Between Burning Worlds (System Divine #2) - Jessica Brody Page 0,243

dignitary sent on a diplomatic mission to chronicle the state of the system.

As she and Marcellus weaved through the marketplace in the direction of Fret 7, she no longer felt the coldness in her bones, the hunger in her belly, or the suffering in her heart. The misery that had followed her around this planet for the past eighteen years was somehow nowhere to be found. Vanished in the stiff, biting winds of the Terrain Perdu.

“Are you sure you remember where it is?” Marcellus asked her for what had to be the fifth time since they’d left the Grand Palais.

“Yes,” Chatine said. “I went to Bastille protecting this place. Trust me, I remember where it is.”

They entered the long, dark hallway of Fret 7, a place Chatine had once called home. In a former lifetime. With one arm dangling limp at his side and the other clutching his ribcage, Marcellus followed closely behind her, his gaze darting anxiously at each closed couchette door that they passed.

She didn’t blame him for being nervous. In their blood-stained formal attire, they didn’t exactly blend in around here.

The mechanical room was damp and dingy, with rusting machines, a tangle of knotted pipes and cobwebs, and a giant greasy puddle in the center of the floor. Marcellus glanced around in awe, his gaze halting at a broken pipe that was dangling from one of the PermaSteel walls. He stared at it like he was staring straight into his past. Into his other lifetime. “I can’t believe the base has been right here,” he whispered dazedly, “this whole time.”

“The best crocs hide in plain sight.”

He looked at her, and for a moment, their gazes locked, a thousand silent words streaming between them, their two former lifetimes crashing back together. The old Marcellus and the old Chatine saying their adieus.

Chatine offered him a small smile before hurrying behind a large, decrepit piece of machinery and kneeling down. She wedged her fingernails under the rusting metal and slid the grate to the side, uncovering a dark cylindrical shaft cut into the floor. In the dim light of the mechanical room, they could see a single ladder leading down, eventually swallowed by the darkness below.

Marcellus looked up at Chatine with a slightly petrified expression and quirked an eyebrow. “Ladies first?”

She snorted. “Then, by all means, after you.”

With a smirk, Marcellus maneuvered himself onto the ladder, cringing in pain as he grabbed the first rung. Once he’d reached the bottom and called back up to her, Chatine took a deep breath and crept toward the edge. She had climbed up countless walls in these Frets, but never had she climbed down beneath them. As she replaced the grate above her head and descended the ladder, she tried to chase away the barrage of disturbing memories that flooded her mind. Memories of being trapped in those dark exploits, under the surface of Bastille. Whatever happened next, wherever her new path may lead, she was determined to never set foot on that moon again.

She felt Marcellus’s hand at her back, indicating she’d reached the bottom. She hopped off the ladder and found herself in a dim, hollowed-out space with a large PermaSteel door cut into the wall.

She looked to Marcellus. “What do we do now?”

He shrugged. “I suppose we could just knock.”

“Knock?” Chatine said with a roll of her eyes. “We’re standing at the door of the most famous rebel group on the planet, and you want to knock?”

He scoffed. “Well, do you have a better idea? Do you want to try to ram the door open with your—”

Suddenly, a deep, ominous click echoed off the bedrock walls, sending a shiver through Chatine. She turned to Marcellus again, unsure what to do. Then, out of the corner of her eye, Chatine saw the flicker of movement. Her gaze snapped back to the door, and she leapt out of the way just as the large, solid bloc of PermaSteel began to swing toward them.

- CHAPTER 75 - ALOUETTE

THE ELEVATOR WHISKED DOWN, LIKE a plummeting rock. Alouette gripped hold of the ornate metalwork as the breeze battered at her hair. Below, the lights of Ledôme’s boulevards, parks, and manoirs grew larger and brighter as she descended, and in the distance, the windows and floodlit lawns of the Grand Palais glowed into view.

Looking over it all, Alouette felt strangely numb and completely alive, all at the same time. It was as if she’d gone up this tower as one person, and now she was returning