While Cannon and Rach are busy loudly cracking tough things like skulls and emotional barriers, Tay and Lex take a quieter approach. The distance between the cell block they were in and Warden Morgan’s office is much shorter than the distance between the cells and the confiscation closet, which means they have the relative luxury of time. They also have the luxury of likely not needing to do any fighting. This is great news for Tay. She’s plenty deadly when armed with her cards, but she’s pretty neutered without them. She could surely handle herself against random townsfolk, but armed prison guards would likely give her more than a run for her money.
Lex, of course, would lose a fight against an unarmed infant. That’s not really true, but it isn’t much of an exaggeration. This world isn’t quite a hell-scape, but with bug monsters, murderous marauders, and plenty of other wacky boogeymen, it’s more or less a constant trial by fire for its inhabitants. Anyone who has any exposure to the wild, untamed parts of the earth outside of civilization, such as Cannon and Tay, have at least a solid modicum of toughness. Even civilization is gruff enough to forge strong fighters out of those who live within its walls, such as Rach. Lex, however, is a different breed. His flavor of civilization is more like what you may know. Reading your silly little book, cozied up on a couch, swaddled in blankets like a newborn.
If you feel as though you relate to any characters in this book other than Lex, you’re probably wrong. He, much like (probably) you, would go down after a single punch to the face, and probably wouldn’t have the wherewithal to throw a punch at all. For you, that’s okay. Unless bug monsters start taking over your world, you probably don’t have much to worry about. Lex didn’t have much to worry about prior to leaving home. Now that he finds himself in the middle of a Marauder’s kill-filled version of Shawshank Redemption, he has very much to worry about. Good kid, a bit flawed, pretty much dead weight in a fight.
With all this in mind, he’s relatively happy with his current position. Definitely not happy in the absolute sense, but he’d rather be here being sneaky with Tay than being loud and skull-cracky with Cannon and Rach. Yes, sure, Tay is essentially actively in the act of trying to kidnap Lex, but he at least knows that she has a vested interest in his well-being. Cannon and Rach seem nice enough, but the only people who they need to emerge from this adventure safely is themselves. Tay needs Lex to be alive and relatively unharmed, which is great news for him because those are two of his favorite things to be. As they slink along the hallway, Lex looks at Tay with perplexity. She is simultaneously an angel of death and an angel of life. His main antagonist, as well as his most devout protector. She’s an interesting one.
There are a lot of ways to describe Tay, especially when seen through Lex’s eyes. However, the one word that rings the loudest in his head is sneaky. Seriously fucking sneaky. Tay spends no caloric expense to be as absolutely silent as she possibly can be. She knows, and Lex can intuit, that the past day or two have gone about as not according to plan as possible. She needs this current plan to work, or her whole world will collapse in on itself. In order to complete this mission successfully, she needs to be very, very, sneaky, and she is putting on a fucking master class.
Watching Tay work fills Lex with equal parts amazement and dread. She’s meticulous about every footstep, rolling her feet and curling her toes with such precision that there’s effectively no noise coming from her feet at all. On a physical level, it’s weirdly discomforting to see something as familiar as footsteps against linoleum and to not hear the corresponding sound. More than that, though, it’s ruining him on a mental level. He knows that Tay’s short term plan is to kidnap him and ransom him safely, but what of her long term plans? She can make herself a phantom when she wants to, what’s to stop her from materializing in his bedroom in the palace of New Boston and kidnapping him again?
He has a minor panic attack about what the distant future may hold for him, but it subsides quickly enough when they arrive at a door marked Warden Morgan, at which point he has a major panic attack about what the immediate future will definitely hold for him. The success of the plan hinges on many things, the most pressing of which is whether or not the warden is in, and whether or not his keys are with him. If he is in, and if his keys are in hand, then Lex is quite sure that he’s got about two more minutes left of being alive, at which point one swift swipe from the warden’s weaponized keyring will send him up or down to whatever world exists beyond this one (spoiler alert, it’s complicated).
Lex steels himself when he sees Tay reach her hand out for the knob. As she does, she presses her other palm up against the door. She twists the knob as slowly as Lex has every seen anyone do anything, and when she starts to pull it open, she pushes against the door with equal force with her other hand. The result is mind bending. Much like with Tay’s footsteps up to this point, she manages to creek open the door with zero audible sound. Lex pictures his bedroom door back at home opening silently to reveal the face of the Marauder killer. He stifles a yelp, making a small noise like a swallowed cough. Tay whips her head at his and says quite clearly with her eyes, if you so much as make a single sound, I’ll gut you like the pig you are. Or, at least, something along those lines.
