“What just happened?”

Elena looked down at her daughter.

Chloe was looking back up at her, and her bright blue eyes were unblinking, holding a level of calm intelligence and quiet resolve that no eight-year-old should have needed to develop.

This was not a child guessing at things she did not understand.

This was a child who had understood, and decided, and acted, and had carried the whole terrible weight of it alone until she could place it, at last, in the one pair of hands she trusted.

“Warden,” Elena said, and her voice came out rasping through a throat gone dry as paper, but underneath the rasp there was something that had not been in her voice a minute before, something Mitchell had never heard from her in five years: hope, and with it, a hard bright edge of purpose.