Night at St. Bridge was an animal with slow lungs. It breathed in, then out, a rhythm of clicks and distant footsteps that tried to convince everyone inside that time would always be there to bleed them dry. Jayden had learned to listen to that breath the way other men listened to weather—reading the shifts, catching the patterns, preparing for what a change might mean. Tonight the air tasted like metal and rain, and every inhalation felt like an invitation.
He lay on his bunk with the light off, the little flare from Malik's cigarette under the laundry room doorway painting the ceiling in the faintest orange. The blueprint was folded and tucked into the back of his sketchbook, the pencil lines softened from thumbprints. He could rehearse it perfectly: Hendrix's cigarette click at 23:12, Ortiz on supply detail at 01:10, Malik's delivery window at 03:00. He'd memorized the creak of hinges and the way the rain made the gate rust sing. All of it had become a map in his head, a map that led to somewhere with no bars.
But a map doesn't show everything. A map doesn't hold what you leave behind.
He rolled onto his side, the mattress hissing in the dark, and held the letter he had written to Layla — folded twice, the ink smudged where his thumb had worried it raw. He'd never planned on sending it. It was a place to put his voice so it didn't keep rattling around his skull at night, a promise made to a ghost. He traced the edges with his thumb as if he could press the words into himself. She was the reason the plan was a plan and not just another fantasy. If he failed, it would be her he had failed to reach.
The cost was an immediate, personal ledger: the risk of a guard's boot in his ribs, the possibility of solitary that would toast his mind into a slow, quiet ruin. But the ledger had longer columns—friends who would be burned by association, Malik and Ortiz and maybe Hendrix if he'd been gullible enough to believe in mercy. People who would be punished for a crime they didn't sign for. Worse, the possibility that ripping them out of the cage would only drop them into a different maze—streets that devoured boys and girls with hands softer than any guard's.
Jayden thought of Dre like he came into the room and sat on the edge of the bunk. Dre's voice wasn't real, but the memory was: the gravel counsel, the way Dre used to say control wasn't surrender but selection. You pick your fight, Scrap. Don't make it for them. Tonight the fight had a name. It had a bridge.
He thought of Layla again, not the kid behind the police cruiser but the girl scribbling flames in a notebook under a blanket. She'd found his name on a photocopy, and that tiny echo had made the entire machine feel crackable. If she believed for even a second that someone had been trying to find her, it would keep her from giving up. Maybe that was selfish—using someone's hope as fuel—but survival had always forced them into compromises that weren't pretty.
The van would come at three. The delivery truck would be a blind. Malik's window was the hinge. Ortiz had the keys. Hendrix would be outside, cigarette dying in his fingers, eyes on a horizon that might as well have been a postcard. Jayden breathed slow and rehearsed the motions. He checked the line in the sketchbook again: gate, vent, hall, delivery door, truck—then the long stretch beyond St. Bridge where the city swallowed up old men and younger men who tried to make themselves new.
He thought about what he would look like on the other side: calm, hollow, free. Would people see him as hero or thief? Did that matter? The answer loomed the way the train whistles did—inevitable, indifferent. He had no illusions about being welcomed by parades.
When he slid out of bed, the boards whispered. He crossed the room like a shadow and slipped the sketchbook under his shirt. His movements had been practiced to small perfection: the rule of silence, the economy of breath. He moved without the fanfare some jailbreaks in movies imagined. There was no music here; only the small, clear sounds—his heartbeat, the distant hum of the generator, the rain in its small language.
Malik was waiting near the laundry gate, a dark shape against darker walls, his face a coin in the dim light. Ortiz stood by the workshop door, fingers flexing the way a man flexes a wrench before a job. Hendrix was where Hendrix always was: under the single yellow light by the gate, his cigarette embers like a tiny, dangerous constellation.
"No coming back if it goes sideways," Malik said, voice low. He had already lost so many hope-lines to institutions like this; he sounded older than his twenty-seven years.
