ZAP.
The noise was unlike anything Chatine had ever heard. Like a fly buzzing its last buzz. A loose wire shorting out in the rain. Chatine snapped awake and opened her eyes. But all she saw in the cramped eleventh-floor cell block of the Trésor tower was darkness.
No orange glow, no unblinking eyes staring back at her, only a shroud of black. Was she dreaming? Chatine groggily pushed herself up onto her elbow and peered around. It was as dark as the exploits.
Then, a series of lights flickered on in the bunks around her. Not the small orange eyes that blanketed this entire building. Instead, it was the familiar, bluish glow of Skins.
Chatine tapped on her own embedded screen and leaned over the side of her bunk to whisper to the woman who slept below. “What’s happening?”
The woman shook her head, fear glazing her eyes.
Tentatively, Chatine climbed out of her bunk and pulled on her boots. She could hear a commotion coming from the center of the tower, the unmistakable sound of feet pounding on the metal steps of the stairwell.
Someone pushed past her and she grabbed him by the shirt sleeve. “What the fric is going on?”
“The cell block door is open!” he whispered giddily before wriggling from her grasp and darting toward the nearest bridge.
Chatine shook her head, trying to clear the last cobwebs of sleep from her mind.
The cell block door is open?
“Power must be out,” someone murmured to another inmate as they pushed past Chatine. “Let’s go!”
Chatine blinked, still unable to process what was happening. Had these people lost their minds? Had the thin atmosphere of Bastille fritzed their brains? Even if the door of the tower was open, where were they planning to go? They were on the Sol-damn moon! What were they going to do? Stand out on the craggy surface and flag down a passing voyageur? And that’s if they even got out the door. More droids were appearing by the second. This whole stupide lot was going to get themselves tazed or paralyzed before they’d even reached the central stairwell.
“Idiots,” Chatine muttered under her breath as she shoved her way through the crowd, back toward her bunk. Let the stupide sots do whatever they wanted. There was no way she was going to run the fool’s errand of trying to escape an inescapable prison.
“Prisoner 51562.”
A metal claw clamped down on her shoulder, stopping her in her tracks. Chatine shuddered and turned around to see a pair of piercing orange droid eyes boring down on her from behind its PermaSteel exoskeleton.
Fear thundered through her. “I-I was just trying to get back to my bunk,” she stammered. “I had nothing to do with any of this, I swear. I’m not trying to escape.”
Muscles clenching, she braced herself for another painful jolt of the tazeur. Or even a paralyzing rayonette pulse. But the basher didn’t move; instead its eyes flickered coolly. “Urgent message for prisoner 51562,” it said in a clicking, rhythmic monotone, as though it were reciting some new, unfamiliar programming.
“Message?” she croaked.
“Your life is in danger. You must leave the Trésor tower immediately,” the droid continued in the same robotic tone. “It is not safe for you to stay here.”
Chatine stared up at the droid, dumbfounded, certain she had misunderstood, or it had malfunctioned. “What?”
“Your life is in danger,” the droid repeated. “You must leave the Trésor tower immediately. It is not safe for you to stay here.”
It almost sounded like a trap. Were droids even capable of setting traps? She didn’t think so. She racked her fog-filled brain, trying to figure out what to do. Was it possible the droid was really trying to warn her about something?
She nearly laughed aloud at the thought. Bashers don’t warn prisoners.
Then again, they don’t send messages either.
“Who is the message from?” she blurted out.
The droid’s eyes flickered for just a moment, processing her question … and its answer.
“Message sent by PompFlic,” the droid stated before turning around and clanking back into the fray.
Every molecule and nerve ending in Chatine’s body seemed to implode in on itself. Now she was certain she had misunderstood. Or permanently lost her mind to the grippe. Because there was no way that droid had just said what she thought it said.
“No, I’m pretty sure it said PompFlic,” said another voice. This one was high-pitched and familiar.
Dead Azelle was back.
Maybe Chatine really was going insane.
“PompFlic,” Azelle repeated curiously. “Isn’t that what you called Marcellus Bonnefaçon?”
