Something in that specific, useless, entirely human detail seemed to reach whatever was left inside the ash-grey shape huddled in front of her, and the flinching eased, fractionally, enough that Savage got an arm under what used to be Merit's shoulder and started hauling her free of the cage with a gentleness that looked strange and out of place on someone built the way Savage was built.
Luxy had the second cage open a heartbeat later, and the shape inside it moved on its own, slow, uncertain, toward the opening, watching all of us with an expression that had gone from wary animal caution to something closer to dawning, disbelieving hope, and I found I couldn't look at that particular transition for very long without my own chest doing something painful and complicated.
The boots on stone were close now, close enough that I could make out individual voices under the sound of them, and Namey came sprinting back from the worktable with a fistful of papers stuffed hastily inside his coat and something small and metal clutched tight in his other hand.
"Move," he said. "Now, all of us, that stair's the only way up and it's the only way they're coming down too, which means we've got about ten seconds before this turns into a fight in a stairwell nobody wins."
We went. Savage half carried, half guided Merit up the narrow stair with a strength I hadn't fully appreciated she had until I watched her use it, Luxy doing the same for the other freed prisoner just behind her, Namey and I bringing up the rear with bow and dagger both ready, and the first guards reached the bottom of the stair just as the last of us cleared the top, close enough behind that I heard a shout go up when they found the cages empty, close enough that I loosed two arrows back down into the stairwell's mouth more to buy seconds than out of any real hope of hitting anything.
We broke out into the loading yard at a dead run, the crates of variant-seven cores looming dark and stacked on either side of us, and Aki was already airborne and screaming a warning cry that cut through the mountain air loud enough to raise the alarm all on its own even without the guards already chasing us, and somewhere behind us I heard the gatehouse door slam open and more boots joining the pursuit.
We didn't make it to the gate clean. A guard cut across our angle from the equipment sheds, faster than the rest of them, and got a fist around the second prisoner's wrist before any of us reached him, wrenching the man half off his feet with a cry that cracked something in my chest to hear. I put an arrow into the guard's leg without thinking twice about the distance, too close for anything I'd call a clean shot, and it took him in the calf instead of anywhere that would have dropped him outright, but it was enough that his grip failed, and Namey hauled the freed man loose and kept running without breaking stride. I understood, watching the guard stagger on two more steps before his leg finally gave out under him, that I'd have kept shooting if he hadn't gone down when he did, and I didn't let myself look at that thought any harder than I had to right then.
Namey went down hard a dozen strides later, his boot catching a loose rail tie in the dark, and half the loose papers he'd stuffed inside his coat scattered wide across the gravel before he could catch himself. He grabbed back what he could find by feel and left the rest, and I heard him swear, short and vicious, in a voice I'd never once heard him use before, and none of us slowed down long enough to ask him what exactly he'd had to leave behind.
Luxy's lockpick had left the perimeter gate swinging loose, and we hit it at a full run, spilling out onto the switchback road with our two rescued prisoners between us and a mountain full of angry guards behind, and it was only once we'd put real distance between ourselves and the fence line, lungs burning, legs shaking with the effort, that I let myself glance back at the dark shape of the mine against the night sky and understand that whatever we'd just walked out of, we hadn't walked out of it clean, and we hadn't walked out of it finished either.
We didn't stop running properly until we'd put the better part of two miles between us and Highhollow's fence line, cutting off the main road into a stand of scrub pine that Namey judged, correctly as it turned out, thick enough to hide four exhausted people, one wyvern, and two barely-standing former prisoners from any patrol that came looking along the obvious route.
Merit sat with her back against a tree trunk, breathing hard, the ash-grey pallor of her skin looking somehow worse in open moonlight than it had under the mine's lantern glow, and the second prisoner, a man none of us had gotten a name from yet, curled into himself a short distance away, one wrist cradled awkwardly against his chest where the guard's grip had wrenched it, shaking steadily in a way that didn't look like cold.
"We can't take them into Highhollow," Savage said, low, once she'd caught enough breath to speak properly. "Threnody owns that town in every way that matters. Whoever they used to be, they're liabilities to that company now, walking proof of what we just saw, and Threnody's not going to let proof like that wander back into a settlement full of witnesses."
"We can't take them much further either," Luxy said, gently, crouched beside Merit and checking, as carefully as she could manage in the dark, whatever passed now for her pulse. "Not tonight. Not at the pace we'd need to outrun a proper search party."