Chapter Four

Now she sank to her knees on the wooden floor and tugged a pin out of her hair; all the doors were locked from the inside at ten o’clock. In less than forty seconds, she’d unlocked the door to the yard outside and was back on her feet. She swung the door open and shivered at the blast of freezing wind.

Nothing and nobody to the left, nor to the right. The outside field area was still and empty in the moonlight, and she took a deep breath.

“OK,” she said out loud and hearing her own voice seemed to steady her. “Here we go.”

Iris tugged the coat tighter around her to protect herself from the cold, then she paused. A wild burst of stupid courage rose in her, higher and stronger, a roaring rebellious need to say a few defiant words on her way out the door. A final departing shot like an old Western, a cutting one-liner just before blowing someone’s face off like a mafia movie. Just something.

But words had never been her strong suit – not even back before she was Iris – so instead she looked up at the camera above the door, stared deep into its emotionless black eye. Then she gave it a huge, beaming smile – and raised her middle finger, picturing Gideon watching the video of this moment the next morning.

Fuck. You.

Stepping out of the building was the strangest combination of terrifying and elating, and Iris took a deep, calming breath. The two Guardians at the front gate were snug and warm in their little building, just sitting there and drinking coffee from thermoses and eating sandwiches that Iris herself had made them earlier. She knew that they wouldn’t budge from their chairs, not even to do a perimeter lap, because what for? They had the motion sensors to do the work for them – but she knew all the blind spots and safe spots.

When she had first started planning her escape, Iris had toyed with the idea of drugging the Guardians’ nightly coffee, since she was in charge of preparing all their food. She imagined herself waltzing past the two slumbering forms, right on out the front gate, a triumphant exit with dignity and sass.

After several nights’ contemplation she rejected that notion, simply because it had too many unknowns: what if only one of them had coffee that night? What if they only had one sip each? What if they were sleeping and another Guardian happened by, wandering aimlessly waiting for Gideon to finish the Ritual, and he sounded the alarm when he couldn’t rouse them from their drug-induced stupor? What if they spilled the thermos’ contents? And so on and so on, too many ‘what ifs’ and ‘maybes’ and she realized that she had to find a more controlled way out, even if that meant with the guards awake.

And then she’d found the way.

She turned right now, away from the guardhouse, and headed for the chain-link fence area closest to the woods. There was a loose section there where one of the metal posts had pulled away and out of the earth a bit; Iris had made a point of walking past it a few times when she’d brought the men their coffee outside in the yard, and she knew that she could slide through the gap. She was very small – well, all the woman-servants were, it was Gideon’s preference and he starved them so they were even smaller – and she was pretty flexible.

Less than a minute later, she had poked the flashlight through the holes in the fence, taken off her heavy coat, thrown it over and clear of the barbed wire at the top of the chain-link mesh, and was on her stomach sliding under the fence. The space between the hard ground and the bottom of the fence wasn’t very wide, and the chain-link edges caught on the oversized cardigan as she pulled herself under and through. She thought that she’d made it – when something snagged and held. Iris flailed and twisted and turned this way and that, desperately trying to get loose.

No go. Argh.

With a huge sigh, she wriggled out of the unbuttoned cardigan and then she was on her feet on the other side. She pulled on the cardigan, pulled hard, and with a horrible loud rip it came free, now with a sizable tear down the back. She didn’t care, she barely paused as she stuck her arms through the sleeves, put on the coat, hat and mittens, and wrapped one scarf around each of her bare legs. She turned on the flashlight and aimed the beam at the trees looming in front of her.

“OK,” she again, this time to the stars above. “Let’s start walking.”