Putting her attention back to the matter at hand, she slowly pushes the door slightly further open. Anyone in the room who happened to be looking at the door while she does this would obviously see it - she’s sneaky, but she’s not invisible. That said, anyone in the room who happened to be looking anywhere else in the room likely wouldn’t. She works so slowly and quietly that, unless you were looking right at it, you wouldn’t even know it was happening.
She puts her ear up to the gap and listens in. No conversation. No footsteps. No breathing. Unless she’s mistaken, the room is totally empty. Lex leans in and hears the same. Both of them experience a jumping sensation in their stomachs, the sensation that things might actually go how they want them to go. Maybe, just maybe, Warden Morgan is out to lunch, and he’s left his keys here. Maybe they’ll be able to get out of town in one piece after all.
Tay pushes the door ever so slightly more. Then a bit more, then more still until, finally, the door is open enough for she and Lex to walk through. They cautiously move in, then breathe a collective sigh of relief when they see for sure that nobody is home. Tay closes the door behind them as quietly as she opened it. The two of them look around.
The office is plain, about as no frills as the man who likely spends most of his time here grumbling and groaning about the town’s constant ne’er-do-well problem. There’s a large metal desk, a pretty uncomfortable looking chair, and a few metal filing cabinets. One window with the shade drawn. No decorations, no posters with a sad cat telling you to hang in there. Unfortunately for Lex and Tay, no blatantly obvious set of keys.
This last observation lands in Lex’s stomach like a wriggling piranha. Between that, the claustrophobia of the small office, and the intrusive daydreams of Tay phasing through the walls of his bedroom and slicing him open with a razor sharp Amex, he starts to lose it a bit. He hyperventilates and doubles over, clenching his knees with white knuckles.
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
“We need-- You can’t-- Oh boy.” He alternates between long, loud breaths in and short, rapid fire breaths out.
“Relax.”
“I’m sorry-- I’m sorry, I can’t-- Oh man.” He coughs, then takes another deep breath in and manages to exhale it with some level of stability. “Sorry. I’m sorry. I’m being really loud, shit.”
“I said, relax. It’s okay. As long as we keep it to a whisper, we should be good in here.”
Lex nods. He’s again impressed with how well Tay is able to project and enunciate while keeping her voice at a low volume. It’s not like she’s whispering, it’s like she’s talking with the volume turned down. “Okay. Okay. Calm. Whisper. We got this. Except for the fact that Warden Morgan’s keys aren’t here, we got this. Totally fine, everything is awesome.”
Tay grabs Lex by the collar. He tenses up and winces, anticipating a cartoonish slap and a command for him to pull himself together. Tay sees this reaction and loosens her grip. “Lex. I need you to relax. We’re fine. The keys are probably in one of these drawers.” She gestures at the desk and the various cabinets.
“Right, right. And if they aren’t, then we’re sitting ducks and the whole town will think I killed that guy and my dad will--”
Tay delivers a cartoonish slap and a command for him to pull himself together.
Lex shakes his head to get his bearings back, then nods as if they’d just had a good pep talk.
He starts rummaging through the drawers of the desk while she goes to town on the cabinets. While he does, his mind wanders. He wonders how long it would take for him to no longer be considered an enemy of the town. Someone from the town would have to send a runner to New Boston, that runner would have to wait until the king would have the time to meet with him, then that runner would have to return to Camp Trin and get the word back to Warden Morgan. He knows enough about the general lack of expediency of things like this, so he figures it would take, at the very least, a full day. By that point, Lex would either have escaped with Tay or been hunted and killed by the town watch. In other words, Tay really is his only hope. He shudders at the though and continues opening and closing drawers.
The daydreaming is definitely slowing Lex down, but so is the fact that he’s trying to be as quiet as Tay is. He’s having very little luck, of course. In the time that it takes Lex to search one desk drawer, Tay has already searched an entire file cabinet, and she’s managed to make less noise than Lex while doing so. He feels a little silly even wasting time doing any searching at all. Tay will probably check these drawers again to make sure that Lex didn’t miss anything. He may as well be--
--Wait a minute.
“Holy shit,” he says, his voice far louder than the agreed upon whisper.
