felt no pain. And for brave Sister Jacqui and stoic Sister Denise, now the only family she had left, she prayed—no, vowed—that she would one day see them again. That she would track them down. She would find this ghastly detention facility where the general was holding them captive, and she would set them free.
Alouette curled up on the couchette’s narrow bed and tried to sleep. Everyone else was sleeping, and she knew she should be as well. In less than three days they would be arriving on the enemy planet of Albion. She would need her strength, her wits, her courage. But every time she closed her eyes, gruesome images of an exploding ship came flooding back. Her mind was so far from the calm, peaceful garden the sisters had taught her to cultivate. It was a messy, knotted tangle of grief.
She pushed herself up and stared out the window of her couchette. But the view did nothing to soothe her. They were almost through the infamous Asteroid Channel which divided Laterre from its longtime enemy neighbor of Albion, and the giant space rocks floating all around the voyageur made Alouette feel anxious and vulnerable.
Pulling her gaze from the window, she immediately spotted her sac lying on the floor, where she’d dropped it the moment she’d run from the flight bridge and locked herself inside this couchette. Alouette hastily scooped up the bag and emptied all the contents out onto the bed until everything that she had left in the world was scattered around her. As jumbled and disorderly as her thoughts.
The screwdriver that Sister Denise had given her. Her father’s titan bloc. Her trusty flashlight. Her mother’s small titan box. Alouette’s eyes roved over each one before finally coming to rest on the thing that she stole.
With a quiet sniffle, she traced her fingertips over the rugged, time-weathered spine of the old leather-bound book with its handstitched seams and crinkled paper. And then, just as it always did, the memory of that night began to shove its way back into her mind, like an unwanted visitor barging through the door. That fateful, regretful night that she’d learned the truth about the sisters and the Vangarde.
She was suddenly back in the middle of that Assemblée room, surrounded by twisting wires and cables, a collage of monitors and circuit boards, and the faces of the sisters she’d left behind. The sisters who were now all gone.
“We knew right away that you were destined to be one of us,” Principale Francine told her. “From the moment you walked through that door with Hugo twelve years ago, you had a curiosity for knowledge. You drank in the world and questioned everything.”
Tears pricked at Alouette’s eyes, as the years of secrets and darkness spread over her skin, puncturing her like a thousand tiny knives. “Does my father— Does Hugo know? About … you?”
“No,” Francine replied with a shake of her head. “When Hugo brought you to the Refuge, we decided not to tell him. While he is a good, honest man, he never showed a propensity for learning. Or a desire for change. He was just too hardened. Too jaded by the Regime. But you, Little Lark …” She released a nostalgic sigh. “Your heart was so pure. And so good. You read about the injustices on the planet, and you wanted to change them. So we started to train you. Sister Jacqui became responsible for your philosophical education. Sister Denise ensured you had technical skills for the field. And I took charge of teaching you the history of our world and the world that came before it.”
“Yes!” Alouette blurted out breathlessly. “The books! I’ve read every book in that library. Because you told me we were protecting them. You told me that’s what the Sisterhood was for.”
“We are still here to protect the books. The books are a symbol, can’t you see? The books represent the kind of life we want for the people of Laterre. A life of knowledge and freedom and ideas. Do you remember why the written word was forgotten? It was deemed too powerful a tool. Too potentially destructive to the new way of life. So it was gradually phased out by the people who feared it. When we rescued those books from the First World, we were rescuing a philosophy. We were rescuing hope. And now we need to find that hope again. That’s why we continue to write and update the Chronicles. That’s why we continue