"Either we do it right," Jayden answered, "or we don't do it at all." It wasn't bravado; it was fact. There was nothing noble in a half-baked escape. The consequences here multiplied like roaches.
They went to work like men on a job. Jayden's hands were steady as he moved to the vent in the workshop, prying at the hidden screws Ortiz had counted. The metal shrieked, small and precise. Malik watched the hallway and gave the signal with a scrape of his shoe when the corridor noise died down: Hendrix had lit his cigarette and walked away to the fence, slow and casual, puffing toward a world that was not here.
The gate latch felt different in Jayden's palm, cool and improbable. He hooked his finger, eased it, and watched the moonlight find the tiny space that would be enough. They would have exactly ninety seconds—delivery trucks were punctual and short. This window was carved out of weeks of observation and whispered exchange.
The truck's lights rolled down the avenue like two slow god-eyes before it eased into the service bay. Malik had given Ortiz's name to the driver as some obscure code. The driver allowed the cargo to be unloaded: two pallets of cleaning supplies, a cardboard barricade of normalcy that hid the quiet scuttle of men under orange vests. The plan had asked for shadows, and tonight the shadows obeyed.
Movement was a choreography. Ortiz slipped past the dock, a ghost with keys. He unlatched the secondary door and left the bolts loosened. Malik signed for the delivery, exchanged a nod, then lingered by the back, pretending to rearrange boxes. The window came alive with the soft, banal noises of a place operating the way it had always done—and in that normalcy, Jayden found the miracle of it: the organism's complacency.
When Hendrix moved to light his cigarette at 03:12, he did not turn his head. He did not see the way Ortiz's hand slipped a small metal bar against the hinge and felt the softness of a system's integrity give. He did not see Malik's shoulders move like a man who had just put on skin that didn't belong to him for a minute. He did not see Jayden's face in the moonlight as he slipped through the widened crack, body low and precise.
They moved like water: through the supply corridor, under the air duct, across the yard where the gravel sang under their boots. Jayden felt everything—every sensation a tiny ledger of consequences he would tally later: the sting of salt on the skin, the ache in his knees, the taste of iron in his mouth from the cut on his lip where a nail had caught. He thought of Layla's photocopied name and shoved the panic back down again. There was no room for flinching now.
Then, a small sound frayed the night—a misstep on gravel. Malik's foot whispered a curse. On the perimeter, a light swung like a lighthouse. Hendrix cursed it's name and clicked the radio. The little engine of the system woke.
"Move!" Jayden hissed, and they moved faster.
The rest was clean, calibrated danger: sliding into the truck's dark belly, breath compressed, bodies flattened as the driver lifted the gate and walked away, swallowed by the night. Jayden lay in the belly among cardboard and the smell of pine-scented cleaner, his heart a drum. He tasted freedom and the ash of what it might mean—malik and Ortiz exhausted, Hendrix's cigarette stub forgotten in the rain, and beyond them a city that would not bend because he desired it to.
He closed his eyes and thought of the crossing, of Layla reading this letter someday, of Dre's voice like a ghosthand on his shoulder. The cost still sat at the edge of his plans, a constant tally. People might die from this. People might be ruined. They might be traded into worse cages. But if one of the fires he carried could light another life—if Layla could be found and the two of them could step into a life that didn't start with sirens—then the ledger would shift.
The truck rolled. The belly hummed like a trapped bee. Jayden pressed his palm over the letter in his shirt until the paper softened beneath his skin. He whispered into the cardboard dark the same vow he'd written in ink: I will find you.
When the truck turned the corner and the world outside the compound swallowed it, the sky blew open with rain, as if the city had finally decided to wash itself clean of apathy.
For a heartbeat, Jayden allowed himself to believe it might work. For a thousand more, he reminded himself that belief was a tool, not a comfort.
They had started the fire. Now it would be a matter of keeping it from consuming what they loved.