Between Burning Worlds (System Divine #2) - Jessica Brody Page 0,56

of the two reasons Roche was here on Bastille. Chatine was the other.

Roche reached a right angle where the air duct bent straight up, and he crept forward until he could stand. Then, using his hands and feet for leverage, he began to shimmy up the narrow shaft.

Chatine followed behind him, her sore muscles aching from the effort, until Roche popped open another vent and they crawled out into a dingy room engulfed in shadows. But it wasn’t the darkness that made Chatine falter. It was the smell. A smell worse than anything she had ever experienced in the Frets. This wasn’t the unpleasant stink of old vegetables, or unwashed bodies, or rusting PermaSteel. This was death and rot and decay all mixed up into one stomach-curdling stench.

They were inside the Bastille morgue.

“Roche,” she barked out, coughing from the stink. “What are we doing in here?”

There was no reply. Through the darkness, Chatine could hear the thump of footsteps and the creak and scrape of something being shoved across the floor. Burying her nose in the crook of her elbow, she shone her Skin around the pitch-black room. Then immediately wished she hadn’t. The slim beam of light revealed a row of gurneys stacked with wrecked, beaten bodies. Arms dangled by tendons from shoulders. Feet bent downward at odd, terrible angles. Great gashes gnawed their way across dust-splattered skin. And from the faces that were still intact, dead eyes stared up into the darkness and mouths gaped open like they were still gasping for a last drop of clean air.

At the far end of the room, she could see some kind of huge metallic box glinting in the glow from her Skin. But before she could fully make it out, she heard another scraping noise and redirected her light toward Roche, who was pushing through a pile-up of gurneys, clearly looking for something.

“What are you doing?” she whispered, darting over to him.

“I kept overhearing Clovis talk about the morgue,” Roche explained hurriedly as he ran his hand along the surface of one of the walls. “ ‘The morgue is the only way off this moon,’ he kept saying. The whole time, I just thought he was being morbid. You know, death is the only escape? But now I realize”—he paused and peered curiously up at the ceiling—“he wasn’t.”

“Wait a minute,” Chatine said, trying to follow his whacked line of reasoning. “What exactly are you saying?”

“I’m saying they’re breaking her out. Right now. They somehow got her up to the roof from this very room, and we need to figure out how.”

Something inside of Chatine started to stir. A memory shoved its way through the fog. Unlike every other memory held captive in her brain, this one was somehow crisp and vivid and sharp.

“This will certainly not be the Vangarde’s last attempt to free Citizen Rousseau. They will try again.”

Chatine shut her eyes and could suddenly see it all again. As though she were living it now. As though she were right there, sitting in the general’s combatteur, soaring over the dark Laterrian landscape on the way back to Vallonay. The general had been talking to Marcellus on his TéléCom, telling him about the Vangarde’s attempt to break Citizen Rousseau out of Bastille.

“They will try again.”

Chatine felt her heart start to pound. This was ridiculous. This was insane. Citizen Rousseau was locked in solitary confinement deep underground. How on Laterre would the Vangarde even get her into the morgue, let alone up to the roof?

“Roche! Are you saying the Vangarde are—”

“Halt!”

A set of metallic footsteps clanged from behind. Chatine spun to find a lone droid coming toward them, clobbering through the crowded morgue. Its glowing orange eyes sliced through the darkness, and its weaponized arm was aimed straight at Roche’s chest.

“Get down!” she screamed.

They dropped to their knees, scrabbling under the gurneys. Rayonette pulses whizzed above their heads. The basher barreled after them, shoving aside gurneys as it went. Dead bodies rolled off and dropped to the floor with the most sickening of sounds.

They kept crawling. But the farther they went, the clearer it became that the droid was chasing them straight toward a dead end. Eventually they would reach the far end of the morgue, and then there was nothing over there but that strange metallic box.…

Chatine slowed as the realization began to seep into her bones. Her mind flashed to every single long, labored walk back from the exploits with the chain around her neck and the prison complex looming