Making Plans

Which means there was about a month and a half from the time they finished their plan till the actual jailbreak, right?

It was four months altogether. It's not that long, but it's not that short either.

But I guess we're finally at the part I'm interested in the most.

...What's this diagram?

Oh, I know. this is the prison's layout, right?

That's right~ It's kinda crude, but it's got everything you need to know on there.

The part that I'm the most curious about is how they got out.

Of course, I'm interested in the story behind the team, but this is a prison break! That's the part that keeps us all on the edge of our seats~!

You told me you wanted to understand the whole process. Is that really just because you're interested in the jailbreak?

Sure, you can think of it like that.

Fine.

If we're going to talk about it, we might as well start from the beginning.

First, let's take a look at the prison's design. The architects clearly learned from their experience with the nomadic cities. The prison wasn't built directly on top of the chassis.

They built a mountain base first, like what you'd find in the real world, and then they finished the prison design on top of that.

This is a pretty common technique these days, but, back in the day, it was ahead of its time, and it was very successful.

Now, let's set aside the prison's outside appearance for the time being.

The prison has three floors, and each floor's structure is more or less the same.

At the lower-left of each floor is the A-Zone. This is where the non-Infected are kept.

To the upper-right is the B-Zone, the Infected block.

The upper-left and lower-right corners are where the guardhouses are. That's where the jailers usually stay.

The black monolith in the center is the C-Zone, where the most serious felons are kept.

The area in the middle here is the underground factory. This is where the prisoners work together.

Over here is the clinic. It's also Domma's room. Next to that is the morgue.

On the other side is the library that they built at Anthony's suggestion.

That's more or less the prison's layout.

Mina spent a bit of time exploring, and with the basic idea figured out, they came up with a way to escape from the prison.

Mhm.

You can tell by looking at the layout that the C-Zone tower isn't actually built directly onto the ground.

There is an elevator in the middle that goes to the basement. Not only that, but the tower itself can actually be lowered underground.

Ohhh? No kidding?

Yeah, these kinds of structures aren't very common. They probably designed it that way so that they can keep the inmates underground during emergencies, where they can't cause trouble.

Right, and to lower the tower, you normally need to flip the switches in two of the guardhouses at the same time.

Oh, I get it.

The info I got after the fact did mention that the tower sank all the way to the bottom, so they probably activated the mechanism at the guardhouses, right...? Huh? Wait a minute... That doesn't make sense.

Even if they made it underground, was there a way out down there?

First off, they didn't go to the guardhouses. They thought about it at one point.

However, they found out the mechanisms could only lower the tower very slowly.

Anthony figured that out from a document he found in the library.

The document was probably a design diagram left behind after the prison's construction. My assumption is no one thought about it, so they stuck it in there when Anthony suggested building a library.

Hah.

They probably figured no one would ever need that for anything. After all, the prison was built more than twenty years ago.

It was twenty-five years ago.

In any case, they couldn't just wait for the tower to slowly sink to the bottom. The guards would have tried to do something, and so they abandoned this idea altogether.

Huh? But in that case...

Fortunately, they found something else on the document—

Take a look at the top of the central tower. There's a room here, and it isn't a prison cell.

That's the real control room of the tower, if not the whole prison.

The control room... I see. That's where you can make the tower drop all the way to the bottom, right?

That's right, and it's also possible to cut off the prison's electricity there to cause a commotion, however brief.

There usually isn't anyone on that floor. You need a special elevator key to get inside. The regular keycards that the jailers carry can't access this floor.

I think I get it now. They went up to the control room, sank the tower all the way to the bottom, and cut the power off to cause a ruckus up above.

But that still leaves us a question—

What happened after that.

Is there a way out underground?

There is.

Domma provided that way out.

She said that, going by her memory, the last morgue doctor had told her there weren't any previous designs the architects could reference when building the prison, and there were actually a few abandoned structures at the bottom of the mountain.

And some of those led to the surface outside the prison.

In particular, there was one fairly close to the morgue.

It's close, but there's also a wall that's three meters thick in-between.

So... did they dig their way through?

Yes, they dug through the wall.

The walls themselves are made of rebar and concrete, but it's just soil outside.

Once you find a weaker section of wall and breach it, you don't need any advanced tools to dig the tunnel.

That's what they did, they took turns digging at the clinic.

Huh? Now that you mention it, if they were going to dig a tunnel at the morgue, couldn't they have left as soon as the tunnel was done?

Have you forgotten already? Getting to the surface outside the prison isn't going to do you much good when the prison isn't stopped at a city.

The prison also raises its security whenever it stops at a city. When that happens, the prisoners get much less free time.

Even Anthony hardly had any free time.

They couldn't just have gone to the clinic like before.

Oh, right. Teehee, I forgot.

Right, since the prison was stopped at a city, Mina left with the construction crew before the jailbreak, so she didn't actually participate in it.

She rendezvoused with the gang outside the prison.

Anyway, at some point in the last month and a half, they stole the key that gave them access to the control room at the top of the tower from Chief Barton.

Then, a few days before the prison was slated to make its next port call, they finished digging the tunnel and made sure it led them to the surface.

Now all the preparations were finally complete.