Page 49 of Night of the Witch
“Absolutely not.”
“I need to get you into the prison, next to the prisoners, so you can teach them the escape routes.”
“There has to be another way!”
I stare her down as she glares at me.
I see the moment when something breaks behind her eyes.
Thereisno other way.
“I can teach you the paths in the aqueducts.” I draw my finger in the dust on the floor, tracing the outlines I have memorized. “There’s a door that leads directly to the aqueducts from the basilica, and, once inside the tunnels, there are paths that split up and branch off. I teach you; you teach them.”
“They can’t stay in the tunnels forever,” Fritzi says. “They’ll be found.”
“Each route ends at a safe house with supplies and disguises. From there, the market—”
“—it’ll be crowded—”
“—then from there, out the city walls—”
“—and to safety.” Fritzi blinks at me. “How are you going to get them out of the cage and to the aqueduct?”
“Gunpowder and a hypocaust,” I say.
“Gunpowder, I get,” Fritzi says. “What the hell is a hypocaust?”
“A heating system under the floor,” I say. “When the ancient Romans built the basilica, they built a heating system using hollowed-out spaces under the floor to keep the building warm.” I’m actually really proud of this—it took a lot of research to formulate this plan, and I’ve had no one but Hilde to appreciate my efforts. Fritzi raises her eyebrow, so I sketch the basilica’s floor plan in the dust.
“See?” I say, drawing arrows, “This is where the cage is. The floor is made of brick, butunderneaththe floor are pillars. I’m going to blow up this part,” I say, drawing a squiggly line, “which will open up one section of the flooring. You simply have to tell the prisoners to be onthisside of the cage. Then the floor will give way, they drop down, and the hypocaust is linked directly to the aqueduct.”
She frowns at my rough sketch.
“You thought of everything, didn’t you?” She says the words flatly.
“I tried.”
Her jaw tenses. “You really do need someone on the inside.”
“I cannot warn the prisoners myself, much less teach them the routes.”
She looks up at me, and I see the fierce determination in her eyes. “When?” she asks.
“The burning is in two days.”
She swallows. “So you’ll drag me to prison tomorrow.”
“If you can memorize the routes tonight.”
She nods tightly. “That’ll give me one day to communicate to all one hundred prisoners.”
My heart thuds. It’s too risky; I can’t ask this of her—
“Yes,” Fritzi says. “I’ll do it. I know Liesel’s been imprisoned—she’ll help too. We can work together.”
She’s just agreed to my plan, and both she and her cousin have actual magic that could aid it. But still, my gut twists with bile as I think about how this means I’m going to have to drag Fritzi into the prison and lock her behind an iron cage myself.
When I first pulled Fritzi through the tunnels, I had only thought of saving her to use her in this plan of mine. But now that the time has come… I am reluctant to let her leave my safety again. It’s a ridiculous thought; I cannot very well leave her in the house fort for all time, and she’s likely safer in the prison than out of it, with the way the kommandant has the men searching for her.
