Page 81 of Mutant Mine

“Perhaps you had better approach them,” I murmur to Rory. They are less likely to make a noise if they wake up to see her face than mine.

She nods at me, then heads towards the bars. She flicks on her flashlight and shines it through the barrier of the forcefield.

“Hey,” she whispers. “Hey, guys, wake up — shh, shh! It’s just me.”

"Rory?” someone replies, sounding bleary.

“Yes — yes, it’s me. Keep your voices down. It’s late. We’re here to get you out.”

“I knew you’d come get uth, Rory,” lisps Tommy, the courageous young man with the broken teeth. He is giving her a ruined grin.

“Who’s ‘we’?” asks someone else.

I step forward into the glow of her flashlight.

There is a collective jump, as the whole group recoils backwards. They stare up at me in shock. I can imagine the calculation that they are performing in their heads: is it safer to be locked up in the cell, behind the forcefield — or free, but with nothing to protect them from me?

“You can trust him,” Rory says quickly. “I promise.”

The older man, whom I recognize from the last time I visited, speaks up.

“I reckon we have no choice. Besides,” he looks at me shrewdly, “He’s treated us decent, so far as he could.”

I do not much like hearing myself spoken about as if I am not in the room — but the man’s assessment clearly holds weight. Now that he has given me his seal of approval, the others exchange glances and nods, their faces set in grim determination. The decision is made. They will leave, with us, tonight.

I am suddenly very glad that I came to see them before, and brought them a peace offering. This moment would have played out very differently otherwise, I fear.

“Where are we gonna go?” asks another.

“There is another ship. They are sending a shuttle for us.”

“Whose ship?” the older man asks.

“I will explain later.”

I am sure they would all prefer that I explainbeforethey get on board some stranger’s shuttle — but not much could be worse than their current situation, so they do not argue the point.

“Reginald,” Rory addresses the older man. “Do we need to do the same thing as last time?”

“Yes,” he nods. “But I don’t have my ID card anymore. It got lost when you were…”

Rory looks away.

They must be talking about the incident that led to Rory’s capture. She was first brought to me because she had been trying to break the crew out of these cells, I recall. She would have needed an ID card for that — and must have lost it when she was attacked.

“I brought an ID card,” I interject.

I pull the card out of my jumpsuit pocket and hold it up into the beam of the flashlight. Rory looks at it, then grimaces.

“Did you take this from a… a body, like the stun-guns?”

“Yes.”

“It’s Carl’s,” she says, her voice cracking. She is addressing the crew in the cells, particularly the two younger men who sent messages for Rory last time.

They both look saddened, though not surprised, to see the face on the card.

“Guess old Carl is doing us one last favor, helping us get out of here,” says the second man.

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