead.

Hayden had saved us.
And I had a hunch I wasn’t the only one here who would never forget it.

He reached for the gates' control box and hit the green buttons.
Both gates started to slide open with a loud clatter of metal. This was it. We were free and taking everyone with us!

Jeremy would be so jealous.
He was always talking about how much luck and determination it took to be in the position of having a firsthand account of an event like this. I glanced around me, wanting to remember every single detail so I could describe what this moment was like to him. He’d be able to write one heck of a story about it.

“
Hey!” a man shouted from the opposite end of the compound.

Hayden dropped my hand as we both spun around to find a perimeter guard running around the buildings towards us.

Then the two at the prisoner building entrance stumbled back to life.

A fourth emerged from the guards’ building, sleepily rubbing his eyes.

Either the freeze team had missed a few guards, or the freeze
spell wasn’t lasting nearly as long as our guy had expected. Whatever the reason, we were all totally screwed.

“
Stop or we'll shoot!” one of the guards yelled.

Three of the guards raised their rifles.
The fourth froze then took off for the officer tent. Probably to call for backup.