“Huh?” That was all I could say. The first feeling I had was rejection. Maybe Alexei read it wrong, maybe he didn’t know how to crack this code after all.

“You sure you read that right?” I asked him.

“YES! I HAVE READ IT MULTIPLE TIMES,” He replied angrily, rolled the letter to a ball, and threw it down. “Pack your bags, we are leaving tomorrow.”

“Hold on! What’s going on? Is there anything else in the letter that you haven’t told me?” I put my hands on his shoulders, trying to make him stay still.

He stared at me with the same shocked eyes. I have never seen him so desperate before. I slowly put my hands off of his body, he seemed to have calmed down a bit. He then suddenly started smiling again, that unusual creepy smile of his.

“Oh, boy, we are fucked.” He finally said.

“What?”

“Tomorrow, at exactly 2 A.M, they are going to some of the people that survived the attack. They are going to have a van, cloaked in invisibility magic, so we should not have to worry about being caught,” He finally explained.

“That sounds like great news to me, why are we fucked?” I asked.

“Because I’m dead. I don’t know how long the surgery is going to take. I don’t know how long I will be out after the surgery. If I don’t wake up then, they are going to leave us stranded. Without my power, that wall ain’t gonna budge from this little amount. Timing is super tight, and we have to be super quick. The odds are too slim.”

“It doesn’t sound like we have a choice, we do this, if we fail, we die, if we don’t, we are as good as dead,” I told him. I had been trying to keep my voice down, even though it was free time and most of the guards are in the prison yard, I couldn’t take any chances.

“Yes, we do, that’s why I told you to pack, take the gun. We are going to stay here until dinner time.”

I nodded. I needed to secure the gun, it was my only weapon to defend myself since I was a Zero. After a short while of us being restless, trying to make sure we had everything we needed, not that we even had much, Paul Elliot walked in. He immediately read the situation.

“What’s going on?” Asked Paul.

“Get ready, and get some sleep too, because we ain’t sleeping tonight, we escape at 2 A.M, sharp,” I answered.

He didn’t question anything else but soon became as restless as we were. He hurriedly

took something out of his pocket and tossed it over to Alexei. It bounced on his right hand but thankfully, he caught it with his left. It was the Anti-Suppression device. I see Ethan had handed it back, I almost forgot about it. I scratched the dark hair on my head, not knowing what else to do. I put the gun back in the hiding spot, and walked out, trying to find Ethan. He needed to know about this too, for he was also a part of the group. I would tell Cecilia at night when she does the surgery. That was it, the final push. Freedom was in my hands, now, I just need to clench my fist and grab it. I walked hurriedly to find Ethan in his jail cell, alone. A skinny guy as shy as him probably wouldn’t survive the other inmates here for long.

“Can I help you?” He said in a low, dangerous tone.

“Sleep, pack, do whatever, we leave at 2 A.M, and remember to go to our jail cell tonight,” I said in a hurry.

“Oh shi-”

“Yeah,”

His reactions were similar to Paul’s. I guessed anyone would feel the same after this sudden news being brought to them. I gave him one final nod before I turned around, preparing to leave.

“Wait!” He yelled out behind me.

“What’s up?” I turned around to face his blue eyes again.

“How are we going to get past the cameras?”

“We don’t have time to even think about that. We are just going to be as quick as possible and leave as fast as possible.” He stared at me like I was crazy. He figured out that the chances of us escaping were slim.

“I know where the control room is, we can get that out of the way if we were able to get in there somehow.”

“And how do we get there?”

“The security room is in the administration hallway, I don’t know how to get there through the guards, but I just wanted to let you know if you could do anything with the information.”

“Thank you, I will think about it.”

It would change the game completely if we could sneak into there, however, it was virtually impossible, there was only one way to get into the administration hallway, and they were heavily guarded by cops. Maybe I could sneak in there after those cops go on patrol at night. That possibility was slim, but it would have been great if I was able to do it. I went back to my jail, I needed to figure out the exact plan for us to sneak out of there. As I sat on the side of my bed, my legs hanging down, I thought up a sensible enough plan. We were going to put our blankets over our pillow, just so that if the guards check in on us, there was a chance that they would think that we were just under the blankets. We were going to spend the night at the nurse’s office. Curfew was at 10 PM, which means we would have 5 hours max for the operation to be done. Then, we would spend the last hour trying to escape. I was thinking of sneaking into the security room while they were having the surgery, our chances were slim, so if we could disable the Spirit Suppression Devices, that would be a huge turnaround. Without the Spirit Suppression Devices or SSD for short, the prisoners would soon realize that they could use their Spirits, which would have caused one hell of a riot. A riot would have been a nice distraction. I hurried back to my cell to find both Alexei and Paul were asleep. I nodded to myself and went to my bed, that night was going to be a restless night, and I needed every second of rest that I got.

