Thus came two days of solitude. Two days of sleeping hunched with my back against the wall, or alternatively on my side, only to wake up in the morning and find my ribs bruised, my hip aching.
Maybe if I hadn't deliberately fanned the flames of his anger in our last conversation then Ezra would have appealed on my behalf. I was owed food twice a day, but no comforts, not even a bed, let alone a blanket.
In my pessimism-addled brain, I worried over the neglectful treatment, aware they could only treat me so immorally - illegally, even - in good conscience if they saw no future in which I walked free and spread word of their misdeeds to litigation-happy lawyers and lawmakers. Even if I could, part of me believed the Guild and the Supers therein were above the law. Who would really challenge the most physically powerful - and dangerous - organization in the country over one girl's mistreatment?
That benefited no one.
On the third day, my jailers seemed to understand how very serious I was about not cooperating, and a pair of Supers moved me to a more long term holding cell. To my mixed disappointment and relief, Tempest was not among them. Flicker, however, was, ensuring I stood no chance of escape, and the other was the perpetually covered man, Fate, who showed little skin even by Super standards. He never glanced my way, as though I was that far beneath him that it pained him to do so. He merely shut me in my new prison under Flicker's watchful eye and then they were gone. Vanished.
In what I presumed to be the morning of each successive day, someone stopped by to inquire as to how unhelpful I was feeling, and every time they asked I showed them exactly how antagonistic I could be. So, imagine my shock when, on my ninth day of captivity, I finally put my weight into forcing the door open and the door swung wide without resistance. In fact, I fell flat on my back with a great, pained, "oomph," from the force of my own unchecked strength.
In retrospect, I ought to have tried the knob normally before resorting to brute force, not that I ever thought I stood a remote chance of breaking the door down.
Warily, I poked my head into the corridor, refusing to believe they'd go through all this effort to keep me around, and yet leave the door unlocked, the corridor largely unguarded. I, admittedly, was not much of a threat, but the lack of security felt like a personal affront. It didn't make much sense, until further examination of the latch revealed a broken lever within the locking mechanism, rusted entirely into obsolescence.
Genuinely, I couldn't remember having a greater stroke of luck in my life, and the sudden change in my fortune proved suspicious enough that I paused, debating whether this was a trap of some kind. "Convenience" was not a concept I was familiar with. Good things didn't happen to me for no reason, and I didn't see why that would change now.
But I couldn't let my apprehension lead to inaction. Not when Atticus needed me.
At the sound of voices coming from one end of the long hallway, I took towards the other end at a atrophied sprint, rounding a corner and then down a set of stairs, where my path diverged into three. The presence of downward leading stairs told me I was heading in the right direction. I hadn't connected the dots at first. Only many full days and nights of near isolation, only my own wandering thoughts as company allowed me to realize the obvious: What could possibly be below the lowest floors of the Guildhall? Made of mostly Thaumaturge-proof stone, an underground prison I'd only ever heard of, designed especially to hold my kind. Atticus had to be down there with me somewhere. I needed only to find him without getting caught.
At the sight of a male guard patrolling one of my potential routes, I hurtled down one of the remaining paths at random. Windowless doors with strange sliding handles flew past on both sides at evenly spaced intervals. I would have liked to stop and peer into each of those rooms in turn, were it not for the voices following after me, unhurried, but undeniably there.
Wait.
They weren't following me. Not all of them, at least.
Some were in front of me, too, unwittingly caging me in.
I nearly flung myself off my feet in my haste to skid to a halt, my hand blindly finding one of the nearby doors and jerking it open. Unlocked, fortunately. Ducking inside, I slid the unbelievably heavy, abysmally loud contraption closed and waited with baited breath for the sound of the oblivious pursuit to pass.
"Are we up to no good?" whispered a wily, overtly feminine voice, the owner having gone unnoticed while I monitored the door.
My spine nearly shot out of my skin, and I whirled to face my unexpected company. "Who are you?" I asked.
A slow smile spread across a woman's face from behind thick stone bars, wider than each of my wrists. "No, who are you? You don't belong here. I do."
I swallowed, mouth suddenly dry. "That obvious?"
Visibly giving me a once-over, smirk ever-present, she said, "Yes. The lack of boring gray is one thing, but the most glaring clue is that you're here in front of me at all, when everyone knows only Aqua can handle me."
I believed her when she implied she was trouble. Any supervillain spelled trouble, but her straightjacket trapping her arms into useless extensions of her torso told me she was especially so. Padding made up the entirety of her cell. No tables. No bed. Nothing with a hard edge.
Either displeased by my scrutiny or otherwise choosing to provide an example of why only the water-user could control her, she bit down on her lip, drawing blood, and across the four feet separating us, sprayed her bloody saliva onto my arm.
"What-" The rest of the sentence got bit off by my teeth snapping together, clenching through a spark of burning pain, the type of pain that lingered, like accidentally reaching for a pan straight out of the oven before giving it time to cool. The type of pain that had you rushing to hold your hand underneath a running faucet for hours.
Her blood ate clean through my clothes, burrowing down into my skin. I took an involuntary step back from her cell when she added, "Don't be dramatic. It won't completely riddle you with holes, since my blood was diluted by my spit. You're welcome for that, by the way. I'm not so generous with everyone. But," her feverish green eyes were locked on my rapidly closing wound, "clearly there's more to you than meets the eye."
"I can see why they keep you locked up," I managed. Already, the pain was beginning to fade as my skin healed over to an angry red, until even that faded. "Clearly you don't play well with others."
"My neighbor in my old cell block would probably agree with you, if they were still alive. That was before they tossed me in here. They made sure not to make the mistake of giving me a roommate again."
I took another step towards the door, increasingly willing to take my chances on the patrolling guards outside having passed. "So you're a murderer."
