At the wall, Harrison interlaced his fingers. "Step here. I'll boost you over." She put her foot in his hands. He lifted, straining, getting her high enough to grab the top of the wall. She pulled herself up with strength that seemed impossible given her condition, driven by pure, desperate will.
Then she was over, dropping down the other side. Harrison grabbed the wall's top edge, pulled himself up, his arms screaming. For a terrifying moment he thought he couldn't do it, that he'd hang there until the guards caught up. Then adrenaline gave him the strength he needed. He pulled himself over, dropped heavily on the other side, his ankle twisting painfully as he landed.
Lydia grabbed his arm. Come on. They ran into the trees, branches whipping at their faces, roots catching their feet. Behind them, Harrison heard guards at the wall, heard them climbing over, but the darkness in the dense forest gave them cover. They had perhaps a two-minute lead.
They ran for the road for where Clara waited with the wagon. 200 yd 150. There the road emerging from the trees. And there the wagon. And there Clara jumping down, her face transforming when she saw her daughter.
Mama. Lydia's voice broke. She stumbled forward, falling into her mother's arms, both of them sobbing. In the wagon, Harrison gasped. Now they're right behind us.
Clara lifted Lydia into the wagon bed, climbed up after her. Harrison pulled himself onto the driver's bench, grabbed the reins, snapped them hard. The horse started forward, slow at first, then faster, pulling them away from Brightwater, away from the sounds of pursuit, away from the facility where they tried to break a brilliant child's mind. They drove through the night, changing roads frequently, heading generally northeast toward Connecticut. Every sound made Harrison jump.
Every distant rider made him think they were caught. But as hours passed and no pursuit materialized, he began to believe they might actually escape. At dawn, they reached the safe house, a Quaker farm in northern Connecticut, whose owners asked no questions. Clara and Lydia were given a room. Harrison collapsed in a chair, exhausted beyond anything he'd ever felt.
But they'd done it. Against the machinery of law and institutional authority, against the power of men like Thorne, who controlled resources and respectability, they'd done it. They'd rescued one brilliant girl from captivity.
Later that morning, as Clara tended to her daughter and Harrison tried to process everything that had happened, Lydia asked to speak with him privately. They sat in the farm's kitchen while Clara bathed upstairs, and Lydia looked at him with eyes that had aged years in the weeks since her abduction. Professor Webb, I need to tell you what Dr. Thorne was planning. What he called the definitive test. You don't have to talk about that now.
You're safe. You can rest. No, you need to know. You need to understand what you saved me from. She took a shaking breath.
He was going to perform surgery on my brain. Harrison felt the room tilt. What? He said it was the only way to definitively understand the source of my abilities. He said the measurements and tests were inconclusive.
That the only way to prove whether my intelligence was genuine or aberrant was to examine my brain directly. He described an invasive brain procedure intended to examine the structures he believed might explain my abilities. He admitted that I might not survive it, but spoke as though that risk were acceptable for the advancement of science. He said my sacrifice would help determine the truth about racial intelligence once and for all. She was crying now silently, tears streaming down her face.
He talked about it like he was being kind to me, like he was doing me a favor by making my death meaningful. He kept saying that surely I understood the importance of contributing to scientific knowledge, that this was my chance to matter, to be part of something larger than myself. And I realized that he genuinely believed it. He thought he was being reasonable, that killing me to study my brain was a legitimate scientific methodology. Because to him, I'm not a person. I'm a specimen, and specimens exist to be studied, no matter what it costs them.
Harrison pulled her into an embrace, feeling her thin frame shaking against him. He will never touch you again. I promise. We're taking you somewhere he can't reach you. You'll be free to learn and grow and become whatever you're capable of becoming. And he'll spend the rest of his life knowing that the evidence that proved him wrong escaped.
Do you think he'll stop looking for me? I think he'll try to find you. But, Professor, the world is large and we're going to make you disappear into it so thoroughly that Dr. Marcus Thorne will search for the rest of his life and never find you.
You'll become a ghost story. the brilliant girl who vanished, the one who got away, and that will haunt him forever." For the first time since her rescue, Lydia smiled, a small, fierce expression that suggested that despite everything they'd done to her, despite all the weeks of isolation and examination and fear, they hadn't broken what mattered most. Her mind was still hers.