Page 77 of The Dandelion Princess
Ella emerges from the pool house, clad in black from the light turtleneck top to the curve-skimming leggings. I look away. These last weeks have felt like climbing a sheer rock face. When I started, I was confident in my ability to scale the heights, but now each handhold is more narrow and unlikely than the last. Bits of gravel scrape my fingertips and skitter to the ground. I can’t see the next grip, and I can’t see my way down. So I hold myself here, every nerve and muscle screaming, waiting for death or rescue.
No matter how much Ella likes my kisses—and she does—she is always in control. I’ve been wrestling with my attraction for her almost from the first moment I returned from Seong, but at the end of every night, cheeks flushed and lips swollen, she is very much the master of herself. She’s still looking for a way to escape, and when I have to let her go for the last time, I’ll do it. I promised.
I shoulder a black backpack and take her hand, threading my fingers through hers. “Caroline will pick up the dress and tiara.”
“Are we really doing this?” she asks.
I nod. “Nils agreed to let us do a security test. He’s giving us thirty minutes to try and cross the wall,” I say, pulling her behind a sculpted bush. “Think of it like war games. If the palace guardsmen tag us within ten meters of the perimeter, we lose.”
Ella cranes her neck. “What’s in your backpack?”
“Rope, folding stool, voltage tester, laptop.”
She reaches up and kisses me. “Do you want to renounce your title?” she asks. “We could run away and become a crack team of hackers, righting the wrongs of a corrupt society. We could spend our winters in a non-extradition country, sipping cocktails on a beach, and wreaking havoc with the locals.”
The dream of me and Ella in a lonely shack in Lijuela takes up residence in my brain like a mountain shrine, overgrown with moss and vines, echoing with desperate prayers. I wheel away and run a shaking hand over my face. “First, let’s get over the wall. How do you want to do it?”
She gauges the distance between us and the fence, and settles on the grass as she logs into the laptop. “I assume you brought this because you already sent a phishing email?”
I crouch down. “I wanted to be prepared,” I say. She grabs me by the collar and jerks me forward for another kiss.
“Put some knots along the rope at intervals,” she directs. Her fingers begin to fly, and I busy myself with the assigned task.
“We’re going to do it along this stretch,” she says, pointing at a schematic of the perimeter, deciding so quickly she might have spent the last decade casing the palace for this moment. “The bushes will cover our approach.”
Ella and I zigzag across the palace grounds, sticking to the shadows, pausing to evade security. “Are you ready?” I ask, folding her against the trunk of a tree, my breathing ragged.
“I’m worried about the glowing screen,” she whispers. We’ll have to use the laptop to override the electrified wire, and we don’t have time for more elegant solutions. Ella looks around my bulk. “Let’s get to some dense vegetation,” she says. Her body tenses, ready to run across open ground, and then checks. “My family won’t be unprotected if we—”
Ella never forgets her family. She can’t.
“They’re safe,” I reassure her. Nils and I have been thorough.
We silently sprint across open ground and break through the hedge line. I pull her under a large ornamental bush, where she opens the computer and turns the brightness all the way down.
“I don’t like our odds,” she hisses.
I grin. “They promised not to taze us.”
We have fifteen minutes left. I unpack the rope, coiling it on one side, and snap the stool open.
“That’s three cameras down,” she says, tapping the keyboard. “Now they know we’re coming.” A rush of activity sounds beyond the hedge, the pounding of shoes along the perimeter fence. “I cut the cameras on the south side and another one by the workshops to divert their attention. If we’re fast enough here, it won’t matter that the cameras can see us.”
A guard slithers between the narrow gap between the hedges and the wall, and we hold ourselves absolutely silent until we hear the heavy beat of retreating footsteps.
“What about the electrical wire?”
She gives an outraged squeak. “Nils is trying to change his password. I can keep him out as long as my hands are on the keyboard.” She grins. “He can’t reset it because I keep slipping an exclamation point in when he tries to duplicate it. If you go right this second, you can get over.”
I perch on the stool, touch the voltage tester to the line, and it beeps loudly. Nils promised to dial the voltage back…
“Okay, notthissecond. I’ll get it,” she swears, her fingers performing magic. “Now.”
I slip the looped rope over a fencepost when a noise sounds in the distance. Someone has spotted us.
“You go first,” she whispers. She grabs the front of my shirt and hauls herself up, convinced my strength is enough to hold us both.
I give the rope a tug, and test the wire. The voltage device is silent. “Brace your feet at the top, step over the wire, and rappel down,” I say. Two and a half meters is not so high.
