Chapter 23 WRECKER
WRECKER
This is insane.
I stare at the lockpicks, the map, and the folded paper spread across our bunk, and can’t keep my voice down any longer.
“We’re not actually planning on doing this, are we?
” I look at my brother, expecting him to laugh it off or call me paranoid.
But the look on Nico’s face says something else entirely.
He’s got that restless, stubborn glint in his eyes—the one that always gets us into trouble.
Jace leans against the wall, arms crossed, just watching us. Nico’s tracing the pencil marks on the map, his jaw tight.
I run a hand over my face. “Seriously, you all want to risk everything on this? On Carrie?”
Before anyone can answer, Nico nudges the envelope. “There’s something else. Bottom of the flap. You feel it?”
I reach in and pull out a scrap of folded notebook paper. On first glance, it’s just a few sentences, handwritten in Carrie’s neat, slanted style. But every other word seems out of place, strange. She’s never been careless with words. Not with us.
Nico squints, reading over my shoulder. “‘Laundry…sunset…guard left…no window…Coleson’… What is this, code?”
I turn the note around in my hands. “If she’s got eyes on her, maybe this was the only way she could explain.”
Jace leans in, his suspicion shifting to curiosity. “What’s she trying to tell us?”
I study the letter, my pulse picking up as I see a pattern, key words and phrases scattered through the lines. I read aloud, slow and careful, piecing together the real message hidden in plain sight. “Laundry at sunset, left corridor when guard leaves, no window for thirty minutes…”
It starts to make sense—Carrie’s mapped out the perfect timing for the escape, down to the guard shift and when the hallway’s clear.
My chest tightens. It’s real. She’s really trying to get us out.
I look up at my brother and then at Jace. “If we do this, there’s no turning back.”
But I already know we’re all thinking the same thing. We’re not just planning—we’re actually going to try.
“But the last word doesn’t fit. Is Coleson someone here in the prison with us?” I say.
“I don’t know,” Jace says, rubbing his chin. “But I swear I’ve heard that name before.”
Nico frowns at something before turning over the leaf. “There’s more here.
There, written in even tighter print, is another series of odd symbols and slashes—some kind of second code. This one looks a hell of a lot more complicated.
Nico leans in, brow furrowed. “You ever see anything like that?”
I shake my head, feeling the frustration build. “No. Not like this. It looks almost like a cipher.”
Jace stands up abruptly, heading toward the bookshelf at the end of the ward. “Keep looking at it. I’ll be right back.”
He comes back with a battered paperback—The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett. The cover is worn, pages yellowed from too many hands.
Jace drops it onto the bunk. “I checked this out the last time I was in the library. The last time I spoke to Carrie. Look at the last word on her code. It’s Coleson.”
He flips open the book, runs his finger along the first page, then points to the copyright and author bio. “I think she’s telling us to use this book to break the code.”
Nico stares at the title, then back at the coded note. “Seriously? This is some spy shit.”
Jace grins, a flicker of hope in his eyes. “No—this is Carrie. She always loved puzzles.”
The words jolt something in me. I remember the night a few of us were holed up in the Reaper clubhouse, half-drunk and bored out of our minds.
Someone handed Carrie an old coded message from a rival crew—just a dumb prank, something they thought would stump her for fun.
She cracked the thing in under fifteen minutes, laughing as she spelled out the answer on a napkin.
Jinn looked annoyed. I just remember thinking she was smarter than any of us.
I blink, coming back to the present, feeling more certain. “If she left us a puzzle, we better take it seriously.”
Nico glances between us, a new edge of excitement in his voice. “Let’s see what she’s got for us, then.”
We crowd close over the bunk, the note, and the battered book, hunched low so no one can see. Jace flips through The Maltese Falcon while Nico keeps an eye on the cell bars. I keep my ear tuned to the hallway, my pulse jumping every time voices echo closer.
Carrie’s system is clever—symbols point to page numbers, then lines, then words. Each time we get a phrase, we jot it down and cover everything with a deck of cards when anyone passes by. At one point, an older inmate gives us a look, but Nico just deals him into a fake game, smooth as ever.
Little by little, the message comes together. As I read the words out loud, my hands go clammy.
Get sent to solitary. East end, cell 3. Floor vent. Pry it up after lights out. Under vent: tunnel access, leads outside fence. Maintenance schedule: power out for repairs. Escape during blackout.
