Sonder didn't wrap the shard back in its cloth.
She just held it and stood and turned and left the room the way she had come.
The storage room. The corridor. The butcher's room, with its tools and its hooks and its stained stone floor.
She passed through all of it without pausing.
The light from her blade moved across the bars again, and she knew without looking that the prisoners were responding to it. She could hear the faint shift of bodies. The soft drag of movement. Fingers reaching.
She didn't look. Not at all.
It was easy.
She kept her eyes on the far end, on the door and stairs that would lead out of this place.
Her steps were even. Not hurried.
The shard sat cold and heavy in her closed hand.
When she reached the end, she sheathed her sword and closed the door, then climbed the stairs.
It was like she was never there in the first place.
But instead of going back to the second floor and exiting through the hole she had made in the roof, she searched for the front door.
It was large. Heavy wood banded with iron.
She tried the handle first.
Locked, as she expected. She didn't search for a key.
She put her hand against it and pushed and felt the lock resist and then give, not all at once but in a slow grind, the bolt tearing through its housing as the door swung open.
It was loud. She didn't mind.
She stepped out into the open air.
The guards outside turned when they noticed that the door was moving.
When it opened fully and the guards were ready for what was to come, Sonder stopped and let them look.
One of them took a step forward, duty surfacing.
Whatever they saw in her face or the thing she carried worked on them the way cold wind worked on a feeble fire.
Fear of being extinguished.
"I don't come in peace," she said and then demanded with a quiet menace: "Take me to your leader."
They looked at her the way one looks at something they didn't have words for.
One of them glanced at the others. They shared a slow, animal-like understanding that whatever stood before them wasn't something they could compete with.
She had an unspoken authority that towered above them, even though nothing was said.
Then the front-most guard turned and walked, beckoning her, and that was all.
Sonder followed.