Ash and Quill(7)

"They're gone," Thomas told him, and Jess opened his eyes. "You've turned the color of spoiled milk. Are you sick?"

Jess held up a finger to signal him to wait and then reached into his mouth to take hold of the slippery piece of string. Relax, he told himself, and gave it a steady pull. He couldn't hold back the half-retching cough as the pin slid free of his throat, but the temporary nausea was a small price to pay for the triumph of holding that pin up for Thomas to inspect. "Old street magician's trick," Jess told him, and pulled the looped string off his tooth. "Swallow it down, vomit it up. Preferably without vomit."

"That," Thomas said with real admiration, "is disgusting."

"Agreed." Jess wiped the hairpin off and carefully bent it flat, then began to work the center until it snapped into two halves. "So many useful things you learn running with a bad set."

"So I'm learning," Dario said from across the way. "What good will that do?"

"Lockpicks."

"So? You unlock our cells. We're still trapped in Philadelphia."

"Then I won't unlock yours."

"I take it back, dear English!"

Jess ignored him as he bent one of the halves into a tension wrench and the other into the beginnings of a pick. Thomas leaned forward to watch him work. "Do you need help?" he asked, and Jess shook his head. "Dario is right, you know. Opening a lock isn't escape."


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"It's one step toward it, and Dario's never right."

"You know I can hear you," Dario said. "Because you're talking out loud."

"Why do you think I said it?" Jess used the fulcrum of a cell bar to put a bend into the pick, then knelt at the door to try out the feel. It required adjustments, which he made patiently, bit by bit, testing the lock and learning its peculiarities.

"Khalila, are you all right?" Dario asked. His voice had shifted, gone warm and quiet. "I'm sorry for what he did to you. That was vile."

"I'm all right," she said. She couldn't see Dario from her side. Walls between them. "No damage done. You all stood with me. That matters more." Her voice was steady, but Jess could see her face. She was still shaken, and angry.

"Well," he said, because he couldn't think of anything other than the obvious truth, "we're all family here, aren't we? It's what family does."

She took in a quick breath and let it out slowly. "Yes," she said, "I suppose we are. And that means a great deal."

Jess went back to work on the lock. "Mind you, if I claim you as family, that's a huge step up for me, and probably several ones down for you," he said. "I never said it, but . . . sorry about my father letting us down, everyone. He's always been rubbish as a parent. I just thought he was a better businessman than to let Burners get the better of him in a deal." And sell me out in the process, he thought, but didn't say. It still hurt.

"That wasn't your fault," Morgan said. "My father tried to kill me, in case you've forgotten. Yours is the soul of family warmth next to him." She sat down on the bunk in her cell and pulled her feet up to sit cross-legged. "Oh, all right, I suppose I'll claim the lot of you as my kin, too."

"Try not to sound so enthusiastic about it," Glain said. "And, no offense, but I have a great father and mother and a lot of excellent brothers, so I'll be keeping them. Still, you make all right friends-I'll give you that."

Khalila sighed and stretched. "Our time is going to pass very slowly if the only entertainment is listening to you all insult one another, and they won't give us books."

"I can recite a few books," Thomas said. "If you're bored already." He began sonorously droning some desert-dry text about gear ratios he'd committed to memory while the others begged him to stop, and Jess muttered under his breath and felt the lock's stubborn, stiff mechanism and the unnerving fragility of his picks. Come on, he begged them. Work. He could feel the tension in the pick now and slipped the wrench in place for leverage. Hairpins weren't the ideal material for this, given the weight of the lock, and his fingertips told him the metal was bending under the strain. Needs better angles. He suppressed a groan and slipped the lockpicks free, studying the damage done, then began working carefully to put a sharper bend in the pick. Slipped them in place again, and suddenly, it felt as if the whole mechanism was laid out before him, brilliant white lines shining in his mind's eye. A subtle shift here, pressure there . . .