The bell for dinner woke me up. The adrenaline pumped through my body, as I knew what time it was. Ethan was already outside the cell, and everyone was already awake. They all had emotionless faces, ready to face whatever was next. That was it, that night was the last night we were going to be in the prison. We were either going to escape or die trying to. Either way was better than being confined forever. My friends knew that too, and that belief kept them and me going.

“You guys ready?” I spoke up.

They all nodded. Ethan Avison seemed more determined than usual.

“Let’s move then.”

I grabbed the gun and the Anti-Suppression Device. Then I led the team to where the nurse's office was. The nurse was located in a hallway connecting the male section to the female one. That made sense, they didn’t have enough money to have separate ones. I could see Cecilia’s red hair from a distance, she had been waiting for us. Alexei got ahead of me and walked inside the nurse’s office.

“Is that the guy who was the TNT in him?” Cecilia asked in her high-pitched voice.

“Yep,”

“Whoa, he is as crazy as he looks.”

Alexei smiled when he heard that. It was like he took pride in being crazy. There was a metal bed that was emptied of bed sheets, which I assumed to be the operating table. Alexei caught on and lay on the bed.

“You sure you can do this, lady?” Alexei asked in a hesitant voice.

“I can try my best,” Cecilia replied, determined.

“And her best is all we have right now,” I assured Alexei. “Start the operation, we don’t have much time.”

Alexei lay dead still on the table, then he pointed to the area where he was hiding the TNT in. Cecilia fetched a syringe from her desk and proceeded to inject the anesthesia into Alexei. Alexei winced when he was stabbed with the pointy end, but he didn’t make much more sound after that.

“We have 5 hours, do it quickly,” I said to Cecilia.

“OK.”

An hour passed. I realized that we didn’t have much to do when Cecilia was operating on Alexei. Paul and Ethan were on guard, however, making sure no one gets in and disturb us. I had to thank them for that, if a guard saw us in there, it would be game over. Ethan was holding a glass cup in his hand. He concentrated on it a bit and then slammed it onto the floor. It didn’t break, he must have turned it as hard as a diamond. That’s a cool power.

“Hey Ethan, mind if I asked you how did you get into this prison?”

He glanced at me with his cold eyes.

“Self-defense.”

The mood between us was interrupted by a deep silence. He refused to elaborate any further. I hoped I didn’t make him angry, or angrier. He was, in fact, holding a hard object in his hand. I sat down closer to him, however. I was intrigued by him, he saved me after all, without him, I would have died in that kitchen.

After a short while, I turned to the allies that were still awake.

“Alright, Paul, Ethan, we should go back to the cell. They are going to check if we are there before curfew, I need you to lay down in bed pretending to be Alexei sleeping.”

“Sure, but how are we going to get out of the cell once they have locked the door?” Paul asked.

“You have a Physical Spirit, you could bend the bars so that we could get out of there.”

“That’s a long shot, I don’t know how tough the bars are!”

“I do, this place is old, and they are under-funded, the bars are outdated, you should be able to bend it so that we could get out, and bend it back again to not cause any alarms.”

“I trust you, Arthur, but this better not kill us all.” He seemed satisfied with my answer.

I looked over to the operation table, there was blood everywhere. It looked like Cecilia was having some trouble finding where to cut so that it wouldn’t kill him. Or maybe I was just over-worrying, I knew nothing about the medical field. The rest of us headed outside, Ethan holding the cup he used his power on with him. It seemed like the guards were getting ready for the patrols, and most of the prisoners were already back in their cells. Dinner time was over, curfew was approaching, and the anxiousness and anticipation grew inside me more and more every second. As we got to the cell, I wanted to clarify something.

“Ethan, would the guards notice that you aren’t there in your cells?”

“Oh, you didn’t know?” He said in surprise.

“What?”

“Because of my Importance score being on the higher side in this prison, I got my own cell and they don’t check in on me until the morning.”

I just realized that every single time I saw him in his cell, he was alone, with only one bed. His cell was bigger as well. I grew sick in my stomach. Even in the lowest place on this planet, there was still discrimination by social classes. I nodded to him and pointed to the bed under my own. We all lay on our beds, just waiting for the lights to go out.

“Hey, we wait a bit after the lights go out, just to make sure the patrol guards aren’t near us yet,” I told them.

They all silently agreed. The countdown startled me. It’s happening, this is it. When the countdown hit 0, the lights went off as usual.