Chatine’s mind was reeling. She glanced out into the commotion of the dark cell block. Inmates were still shoving their way toward the bridges, trying to reach the tower’s central staircase.
“Oh, no, I remember now,” Azelle went on inside her head. “It’s what Marcellus called himself.” She giggled. “That boy is cute, but he really couldn’t get the hang of Third Estate slang, could he?”
Chatine shut her eyes, trying to block out the shouts and the thundering sounds of footsteps. She needed to think.
“What’s to think about?” Azelle asked. “Marcellus Bonnefaçon sent you that message. Something is happening. Something bad. And he’s trying to warn you. You need to find …”
Roche.
Chatine’s eyes flew open. And suddenly, she was on the move. She sprinted back to her bunk and threw herself up the rungs of the rickety ladder. Reaching into the small tear in her mattress, she searched for the silver ring.
Marcellus’s ring.
As her hand clasped around it, she felt a surge of hope. A surge of energy. And more important, a surge of courage.
Azelle was right. He was warning her of something. Warning her all the way from Laterre. Which meant …
He hadn’t forgotten about her.
She slipped the ring into the pocket of her uniform and jumped back down to the floor. She was suddenly wide awake. More awake than she’d felt in over two weeks. She jabbed at her Skin, using its dull glow to navigate her way around the neighboring bunks. The commotion had now consumed the whole cell floor. Inmates were charging toward the bridges. Rayonette blasts whooshed past her, burying themselves into unsuspecting flesh.
Chatine dropped to her hands and knees, remembering an old trick her parents had taught her for maneuvering around during a riot. If the bashers are shooting high, you stay low.
Crawling through the pandemonium, Chatine headed for Roche’s bunk, which was on the other side of the cell block. But even on her hands and knees, it was arduous to move. She was forced to dodge crumpled bodies, trampling footsteps, and the glimmering, terrifying legs of the droids trying to keep order.
“Roche!” she called out as she reached his bunk. She climbed up to the second-level mattress and cringed when she saw the bed was empty. Had he already left? Was he out there in that anarchy?
Chatine pushed toward the cell’s inner railing and looked out over the gaping eleven-floor drop. In the low light of the Skins, she could see the winding stairwell in the center of the tower, linked by gangways to the prison cells on each floor. Every single one was crammed full of people shoving and stumbling toward the staircase, causing the PermaSteel grating under their feet to rattle in the gloom. Droids stood behind the railings of each floor, firing their rayonettes toward the stairs. Prisoners stumbled and fell as pulses buried into their flesh, but it only seemed to cause more chaos as the other inmates tried to maneuver around them.
Chatine felt a surge of frustration. How was she even supposed to get down there? What good was Marcellus’s warning if she couldn’t escape the tower?
A scream broke into her thoughts, and she looked out just in time to see a body being shoved over the edge of one of the gangways. Chatine gripped the railing as the inmate accelerated down, down, down, toward the bottom of the tower far below.
The thud echoed through the entire building, reaching her, even eleven floors up.
Chatine turned away, her heart galloping in her chest. She knew better than to peer over the railing and look. Her nightmares were already bad enough.
Trying to catch her breath, Chatine struggled to come up with a plan. This whole scene reminded her of that horrible riot in the Marsh after Nadette Epernay’s execution. The bedlam of bodies and droids and rayonette pulses whooshing past her ears. That had been the day she’d first met Roche. She’d been crawling around on the Marsh floor, and she’d ducked under a stall to find him hiding—
Her thoughts screeched to a halt.
She raced back to the bunk and dropped to her knees again, peering under the lowest mattress. She almost smiled from the relief that rushed through her.
There he was. Tucked into a tiny, shaking ball, with his head buried between his knees. The light from her Skin illuminated his soft, recently shaved head. It reminded her of the baby chicks that were sold in the Marsh.
“Roche” she whispered.
He looked up briefly but stiffened and snapped his gaze away the moment he recognized her in the darkness.
Chatine climbed into the cramped space and crouched in front of him. “Roche. Look at me. We need to get out of here.”
Roche’s jaw pulsed, but still he would not meet her eye.
“Roche, please.” Chatine pulled at his elbow. “You have to come with me. We have to get out of here. It’s not safe.”