Nico leans over the map, voice just a whisper. “Jace, you ever hear about some tunnel in solitary? You’re the only one who’s spent a night in that hellhole.”
Jace shakes his head, eyes narrowed. “Never. Just the usual vents and the slab. If there’s a hatch, it’s hidden as hell. Or welded down.”
Nico shakes his head, incredulous. “How the heck did she even find out this stuff?”
I think about the way Carrie laughed with the staff at the event, her smiles and her quick questions that never seemed suspicious—just friendly, like she was trying to get along. That was the game.
We decode the rest of it piece by piece. It takes a fair bit of time. None of us are as smart as Carrie, and as I memorize the pattern, I can’t help but think how cool she is.
She deserves better than us.
The thought comes to me, leaving me almost breathless. I want to be worthy of her.
By the time we’re done, it’s dark outside. It’s too risky to write it down and leave it out so after we’re done decoding, Jace crumples the paper and eats it. It’s fairly disgusting, but effective.
“Okay, so we all know Carrie’s directions now,” Nico says calmly.
“Only one of us should get thrown into solitary—the others act as a distraction. Use kitchen job for access. Meet at the old delivery alley by the kitchen during blackout. Practice the route after dinner. Christmas kitchen shift is the best time to move tools,” I say by memory.
Nico frowns. “Wait, just one of us in the hole? Not all three? I swear I read—”
Jace interrupts him. “Yeah. The guards never put more than one from a fight in solitary at the same time. If we all go, they’ll split us up all over the prison. But if it’s just me, and you two are causing trouble somewhere else, they’ll keep us apart like normal.”
I scan the note again. “Look—she wants me in the kitchen for the holiday shifts. Christmas week, the kitchen’s a mess, tons of inmates are rotating in.
I’ll have a reason to be moving around, and I can hide a tool near the delivery alley.
Nico, your job is to set off a small alarm or distraction on the admin side right before the blackout, so the guards are running in circles. ”
Nico grins, rubbing his hands together. “Just my style.”
Jace keeps his eyes on the map. “I’ll pick a fight in laundry when the right guard’s on—guy with the limp, that’s the note here. He’s the one who always sends people to east wing solitary. I just have to make it obvious, but not bloody.”
We keep our distance from Carrie. It’s the hardest part. For the last two weeks, none of us have spoken to her directly.
If anyone’s watching, they’d think we don’t care about her at all. It feels wrong, but we know we have to play it safe. If the guards or the warden suspect anything, we’re done.
Instead, we use every spare moment to observe, plan, and test. Thanksgiving is coming, and the whole prison is on edge—extra food deliveries, more movement in the kitchen, shifts changing all the time. We use it to our advantage.
Jace keeps his head down in the laundry.
He studies the guards’ schedules, memorizes when the officer with the limp is on east wing solitary rotation.
He notes who watches the cameras, which guards are lax during meal delivery, and which days the laundry supervisor lets the jobbers roam without supervision.
He times his path from the laundry room to the admin corridor, noting blind spots, fire doors, and which workers gossip instead of watching.
Nico volunteers for library detail. He wipes tables, restocks books, and fixes shelves, but really he’s checking the admin side exits and searching for weak points in the staff doors.
He also hangs out near the rec room and admin hallway, learning how quickly guards respond to small disturbances—a cough, a dropped book, a loud laugh.
Twice, he sets off the old alarm by the staff restroom just to watch how fast they scramble.
He makes it look like an accident every time.
I join the kitchen crew, signing up for shifts all through Thanksgiving week.
The place is chaos—big frozen turkeys everywhere, delivery drivers complaining about late paperwork, half the cooks high on pie fillings.
I pay attention to the side doors, the service alley, and the rusted delivery elevator Carrie marked on the map.
On my second day, I stash a screwdriver behind the potato bin just like her instructions said.
We practice our “routes” in pairs—never the same two people, never at the same time.
Sometimes Jace follows the corridor from laundry, sometimes I make a big deal out of running to the kitchen freezer and then sneaking a peek out the alley door.
Nico runs errands for a bored guard, asking if he can take books back to the admin office, just to get a look at the doors.
We compare notes at night in whispers, always with one eye on the hallway and one ear on the guards’ boots.