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He didn’t see me
I waited for his footsteps to recede and then squeezed into the hall Eht? The floor ran uphill to the left, downhill to the right According to Bentham ere in Caul’s tower, but his prisoners were not We needed to get out Down, then Down and right
We turned right, hugging the inner wall as the hallway spiraled doard The rubber soles of my shoes squeaked I hadn’t noticed the noise until now, and in the ae-inducing
We went on for a short while, and then Emma tensed and threw her arm across my chest to stop me
We listened With our footsteps silenced, we could hear others They were ahead of us, and close We rushed to the closest door It slid open easily We dove inside, closed it, threw our backs against it
The roo both We were inside a huge drainage pipe, thirty feet wide and still under construction--and eren’t alone Where the pipe ended and broke into rainy daylight, a dozenat us, du their lunch break
"Hey! How’d you get in there?" one shouted
"They’re kids," said another "Hey, this ain’t a playground!"
They were American, and they didn’t seem to knohat to hts in the hallwould attract their attention, too
"Have you got that finger?" I whispered to Eave theer By which I mean we put on the dust masks (wet from the stream but still serviceable), Emma crushed a tiny bit of Mother Dust’s pinky, and alked down the pipe toward the men and atte it out of her cupped hand, but it just swirled into a cloud around our heads, whichit, which didn’t work at all The dust, it seeood as an offensive weapon By now the pipe builders were growing impatient, and one had jumped down froer away and made a flanited the dust hanging in the air, turning it instantly to s and soon slumped to the floor, fast asleep When a few of his friends ran to help hi s work at us We ran back to the door before the situation could devolve further I checked that the coast was clear and we slipped into the hall
When I closed the door behind us, the sound of the men’s voices was muted completely, as if it hadn’t just shut them inside but had somehow turned them off
We ran a short way, then stopped and listened for footsteps, then ran, then stopped and listened, spiraling down the tower in stuttering bursts of action and silence Twiceand ran to hide behind doors Inside one was a stea with the screams of monkeys, and another opened into an adobe roo htened Around the last bend was a pair of double doors with daylight gleauards around?" I said nervously
Eed and nodded toward the doors, which appeared to be the only way out of the tower I was about to push the a joke I could hear only the burble of his voice, not the words, but it was definitely a joke, because when he finished there was an eruption of laughter
"Your guards," E a fancy meal
We could either wait and hope they went away, or open the door and deal with them The latter option was braver and faster, so I su to throw open the door and fight, and to please not discuss the matter with Old Jacob, who inevitably would whine and resist But by the ti it
Silently and quickly, she pulled open one of the swinging doors Arrayed before us were the backs of five wights inmodern police-issue-type pistols at their waists They were standing casually, facing away from us None had seen the door open Beyond thes, and rising in the farther distance was the fortress wall I jabbed er hidden in Em these wights unconscious and then dragging them inside the tower seemed the most expedient course of action She understood, pulled the door halfway closed, and began to dig out the finger I reached for the dust masks, which were stuffed intoflew over the fortress wall in the distance, sailed toward us through the air in a graceful arc, and fell splat in thedribbly blobs of fire everywhere and sending the guards into a state of excitement Two ventured to see what had landed, and as they bent over to exa over the wall and hit one of the, his body aflaent and traveled fast, it was a asoline and excrement)