Between Burning Worlds (System Divine #2) - Jessica Brody Page 0,63

up her entire field of vision. In the glow from the control panel, his dark eyes sparkled. He was definitely speaking to her now. She squinted, trying to bring his face into focus. It was a nice face. From what she could tell. A little too chiseled and perfect to look real, but nice.

“I don’t suppose you have any advanced knowledge in stealth management systems, do you?”

Chatine tried to formulate a reply, but the only sound she seemed capable of making was, “Huh?”

The man twisted his mouth to the side and sat back up in his chair. “Didn’t think so.”

Chatine tried to speak again but was promptly cut off.

“Look, I’d love to chat, but I’ve got to figure out how to fix this or we’re both going to get turned into moon dust. There are Ministère combatteurs swarming this place. Their scans have detected us, but up until now, they haven’t been able to locate us. That won’t last long, though, if I can’t get this generator to work.” He rose from his chair and leapt right over Chatine’s head in a blur of color and movement. She tried to track him with her eyes, but he moved too fast for her to keep up. He reached the control panel to her left and began fiddling with knobs and jabbing at screens.

“Stealth mode activat— Stealth mode deactivated.”

“Not good, baby!” the man said, shaking his head. “Not good at all.”

Chatine ground her teeth. This man was making no sense whatsoever. Nothing about this whole situation was making any sense. And he was still upside down.

She slowly pushed herself to a sitting position, seeing her surroundings clearly for the first time. There were glowing screens. More rows of dials. More riveted walls and small metal cabinets. Chatine glanced up and took in the stars again. Except she now realized she was looking at them through a plate of curved plastique. The vast, scuffed window above her stretched all the way down in front of the young man at the control panel, and through it, she spotted the burning wreckage of the Trésor tower roof. Her heart immediately sank. She was still on Bastille. Tucked away behind a water tank, from the looks of it, yet definitely still on this Sol-forsaken moon.

And this ship didn’t look like any ship Chatine had ever been in before. Not that riding in one combatteur and one prisoner transport voyageur made her an expert on the subject, but there was something about the controls. They felt old somehow. Like the entire ship was made up of parts she could find at Monsieur Ferraille’s junk stall in the Marsh. Relics of a lost world.

“Okay, I’m going to try something a little extreme,” the man said, staring intently at the controls in front of him, “so bear with me, baby.” He gripped a metallic toggle with pinched fingers, flicked it down and then back up.

Chatine felt the floor beneath her rattle, and then the entire ship shook violently. She braced her hands on either side of her for balance. And that’s when her gaze fell upon her left leg. Her prison uniform was ripped open, and there was a gash just below her knee cap. Bloodied and deep and oozing. The sight of it nearly made her faint again. She took deep breaths to push away the curtaining blackness and then gently prodded at the skin around the open wound.

Still, no pain.

How strange.

“Did you paralyze me?” she asked, finally finding her voice. But as soon as the question was out of her mouth, she knew it was wrong. She’d been paralyzed by enough rayonettes to know what it felt like, and this wasn’t it. Her leg wasn’t numb and cold. It was tingly and … warm.

There was that word again. It was so foreign to her. Chatine had spent her entire life freezing in the Frets and then on Bastille. This was the first time she could ever remember feeling so Sol-damn warm.

Without warning, the man—presumably the pilote of this ship—leapt back over Chatine and collapsed down in the capitaine’s seat again. “Paralyzeurs? No way. We don’t get near that toxic stuff. Too much of that and it starts to do permanent damage. Messes with your brain.”

Chatine wondered if that’s exactly what was happening to her. Too much paralyzeur in her system from years of being shot at by bashers and cyborg inspecteurs, and now her brain was hallucinating being inside some ancient-looking ship with a wild-eyed, chisel-jawed man