Judy had never given much thought to what it would be like to be arrested. She had always done her best to obey the law, and had always, always assumed that the City Guard would do its best to correct mistakes. The bad old days of the City Guard pulling mammals from their beds in the night for imagined crimes had been done for centuries; everyone knew that. The City Guard was unfailingly professional, she had always believed, and on the day she had received her golden torc Judy's heart had about burst from pride at finally being a member.
But as she had been dragged through the streets of Phoenix back to the barracks, her feet not even touching the ground as she was effortlessly hustled along by a guardsmammal three times her height who seemed totally deaf to her protests, that confidence in the City Guard began to waver. And when she had been unceremoniously tossed into a holding cell, Nick's limp body sprawling across the floor a moment before she hit it herself, she couldn't help but think that the terrible error that was being made would never be fixed.
Judy tried to push that awful thought aside, instead turning her focus to Nick. She grabbed him by the front of his robes and, with a grunt of effort, rolled him onto his back; he had landed in the cell face down and was surprisingly heavy. "Nick?" she asked, grabbing his head in her paws and pulling his face toward her, "Nick, can you hear me?"
Her voice cracked as she spoke and she felt hot helpless tears running down her face. Nick uttered a low and wordless moan, his eyes rolled back into his head so far she could only see the whites. Judy frantically ran her paws through the dense fur of Nick's head, desperately trying to find a bump or a bleeding wound; the words of one of her instructors passed unbidden through her mind. Never ever hit a mammal in the head unless you're willing to kill them, the gruff polar bear had said one day, Or unless you want a vegetable.
What if Cencerro and his guards had hit Nick hard enough that he'd never be the same? Was there a chance that he really had been reduced to—Judy shook her head fiercely and tried desperately to remember everything she had ever learned about head wounds, but no matter how she searched she couldn't find an injury to his head. "Hey!" she called out desperately, "He needs someone to look at his head!"
There was no response, but Judy hadn't really expected one. They had been brought down to a sub-basement of the barracks; although it was not unusual for barracks to have underground holding cells, she had never before seen a cell exactly like the one she was in. It was similar to the cells of Oztoyehuatl's Jail meant for holding alchemists, which Judy had toured once while still in the academy. Rather than being a thick box of diamond broken only by air holes too small for any mammal to get through, the cell had closely spaced prisms of diamond, each nearly a foot thick at their widest. Judy might have been able to get her arm through one of the gaps, but certainly not her head or the rest of her body, and she had no hopes of pulling the bars, which looked to be deeply sunk into the floor, apart. Unlike the cells in Oztoyehuatl's Jail, though, it actually had a door—the Phoenix City Guard must not have any alchemists to make a hole in a solid wall, some distant part of Judy's mind told her—but it was just as solidly built of diamond as the bars and Judy had certainly never learned how to pick a lock. Like those cells for alchemists in Oztoyehuatl's Jail, though, there was a circle of glowing alchemical symbols surrounding the cell, about six feet from the nearest side, and Judy could feel the same sort of static tingle in her fur she had always felt when Nick performed alchemy of any kind. Beyond the cell, there was nothing else in the sub-basement; they had been brought to a level below the normal cells meant for normal mammals.
The glowing circle of the anti-alchemy array was the only light, palely illuminating stone walls smooth as glass that looked to have been carved out of the earth and just barely providing enough light to see the door that led to the stairs. Judy couldn't see or hear anyone else in the sub-basement with them, or keeping watch at the door; it felt as though they had been thrown into a pit and forgotten. "Please!" Judy yelled as loudly as she could.
There was no response. The sub-basement was almost deathly quiet, the stone walls and ceiling so thick that Judy couldn't even hear anything happening on the levels above them; the only sounds she could hear were her own rapid breaths and Nick's much slower ones. She took a deep and somewhat unsteady breath, forcing herself to focus. If no one else was going to come help, Nick needed her.
He didn't seem to have a head wound, but that didn't mean that he was uninjured; what if he had been stabbed and had passed out from blood loss? Judy roughly pulled Nick's robes open, and despite the seriousness of the situation had to immediately look away, her ears burning; the cream-colored stripe on the underside of Nick's muzzle went all the way down. She forced herself to turn back toward Nick, firmly keeping her eyes focused on his chest as she ran her paws through the soft fur. She couldn't find any injuries or bloody spots, not even when she carefully rolled him onto his side to check his back. Judy closed his robes as best she could, having ripped some of the delicate buttons with how quickly she had pulled them open, and put one ear up against his chest. She had no idea just how fast a fox's heart was normally supposed to beat, but like his breathing his heart rate was incredibly slow.
