Free Web NovelChapter 77: Mise En Place
Proxy moved along the wall, not hurrying, but not so slowly that he looked like he was dodging anything in particular. The guards were scattered across the active sections, and none of them were looking at the wall. None of them were looking at the kitchen, either, which, in its own way, was reassuring.
He reached it and pushed the door.
The kitchen was smaller than the amount of food suggested. Overhead lighting, white and harsh. fгeewёbnoѵel.cσm
A counter was along the left wall, and another along the far wall. A rack of kitchen knives sat on a bar magnet near the door, cleaning supplies lined up at the base of the far counter, overhead storage he did not have the height for and did not have the time to bother with.
And Vex standing in the center of the room.
She turned when the door opened, though she had clearly heard him coming already, because she had stopped before it. Her expression was attention narrowed to a point, everything else set aside. Not surprised. If anything, mildly satisfied that her prediction had been close enough to count.
"You figured it out faster than I expected," she said.
"Neither of us are blind, or stupid." Proxy said.
She gave that a brief tilt of the head, the closest thing to agreement she seemed willing to spend.
"We have the same problem. One week, no tools, a room full of crazy maniacs."
She paused. "I’ve checking the prison structure since we were brought here, possible escape routes, possible ways for us to get resources to get out."
He looked at her.
"And you want what, in exchange for that."
"Someone who can think through a problem," she said.
She shifted her weight once, then went on. "That’s all. I’m also not going to pretend the golf course fight didn’t happen, because that otherwise wastes the time we don’t have."
She held his gaze, steady and waiting. "I need to get out of this place. So do you, and there is no rule we can help each other in the process."
Proxy did not answer at once. He was observing her the way he observed everything, which is to say, by asking what she was presenting, what she was withholding, and what the difference between the two was supposed to accomplish.
She needed to survive the week, and this sort of alliance suggested she either wasn’t confident on her lack of allies, or would like to cover her bases if possible.
He was still turning that over when the kitchen door opened.
Nyx walked in.
She looked at Proxy. She looked at Vex. She looked at the space between them and took what she had walked into, her expression arriving at its conclusion before she bothered to speak.
"Well."
The warm in her voice had an edge to it, "I come in here and find you talking to another woman. And Jinx was already enough of a headache."
She looked at Vex directly, and the smile stayed, but the edge behind it grew.
"You had a gun at the back of his neck, I remember it. I never did get to settle that."
Vex read the room in less than a second and moved.
She put the nearest counter between them, pulled the ladle from the wall hook, and threw it at Nyx’s face in one motion.
Nyx took it on the forearm and kept walking.
Vex moved along the counter toward the far end of the kitchen, keeping the counter between them like a line she intended to keep intact. She grabbed the pan hanging on the wall, large and heavy, cast iron by the sound it made coming off the hook, and swung it as Nyx came around the counter’s end.
The pan caught her on the left shoulder, and the impact was real. It cost Nyx one step backward.
Vex did not wait to see whether it was enough.
She moved toward the far counter, the full length of the kitchen between them, her eyes on the near objects, her movements methodical, as if she were spending seconds carefully instead of losing them.
Nyx closed the distance faster than the kitchen had room for.
She got her left hand on Vex’s collar from behind.
Vex dropped her weight at once and turned inside the grip, driving her elbow back into Nyx’s right side. The elbow landed cleanly, and Nyx made a short sound through her nose and did not let go of the collar.
She had Vex’s arm with her right hand, thumb finding the elbow, pulling the arm into a position it was not meant to keep. She turned with it, using the joint against the direction Vex’s body wanted to go, and put her face-first into the counter surface. The sound of the impact was flat and final.
Vex’s hands went out to the counter to push off.
Nyx hit her once more at the base of the skull with the heel of her palm.
Vex went down and did not get back up.
Proxy had been moving along the opposite counter during the fight.
He was reading labels. The cleaning supplies at the base of the far counter were in standard facility format, industrial bottles with black text on white. He found the bleach-based cleaner, the ammonia-based one beside it. Both were small enough to sit flat inside the waistband of the uniform.
He tucked them against his lower back under the fabric and noted, with the detached calm of a person inventorying future problems, that putting them together in an enclosed space would produce chloramine gas. Useful information. Not yet useful enough to matter.
He moved to the knife rack by the door. He took the second-longest blade, pulled a folded cloth from the counter beside it, wrapped the blade, and pressed the bundle flat inside the waistband at his right hip with the handle pointing inward.
He looked at Vex on the kitchen floor. She was breathing, slow, even, unconscious rather than worse. She would wake with a specific and accurate understanding of who had been in the kitchen and what had happened, and that was a problem he would deal with when it became the current problem. There was no point solving a future problem early when the present one was still occupying the room.
Then the canteen sounds changed.
Through the door came louder commands, cutting through the general noise, and the clatter of guards who had been reinforced and were now doing their jobs properly. The brawl was winding down. Guards checked the surroundings when brawls wound down. The kitchen would not be the last place they looked.
"Nyx," he said.
She was already looking at him.
She had the calm expression she wore when something had been resolved and she had been the one to resolve it. She glanced down at Vex on the floor with the look of someone confirming an obvious result, then came toward him across the kitchen at the easy, light walk she used when the world had gone back to being fine.
Her two fingers found the back of his sleeve before they had reached the door.
They came back through the kitchen door into the canteen at the pace of people who had been somewhere in the room the whole time. The brawl’s aftermath was spread, scattered inmates, guards moving through the rows, and two more coming from the entrance. The swordsman and the guards managing him were still working through their own situation, but the active fighting was done.
Proxy and Nyx moved through the room toward the far wall, staying away from prying eyes, and he felt the bottles against his lower back and the knife flat against his hip.
Neither of them said anything about the kitchen.
