It hadn't taken long to take stock of their supplies; the cell had been completely empty except for the chamber pot (which was, mercifully, itself empty and quite clean) and the cot, which was solidly made of pegged-together pieces of wood. The cot was topped with a cushion so thin that it was barely more than a padded piece of cloth, and there was no pillow or sheets to go with it. Judy's own belongings amounted to the clothes on her back and nothing else; she felt a pang of regret when she realized that the little golden carrot Nick had made her had been seized.

Once they had finished their search of the cell, Nick had pulled at his robes, an expression of displeasure coloring his face. "Did they drag me here on my stomach?" he asked, "Half my buttons are broken."

Judy had felt the insides of her ears burning and coughed awkwardly, but she was spared having to explain that she had done the damage to his clothes in her attempts to see if he was injured when Nick simply heaved a sigh and sank to the floor of the cell, still fidgeting with one button. "It shouldn't be too hard to get out of here," he said at last, still playing with the broken button, and Judy immediately forgot her prior embarrassment as she sat on the floor next to him.

"Really?" she asked, her ears perking up, "Can you pick the lock?"

He had given it only the most cursory of looks; Judy had examined it more closely despite her complete lack of experience in how to break locks. To her inexpert eye it looked incredibly solid, the case made out of some dully metallic alloy with an oddly squiggly keyhole so thin she couldn't even slip a nail into it. Not that the keyhole had been easy to reach; her paw just barely fit between the gaps in the diamond bars that defined the cell and she had to bend her wrist awkwardly to grope at the lock to get a sense of it.

Nick simply chuckled. "There's generally not much of a need for alchemists to pick locks," he said dryly.

As he spoke, he succeeded in pulling the broken button off his robes, and he rolled it around in his fingers. Judy could see his point, though; if it wasn't for the anti-alchemy array she supposed it would take him less than a minute to simply transmute a way out. It seemed to follow, then, that if he wasn't going to pick the lock he was going to somehow disable the anti-alchemy array, and she stared at it from between the bars, trying to figure out what he had seen. The array simply glowed serenely from the symbols and lines in the floor; to Judy it looked as solid as the lock. "But it won't come to that," Nick continued, "I was right about Rogelio, though. You see what he did?"

Nick gestured in the direction of the anti-alchemy array, and Judy's gaze fruitlessly followed to what he was indicating. "I don't know what I'm looking at," Judy admitted, and some of the old impishness seemed to go back into Nick's features.

"Then it's very lucky for you that you're sharing a cell with a particularly clever fox," he said, puffing up his chest a little, "Rogelio made a very basic anti-alchemy array. Nothing even slightly tamper proof. Remember what happened when we were sparring and you broke my circle?"

Judy did. Nick had recovered almost instantly, but when he had reached out for his magic nothing had happened. "But how are we going to break the circle?" Judy asked, and Nick held up the button he had been playing with.

"With this," Nick said, rather triumphantly, and Judy looked from the button to the anti-alchemy array and back to the button.

The button held a diamond at its center, the metal surrounding it a bit battered. "How are we supposed to break the circle with that?" Judy asked, "Neither one of us—"

Nick was looking in the direction of the cot, and Judy cut herself off as she realized what he was planning. "So we break up the cot, tie the pieces together with the diamond at the end, and you scratch out a part of the circle?" Judy asked, and Nick nodded his approval.

"Almost as clever as I am, Carrots," he said modestly, "But it'll be you scratching out part of the circle. My arms don't fit through the bars."

Judy laughed, and she couldn't restrain herself. She reached over and hugged him tightly. "Thank you," she said, and Nick coughed, rubbing at his muzzle with one paw.

"Despite the company, I don't want to be here anymore than you do," he said, "Now come on, you've got a lot of work ahead of you."

Breaking up the cot turned out to be one of the more difficult parts of Nick's plan; whoever had built the cot had done an excellent job, and in the end it took both of them levering the cot up against one of the diamond bars to pull the pieces apart. Judy's paws were sore and smarting when they finished, but in the end they had the legs of the cot securely lashed together with strips Nick tore from the hem of his robe. Nick took care of fastening the diamond at one end of their make-shift pole, first using one of the hard corners of a cell bar to cut a narrow groove in the wood and then delicately unraveling some threads from his increasingly tattered-looking robe to tie it in place.

When Judy pushed her arm as far as it would go through the bars, holding the pole as close to one end as possible, it was just barely long enough. But it was long enough, and Nick's instructions were rather simple. All she had to do, he had said, was make a break anywhere in the circle, and it would stop working. Once he could perform alchemy again, it'd be trivial for him to get them out. And so, although it had taken what had felt like days of effort (and more realistically had been about three hours) to even get ready to begin the scheme, Judy began scratching away at the floor as quickly as she could.

"You know, there's something that's been bothering me," Nick said, "Besides being locked in a cell without food or water, I mean."

