Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please.

– Mark Twain

***

Matteo's prediction that Johnny and his goons won't let us rest is on the money. At regular intervals, one of the guards inevitably shows up to bang on the bars and shine the flashlight into our cell. The time between their visits is just enough to doze off and nearly get a good sleep.

Sleeping beauty is the mildest nickname I receive from the goons. It's also the most creative, so I'll take wake up, sleeping beauty! over the unpleasant alternative means of rousing me from Matteo's chest.

Who would have thought that in an empty room, with absolutely nothing to do, I wouldn't be able to catch up on all the zzz's I had missed since age thirteen?

The cacophony of metal-on-metal intrudes into my fragmented dreams, creating surreal scenes. Despite the damp and cold, I always wake up coated in sweat. I get used to waiting out the racing of my heart and watching Matteo drag himself to his feet. He goes to confront the assholes. He does it again, again and again.

This time, however, when I wake up, it's not the guards. There's a scraping sound, not shouts and banging. The crumpled hoodie is all mine, a sleeve thoughtfully wrapped around my butt. Matteo crouches a few feet away, dragging the mangled camera's bracket against the wall. The scraping of metal on stone is not as bad as it would have been on glass, but it echoes through my under-slept mind.

Oh, gosh, that's it. He's gone mad. An icy shiver runs down my spine and drives me to my numb feet faster than a whip would have. "M-matteo?"

"Sorry I woke you up. Go back to sleep."

He sounds sane, but I limp over to him with a solicitous smile on my lips. "Matteo, are you okay?"

He lifts his head from his scraping and gives me a crooked smile. "I've been better, but bones knit fast on me. Always did."

"That's good." My voice is thick with sleep, and so are my thoughts, churning through my mind like through molasses. "Wait how do you know that?"

"Been there, done that." He shrugs. "The main thing, I heal good. Probably the lifting and stuff."

"What stuff?" I echo.

"Karate, boxing... and a half-dozen other MA's. The sports that were supposed to keep me out of trouble when I was a teen." He looks up at me. Something sticky smears his hands, but his eyes hold on to a quiet glimmer of sanity. "Only it didn't."

"Sorry to hear that," I mumble.

"It's not anybody's fault." He lowers his head over his scraping again.

If he is sane, what is he up to? I peer at his project and stifle a gasp of surprise.

The section of the wall he's working on is modern brickwork, rather than ancient stone, roughly seven feet by five, like an oversized doorway. I saw it yesterday. I thought it was weird, but didn't pay heed to it. I should have, because the weird things like that are the urban explorer's lure. Maybe it's me who is going mad...

"What do you have here, Matteo?"

"A crack. Look."

A crack zigzags through the cement coating, widened by fallen out bits from its initial swollen gap. Matteo's efforts exposed a brick underneath the plaster. Afraid to breathe, I extract a hair clip from my matted hair and poke its crappy metal prong into the cement.

The damp gray layer sloughs.

With shaking fingers, I stick the pointy end of my clip into the mortar between the bricks. It's old and weathered by the moisture weeping over the walls. I wish it would come out in clumps, but that's too much to hope for. At best, my clip could strip a bit of mortar, a sixteenth of an inch in thickness, maybe less. But it's not nothing. Not nothing!

My heart beats louder, pouring adrenaline into my veins, to suppress the pangs of hunger and thirst. "Could it be a blocked off passage?"

"I hope so," Matteo says. "I couldn't sleep and something was nagging at me. Then I remembered something. Before I came for a look-about, I talked to the family. Aunt Clara mentioned that the dungeon was bigger once, but a section had to be abandoned because of a scandal in the mid-eighties. I thought it was pointless, but..."

He trails off and digs in.

I join his efforts on the other side of the same exposed brick, where my trembling hands won't get into his way. "Thank goodness for the shoddy contractors!"

"Thank goodness for them. And for the old ladies, prickly enough about the family's reputation to remember it."

Mid-eighties? If this was grouted back then, it gave the moisture nearly forty years to gnaw on the mortar. If it's just one layer—and why would they add more in a dungeon already hidden inside of an abandoned castle?—we'll get an opening large enough for me to squeeze through before we keel over from hunger.

"This is good, Matteo, so good! The first good news we've had since forever!"

I might be humming at this point. Yup, definitely humming.

Oh, how low I have fallen, if the prospect of pulling apart a brick wall with a hairpin makes me giddy with happiness!