“Shh,” Tay snaps, not looking up from her cabinet.
“I got it.”
This gets Tay’s attention. In a momentary lapse in judgment, slams the cabinet drawer shut. The clang of metal on metal reverberates through the office. Anyone walking by just then certainly would have heard it, but she’s too excited to care. She strides up to Lex. “No way.”
“Look!” He holds the keyring up in front of him. It’s the same one they all saw earlier: Long lanyard with a large keyring attached, dangling from which is an eclectic assortment of keys, blades, and blocks.
“Amazing stuff,” Tay says, finding her whisper again. “Let me see it.”
She tries to take the keyring from Lex, but he yoinks it away like a Charlie Brown football.
Her face darkens. “What are you doing?”
“Why do you get to carry it?”
“I just want to see it.”
“No.”
“Lex.”
“What? I don’t think I’m crazy for wanting the tiniest iota of leverage here.”
“Give it to me. Now.”
“No! You kidnap me, you incriminate me, you threaten to come break into my bedroom. I’m having this one thing.”
“What? I didn’t-- Lex, give me the keys.”
“No.”
“I’m not asking again.”
“You’re not getting them.”
“Come here, you little--” She grabs Lex by the collar again, and he immediately seizes up. Even still, he manages to keep the lanyard out of reach. They get themselves into classic sibling squabble stance: Tay grabbing Lex’s collar, Lex pushing her face away with one hand and keeping the lanyard outstretched behind him with the other, Tay grasping at it with her free hand. They exchange a few curses before they’re interrupted by the sound of the office door opening.
Immediately, they duck behind the desk. Lex still has the lanyard in his hands, and Tay knows better than to make a fuss right now. She puts her finger up to her mouth, as if Lex needed a reminder to be quiet. They hear footsteps and voices as two bodies enter the room.
“You’re positive?” Asks a voice that Tay and Lex both recognize as Warden Morgan’s.
“Yes, sir,” answers a voice that they don’t recognize.
“How the hell could this have happened?” He bangs his fist on the desk, sending reverberations bouncing between Lex’s and Tay’s skulls. Lex winces and fights the urge to cover his ears. “Our perimeter is supposed to be airtight, now in one day we’ve got fuck ups all over the place.”
“I’m sorry, sir.”
“Don’t get sorry, get busy! Grab the others and fix the fucking problem. Now! I’ll catch up with you when I get my keys.”
Lex and Tay hear one set of footsteps running away down the hallway. The other set starts to pace around the desk. They have about two seconds until Warden Morgan makes it to the far side and sees that he has two escaped convicts hiding underneath it. Lex’s heart is beating through his chest. Morgan said something about fixing a mistake... Could Cannon and Rach have already been caught? Maybe someone found Diaz’s body bleeding out in the cell block. Either way, this is very, very bad. Nobody was supposed to know about their escape attempt until they were already gone, but they’re not even halfway through with the plan and things are already falling apart.
“What the fuck?” Warden Morgan’s voice booms out like an assault rifle. He looks down at Tay and Lex, the latter of whom is holding his keys.
“Warden Morgan,” Lex says with the fakest smile he’s ever worn. “Hi. I think this is yours.”
He jumps up from under the desk and holds out the keyring. Morgan’s look of surprise has given way to a look of absolute befuddlement. For now, though, he’s not going to complain. He snatches the lanyard from Lex.
“Lex, what the fuck?” Tay spits. She also jumps to her feet.
Lex realizes what’s just happened. He looks at his hands, as if surprised that they’re now empty. He looks at Tay. “I’m sorry! I panicked!”
“Why the fuck is that what you do when you panic?”
“I don’t know!”
“Ten seconds ago you refused to give it to me, now you give it to him without even asking for it?”
“This is a very stressful situation, okay?”
“If I may interject,” Morgan says, swinging the lanyard back and forth at his side, “What in the ever loving fuck is happening in my town today?”
Lex says, “We gotta get out of here.”
“Not without those keys,” Tay says. She leaps up and tries to snag the lanyard out of Morgan’s clutches, but she’s too slow. He steps back, winds up the lanyard, and retaliates by slamming the keyring across her face. She flies across the room, hitting the floor hard and sliding into the opposite wall. She slowly builds to her feet. She wipes her hand against her cheek and sees plenty of gushing blood.
“Not without answering a hell of a lot of questions,” Morgan says, swinging the lanyard back and forth. “Either the easy way, or the hard way.”