The ledger said Cassian's execution was over.
The living Cassian remained inside wagon twenty.
Because the record marked his execution complete, the family chain could no longer read him as a prisoner. Only the prison's original ledger remained in his hand.
He intended to escape through that gap.
Take the rear twenty wagons. Leave the front twenty and their prisoners as fuel to obstruct pursuit.
If the plan succeeded, nine people would leave. If it failed, all forty wagons would become one family again.
"Whom did you forget?" Ria asked.
Cassian looked at the tooth key. One use had locked one memory—a name. He could not recall whether its owner lived or died.
"I don't know."
"How do I record something you don't know?"
"Leave a blank."
Ria made one.
`Name lost through first use of the tooth key: .`
The empty space stood out more than any name.
Cassian did not look at it. He opened the Innocence Bond ledger.
"Wake the family."
Felix spoke through the pipe.
"They are awake."
"They're watching the dream you gave them."
Cassian returned the first original sin to the name of its prisoner.
The old man in wagon three remembered his son.
He also remembered the night he consumed sixty-three years of his son's remaining life.
He did not cry. He seized the wrist of the young prisoner beside him.
"How many years do you have?"
The memory of the good father was gone. The thief's habit had returned.
Names returned in wagon seven. Twelve prisoners spoke their names at once. Three had been stolen and used by the same man.
Three people seized his throat and pulled out his tongue to determine the true owner.
The well keeper in wagon twelve kicked away the water tank.
"Don't drink!"
They stopped—then remembered that he had poisoned hundreds. They rushed to drink him instead.
In wagon eighteen, a hunter dropped to all fours. In twenty-four, the names of murdered spouses rose from the marriage register. In thirty-one, children's cries caught on every nail in the floor.
Receiving their sins did not make the prisoners good.
It only told them why they were here.
The Immaculate Prison did not reform criminals. It made them manageable by erasing their crimes.
Cassian continued returning the originals.
Fights erupted in every wagon. Blood dirtied the white walls.
The guards opened the doors.
"Family must not fight!"
The first guard met the eyes of someone he had tortured. The prisoner remembered his name.
The second recovered a sinmark he had stripped and stored. The third tried to close a door and was dragged inside.
The riot did not obey Cassian.
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It did not need to.
Everyone had recovered someone they wanted to kill.
Felix stood atop wagon nineteen, holding a child in white prison clothes.
The child's ankle had broken in the riot. Felix set the bone, gave him water, and tucked a blanket beneath his chin.
All the while, lifespan continued burning in the first wagon. The chain selected the weakest as fuel to pull wagons slowed by the riot.
"Don't burn the seven-year-old," Felix ordered.
The flame moved from the child's throat to an old man beside him.
The old man's remaining three months burned at once. The wagon moved one inch.
Felix closed his eyes.
"Thank you, Father."
Cassian climbed onto the roof, dragging his left foot behind the severed tendon.
"You choose your family well."
"I saved the child first."
"By killing the old man."
"You saved skills first."
Felix looked behind him.
Shoemaker. Midwife. Two thieves. Wheelwright. Carpenter. Two literate prisoners. Nev.
Nine prisoners.
Cassian did not count himself. Ria was not prison property.
"Does that child have no skill?" Felix asked.
"Not yet."
"So you abandon him?"
"You're holding him."
"And if I die?"
"I count him tenth."
The child's eyes held no fear. They had seen many adults count people as numbers.
Felix put him down.
"Do you think you are different from me?"
"I told you I don't call them family."
"Only the name differs."
"That's why we're fighting."
Cassian broke the ledger's spine.
All forty family chains loosened at once.
The central coupling beneath wagon twenty joined the front twenty to the rear twenty.
Cassian had the shoemaker attach a leather strap. The midwife reached into the gap for the locking pin. The thieves opened the white lock. The wheelwright lay beneath the coupling.
"When do I pull it?"
"When the front reaches its highest speed."
"When it burns more fuel."
