Page 43 of Empire of Shadows

This suite was larger than Ellie’s, consisting of two adjoining spaces. The room they entered was a small parlor with a table and chair, lit by a single lamp. Beyond it was a bedchamber, swathed in gloom from the falling twilight.

“Why have you brought her tomyroom?” Dawson protested.

“You have work to do on the map,” Jacobs replied as he slid Ellie off his shoulder and dropped her onto the floor.

“But what are you going to do with her?” Dawson pressed.

“I’ll dispose of her later when there are fewer people about,” Jacobs replied.

The remark was not particularly bragging or vicious. Jacobs made Ellie’s demise sound as ordinary as taking out the rubbish.

A sharp, cold bolt of terror shot through her.

“Surely you aren’t going to—you know—right now,” Dawson complained. “You can’t expect me to work in here with a… a deceased person.”

Jacobs’ only answer was a raised, weary eyebrow.

“Well?” Dawson prompted stubbornly as he crossed his arms.

Apparently doing his job with a murdered woman on the floor was a hard line for the professor.

“Fine,” Jacobs gracelessly conceded.

He grabbed Ellie by one of her bound arms and dragged her across the floor into the bedroom. The bed inside was built with a squared canopy frame that was meant to be draped with mosquito netting at night.

Jacobs considered her as she glared up at him from the floor.

“A little extra precaution, I think,” he concluded.

He hauled her upright by her bound wrists, then knotted the loose ends of Dawson’s paisley necktie neatly around the canopy beam. Ellie found herself anchored there, her hands raised above her head.

Jacobs considered the arrangement for a moment—and then walked away, apparently satisfied with it.

Dawson’s wide gray eyes watched Ellie from the adjoining room, then disappeared from view as Jacobs pulled the bedroom door shut behind him, leaving her to the gloom.

He didn’t bother to lock it.

Ellie’s frustrated scream was little more than a choked groan through the fabric of the gag.

?

Ellie cursed herself roundly. How could she have been so careless?

She had thought she was being terribly clever. It had simply never occurred to her that someone like Jacobs would have the resources to overcome the timetables and forge his own path to the colony.

Now, she might pay for that mistake with her life.

No—Ellie refused to allow that. She would find a way out of this.

The canopy frame was a box fixed to posts at each corner of the bed. Though Ellie could slide herself along the beam to which she had been tied, there was no gap through which she could wriggle her bindings in order to free herself.

Ellie yanked herself closer to one of the posts, trying to study it in the dim light. The bed was perhaps four and a half feet wide. Both post and beam were made of sturdy hardwood, but Ellie couldn’t feel any nails. The structure must have been fitted together with wooden dowels and glue.

Dowels were less sturdy than nails. An idea began to take shape in her mind.

Ellie could hear the murmur of low voices through the door to the next room, along with the scrape and shuffle of furniture. She would need to be quiet.

She climbed up to kneel on the mattress, then tugged herself along the beam until her back was pressed up against one of the posts.

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