The thief swore under his breath — sothing short and colorless — and imdiately reversed direction.
"Co on co on let’s go before they catch us here."
Yuto didn’t ask questions. He turned and moved, and Shiny moved with him the way a shadow moves, without being told, without delay. Behind them the alarm bells were still going, ringing through the stone walls of the estate in overlapping waves, the kind of sound that made every corridor feel watched even when it wasn’t.
The servant passages were narrow and dim and slled of damp cloth and old grease. The thief led them at a pace that sat just beneath a run — fast enough to matter, slow enough to listen. Yuto kept his footsteps light and his attention wide. Every branching corridor, every stairwell, every door they passed was a place sothing could co from. He catalogued them without thinking about it. Old habit. The kind you didn’t realize you’d developed until the mont you needed it.
The thief took a left, then a right, then stopped at a junction and stood there for a mont too long.
Yuto looked at him. "I can’t believe I trusted the plans of a thief."
"The estate’s bigger than it looked from the outside." He glanced both ways down the junction. "Give a second."
Yuto gave him three seconds and then the sound of footsteps ca from the left corridor — multiple sets, moving with purpose — and the decision made itself.
They went right.
The passage they entered was lower-ceilinged and colder, the kind of cold that cos from stone that never sees light. It opened eventually into a wider servant corridor, and that was where the three guards were waiting, or not waiting exactly — they ca around the corner at the sa mont Yuto’s group arrived at it, and for one flat second everyone just looked at each other.
"There!" one of them shouted.
Yuto didn’t think. "Shiny. Take them down! He paused. But don’t kill them."
The thief turned to him with an expression of genuine bewildernt. "Why not kill them? They’re actively trying to capture us."
Shiny was already moving. The first guard lunged with a spear and he stepped around it so cleanly it was almost polite, then hit him once in the throat — not hard enough to crush anything, hard enough to turn him off like a lamp. He dropped. The second guard swung his sword in a wide arc that would have been dangerous against soone who intended to stand still, but Shiny kicked his legs out from under him mid-swing and let gravity finish it, slamming him into the wall with the kind of impact that ends conversations.
Yuto answered the thief while the third guard was still registering that his two colleagues had just ceased to be useful.
"I don’t know... I don’t want Gina getting dragged into worse trouble because of ."
The third guard charged. Shiny stepped into it, caught the arm, redirected it, and hit him once in the stomach — asured, almost thoughtful. He folded and went down and stayed there.
The thief was quiet for a mont.
Then he said nothing, and they kept moving.
The correct route, it turned out, was one the thief had already passed without recognizing. He found it on the second pass — a narrow stone corridor branching off from behind a supply shelf, barely wide enough for one person, sloping slightly downward into the dark. It slled of standing water and rot and sothing older than both.
Yuto did not find it reassuring. He went in anyway.
The corridor ran for longer than it should have, given the size of the estate above it. The walls were slick. The floor was uneven. Sowhere in the dark ahead, water was moving in that patient, indifferent way water has when it has been moving for a very long ti and expects to keep moving long after everyone involved has stopped caring.
Then the corridor ended.
Iron bars. A heavy iron grate set into the stone, old enough that the rust had gone past orange into sothing darker, but solid — the kind of solid that doesn’t announce itself, that just sits there and waits for you to test it and find out.
Beyond the bars: open air. Night. The sll of grass and cold and sothing that might have been freedom, or might have just been the eastern garden.
The thief exhaled — a long, unsteady breath — and let his shoulders drop.
"That’s it. We’re out."
Yuto was already looking at Shiny.
He was already looking at the bars.
"Cut it open," he said.
Shiny didn’t use the sword. Instead he planted his stance and drove a kick into the grate — not a testing kick, not a feeling-it-out kick, the real one, with his full weight behind it. The bars groaned. tal shifted against stone. He hit it again, sa spot, and a third ti, and on the fourth the entire grate lurched outward with a sound like sothing giving up its principles, and then it was gone, swinging open against the outside wall, and cold night air ca pouring in.
The thief laughed — actually laughed, relief cracking through the composure he’d been holding together all night — and dropped to his hands and knees and crawled through without ceremony.
"We made it!"
Yuto didn’t move.
He stood at the mouth of the drainage exit and looked back the way they’d co. The corridor behind them was dark and the alarm bells above were still ringing and sowhere inside that estate, past all of it, Gina was still there.
The thought sat in his chest like a stone that hadn’t decided yet whether to sink or stay.
Was she safe? The house had no reason to move against her, she hadn’t been the one to kill Teki, and she hadn’t helped in his escape. She was just the girl who happened to live with the boy they’d arrested. She wasn’t the problem.
He knew that.
But at the sa ti, it was still an extrely hopeful notion, after all, they had lost a son, who know how reasonable they would be.
He looked at Shiny.
"It feels wrong to without her doesn’t it? Should we go back for her?"
Shiny considered this with the gravity he brought to most things. Then he scratched the back of his head once, slowly, and said nothing.
From outside the tunnel, the thief’s voice ca bouncing back in, impatient and incredulous.
"What are you two waiting for?!"
Yuto stood there one mont longer.
The bells kept ringing.
He let out a deep sigh.
Then he turned, got on his hands and knees, and crawled through.
The cold hit him imdiately — sharper than he’d expected, the particular cold of late night air against skin that had been in a stone building for hours. The grass under his hands was damp. Above him the sky was clear and the moon was out and it was, objectively, a decent night to have escaped from a noble’s dungeon.
He stood up.
He looked back at the estate wall. Above it, one of the towers was lit, warm light in a high window, the kind that ant soone was still awake. He stared at it for a mont.
Then he lowered his head and followed the thief into the dark.
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