Between Burning Worlds (System Divine #2) - Jessica Brody Page 0,23

she owed it to the girl to look. To remember her crushed skull and blood-stained scalp. To capture it in her mind, no matter how much she knew it would haunt her.

Because if Chatine didn’t remember, who would?

“It wasn’t your fault,” Azelle said, her voice taking on a careful tone, like she was skirting around the edge of a cliff. “There was nothing you could do. About either of us.”

Of course, Chatine knew that.

Didn’t she?

Azelle sighed. “Do you ever wonder what happened to Maman and Papa?”

Chatine flipped onto her stomach. She did wonder that. Almost daily. Even though her parents had been arrested only a few hours before Chatine, they’d mysteriously never showed up on Bastille, once again somehow managing to dodge their fate.

“Do you think they escaped?” Azelle asked. “Or maybe they’re dead?”

For the sake of the entire System Divine, Chatine hoped it was the latter. She closed her eyes and tried to fall back asleep, but it was quickly becoming obvious that it wasn’t going to happen.

“I think it might be one of those nights,” Azelle said, and Chatine knew she was right.

Careful to keep her hands out of view of the “eyes,” Chatine reached into the small tear in her mattress and felt around for the tiny object she kept hidden inside. Every night, she was terrified she’d come back to her bunk to find it stolen. But she knew better than to keep it on her, where the droids could find it. She nudged around with her fingertip until her skin touched metal.

Then she closed her eyes, for just a moment, and pictured the silver ring. His ring. She hadn’t actually seen it since she’d arrived on Bastille and stashed it in the first hiding place she could find. But every night, as she lay here on this bunk, she could feel it. With every turn of her body, she could sense it pulsing. As though it were its own moon with its own gravitational pull.

The feel of the cool metal against her skin brought back a wave of memories. The kind of memories she only allowed herself to indulge in on the worst of nights here.

Marcellus.

Sitting across from her in a cruiseur, his hazel eyes twinkling, his lips quirked into a small smile.

Marcellus.

Kissing her on the rooftop of the garment fabrique. Deeply. Intensely. Endlessly.

And then finally, Marcellus.

Turning away from her. Calling her a traitor and a déchet. Walking out of her life forever.

Chatine’s heart wrenched. Would he ever forgive her for betraying him? For spying on him for the general? For stealing his mother’s ring? Somehow, she doubted it.

Yet, somehow, it still mattered to her that he did.

Eventually. Maybe. Someday.

“All prisoners rise.” A robotic voice blared through Chatine’s audio chip like a monster in her head. Chatine yanked her hand out from the tear in the mattress as the dingy overhead lights illuminated. All around her, she heard the groans of people waking up and stumbling out of their beds.

Chatine kicked off the scratchy sheet, climbed down from her bunk, pulled on her boots, and followed the slow procession of prisoners making their way toward the stairs. The languid, mechanical movements of her fellow inmates made them look almost dead. And on some level, Chatine supposed they were. Being alive was only half the battle on Bastille. You had to have something to live for. And most of the prisoners here did not.

The Trésor tower cell block was a shadowy, circular chamber made up of twelve floors, each linked to a winding central staircase by a series of metal gangways.

Stepping onto the nearest bridge, Chatine glanced precariously over the railing. Normally, heights didn’t bother her. She was used to being up high, looking down at the world. But this dizzying, eleven-floor drop always made her stomach roll. She swept her gaze down to the ground floor, trying to imagine the place that was rumored to be buried beneath it. A place shrouded in even more darkness than the exploits.

The inmates called it the Black Hole, where the most dangerous prisoners of Bastille were kept. Chatine had heard that the walls down there were made of thick, solid PermaSteel and that there was one cell in particular that was guarded thirty hours a day by droids. This was where the most famous criminal on Laterre was kept.

Citizen Rousseau.

The woman who had led the only known rebellion against the Regime … and failed.

Of course, no one on Bastille had ever seen her in person. Being confined to