Between Burning Worlds (System Divine #2) - Jessica Brody Page 0,83

tower of wood exploded into flames. Bigger and wilder than Marcellus had ever seen before.

What on Laterre … ?

He’d barely had time to form the question in his mind before the blow sent him flying backward and crashing into a support beam. His head hit the wood with a crack that sent the room spinning and his vision spiraling into darkness.

- CHAPTER 24 - ALOUETTE

RAIN DRIZZLED SOFTLY FROM THE dark skies over Montfer as Alouette and Gabriel hurried through a maze of crumbling shacks and makeshift shelters that looked like they were sinking into the mud below. Alouette had seen poverty in the Frets, but nothing could have prepared her for this. Hungry eyes looked out at her from shadowy doorways, and a few shoeless children ran up, yanked on her coat, and pleaded for chou bread. But she’d traded her last piece to Dahlia hours ago.

“What is this place?” she whispered to Gabriel, her voice cold and horror-struck.

“The Bidon,” Gabriel replied. “Housing for the exploit workers.”

Housing? Alouette thought as she glanced around again, shuddering at the rusting shacks, with their pockmarked roofs and off-kilter doors. That’s a generous term.

“This is where the Third Estate live in Montfer?”

“Most of them,” Gabriel said. “Some are lucky and get jobs as live-in servants in the Second Estate quartier on the other side of the wall. But most everyone in Montfer is somehow connected to the exploits. If they’re not digging the iron from the ground, they’re processing it into PermaSteel in the fabriques. Or catching fish in the harbor to feed the workers.”

Alouette peered into one of the crooked shacks and saw a young woman trying to rock a crying baby to sleep. She locked eyes with Alouette, and the desperation in the woman’s gaze made Alouette’s stomach clench.

She looked away. “Someone should … do something about this,” she whispered to Gabriel. “The Ministère should—”

“The Ministère doesn’t care.”

The reply came like a slap in the face. She suddenly heard Principale Francine’s words echoed back at her:

“The Regime is extremely corrupt. The very origins of Laterre were unjust and divisive, designed to keep the poor downtrodden and defeated and ignorant.”

Then, with a flinch, Alouette realized that someone was trying to do something about this. The Vangarde. The sisters she’d left behind.

Gabriel massaged his left shoulder. “Sols, that paralyzeur works fast.”

Alouette cringed as she watched him shake out his dead arm. “Merci for that, by the way. No one has ever taken a rayonette pulse for me before.”

“Honored to be the first.”

Alouette still couldn’t seem to process what had happened back there, outside the Precinct. She’d taken down two Ministère officers. With her Tranquil Forme. The same way she’d been able to defeat Inspecteur Limier in the Forest Verdure.

She’d somehow convinced herself that the incident in the forest had just been an accident. A fluke. The sisters’ Tranquil Forme wasn’t a weapon. It was a practice of mindful meditation. But clearly that had been a lie too. Just like all the rest of the things she’d been told about the Refuge over the past twelve years.

“Oh, and before I forget,” Gabriel added, “here’s this back.”

He reached into his pocket and withdrew a long metal object. It was familiar, but it still took Alouette a second to make sense of it in Gabriel’s hand.

“My screwdriver?” she asked, immediately looking down at her sac to check for holes in the fabric. “Where did you— How did you—?”

“I swiped it outside the Precinct,” Gabriel said nonchalantly.

“Swiped it?” she repeated curiously, still trying to keep up. “But why?”

He waved the screwdriver at her. “To get out of the cuffs.”

Alouette grabbed the tool and turned it around in her hands, like it had suddenly turned into a magic screwdriver.

“Ministère cuffs have a weak point at one of the seams. I found it years ago.” He chuckled like this was highly amusing. “They still haven’t figured out how I keep escaping.”

Alouette returned the screwdriver to her sac. “Where are we going?” She glanced uneasily at her surroundings. It wasn’t just the poverty that unsettled Alouette about the Bidon. There was something else, too. The stench of smelting iron in the air. The suck and pull of the heavy mud under her feet. The damp, stinging breeze swirling from the ocean to the east.

Alouette soon realized that it felt … familiar.

Not in her mind, exactly, but in her body. Her bones suddenly felt cold. Her stomach seemed to ache and clench with hunger. And her skin could distinctly remember the touch