"Yes."
Thirty-four people remained in the front: rioters, those unable to walk, fever patients, those excluded from Cassian's nine.
Their remaining lives would turn the front wheels. While pursuers chased the fleeing front, Cassian would take the ledger and nine prisoners away with the rear in the opposite direction.
"He is using thirty-four people as bait," Ria said into the pipe.
Her voice spread through every wagon.
"Eleven cannot move."
"Six will die without treatment today."
"One had seven years left. She now has twenty-three days."
The feverish woman touched the number at her throat.
`23 days.`
Cassian did not change the plan.
"Why leave us in front?" she asked through the pipe.
"Because you'll run fast."
"To kill us?"
"You only need to outlive the pursuers."
"How many minutes?"
"Seventeen."
Her laugh was clearer than her cough.
"You buy my twenty-three days for seventeen minutes."
"An expensive trade."
"What if I don't sell?"
"The chain takes it."
"Not you or Felix?"
"The prison."
She looked around at the six people Cassian had abandoned beside her, destined for the right page of his escape ledger.
"Then we should steal the prison first."
Cassian heard her.
He did not include it in his calculation.
That was his first mistake.
At the riot's peak, Felix pulled the family chain.
The throats of the prisoners in the front twenty ignited. Lifespan flowed into the wheels, and the wagons accelerated.
"Now," Cassian said.
The thief opened the lock. The midwife pushed the pin. The wheelwright braced the coupling. The shoemaker's strap drew taut.
Cassian placed the line of Oath Severing against the ring.
Cutting it would make the front bait and free the rear.
Before his hand descended, the coupling came free.
Cassian had not done it.
The feverish woman stood beneath the front wagon twenty holding the locking pin.
The midwife had found a false pin. The real one could be removed only from the front.
"How did you know?" Cassian asked.
The woman wiped away blood.
"You counted only people with skills."
She struck her chest.
"I've had a fever in this prison for thirteen years."
"Whenever a wagon hurt, I hurt with it."
The fever was not disease. It was the trace of receiving the family chain's friction and speed through her body.
She could read the prison's pulse.
Cassian had failed to count that skill.
"Come to the rear."
"Now that I'm useful?"
"Yes."
"Too late."
She threw the pin.
The front twenty broke free from the chain.
They did not flee in Cassian's intended direction.
The woman kicked the roof's direction plate. Its white arrow turned from north to west.
Toward an unnamed gorge where the Immaculate Prison erased condemned prisoners from records and discarded them.
Toward the Nameless Gorge.
The prisoners opened the doors, lifted those unable to walk onto the roofs, and laid fever patients inside food crates.
Cassian's opposition had acquired its own wagons.
For the first time, Felix did not hold the child. He reached toward the fleeing front half.
"Return my family!"
The feverish woman spoke into the pipe.
Before that, she kicked the wheel of her cart once.
A loose axle pin fell into her palm.
The carts Cassian had left as bait had locks, but no drivers.
"Who will drive this?" someone asked.
The woman fitted the axle pin back with a hand shaking from fever.
"Someone who was abandoned."
Two prisoners who could not walk pulled the reins from the roof. A blind mason chose the direction of the Nameless Gorge by the sound of the wheels.
Cassian's plan had room for only nine people fit to fight.
In the plan they stole, not one person was useless.
That difference moved thirty-four carts.
"We are not your family."
She looked toward Cassian.
"And we're not that man's bait."
Twenty wagons cut through the night.
Ria recorded two numbers.
`People Cassian intended to take: 9.`
`People Cassian abandoned who escaped by themselves: 34.`
She wrote every name beneath them.
Cassian's rear twenty stopped in the middle of the road.
The pursuit bell rang. Felix's guards approached from both roads.
Cassian watched the escaping wagons.
His plan was ruined.
They had taken its cost with them.
And yet he laughed.
Someone he had abandoned had stolen his calculation.
Now he had a reason to hunt.
The Nameless Gorge swallowed them first.