in his chest and gut. The second guard crumpled, grasping at his chest and belly as he dropped into the mud.
All the years of training with her stepbrothers, all the firefights she had narrowly escaped with her life, had all led to this moment. She didn’t flinch. She didn’t hesitate. She moved. Quickly. Pausing just long enough to strip the second guard of his weapon and keys before rushing out of the pen.
She glanced toward the cells packed with prisoners. She held up a hand as if to tell them to wait and dashed into the abandoned guardhouse. Evidence of how quickly they had decided to leave was everywhere. There was uneaten food on the tables and spilled drinks puddling on the floor. Whatever was coming, they must have decided it was better to face charges for abandoning their posts than to die.
She searched the guardhouse and found the security room. The door had been left open, and the green glow of screens drew her attention. Inside, she found keys to the cells on one wall and snatched them. Her gaze lingered on a radar image, and she tried to make sense of it. The storm on the radar looked huge and swirled evilly across the screen.
Spurred on by that discovery, she raced out of the guardhouse, across the prison yard and slid to a stop in front of the first cell. There were easily twenty people crammed into the space. She tried three keys before finding the correct one and jerked the door open, gesturing for all of them to flee. She ran to the other cell that seemed to have a similar number of prisoners, including children clinging to their mothers, and freed them, too.
One of the women, an older lady who had been kind to her the first day and who had assumed a leadership role among the camp, hugged her so tightly she couldn’t breathe. Maisie pressed the keys to the heavy trucks with the large canopied cargo areas into the woman’s hands and urged her to go, to take the prisoners and leave. The woman seemed confused, and she could barely make out the woman’s lips in the lightning as she questioned why Maisie wasn’t coming. Unable to explain, Maisie drew a target on her chest with her finger. The woman seemed to understand as she nodded slowly and backed away, holding Maisie’s gaze a moment before turning, grabbing a child and running toward the crowd of freed prisoners.
Maisie watched them load into the large trucks that had been left behind. Certain she had done all she could to help them, Maisie rushed back to the guardhouse and hastily changed into the smallest pair of pants and a shirt she could find. The only boots left behind were at least two sizes too big, but she layered on socks to make them fit better. A jacket and cap finished her stolen ensemble.
She wasted only enough time to grab a pack, stuff it with essentials like packaged food, a canteen, first aid kit and socks. Once she had the bare essentials, she searched the security room for maps and found a set of folded, laminated field maps jammed into a dusty corner on a shelf. There were tablets and other navigational tools that would have been more accurate, but she couldn’t risk being tracked by the devices syncing up with the government or Splinters.
Out in the storm, she stretched her jaw to ease the dull ache building in her ears. It was the same thing she experienced when flying, especially when leaving and entering the atmosphere of a planet. It hadn’t ever occurred to her that the same kind of pressure could happen with a storm.
A hard pellet of hail smacked her right in the forehead. Wincing, she put her arms up and tried to make herself the smallest target possible as she dashed into the woods. The intensity of the storm grew exponentially worse. The small hailstones morphed into larger and larger icy balls of pain. They whacked her hands and arms and pinged off her head and chest. The sting of the impacts left her on the verge of tears.
But she kept moving. The storm and its aftermath were the best cover she could ever hope for, and if she didn’t use it to her full advantage, she would regret it.
Instead of moving downhill, she trudged up the mountain, cutting through the heavy woods and finding some shelter from the hail under the thick