Between Burning Worlds (System Divine #2) - Jessica Brody Page 0,74

glanced over at the other girls crammed onto the bench next to her. They had thankfully stopped crying an hour ago, but their faces were still haunted. Guilt coursed through Alouette, mixing with the fear knotting up her stomach. If the officers had tracked Alouette to Montfer because they knew she’d been living with the Vangarde, then this was all her fault.

“I’m scared,” a small voice said, breaking through Alouette’s thoughts. She turned to see Heloise looking up at her with wide, desperate eyes. She was so petite, so skinny, and the cold had turned her lips so blue they almost matched the azure of her flimsy dress.

Alouette didn’t know what to say or how to chase away the terror in Heloise’s gaze. Because, in truth, she felt the same. She knew her own eyes were probably brimming with the same fear.

Alouette scooted along the bench, pressing herself closer to Heloise’s shivering body. “It’s okay. Fear is like a wave. It comes and then it goes away. Just try to breathe.”

As soon as the words whispered out of her, she knew instantly where they’d come from. They were the same words Sister Jacqui used to say to her when Alouette was a child and had woken from a nightmare.

With a sigh, Heloise laid her head on Alouette’s shoulder and—as the girl’s shudders subsided, turning into the long, whispery breaths of sleep—Alouette’s mind returned to her mother. Lisole. She had once been thin and sickly just like this girl. She had once sold her blood to make ends meet. But that still didn’t answer the larger, burning questions that were searing holes in Alouette’s mind.

Why had her mother really left Montfer? Where did she go? And why had she told Madame Blanchard that her baby was dead before giving Alouette to the Renards?

Alouette exhaled a long breath and, with her cuffed hands, reached into the sac strapped around her body. She’d kept it close to her the entire voyage here, never once letting it out of her sight. Each item inside had been chosen with care and purpose. When she’d left the Refuge, she knew she could only take a few things with her. And now, just like she’d done countless times during her journey, she brushed her fingertips lightly over the items, trying to draw strength from each one.

A flashlight, to light her way.

Her metal devotion beads, because despite her anger at the lies and the darkness, she still couldn’t bring herself to leave them behind.

One of the titan blocs Hugo Taureau had given her before he’d left for Reichenstat. She’d traded the other in the Marsh for passage on the bateau and new clothes.

The locked titan box with the delicate engraving of two First World beasts on its lid that had once belonged to her mother.

And of course, her trusty screwdriver. Sister Denise had given it to her for her eighth birthday, and that same day, she’d showed Alouette how to disassemble a Ministère device. It was an old biometric lock that Denise had said she’d bought from a stall in the Marsh. Alouette could still feel Denise’s hands on hers, guiding the screwdriver, pointing out the various wires and mechanisms and circuitry. And Sister Jacqui—dear Sister Jacqui—smiling over from her desk, watching the two of them work.

Suddenly, in the shadow of everything that had happened, that memory began to change shape, take on new meaning. Alouette had always believed Sister Denise’s obsession with dismantling Ministère devices was just a hobby. Now she realized it had been a necessity.

Was that how she and Jacqui had broken into the Ministère headquarters? Because Denise knew the innerworkings of a biometric lock?

As Alouette’s fingertips brushed against the screwdriver’s plastique handle now, she had to blink back the tears that threatened to blur her vision as, once again, Principale Francine’s painful words sliced through her memory.

“We don’t even know where the Ministère is holding them.”

Alouette didn’t have to be a member of the Vangarde to know what was happening to Jacqui and Denise now. She knew how brutal the Ministère could be. And the thought of her beloved sisters being tortured made Alouette’s stomach clench with agony and uselessness and guilt.

She could have stayed. She could have joined the Vangarde and tried to help find Jacqui and Denise. But instead she’d chosen to leave. To travel the Secana Sea in search of answers. Answers that now seemed farther away than ever.

What if she’d left the Refuge for nothing? What if she’d come all