He yanked his arm away from her. “I’m not going anywhere with you! You’re the one who got me sent here in the first place, Chatine,” he spat the pronunciation of her real name.
She felt the familiar hollowness of shame spread through her. “I know. I know. I’m sorry. But you need to trust me right now.”
“Why?” he asked spitefully. “Why would I ever trust you again?”
“Because I got a message!” she shouted, her frustration boiling over. “That said our lives are in danger and that we have to leave the tower immediately.”
Roche stared at her, unblinking. “A message? From who?”
“Someone I trust,” she said, but Roche only narrowed his eyes in suspicion. “Look,” Chatine tried another tack, lowering her voice into what she hoped was a grave, firm tone. “Something is happening on Bastille. Something to do with the power going out.”
Roche’s gaze softened from suspicion to curiosity. “What do you mean?”
“I don’t know,” Chatine said helplessly. “And I don’t want to wait around to find out. So, come with me right now. We need to get as far away from this tower as possible.”
She pulled again on Roche’s arm. He didn’t move, but he didn’t fight back either. His body was as limp as a wet rag. “Roche!”
“Shh!” he said. “I’m thinking.”
“There’s no time to think!” Chatine cried. “We have to go now.”
“Go. Now.” Roche repeated slowly, pensively. He peered up at the sagging mattress above their heads as though he were trying to look through it, straight out of the tower and all the way to the stars. “ ‘… the only way off this moon.’ ” He sounded like he was in a trance. “It’s happening now.”
Then, suddenly, he was unfurling himself and scrabbling out from under the bunk. Relieved, Chatine darted after him. But to her surprise and then, dread, she saw he was not moving toward the nearest stairwell bridge. He was heading toward the railing. He was—she gasped aloud—climbing onto the railing!
“Roche!” she screamed, charging forward.
“Watch where you’re going, Nov,” a giant man barked at her as she screamed past, accidentally stomping on his foot.
Reaching the railing, Chatine glanced up to see Roche hoisting himself up onto the next floor, his legs dangling just above her eyeline. “What the fric are you doing?” she yelled up at him. “Are you out of your Sol-damn mind?”
“The roof!” he called back. “We have to get to the roof.”
“What?” Chatine asked, certain now that he was out of his Sol-damn mind. But he also was not stopping.
Roche’s small boots disappeared above her head, and Chatine felt a rush of annoyance and then determination as she grabbed for the railing and launched herself upward. Her muscles must have weakened during her short time on Bastille, because her climbing skills weren’t what they used to be. By the time she pulled herself up to the next floor, her arms ached and she was panting from the effort.
The twelfth-floor cell block was mostly deserted. Everyone had already made their way to the stairwell and the droids had inevitably followed. Chatine and Roche were the only sots trying to get up instead of down. And she still had no idea why.
She heard a small grunting sound and stumbled in the darkness until she found Roche kneeling down on the ground, struggling to open an air vent in the wall. The vents were normally secured to keep prisoners from trying to escape, but the power outage must have disabled the locking mechanism, because a moment later, the rusty metal grate swung open and Roche dove inside.
With a groan, Chatine followed after him. The duct was narrow. She could barely wedge her shoulders through, and she had to slither on her belly to keep from knocking her head. “Roche,” she said in a harsh whisper. “Are you insane? What the fric are you—”
“Don’t you see what’s happening?” Roche called back to her, maneuvering deftly on his elbows like he’d climbed through a thousand air ducts before. And he probably had. He was a Fret rat, after all. Just like her. “Don’t you think it’s strange that the power just happened to go out on the very same night that the Vangarde started that fight in the dispatch bunker?”
The Vangarde.
Chatine’s crawling slowed. She had nearly forgotten about the man she’d recognized as one of Mabelle’s operatives, slipping that that strange vial into the pocket of the long-haired inmate.
“Wait, you knew they were Vangarde? How did you—” But the answer came to Chatine a second later. “Clovis,” she murmured, remembering the same precisely rolled shirt sleeve on Roche’s unofficial bodyguard.
“Did you forget I also used to run messages for them in the Frets?”
