Between Burning Worlds (System Divine #2) - Jessica Brody Page 0,55

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