cheeks flood with heat. He dropped his gaze down to his hands and muttered, “I’m just having a hard time getting my head around all of this. You living here. With them.”
“They’re nothing like I thought they’d be. They’re good people. They saved me. And they’re going to save your friend in there. Who, by the way, doesn’t exactly look like your style either. Since when do you hang out with shaggy-haired Third Estaters?”
“Well,” Marcellus said, a grin pulling on his lips. “I did know this boy once named Théo. He had pretty shaggy hair too. I just never saw it because—”
“Right, right,” Chatine interrupted. “I stand corrected.” She ran her fingers over her scalp again, as though trying to remember what it felt like before all the hair was shaved off.
Marcellus’s smile instantly faded, and his stomach clenched. “Was it bad? Up there on Bastille?”
“No,” she deadpanned. “It was paradise. All the chou bread you can eat and hours of stimulating conversation down in the zyttrium exploits.”
Marcellus knew she was making a joke, but he still felt chastised. Of course it was bad up there. It was horrible. The worst conditions a human being could endure. He took a breath, steeling himself to ask the question that had been secretly plaguing him ever since he’d first watched Chatine’s arrest report. “Was it my fault?”
Chatine’s head snapped toward him. “What?”
“Your arrest. Was it my fault? Did you get sent to Bastille because of me?”
“Why would you think that?”
“Because Marcellus is always trying to take credit for other people’s misfortunes,” Cerise muttered. She turned toward the operating room door. “Argh! Would it kill someone to give us an update or something! He could be lying dead in there for all we know!”
Alouette shared a knowing look with Marcellus before jumping to her feet and guiding Cerise back to the cot with her. Cerise sat down on the thin mattress, and Alouette handed her a mug of hot chocolat. “Sit here. Drink this. Don’t move.” Alouette sat down beside her and linked her arm with Cerise’s. The gesture, Marcellus was certain, was meant to be both comforting and restraining.
“It wasn’t your fault,” Chatine whispered.
“I just …” Marcellus floundered for words. “You never would have been sent there if it weren’t for me. The general never would have hired you to spy on me and you never—”
“I never would have gotten out of there if it weren’t for you. You saved me. Your message from the droid—if it weren’t for that, I might have died in that tower.”
“Why were you on Bastille?” Marcellus turned back to her to see the lightness had vanished from her eyes. “Your arrest alert just said treason.”
“I lied to the general,” she explained without meeting his gaze. “I discovered where the Vangarde base was, and I told him I would lead him to it. But I lied. I led him somewhere else, and he had me sent straight to Bastille.”
At this admission, Alouette glanced over at Chatine. “You found the Refuge?”
“Refuge?” Chatine repeated curiously.
“That’s what the Vangarde call their base,” Marcellus explained.
“Yes. I found it.”
“And you protected it?” Alouette asked.
“I protected the Frets. I protected my people. And I guess, yes, I protected the Vangarde, too.”
Chatine turned to meet Marcellus’s gaze, her intense gray eyes the color of Laterre’s sky. And at that moment, something flowed through Marcellus. Something unnerving yet comforting, irritating yet familiar. He’d been so wrong about her. So many times. This girl who’d spied on him. Who’d deceived him. This girl who’d joked with him. Challenged him.
Kissed him.
This last memory made Marcellus’s frozen toes feel warmer than they’d felt in a lifetime. He hastily pulled his gaze away from hers only to have it land on Etienne. The Défecteur was glaring at Marcellus as though he had microcams affixed to the inside of Marcellus’s brain, monitoring all of his thoughts and emotions. As though he, too, were watching Marcellus and Chatine kiss on that rooftop in an endless loop.
Marcellus cleared his throat and instead turned his eyes to Alouette, but looking at her only made his heart clench with some other emotion he couldn’t quite identify. He dropped his gaze to the floor, which right now felt like the only safe place in the room.
“How did you escape?” Alouette asked Chatine.
“I … ,” Chatine began with difficulty. “I escaped when the Vangarde was breaking out Citizen Rousseau.” She looked like she was about to cry. She opened her mouth to say more, but no