Chatine felt a simmer of guilt. Of course she hadn’t forgotten that. She could never forget that. Those messages were one of the two reasons Roche was here on Bastille. Chatine was the other.
Roche reached a right angle where the air duct bent straight up, and he crept forward until he could stand. Then, using his hands and feet for leverage, he began to shimmy up the narrow shaft.
Chatine followed behind him, her sore muscles aching from the effort, until Roche popped open another vent and they crawled out into a dingy room engulfed in shadows. But it wasn’t the darkness that made Chatine falter. It was the smell. A smell worse than anything she had ever experienced in the Frets. This wasn’t the unpleasant stink of old vegetables, or unwashed bodies, or rusting PermaSteel. This was death and rot and decay all mixed up into one stomach-curdling stench.
They were inside the Bastille morgue.
“Roche,” she barked out, coughing from the stink. “What are we doing in here?”
There was no reply. Through the darkness, Chatine could hear the thump of footsteps and the creak and scrape of something being shoved across the floor. Burying her nose in the crook of her elbow, she shone her Skin around the pitch-black room. Then immediately wished she hadn’t. The slim beam of light revealed a row of gurneys stacked with wrecked, beaten bodies. Arms dangled by tendons from shoulders. Feet bent downward at odd, terrible angles. Great gashes gnawed their way across dust-splattered skin. And from the faces that were still intact, dead eyes stared up into the darkness and mouths gaped open like they were still gasping for a last drop of clean air.
At the far end of the room, she could see some kind of huge metallic box glinting in the glow from her Skin. But before she could fully make it out, she heard another scraping noise and redirected her light toward Roche, who was pushing through a pile-up of gurneys, clearly looking for something.
“What are you doing?” she whispered, darting over to him.
“I kept overhearing Clovis talk about the morgue,” Roche explained hurriedly as he ran his hand along the surface of one of the walls. “ ‘The morgue is the only way off this moon,’ he kept saying. The whole time, I just thought he was being morbid. You know, death is the only escape? But now I realize”—he paused and peered curiously up at the ceiling—“he wasn’t.”
“Wait a minute,” Chatine said, trying to follow his whacked line of reasoning. “What exactly are you saying?”
“I’m saying they’re breaking her out. Right now. They somehow got her up to the roof from this very room, and we need to figure out how.”
Something inside of Chatine started to stir. A memory shoved its way through the fog. Unlike every other memory held captive in her brain, this one was somehow crisp and vivid and sharp.
“This will certainly not be the Vangarde’s last attempt to free Citizen Rousseau. They will try again.”
Chatine shut her eyes and could suddenly see it all again. As though she were living it now. As though she were right there, sitting in the general’s combatteur, soaring over the dark Laterrian landscape on the way back to Vallonay. The general had been talking to Marcellus on his TéléCom, telling him about the Vangarde’s attempt to break Citizen Rousseau out of Bastille.
“They will try again.”
Chatine felt her heart start to pound. This was ridiculous. This was insane. Citizen Rousseau was locked in solitary confinement deep underground. How on Laterre would the Vangarde even get her into the morgue, let alone up to the roof?
“Roche! Are you saying the Vangarde are—”
“Halt!”
A set of metallic footsteps clanged from behind. Chatine spun to find a lone droid coming toward them, clobbering through the crowded morgue. Its glowing orange eyes sliced through the darkness, and its weaponized arm was aimed straight at Roche’s chest.
“Get down!” she screamed.
They dropped to their knees, scrabbling under the gurneys. Rayonette pulses whizzed above their heads. The basher barreled after them, shoving aside gurneys as it went. Dead bodies rolled off and dropped to the floor with the most sickening of sounds.
They kept crawling. But the farther they went, the clearer it became that the droid was chasing them straight toward a dead end. Eventually they would reach the far end of the morgue, and then there was nothing over there but that strange metallic box.…
Chatine slowed as the realization began to seep into her bones. Her mind flashed to every single long, labored walk back from the exploits with the chain around her neck and the prison complex looming in the distance. She thought of that glimmering silver chimney shooting up into the sky from the roof of the Trésor tower.
The roof.
“This way!” she bellowed to Roche, scrambling ahead of him.