The work with the stick was mind-numbing, and Judy wasn't sure how long she had been at it, but her paw had gone almost completely numb and her shoulder ached from pressing it against the bars. Nick had busied himself preparing for his contribution to their escape; in the center of the cell he had started drawing out alchemical symbols with his own blood, obtained by pressing a finger against his sharp teeth. It had been the first time he had spoken directly to her since they had started; he had been muttering to himself, but the bits Judy caught didn't make any sense to her.

"What's that?" Judy asked, taking a break from her work.

Nick had spoken the words lightly enough, but Judy thought she understood him well enough to know that he wasn't quite joking. "Why did Cencerro tell you anything?" Nick asked, "He said we'd both be dead in a few days—no food or water does tend to do that—so why bother?"

Judy frowned. It was, she had to admit, an excellent question she hadn't considered. "To gloat, I guess?" she hazarded, and Nick shook his head.

"You don't know Cencerro the way I do," he said, and there was a wealth of meaning in how he said the words.

"Maybe you didn't know him as well as you thought."

"Maybe," Nick said, and the word was almost a sigh as he looked down at his own work.

"Why did he hate you so much, anyway?" Judy asked.

To her, at least, Cencerro's distaste for Nick had seemed far more personal than simply loathing foxes specifically or predators generally could explain. Nick took a minute to consider the question, which Judy used to attempt to massage the life back into her paw. Although Nick had been rather dismissive of the quality of the alchemy Rogelio had used to create the anti-alchemy array, the array itself was relatively wide and even with a diamond it was slow going to break it.

"Because he couldn't do anything about me," Nick said, and there was a slight smile tugging at his muzzle, "It drove him crazy, you know. Here was this fox, obviously up to something, but his honor wouldn't allow him to arrest me without evidence. Of which there never was any, of course."

"Of course there wouldn't be," Judy said, "You never broke the law."

Perhaps it was just her imagination, but Judy thought Nick avoided her eyes for a second. She might have just embarrassed him; her heart had gone out to him and he must have been able to hear the emotion in her voice. It wasn't fair for Cencerro to use the City Guard's resources to harass Nick simply because he was a fox; it went against everything she believed as a member of the City Guard. "He was obsessed with the law," Nick said thoughtfully, "I can't imagine what it would take to make him conspire against the throne."

"Maybe he thought he'd be writing the laws soon," Judy suggested, and Nick shrugged.

"His cousin is part of the Queen's Council," Nick said, "Along with the friend to all mammals and the torc heir."

Judy knew exactly who the other two mammals were that Nick was referring to; Leodore Corazón was always in the news for some initiative to help others and Esteban Cerdo's father had been perhaps the most successful merchant Zootopia had ever seen. "Do you think someone on the Queen's Council is involved?" Judy asked; considering that she owed her career to Corazón she couldn't help but hope that the lion was uninvolved in whatever Lieutenant Colonel Cencerro was a part of.

"If one of them is, his cousin would make the most sense, don't you think?" Nick asked, and Judy nodded her agreement.

She took up the stick again, pushing her concerns aside, and continuing her work. When they had started, Judy had worried that a guard might come into the sub-basement and observe what they were doing; she had listened as hard as she could after the incredible racket they had made pulling the cot apart. But the hours had gone past without any kind of interruption, and Judy supposed that Cencerro meant for them to starve or die of dehydration in the cell. Or perhaps something faster but less pleasant; for all she knew Cencerro had re-discovered the secrets of alchemy that had been used to blast the Outer Baronies into wastelands and was going to completely destroy Phoenix and everyone in it.

Whatever the case, Judy had been emboldened by the continued lack of any sort of oversight and had started working faster, falling into a monotonous routine that was broken only when the diamond she had been using had worn too much to be of any use and Nick had to replace it with one from a different button. With a fresh diamond she had gone right back to work, her lips peeled back and her brow furrowed as she concentrated on staying in the shallow groove she had created. Getting started had been the hardest part, and it had taken hours to notice any kind of defined spot where her cutting edge ran smoothly. But the spot was there, seeming to dance in her vision as she stared at the spot in the glowing circle and tried not to squint or blink in the light it threw off. She was so intent on her work, in fact, that she didn't notice at first when the light suddenly winked out and plunged the sub-basement into near total darkness.

When Judy stopped, her arm felt as though every muscle in it was complaining; even relaxing her grip to let go of the stick took far more effort than it should have. "I knew you could do it," Nick said cheerfully, clapping one friendly paw on her numb shoulder, "Now what do you say we get out of here?"

"Let's do it," Judy said, and he nodded.

Nick placed his paws against the simplest looking of the alchemical patterns he had drawn out, closing his eyes. His muzzle contorted with effort, and suddenly the bars of the cell began darkening, their near-perfect transparency giving way to dull opaqueness. The bars glowed briefly with their own internal light, but as that light faded the bars did not become transparent again; they were silvery-black and dull. Judy pushed against one and the outer surface crumbled in her paw, falling apart into a dark powder. Judy turned to Nick to congratulate him, but he had turned his attention to a significantly more complicated circle he had drawn, which seemed to cost him even more effort. He trembled as the floor of the cell writhed and changed colors, forming a portion into a smooth cylinder much longer than it was wide with a wickedly sharp-looking tip on one end. "For you," he managed, and Judy hefted the spear he had made.

