After a minute of frowning with her eyes closed, she said, “He’s got a bad concussion.”
The breath caught in my lungs. Someone had hit him?
I sank down onto an empty cot beside Dad. Would he be okay? Would he suffer any long term damage? Dad had always been the smartest person I’d ever known. The thought of him losing any of that brilliant intelligence made my eyes sting.
“Can you help him?” I asked.
“Give me a minute. Maybe I can reduce the swelling,” the woman muttered, her eyes still closed.
I felt every second tick by, could hear my every breath along with Hayden’s and the woman’s and my dad’s.
Finally, after what felt like an hour, the healer opened her eyes and smiled. “There. All patched up. He should come around in a few seconds.”
We waited, watching Dad’s face in the beam of Hayden’s flashlight. When Dad’s eyelids began to flutter, I reached across the aisle and grabbed his suddenly too frail hand to let him know I was here.
Jumping at my gentle squeeze of his hand, Dad opened his eyes and looked around. “Where—”
“Shh, Dad,” I whispered. “We have to stay quiet. We’re in the prisoners’ building at the internment camp. Hayden’s breaking us out of here.”
Dad grimaced and rolled up onto an elbow, using his free hand to check the back of his head. “Oh boy, that hurts. That’s what I get for refusing to join the mad doctor here. Feels like I cracked my brain pan.”
“You did,” the healer murmured with a small smile. “You might have headaches for awhile as your skull finishes healing. Take it easy moving around, okay?” She slowly stood up. “I’d better go help the others.”
“Thank you...”
“Pamela,” she said, holding out a hand for me to shake.
“Thank you, Pamela.”
Dad smiled his thanks at her as she got up to go help someone else. Then he looked at me, blinked fast a couple of times and frowned. “Tarah, what are you doing here?”
“Rescuing you, of course.” Well, minus the small hiccup of getting myself arrested and rescued first.
Dad sighed. “Your mother’s going to kill me.”
I winced, realizing I’d forgotten to call her earlier and let her know where I was and that I was okay. “Not if she kills me first.”
“You feel up to getting out of here, Dr. Williams?” Hayden asked, offering my dad a strong hand.
“I was ready to blow this joint the second I arrived,” Dad muttered. He let Hayden pull him upright.
The three of us were pretty slow in joining the group of detoxed adults at the dark end of the building farthest from the door. Dad’s knees kept popping so loudly I worried the guards outside would hear them.
“You’ve got a plan for how to get everyone out of here, right?” Mike whispered to me once we’d joined the others. “This whole prison break was your idea, after all.”
I winced. “Yeah, well, I was kind of hoping you guys would fill in the details.”
Hayden crossed his arms over his chest and frowned at Mike. “Can’t we just use your cloaking spell again to get them out a handful at a time the same way we came in?”
Mike cringed. “Sorry, but no. We’re going to need a plan B. All this detoxing’s tapped me out. I’ve got five, maybe ten minutes of cloaking left in me tops.”
That wouldn’t be nearly enough time to get all these people out.
“Can anyone else do a cloaking spell to get us out of here?” Hayden asked the group.
The answer was a whole lot of head shaking.
Oh crap. I shared a worried look with Hayden.
Trying not to panic, I said, “Come on, everyone. We need ideas here.”
Silence as everyone looked to everybody else in the dimly lit circle.
Finally a short guy at the back stepped forward. “Uh, what about a freezing spell on the guards?”
“You can freeze someone?” I hadn’t even known that kind of spell existed in real life.
The man nodded. “The body’s ninety percent water. I just concentrate on that while using a basic freezing effect, and it locks them right up like a cryofreeze. Used to do it on my kid brother all the time when he was acting like a punk.”
A few men chuckled quietly and were quickly hushed by the rest of the group.
“Is your brother still alive?” Hayden asked, eyebrows raised. “We’re aiming for nonlethal stuff here.”
The man grinned. “Yeah, he lived through it. Can’t promise he didn’t lose a few brain cells, though. I ‘might’ have forgotten to unfreeze him for a half hour or so once or twice.”
One corner of Hayden’s mouth twitched. “Good enough...uh, what’s your name?”
“Harvey. Harvey Lansing.”
“Good to meet you, Harvey. Mike, can you cover him while he freezes all the guards?”
Mike nodded and walked with Harvey towards the building’s door at the other end. When they were about ten feet away from us, they simply faded out of sight. A few minutes later, the building’s door eased open several inches, paused, then closed shut again without a sound.
“Stay quiet and wait for the signal,” Hayden told the rest of the prisoners. Then he and I carefully picked our way through the rows of cots to the door, pressed close to the cold metal and listened.
We couldn’t hear a thing out there.
After a couple of minutes of waiting in dead silence, Hayden turned off his flashlight and risked cracking the door open a centimeter. After several long seconds, he pointed to the left then the right and gave me a thumbs up, which I took to mean the guards at the door were frozen now.
Curious to know just what a frozen person looked like, I slipped in between him and the door and peeked out through the tiny sliver of an opening. The guards at either side of the doorway weren’t moving. They weren’t breathing either, but were still standing at attention, which seemed a good sign. From what I could see of the nearest perimeter guards, nobody else had noticed yet.
I couldn’t see the freeze team. They must have moved away so we weren’t included in Mike’s cloaking sphere. At first, I couldn’t even tell which perimeter guards they’d frozen so far. The guards didn’t move that much anyways. But after a few minutes, I could detect one difference. Unfrozen guards turned their heads an inch or two from side to side as they scanned the perimeter beyond the fence.