“Halt!” More rayonette pulses exploded into the dead bodies around them as the droid charged through the morgue.
“The disintegrateur?” Roche cried out as they drew closer to the large hulking machine. “Are you—” But he must have suddenly come to the same conclusion as Chatine, because he started crawling faster. “Yes,” he whispered eagerly.
Roche was ahead of her now, and he immediately clambered up on a conveyor belt that led into the big, metallic chamber. He had to shuffle on his elbows to pass through the small opening and into the belly of the machine. Chatine had seen a disintegrateur back on Vallonay. It had given her the creeps there, and it certainly wasn’t any more comforting here.
But now it was their only way out.
Chatine scrabbled up on the conveyor belt and was about to climb inside after Roche when the bouncing glow of her Skin suddenly snagged on something. Somebody. And a tiny cry crawled out from the back of her throat.
A few mètres away, on a rickety, rusting gurney, with a skull half caved in like a mutilated monster, was Anaïs.
The dark room spun. Chatine swore she was going to pass out. She felt the air around her head twist and bend.
“Chatine!”
A voice shot out from the opening of the disintegrateur and yanked her out of her stupor. She felt the air around her twist again as another pulse from the droid’s rayonette missed her face by a centimètre. Glancing back, she saw the basher was right behind her, reaching for her. She shrieked and clambered up the conveyer belt just as its metal claws grasped at her ankle. She gave a forceful kick and broke free before launching herself through the small opening of the machine.
Inside, the chamber was dark and cramped, and Chatine could barely lift her head.
“Roche?” she called out, trying to maneuver the light of her Skin.
She could see him just up ahead, furiously patting, slamming, and kicking at the walls around him. “Where’s the fric-ing chimney?”
Just then, the whole chamber began to shudder around them with the force of a mighty storm. Chatine peered over her shoulder and her stomach heaved at the sight of a single beam of orange light slicing through the darkness.
“The basher!” she cried. “It’s trying to get in.”
“There’s no way it can fit,” Roche said.
But it soon became apparent that it wouldn’t have to. Because a second later, the deafening sound of ripping metal exploded in Chatine’s ears. The floor rumbled beneath them like the whole moon was breaking apart.
“We have to get out of here!” Chatine patted desperately at the walls and ceiling of the chamber.
“I know! But I can’t find the opening for the chimney. It must be sealed off.”
Chatine’s stomach heaved again. This time in defeat. Had she been wrong? Had the Vangarde gotten to the roof another way? They were trapped. The droid would tear this metal tomb apart to get to them. There was nothing else to do.
Chatine reached into the pocket of her uniform, drawing out Marcellus’s ring, remembering the first time she’d ever seen it. It was in a place much like this. And much like now, it seemed to serve as the only ray of light in the darkness.
The chamber continued to shriek and judder as the droid ripped through the metal.
Please, she whispered to the Sols, sliding the ring onto her finger. Please help us.
Back on Laterre, Chatine had never been the praying type. But then again, she’d never tried to escape a prison on the moon before.
People change.
“Look!”
Chatine opened her eyes to see Roche staring upward, shining the light of his Skin at a narrow panel above their heads. With a loud scrape, he pushed it aside, and that’s when Chatine saw it.
A single rope dangling down from the chimney.
Amazed, she peered at the ring on her finger, and then back up at the rope.
At salvation.
With one final, earsplitting screech, the disintegrateur split apart. Orange light flooded the chamber. Roche grabbed onto the rope and began to climb, quickly disappearing into the darkness of the chute. The droid heaved away a giant piece of the machine and aimed its rayonette inside. Chatine shimmied forward, latched onto the end of the rope, and heaved herself up. Three pulses were fired off, each one grazing the fabric of her prison uniform.
She continued to climb until she could just make out the first few pinpricks of stars in the sky above her head. Almost there. With each hasty pull of the rope, she felt Marcellus’s ring digging into her finger. Once again, the touch of the cool metal seemed to bring her strength. Courage. Luck. And, as she continued to scrabble upward toward the roof of the Trésor tower, she also couldn’t help but feel hope. That maybe, just maybe, Marcellus’s stolen ring might actually find its way back to him.