you are haunted like every other holy thing.
what tried to destroy you didn't have the strength.
still you stand,
sturdy and smelling of smoke.
- little bird, clementine von radics
༒
in which tommy shelby finds his asylum
in the ver...
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She didn't know how many hours had passed, and she had lost count of the days. But when a quake shook the asylum, accompanied by a sound louder than anything Winnow had ever heard, she knew the time had come.
The ground shook; dust fell in flurries from the ceiling; the lights swung haphazardly, sending shadows reeling about the asylum like dancers drunk on the tune. From the back corner of her cell, pressed against the two cushioned walls she clutched for stability, Winnow looked up and allowed herself to smile.
As the metal door to the high-security ward swung open, Winnow pushed herself up onto unsteady legs and moved towards the bars, clutching them with both hands and waiting in silence. Voices drifted in from the hall, each one louder than the next, and a thrill crackled beneath her skin, electric, even as she shrunk back from the sound.
Here it came. Freedom.
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Even hundreds of metres away from the asylum, the air still smelled like ashes and dust, rising up to choke Winnow like a noose. Barefoot, clad only in the same dirty white rags she had been shoved into this morning, she staggered through another deserted alleyway, thanking the rain one thousand times over for clearing Birmingham of half its crowds.
Everything roared: the rain, the cars, the muddied puddles in the gutters as wheels seared through their shallow depths. The smoking asylum, the shouts of panic within its halls, the hurried mutters of the black-clad men outside them. It seemed the assistance of those men only extended so far: the moment they had completed the job of extracting her, Winnow was left behind. They would have nothing more to do with this strange, brittle, wide-eyed girl—they made that perfectly clear.
Too terrified to forge her own path through the harsh crags of the city, too terrified to beg the men for help, Winnow had said nothing at all as they left her in the dust-choked street. She didn't want to know how they would have responded if she'd tried. The man from the other day had looked at her with quiet calculation, wary and contemplative, but these fierce men beheld her with open mistrust and mutters beneath their breaths. We've had enough shit with those Chinese already, one of them hissed to another, even as he grabbed Winnow by the wrist to lug her from the cell. What's he on, setting one of their little crazies loose?