Judy frowned as she considered what her examination of Nick had taught her, besides a visual she did her best to push out of her head. He didn't have a bump on his head or any cuts anywhere on his body. He seemed barely conscious and unable to move or respond; he had barely shifted at all while she had been examining him, and while he had moaned a few times it hadn't been anything resembling words. His heart and his breathing were both incredibly slow. Putting it all together, what did that leave? Poison, perhaps? If so, there wasn't anything she could do; she knew even less about poison than she did about head injuries. Still, her mind couldn't help but jump to the worst case scenario; had Cencerro dosed Nick with something slow-acting to give him an agonizing death? Nick didn't seem to be in pain, but she couldn't tell for sure. She wasn't a healer of any kind, and for all she knew Nick was dying before her eyes.
Judy wasn't sure how long she waited, keeping her attention firmly focused on Nick, before anything else happened. There were no windows in the sub-basement or anything to tell the passage of time; it might have been hours that crawled past. Judy had tried keeping track of time by alternating prayers that Xolotl would see fit not to claim Nick with calls for someone to come look at him, but she lost count and couldn't remember how many repetitions of the cycle she had gone through. Her mind was starting to feel numb, as though by seeing first the dead body of the goat shopkeeper, and then being arrested and thrown into a cell alongside an unresponsive Nick, she had felt too much in too short a time and simply didn't have the energy for anything more.
Even her worry over Nick was difficult to sustain; he wasn't getting any better, but he wasn't getting any worse, either. His breathing remained regular, no matter how long the gap was between each breath, and he did occasionally twitch or moan. Judy tried to take it as a good sign, forcing down the dark thought that perhaps Nick would never recover from how he was, but it was a welcome distraction when she heard the clop of hooves coming down the stairs.
Despite her excitement, Judy carefully lifted Nick's head off of her lap, where she had propped him up, and set it onto the floor as gently as she could. The cell they were in didn't have a pillow, or really much else in the way of contents; there was an incredibly uncomfortable looking cot with no padding, a chamber pot, and nothing else. She stood up, pulling her uniform tunic down to straighten it as best she could. That, at least, they had left her; although her armor, weapon, and everything she had carried on her had been confiscated, she still had her uniform and the torc that marked her as a member of the City Guard. She forced herself to stand at attention, and soon enough the thick door into the sub-basement opened noiselessly and Lieutenant Colonel Cencerro walked in alone.
Although she was dying to beg for help for Nick, Judy did her best to stay professional. All she had to do, she told herself, was demonstrate that it was a terrible mistake and she and Nick would be free to go. She was simply over-reacting, the way everyone expected a bunny to. Cencerro approached the cell, crossing the line of the anti-alchemy array but stopping about three feet short of the bars that separated them. "Ensign," he said, inclining his head.
To Judy, he looked and sounded much the same as when they had first met. His uniform was crisp perfection and his voice and face were both coldly emotionless. "Lieutenant Colonel Cencerro, sir," Judy began, unable to contain herself any further, but the sheep interrupted before she could get another word out.
"I do apologize for arresting you, ensign," he said, "You seem rather devoted to the City Guard. An admirable trait, although the company you keep leaves much to be desired."
The sheep's lip curled briefly as he glanced down at Nick. "Sir, there's something wrong with him," Judy said, the words tumbling quickly out of her mouth.
Any concern about clearing either his name or hers could wait until she was sure he would be alright, and she plunged on, "He needs a doctor, or a healer if there is one."
"There's no need for that, ensign," Cencerro said, "He was given a quauhxicalli made from sloth blood. Rather effective at incapacitating a mammal, wouldn't you say?"
"It's a quauhxicalli?" Judy asked, but she could feel warm relief flowing through her.
She hadn't even considered the possibility, but it seemed obvious in retrospect. She had heard of the most expensive quauhxicallis incorporating sloth blood to make the effects last longer, but had never heard of one deliberately intended to slow a mammal down. But then, maybe it was just how the Phoenix City Guard operated, considering the lack of functional torcs in the settlement. "Oh yes," Cencerro replied, "I would have preferred it to be poison, or perhaps a sword to the gut, but we all make do as best we can, don't we? Besides, the two of you will be dead soon enough."