It wasn't quite as perfectly balanced as her own spear, but it felt like it was made of the same strong and lightweight metal. "Are you alright?" she asked.

It took Nick a moment to respond; he almost looked as though he might vomit. The color had gone out of the insides of his ears, which had pressed themselves flat against his head, and he was still trembling and panting. "Fine," he said at last, "Just... Hard with a circle like this and no focus."

Although Nick had obviously taken quite a bit of care in drawing out his work, he hadn't had much to work with. He had apparently used a bit of thread unraveled from his robe to aid in drawing straight lines and circles, but they weren't quite as perfect as the ones she had seen him make with his tools. "Come on," Judy said, and offered him a paw; it took him a moment and then he was standing next to her.

Judy knocked against the bars with her spear, quickly making a hole large enough for both of them to walk through, and then they were next to the door. Judy was reaching for the doorknob when Nick spoke. "Wait!" he said, and he still looked completely drained from the alchemy he had done.

"What is it?" Judy asked, turning the spear over and over in her paws; she didn't want to hurt anyone, particularly not a member of the City Guard, but she was ready for action and could feel the tension of it in her.

"What if this is a trap?" Nick asked, "You know, let us escape so they can kill us escaping?"

Judy paused, trying to think up some reasonable counter that she could give. "Then they could have just killed us and made it look like a failed escape attempt," she said at last.

"You did say he didn't trust all of the guards," Nick pointed out, "But they'll pretty much all think we're guilty if they catch us escaping, right?"

"That's..." Judy began, and then stopped.

"That's a chance we have to take," she said.

Their plan, such as it was, was extremely simple. They would get out of the barracks and out of Phoenix as quickly as possible, and then head for the Middle Baronies, again as quickly as possible. It wouldn't be a pleasant trip without any supplies, and probably even more unpleasant for Nick since he'd have to make up the difference with transmutations, but unburdened they could probably make great time. Whether they would be fast enough to outrun Cencerro and whatever he had planned was an entirely different question, but they had to at least make the attempt. And so Judy, her heart pounding in her ears, reached out and slowly pulled the door open.

Nothing happened.

No guard leaped out at her or called out an alarm; it was almost anti-climactic to see nothing more than the simple staircase that stretched upwards to the main level. Judy strained her hearing as much as she could, but still heard nothing. She motioned for Nick to follow her, and he did, moving with exaggerated slowness. They crept up the stairs until they were in the basement, but the normal cells were dark and empty and there were no guards present. The next segment, though, was the most dangerous, and the seconds seemed to stretch out as they slowly made their way up the last few stairs. First there were ten steps left, and then eight, and then three, and then suddenly they were standing at the door that led into the main barracks level. "I don't hear anything," Judy said, the words so low she was practically just mouthing them, and Nick actually did mouth his response.

"Me neither."

"Ready?" Judy mouthed, and Nick nodded.

She tried not to think of the danger. She was small and fast, a difficult target to hit and trained in how members of the City Guard thought. Nick was taller, a civilian, and Judy could tell that he was still exhausted from the alchemy he had done in the cell. She hadn't told Nick, not wanting to speak the words out loud, but she had decided that she would do whatever it took to make sure Nick escaped the barracks, even if it cost her her own life. "Three..." Judy mouthed, her paw on the doorknob.

"Two..."

"One..."

She threw open the door and ran, making sure Nick was at her side. She barely paid any attention to what they were running past, more concerned with making sure that she didn't leave Nick behind, but there was no one present. The walls and cold furnishings slipped past, the exit in sight, and Judy put on a burst of speed as she pulled Nick along. Amazingly, impossibly, no one had spotted them; they were going to make it.

They burst into the light of a new day, Judy's heart beating with sudden and fierce joy, but as they ran past the barracks Judy noticed something. Or rather, she noticed what she wasn't noticing.

The tavern next to the barracks, which had been doing such a bustling business the first time Judy had gone past, was still, all of the tables and chairs out on balconies empty. The streets were totally deserted, feeling uncomfortably wide with not so much as a single pedestrian or merchant fighting for space. There was none of the vibrant pulse that Phoenix had always seemed to have; there was no murmur of distant conversations or creaking of wagons or any of the hundred other sounds that gave a place life.

A bird cried out in the distance, and it almost sounded like a mammal screaming, echoing between buildings in a way that normal life in Phoenix would make impossible. Judy had come to a stop before she had realized it, looking around in stunned silence as Nick did the same. A scrap of paper caught on a low and mournful wind blew past, and the rugs on display at a nearby rug-maker's flapped limply and impossibly loud in the quiet.

Judy turned to Nick, noticing how wide his eyes were, and couldn't help but break the silence. "Where is everyone?"