Five days later, he cut through one more time.

And the last side of his escape box, with the wall weakened, he cut through in three days.

Before he’d left the blue cell, he’d gorged himself on all the bread he’d accumulated, but he hadn’t managed to bring much along with him to this cell. In the last twelve days of the fifteen he’d been here, he’d eaten nothing.

That was good in only one way: it meant Andross Guile hadn’t noticed Gavin had escaped his first cell. Water flowed through each of the cells, so he hadn’t died of thirst. It was, of course, terrible because it meant he hadn’t eaten in twelve days.

His brother had done better.

Gavin spent hours etching lines between his holes to weaken the wall. After many kicks that threatened to break him before he broke the wall, the panel finally gave way.

It wasn’t large, but by wriggling his broad shoulders through the hypotenuse of that partial rectangle, he made it through and dropped into a dim gray-lit circular chamber.

The wall his brother had broken through had been repaired.

What had his father been thinking? Why go to so much effort and not set up alarums to notify him if Gavin escaped? Andross couldn’t even draft green himself, which meant immense trouble in bringing a trusted green here. But then, Andross had certainly cultivated total blind loyalty among enough monochromes to do his dirty work when necessary.

Unless Andross knew, and was cruelly just watching every step?

No, that was paranoia. Andross had seen the broken pieces of this prison and had it repaired. He would do that first because he was cautious, just in case.

Later, when he had time, Andross would try to figure out every piece of Gavin’s creation. But he would be busy in the interim, and he was an old, feeble man, after all, wasn’t he?

How had he seemed so powerful and young when he’d come down to see Gavin?

It was surely only a façade of youth.

No matter. Gavin had to get as far as quickly as he could. The green prison had cost him too much time already.

He searched the underside of the outer wall of the green orb that had just been his prison. Near the base, a section yielded.

A hidden lever popped out of the granite wall.

It took him several minutes of gathering his starvation-sapped strength to pull it.

The secret door opened to Gavin’s old access tunnels.

He poked his head into the pitch-black tunnel. Andross hadn’t discovered all of Gavin’s secrets in the construction of these tunnels, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t planted traps of his own.

Bet the torch is trapped.

Gavin froze, but he hadn’t heard it aloud. It wasn’t the dead man, it was only his own thoughts.

Not so strange, under the pressures of solitude and starvation, that he would externalize some dark mirror of himself. Still, it was too akin to madness for comfort.

Talking to yourself is one thing, not realizing both voices are yours is quite another.

There we go. That’s my voice in my head. That’s me. That’s my own sardonic sanity speaking.

Goddammit, Karris, I miss you. I need you.

Gavin blew out a breath. Then, still outside the entrance to the tunnel, Gavin reached an arm in and found the yellow lux torch in its sconce. He hadn’t trapped that one. But Andross might have trapped it. He figured that his older brother would be too paranoid to grab the first torch, and would grab the second or the third. It was still there, of course.

Gavin yanked the torch from the wall and snatched it back around the corner.

Nothing happened.

He expelled a slow breath, and examined the lux torch carefully. He peeled off the clay facing and was rewarded with soft yellow light. His own work. He could shake the torch to increase the reactivity of the yellow and get brighter light, but he didn’t bother. That would make the torch burn out faster.

He stepped into the tunnel.

Nothing.

He took his time working his way up through the spiraling tunnel, climbing, slowly climbing, but watching every step. After all his privation, he tired quickly anyway.

Andross Guile would have a trap here somewhere, wouldn’t he? But traps took time to craft, Gavin knew that well. How long had he been down here? How much time had Andross been able to take away from his other work?

Gavin made it to the second lux torch. He’d trapped the handle of that one with hellstone, though he hadn’t thought his brother would grab it. An easy trap, and one Gavin had easily avoided.

But Gavin’s slender hope that Andross Guile hadn’t found these tunnels was dashed when he found the third lux torch. That was the one his elder brother had taken and used. It had been replaced, put back perfectly in place, a mockery.

Burn in nine hells, father.

It shouldn’t have shocked him that Andross Guile was a subtler torturer than he himself had ever been. But Gavin couldn’t even imagine the rage his father must have felt when he found the rotting corpse of his favorite son in the yellow cell. And not an ancient corpse, either.

What a shock it must have been for Andross Guile, and he had never been a man to let an offense go unanswered.

If Andross hadn’t found it, there was a stash of food hidden in the chamber ahead. Cured meat, bread in airtight containers, and wine stored in new skins that should have aged well.

His mouth watered at the mere thought. Food. It was maddening to even consider it, but Gavin couldn’t hurry.

Surely I’ve learned patience in suffering by now.

He approached his old work chamber slowly. It was ten paces wide and blessedly square after the hellish globes Gavin had been trapped in. A small cot came into view, then a table.

Trap, I’m telling you, his sardonic self said. Trap.

He ignored the heckling, but he was careful where he aimed the light of his lux torch lest he spring his own trap as the real Gavin had.

He moved slowly forward. He’d concealed a tiny portcullis in the ceiling above the entrance to keep his brother from fleeing back down the tunnel. It was raised again, of course, reset.

He was so close. From this chamber, he could avoid the other cells, and escape. Food and wine were here. In another hidden cache just down the next hall, weapons and clothing and bandages and ropes and grapnels and every other kind of gear he might need waited.

His father would have trapped either this room, or the very last one.

The very last room would be it: that was how his father worked. But he wouldn’t expect Gavin to have weapons and rope. Gavin’s options would expand exponentially once he had those, and his strength back.