The baying of the Hounds instilled the same panic in Prue that it did in Whitechapel's swooning maidens. Had she not Dr. DuPont's steady voice and the waking grasp of Justine's fingers to guide her, she might have gone boneless to the floor and made Ives carry her. Instead she obeyed. "Ah, at once, Dr. DuPont!" A slender coupling rod served her as a pry bar to unseat the trapdoor from the deep dust, but the wood began to creak in protest as the hinges, melted to slag, held the opposite end firmly down with all the solidarity of Parliament's banded wood doors. Even with all the pressure of her slender body, she could not heft it.<br/><br/>Only one of them could. "ives," she coughed, "help, please." The clockwork butler's telescoping fingers gripped under the old wood as Prudence pried. Splinters cracked from the robot's strength, the fused hinges warped, and two feet of gap opened between floor and hatch. Prue's long legs reached down, and her shoes sounded on the roof of the hollow cask below. A brush of clumsiness made her shoe slip across the slats, and she fell atop it, cleanly clearing the way for the next woman to descend. "I'm alright," she called, though winded from the shock to the pelvis. "Oh, gracious. The wood down here is burning. The lab is<em>assuredly </em>on fire!"<br/><br/>By Ives' wholly dedicated strength, the gap opened a little wider so Justine could be lowered down. Prue's outstretched arms accepted the groggy woman like a bride, all white in Charlotte's lab coat and from a shortage of blood and oxygen. Prudence was pink enough for the both of them as she gingerly felt her way down to ground, crowded by timbers and shelves and casks that were being first licked by flickering orange flames. A resounding thump from above made her sink down with a yelp. She hoped that it was Charlotte and Ives, and not just a beam fallen to trap them in a flaming pure.<br/><br/>It was her duty, should anything happen, to take care of Justine. With heat crowding all around, she brought the subject's hands to one of her own, clothed in a wooly glove to stave off the London chill. "Do you see me? Do you remember your name?" Fingertips rosy with little flecks of rust touched Justine's face and left coppery evidence on the skin. "My name is Prudence. Prudence Chastity Crosswhite." Dark eyes pleaded for the subject's mental wellness, and for the doctor's wellness, too- she could not turn her eyes up toward the smoke for long, but she felt she could hear Charlotte's huff of indignation there in the room with them.<br/><br/>The only breath of cool air came from behind the wrought iron filigree of a shared cellar gate. They were ages old, the tunnels of old London, bricked over on the surface and turned into smuggler's tunnels, opium dens, wine cellars, storage space. The gate's locking bold slid from the stone with a wretched shriek, and the unoiled gate creaked open to a dark passage of cool green stone painted only by the flickers of fiery light behind them.<br/><br/>"I know the streets of Whitechapel very well," she reported, between filling her lungs with clean air from the cellar's chilly stores. "I've lived here all my life." Prudence was not strong like Ives, or brilliant like Charlotte. She was not brave like Justine either. But as the slums of London had grown like weedy vine over and under itself, Prue knew its every fiber. A knocker-upper she had been before, a girl who tapped the windows with a pole to wake the morning workers. That had been before the war. "I must ask you to trust me," she said lightly, delicately, as she led backward into the claustrophobic shadows.