At first, Judy thought that she must not have heard Cencerro correctly. It didn't make any sense that the commander of the Phoenix City Guard would speak so casually about murder, but his face was cold and grimly set. He wasn't joking, she realized; he really did mean every word he had said. "Then... Then why didn't you just killing us outside the bookstore?" Judy asked.
The question had simply come into her head and out of her mouth; none of her training had done anything to prepare her for the possibility that a superior officer would plan to kill her and a civilian. And for what? Cencerro wasn't making any sense, and for the sake of Zootopia as a whole, as well as for the sake of Nick's life and her own, she had to figure out why.
Cencerro laughed, and Judy had to repress a shudder. She had never before seen a mammal with such coldly merciless eyes; his face looked almost corpse-like. "There are proper forms to be followed, ensign. Not all of my officers are quite so loyal to me as I'd like. Killing a fellow member of the City Guard—even a bunny—would be a step too far. And they'd certainly never stand for an execution without a court martial, but there simply isn't the time or the evidence."
Cencerro frowned. "You had the poor luck to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. It was supposed to be a different officer bringing the alchemist in for his bid," he said, and his eyes turned again toward where Nick lay insensate and drooling on the floor of the cell, "Someone who would have already framed him before he even set foot in Phoenix."
He sighed, but to Judy it seemed more a theatrical touch than anything he really felt. "It would have been satisfying to kill the fox myself, but in a few days both of you will be dead and none of this will matter," he said, "I do promise, though, that when I'm named Captain General of the City Guard, I'll tell your parents you died an honorable death in the tragedy at Phoenix. It'll be a comfort for them, don't you think?"
"You'll never be Captain General," Judy said with a vehemence she didn't feel.
Judy would have rather believed that Cencerro had gone mad than that he had become so corrupted, but Cencerro spoke each word with cold certainty, and at her words he smiled that awful smile again. "After Bogo's repeated mistakes, and my upcoming heroism, there won't be much of a choice," he said, "I'm already the frontrunner for the position, you see."
"You'll never be a hero, either," she said, and Cencerro simply stared at her.
His face had become a bland, unreadable mask, and she felt her skin crawl under her fur. The way that he shifted so rapidly from apparent shows of emotion to that awful inscrutable expression was somehow worse than either alone would have been. "You won't be around to see it," he said simply, "Goodbye, Ensign Tochtli, and give my regards to Nicholas."
With that, he turned and left, closing the thick door to the stairs behind him. Judy sank to the floor of the cell, her mind whirling with everything Cencerro had just said. What could he possibly mean by "the tragedy at Phoenix?" What kind of hero was he so confident he could be? She knew it was her duty to stop him, but by all the gods how was she supposed to do that?
It was sometime later when Nick became responsive again; over the course of perhaps an hour his movements started becoming more frequent and seemed more deliberate, and at last he sat up, rubbing gingerly at his head. "Nick!" Judy cried, and she wrapped her arms around him, "Are you alright?"
She couldn't help herself; after so much time spent alone with her own thoughts, her relief at seeing Nick apparently recovered was too great to be contained. "Fine," he said, although he sounded bewildered as he looked around, "Why are we in jail? What happened?"
Judy did her best to summarize everything that had happened; Nick's memory of events apparently ended shortly after she had entered the bookshop. She didn't think she told the story particularly well—in trying to tell him everything as quickly as she could, she kept stumbling over her words or diverting to tangents or asking him again how he felt—but Nick listened attentively, and when she had at last explained what Cencerro had said on visit, she came to a stop. "I'm really sorry," she said, "I was only following you because Cencerro ordered me to, and now—"
"You never could have seen this coming," Nick said, cutting her off, "I certainly didn't."
He glanced around the cell, his features set in a frown, but Judy couldn't stop. "No, but I still should have trusted you enough to just talk to you when you were talking to Fermina," she said, "You weren't doing anything wrong and Cencerro was obviously just trying to—"
Nick squirmed in apparent discomfort at her show of emotion, putting a paw on Judy's shoulder as he interrupted again. "Let's forget about that," he said, "What do we do now?"
He sounded somewhat lost, and Judy couldn't blame him. He had gone from planning to put in a bid on a minor government contract to getting arrested as part of some inscrutable plot that could only involve the overthrowing of that government. Judy still had no idea how all the pieces fit together—was arresting Nick part of Cencerro's plan, or was it simply a bonus to his obvious grudge?—but she thought she knew enough to be sure that the attempt on the princess's life was somehow connected to whatever Cencerro was planning. She had no idea what that could possibly be, but from how he had phrased it she thought that at least some of the Phoenix City Guard was loyal to him and it wouldn't go well for the inhabitants of the settlement.
