Page 9 of The Winner's Kiss
She wanted to scream at him to stop, she wanted to grab him through the bars and make him stay, make him get her out now. But she heard herself say, “I promise,” and then he was gone.
She sat for a long time looking at the key on her palm. She thought about Verex. Her fingers curled around the key. She dug a hole in the dirt and buried it.
Curling up with her hands beneath her cheek, she rested her head right above the buried key. She tucked her knees in close and toyed with the knots that bound her cut dress to her legs. Kestrel’s mind, though still sticky and slow, began to work. She didn’t sleep. She began to plan—a real plan, this time—and as she arranged the different possibilities there was a part of her that reached for Verex in her mind. She embraced her friend. She thanked him. She dropped her head to his shoulder, breathing deeply. She was strong now, she told him. She could do this. She could do it because she knew that she hadn’t been forgotten.
The senator left. There were several lean, thirsty days. Once Kestrel caught the guard in charge of the women prisoners watching as she spilled her drugged water to the dirt, but the guard just gave her the sort of look a mother gives a misbehaving child. Nothing was said.
It worried Kestrel to grow weaker than she already was. She wasn’t sure how she’d survive the tundra in her condition. But she needed to keep her wits about her. She was lucky it was summer. The tundra was brimming with fresh water. It was full of life. She could raid birds’ nests. Eat moss. She could avoid the wolves. She could do anything, as long as she got out of here.
Her body didn’t like being weaned off the drugs. She shook. Worse, she craved the nighttime drug. In the morning, it wasn’t so hard to pretend to eat and drink, but at twilight she wanted to gulp every thing down. Even the thought of it made her throat dry with desire.
She waited as long as she could for the senator’s sake. One warm night in her cell, she untied two lengths of rope from around her legs. She adjusted her makeshift trousers, which were held together with the remaining knots the guard had tied on Kestrel’s first day in the camp. The trousers looked more or less the same as they had before.
Kestrel knotted her two pieces of rope together. She tied them with the strongest knot her father had taught her to make. She tugged at the new length—about as long as four of her hands, from fingertips to wrist. It held. She curled it up and shoved it down her dress.
Tomorrow would be the day.
Kestrel made her move after the prisoners returned from the mines.
In the fuzzy, greenish twilight, Kestrel pretended to take her meal. Her heartbeat still held a trace of the morning drug; it tripped over itself. Then it seemed to steady, pulse strong. Kestrel should have been nervous, but she wasn’t. She was sure. This would work. She knew that it would.
The silver-braided guard led Kestrel and the other female prisoners into their block of cells. They turned down Kestrel’s hallway. Unseen, Kestrel slipped the knotted rope from her dress. She made a fist around it and let that fist rest against her thigh in the shadows. The guard imprisoned women one by one. Then, her back turned, she stood before Kestrel’s cell and unlocked it.
Kestrel came up behind her, rope stretched taut between her hands. The rope went down over the woman’s head and tightened around her throat.
The woman thrashed. Kestrel had the wild thought of having caught an enormous fish. She clung hard, ignoring the wheezing. Even though she was rammed back against a wall, she didn’t let go. She tightened the rope until the woman slumped and collapsed.
Kestrel ran into her cell and feverishly dug up the key to the gate. When she came back into the hallway and saw the woman on the floor, the cell door key having fallen from her hand, she registered the other prisoners, standing where they had been, their faces blank but their bodies uncertain, fingers twitching at their sides. They were aware enough to know that this was not how evenings went. None of the women, though, seemed to know what to do about it.
“Come with me,” Kestrel said to them, though this offer was foolish enough to border on suicidal. How would she get them to the gate without being noticed? She couldn’t save the entire camp. How would they survive on the tundra, and not be caught? But . . . “Come with me,” she said again. She moved back down the hallway, toward the exit. She beckoned them after her. They stood still. When Kestrel took a woman’s hand, it was snatched back.
Finally, Kestrel picked up the cell door key that had fallen to the ground and pressed it into a prisoner’s hand. The fingers stayed loose. The key dropped.
Frustration surged through Kestrel—and relief, and shame at her relief. She wanted to apologize. Yet she wanted most of all to live, and she knew—the knowledge was sudden, lancing, sharp—that if she didn’t leave now, she would die here.
Kestrel clutched the gate key. “I’ll leave the gate open,” she promised.
No one replied.
She turned and ran.
It wasn’t dark enough. She cursed the greenish sky. Someone was going to spy her shadow, creeping along the outside wall of her prison block.
But no one did. The windows of the guards’ barracks burned brightly. She heard laughter. She saw one lone guard by the gate. The young man was leaning lazily against the bars.
Still crouched in the shadow of the prison barracks, Kestrel shifted the heavy key in her palm, its jagged teeth pointing out.
The guard at the gate shifted. She thought she saw him close his eyes as he sighed and settled into a more comfortable position.
Swiftly, her tattered shoes silent over the ground, Kestrel sped toward him. She swung her fist with the key at his head.
He lay in a heap at her feet, his temple bleeding. Kestrel fumbled with the key, her breath loud, gasping. It wasn’t until she moved to set the key into the gate that she thought of the possibility that it was the wrong key, that she had been tricked, or Verex had, or the senator.
Horror spiked through her. But the key went in smoothly and it turned, making no more sound than a knife in butter.
A giddy rush. Her heart soaring in her chest. Her ribs spread wide with relief. A laughing breath.
She pushed the gate open. She slipped out onto the tundra, stealthy at first, then running as fast as a deer.
