In the madness, a slender Tuncian girl bolted forward and threw her arms around Lu. Ben had seen her on the deck of theAstuto—she was one of Vex’s crew, like the tall Mecht woman who had caught up with them as they left the prison. Nayeli and Edda, Lu had told him.
Nayeli pulled back from Lu and looked at Vex.
“Did you find her?” Vex and Nayeli asked each other in tandem.
Nayeli’s eyes widened. “No onefound her?” She swung around. “Cansu! CANSU!”
Vex put a hand on her arm. “Maybe we didn’t hit all the prison’s levels.”
Next to them, Pierce whipped around from searching the crowd, likely for his husband. “Are you questioning Nathaniel’s methods?” He tapped the Budwig in his ear. “He says we searched every level. If we didn’t find someone, they aren’t here.”
Nayeli dove at Pierce, her fingers in claws. Edda caught her around the waist.
“Cansu could be in this madness,” Vex offered. “We’ll get to the escape boats and go to Port Mesi-Teab—it’s the first place the Tuncian Head would go.”
People ran, cannons blasted, and Nayeli screeched horror and frustration and grief. Edda heaved her around andthe two shot off into the courtyard along with the thinning stream of people, followed by Pierce and his raiders. Lu and Vex, his arm over her shoulders, limped across the trampled grass.
More cannons fired, more defensors were coming.
Ben took off, Gunnar hot behind him, ushering the last few stragglers out of the courtyard and to the twisting stone staircase that led to the prison’s wharf.
Docks stretched into the water, most holding quiet prison transports. To the left, other docks held steamboats for escape: two huge paddlewheels and five smaller boats with single smokestacks. Three had launched off into the water, their decks alive with escapees.
“Blaise!” a raider cried from the deck of a paddlewheel. “Where to? Head Blaise!”
A voice came from the crowd, disembodied—but furious.
“Port Mesi-Teab! God help me, Port Mesi-Teab!”
A cheer went up from here, there, a boat farther down. A decision had been made, one Ben couldn’t recognize, and he left it in the pile of things he would deal with later.
Ben and Gunnar leaped onto a paddlewheel with a wide deck of dented pale wood and a two-story section of rooms rising above the pilothouse. Ben looked over the railing and spotted Lu and Vex crouched on the deck of a different boat before a voice bellowed, “Off!”
The command echoed across the boats. A rev of engines, and the steamboats launched away from the docks, chargingout into the river as the final prisoners leaped to the decks.
None too soon. Defensors arrived close enough to fire at the escapees, bullets clanging off hulls, people shouting in fear. Orders volleyed, and defensors boarded the prison boats—
“The pipe’s broken!”
“This one, too!”
The raiders had disabled the prison transports. By the time the defensors found functioning craft, the escapees would be long gone.
Port Camden’s night-shadowed silhouettes faded, and a hush fell over Ben’s steamboat. He noted the gaunt, watchful faces across the deck—some prisoners, others raiders who had helped with the rescue, stricken by the sight of Port Camden shrinking into the night.
These people were likely Emerdian, then. Or had called Port Camden their home.
Someone started a lilting hymn about healing from sorrow. Others joined, and Ben winced. Were they singing for their own devotion, or had Elazar’s imprisonment manipulated them? Had monxes sung over them as they had over Ben and Lu? Without the antidote for the prison’s magic, hymns and prayers could have compounded, warping minds, stunting reason.
Ben started to remind these people that they were free and didn’t have to bow to Elazar’s influence. But tears streamed down the face of an elderly man, and Ben’s eyeslifted to Gunnar, behind him, shadowed in the heavy night.
“You will confirm that you are the traitor he has made you,”Gunnar had said in the first village Elazar had dragged them to.
What could the Crown Prince of Argrid do here, now?
Ben leaned against the railing, memorizing the shape of Port Camden’s buildings against the swell of the jungle, the rush and rise of the escapees singing.
He couldn’t help these people yet. He just wanted to remember this moment.