"We need to get back to Zootopia and warn Captain General Bogo that Cencerro is going to do something," Judy said.
It wasn't much of a plan, but it was all she could think of. Nick's skepticism was plainly written across his face as he considered her for a long moment. "No one's ever escaped from one of these cells, you know," Nick said.
"No bunny ever joined the City Guard until I did," Judy answered firmly, "We're going to get out of here. I know we can."
It didn't matter that she had absolutely no idea how they would accomplish it, but her confidence in herself and Nick was unshakable. The simple truth, though, was that unless Nick knew how to pick locks, and happened to have a lock pick set on him that the guards hadn't confiscated, he had no way of opening the door. He couldn't do alchemy while they were in the cell and its surrounding anti-alchemy array, which seemed to be quite the obstacle to a successful escape. If the guards had left Judy her quauhxicallis—which they hadn't—she might have been able to at least try to force the lock, but she couldn't even do that much.
Nick was silent a moment, perhaps considering their situation as she was, and then suddenly laughed. "You know, Master Rogelio beat me for the contract on this cell," he said, shaking his head ruefully, "He had some words about the dangers of letting a fox design a... how did he put it? 'A cell he was bound to occupy someday.' And wouldn't you know? That miserable old porcupine was actually right about something."
He was smiling, though, and it brightened his entire face. It was nothing like his usual smirk, and when he spoke again Judy's heart leaped. "Rogelio's a good alchemist, but not a very clever one," he said, "Come on, Carrots, let's see what we have to work with."
Author's Notes:
In works of fiction, hitting someone in the head is often seen as a harmless off button with no lasting effects. In real life, it's extremely bad for you to get hit in the head hard enough to get knocked out. It can easily cause permanent impairment if it doesn't simply result in death, and I've done my best to avert this trope in my stories. Bogo suffered a severe concussion as a result of the blow he took to the head, and without magic would have likely been in worse shape, and it speaks highly of Judy's instructors that they warned against attempting to temporarily incapacitate someone with a headshot.
Judy noting that she's not a doctor isn't a deliberate reference to my Sherlock AU series, in which Judy is indeed a doctor, but I suppose Dr. Hopps would have better luck coming to a differential diagnosis.
As has been previously established, the high security cells in Oztoyehuatl's Jail are hollow boxes of diamond without any doors; opening them requires an alchemist to make a hole. Considering that Phoenix is really on the outskirts of civilization, and alchemists are rare to begin with, I figured it made sense that they wouldn't be able to exactly copy the city-state's most secure cells.
Judy using a prayer in an attempt to tell the passage of time is a method that was actually pretty commonly used before clocks were accessible. Some old recipes, for instance, would give the time needed for a step, such as simmering or baking, in how many times the Lord's Prayer was to be said before moving to the next step. Xolotl was the Aztec god of death, Quetzalcoatl's brother and, interestingly enough, a canine.
Up until this point, all mentions of quauhxicallis in this story have shown their positive effects in granting mammals abilities they don't normally have or strengthening their existing ones. However, this chapter also shows quauhxicallis can be used to make a mammal weaker, in this case by using a sloth as the donor of the blood. Sloths do indeed have incredibly slow metabolisms, less than half of what a typical mammal their size would have. I figure metabolism greatly influences how long a quauhxicalli lasts; ones that dramatically increase a mammal's speed and reaction time lasting only minutes while one that dramatically slows them down lasting hours.
Court martials go back centuries, and in many countries the military system of justice is separate from the civilian judicial system. This chapter suggests that such a division exists in this setting, and that as a military officer Judy would be tried by a court martial for any crimes she committed.
This chapter also indirectly answers a question that was asked earlier about the anti-alchemy arrays used to contain alchemists. The circles only prevent alchemy from working, not quauhxicallis; Judy notes that if she had hers she could at least try something.
Judy's thoughts refer to the "attempt" on the princess's life rather than "attempts" because she only knows of one; the information regarding Jaime's attempt did not make its way to her. Both storylines have critical information that the other doesn't, and I hope you'll enjoy seeing how things proceed as they progress toward the point where they finally intersect! As always, thanks for reading, and if you're so inclined as to comment I'd love to hear what you thought.