She shrugged. "Thief by trade, murderer by choice. She deserved it, if that helps things."
"I'll just... be going now."
In a musical voice, loud enough to make me cringe for the fear of who might overhear, as was no doubt her intention, she said, "I hope you have a good plan, because if you're in here, you can't be doing too hot so far." In a flash, she rammed her face into the bars, glaring up at me through her lashes with her chin tilted down. "Let me out and I might even help you. Obviously, you're not one of them, so that means you're one of us, taking your chance at an escape. I'm right, aren't I?" A bright, jubilant laugh. "You're not going to make it very far with only healing on your side. Help me help you."
I must have been half as insane as she seemed, because I seriously considered the offer. "What assurances do I have that you won't kill me?"
"What?" she prodded liltingly. "You don't trust me?"
Nope, and rapidly trusting her less with each shared sentiment. I amended, "What assurances do I have that I'm not releasing a serial killer onto the streets that will murder random innocents?"
Her lips puckered into pout. "You know, for a fellow prisoner, you're awfully judgmental. That murder was a one-off, and didn't I already tell you she deserved it? Killed her husband and kids in a fit of uncontrolled, superpowered rage, she did. Kept begging to die, so I did her a favor. I put enough of my blood in her water and she drank it riiiiiight up like she couldn't get enough. Poor dear. Just like that, I got myself a private room. Nice, isn't it? Spacious."
Talking to this woman was making me feel ill, but I lacked the luxury of options, so I said, "I don't have a key. I don't know how to get you out, even if I could."
"Not a problem." She turned, pressing her back against the stone bars between us and speaking over her shoulder. "Undo my buckles restraining my arms. I can do the rest."
Aware I was possibly making a very, very poor decision, I did as bid, wrestling the straps free one after another. "I'm actually looking for someone."
"How cute," she replied in a flat, bored voice that plainly wondered what that had to do with her.
I pressed on, moving to the last buckle. "If anyone can get us out of here, it'll be him. He used to work down here, so he'll know the layout, and when we're outside, hopefully he'll be able to teleport us away."
So much hinged on that single word: hopefully. Hopefully, the shadows would be the power available to him when we found him. Hopefully, he was in a state to use them.
Hopefully, we'd find him at all before being captured.
At last shrugging off her straightjacket with a shuddering sigh of relief, the woman faced me with that eerie slow smile and said, "The more the merrier! The guards call me Cobra, but you can call me Skye."
*~*~*~*~*
It soon became evident why the Guild saw fit to restrain her in the manner they did, and place her into such a bizarre cell.
"They can do their best to make sure almost every inch of our prison is made of that blasted stone," she explained, bringing the pad of her thumb up to an incisor filed sharp and biting down until blood welled to the surface. Her hands were riddled with scars. "But, unfortunately for them, not everything can be made of stone, such as the inside of the locks." As she said this, she reached blindly around to the outside of her bars and coated the keyhole in her blood, letting droplet after droplet dribble inside and sizzle against the metal therein. Satisfied, she drew the cell door open with a nudge, tasting the first fragment of freedom she'd had in I couldn't say how long. "Easy enough work for me."
What I hadn't agreed to, but stood no real chance of stopping, was Skye's insistence on releasing every prisoner we passed. Perhaps she had no homicidal intentions, but surely at least one person we loosed in the corridors had no such qualms.
"A wee distraction never hurt anyone," Skye said innocently, though I had a strong feeling this one would.
The isolated rooms for the imprisoned thaumaturges not trusted with their fellows gradually cleared out in favor of the side-by-side cells built straight into the hallway, unhidden behind doors, and still Atticus was nowhere to be found.
"Methinks the guards have discovered our little escape plot," Sky mused when we heard a sharp uptick of commotion in the distance, "and your boyfriend is nowhere in sight. Looks like we'll have to find our own way out, doesn't it?"
"No!" I said sharply. "You said you'd help, and I'm not leaving without him."
"I said I'd help you escape. I made no such promises for him."
"Just another minute and you can leave without me, got it?"
By that point, I was running outright, calling his name at the top of my lungs. I was so far beyond the point of incriminating myself that nothing else mattered anymore. Just him.
Atticus. Atticus. Atticus. Atticus. Atticus. Atticus. Atticus. Atticus. Atticus-
I ran headlong into a guard, body crashing and breaking against another body. We fell from the force of the collision, myself on top. When she made an attempt to push me off, I slammed her by the shoulders back into the ground. I couldn't hear anything over the sound of my own screaming, "WHERE IS HE? WHERE ARE YOU KEEPING HIM? TELL ME!"
Expression gripped by a feral brand of rage, her teeth bared, the Super - one I knew, had even spoken to on occasion - drew moisture from the atmosphere and forced it down my throat, up my nose, into my lungs. I balled my hand into a fist and struck her hard in the temple. A brief shock of pain told the poor form of my punch broke my thumb, before it righted itself moments later. She went slack after a second and third blow.
Sputtering, I dragged myself off Aqua's unconscious form. To Skye, I said hoarsely, "You could have helped."
"As much as I would have loved to get a little payback on my favorite warden, you looked like you had that covered. Besides, I can't heal myself if I drown. There's more at stake for me."
"I don't know if I can heal from drowning, either," I countered. "That's not like a normal injury."
"Now would have been an excellent time to find out, wouldn't it?" she said, dismissive. "Help me drag her into one of the cells so she won't be an issue when she wakes."
"Do that yourself." I couldn't waste anymore time. Soon, the place would be swarming with guards.
I didn't catch her response, because I had already taken off by the first syllable off her tongue.
"Atticus?" I called again, for what felt like the thousandth time, my throat growing scratchy from overuse.
Then I heard it: two syllables, uttered so faintly I nearly missed them.
"Lily."