Matteo's arm wraps around my shoulders, turning me away from the bricks that hold me in thrall. "Bryn, I don't know how much it would help us, because my aunt didn't mention a separate exit. But it's something to try, right? Just something to try."

Fine, fine. The reality check can't hurt.

I clutch the hair clip tighter. "Access to a new area opens new options, Matteo. The walling off seems to have been done in haste. We could find abandoned stuff there. What they saw as garbage could be our salvation. And if there is infrastructure... like an exposed water pipe... gosh, Matteo, a water pipe... just think of that!"

The thought of water makes my living eye sting. I try to swallow, and sure thing, I don't find a single drop of saliva in my throat. I dry swallow with a parched throat, a horrible sensation.

Water, I would give everything I own for a drop of water.

He clutches me even tighter. "Bryn, promise me you won't give up, if there's another wall behind this one."

The itsy-bitsy spider of suspicion climbs up the waterspout. For a guy who got up early to scrape cement off a dungeon wall, he has a lot of reservations all of a sudden. I have a hard time believing his plea that he knows nothing more. "Okay, Matteo, out with it. What did Aunt Clara tell you?"

He scratches the back of his head. "That's why I hoped to get a brick out before you woke up, but you being you..."

His chuckle is full of conflicting emotions. I like the fondness, but he can check the exasperation at the door... once we have a door that is. "Me being me, I would have noticed a brick on the floor anyway."

"Fair enough," he says. "The scandal was terrible for the times. They could have cleared the area out to get rid of evidence. They could have taken a blowtorch to it."

"That bad? What the heck did you have here? A body-snatchers' chop-shop?" My giggling is just a touch shy of hysterical, but the expression in his eyes shuts me up.Oh, gosh.

"It was a brothel. Well, kind of. With some..." he cringes, "nasty stuff."

I pluck another scoop of disgusting gray matter from the brick's edge and flip it to the growing dirt mound on the floor. "Rich people preying on the vulnerable poor?"

For a while we dig in silence.

"Shit, Bryn, will you stop judging? That's why I don't tangle with the prissy girls from the suburbs."

"I'm not judging. I'm too exhausted to judge. And too hungry. It's been days since I've had a shower. I don't have a judgmental bone left in my body."

Every word out of my mouth is true. My stomach is growling, my throat is raw, and everything itches. The boost of adrenaline that the discovery of the cemented wall injected into my veins is used up. It's hard to derive continuous joy from digging little bits of mortar from around a brick.

"Yeah, right," Matteo grumbles.

"I'm not judging."

He doesn't reply.

The footsteps overhead interrupt our standoff.

Matteo jumps to his feet with almost a palpable relief, as if it suddenly became a pleasure for him to trade insults with the guards and dodge buckets of slop.

Maybe it is, maybe he needs to take his ire on someone who isn't me.

For me, the spectacle has grown old. I dig and stew in resentment. My nail breaks, making me cuss like it's the worst thing to have ever happened to me.

Deep down I know that I cuss, because I'm still pissed with him. After the guards had called me his whore, a cunt and a psychotic bitch—and they continue to do so right this minute—their curses lost their bite. But Scali... Scali managed to find the word that stings me. Prissy, am I? Jerk!

When this round vs. guards ends, he crouches next to me, chewing his already chapped lips.

"They brought more men in," he tells me companionably, forgetting our interrupted argument. "I didn't recognize these two guys."

"I'm not prissy," I say. "Let alone a prissy princess."

What little peace of mind he's gained from the yelling match crumbles into dust. "No, no. You're not prissy! You break into the abandoned buildings, knowing that mommy and daddy would bail you out. You're such a brave girl!"

My mouth hangs open. "Scali, what the fuck?"

"And if you find squatters there, what do you do, Bryn? Run like the wind? Give them money for drugs and booze?"

"What even brings this on?"

"What do you do, Bryn?" Scali asks again, too softly for my liking.

Enough is enough. My surviving eye narrows on its own. "At least I didn't grow rich from selling them drugs."

"Screw you," Scali growls.

We dig back into the soggy mortar with our primitive tools, widening the gap around the brick, while another one is widening between us. Even back at St. Luke, I felt that we were radically different.

The temptation to curl into a little ball on the hoodie and give up on life is growing. Sugar crush, I tell myself, it's just my blood sugar plunging. I have to soldier on, because this isn't St. Luke. I can't drive away in a huff from here. We have to dig together.

If one of us jumps up in anger, throws up their arms, abandons the digging, then one of us... nope, there is no one of us. If Scali or I abandon the digging, I won't live long enough to know what's hiding behind the brick wall.