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- 'How are you enjoying escaping?' I asked him. He had very much continued to do so, wandering the prison with the casualness of a feline. He had even disabled, briefly, the Custodian we had placed outside his door, waking it up only on his return with a cheery tap and a wave. 428 was not taking The Prison seriously.
- [...]
- 428 gave it every appearance of serious consideration, and then he leaned forward, candidly. As you said, it's a hobby, really, sir. After all, every man must have a hobby. The lower security levels, they're the easy bits. It's getting beyond a certain point, that's really tricky. But I'll get there. Honestly, if you hadn't incinerated Clara's mobile, I could have shown you Candy Crush. Now that's annoying.'
- [---]
- The Custodian did not reply.
- 428 repeated his question. And then with a weary sigh of resignation, vanished from the window of his cell. A moment later, the door popped open and the Custodian's camera went blank. As it did so, 428 muttered something bitterly.
- [...]
- 'Tell Bentley I am sorry,' 428 said to me, his voice soft. 'And, just so you know, solitary is just as easy to get out of.'
- [...]
- The annoying thing was that 428's timing was dreadful. This was the worst moment to be pulling his running-around stunts. He was normally more careful. He usually slipped in and out of his cell without troubling the alarms, but this time he'd lit the board up like a festive display.
- [...]
- 428's cell was open and empty. A note was pinned to the door: 'Back in 5 mins. Sign for any parcels'.
- [---]
- 428 leaned back and clicked his tongue. 'Normally I'm a bit subtler, aren't I? But I think we're both tried. And that alarm had been going on for over six minutes. I say that, just to sound casual and so that I'm not letting on that it had been 6 minutes and thirty-nine seconds. Normally you can feel power being rerouted to cope with the system failure. You know, the air gets a little sticky, the gravity goes up by 0.3 per cent and then by 0.8 per cent... Those little tell-tales. But this time nothing. Which means that this time, before it ended, it was so bad your system was locked out of whatever was going on. It really needed a kick up the backdoor.'
- 'I'm sorry?'
- 'It takes an expert to open their cell door as badly as I did. I set off all the alarms, didn't I? It pulled your system out of its loop and gave it something fresh to sink its teeth into.'
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