Between Burning Worlds (System Divine #2) - Jessica Brody Page 0,89

“Well, two days ago, I was out in Céleste, on the Southern Peninsula, scanning signals from the satellites—”

“Wait, you were what?” spat Marcellus.

“Scanning signals from the satellites,” Cerise repeated, slowly enunciating each word.

“In the Southern Peninsula?”

“Céleste is gorgeous this time of year. Have you been? Brilliant pure white skies. And it’s where the Laterrian cloud coverage is thinnest, so you get the best signal strength from the satellites.”

“Really?” Alouette asked, sounding genuinely interested. “I never read about—” she caught herself and cleared her throat. “I mean, I’ve never heard that before.”

“Why were you scanning satellite signals?” Marcellus asked.

“Because I was looking for the kill switch,” Cerise replied matter-of-factly.

Marcellus fought back a groan. “Seriously, Cerise?”

“What’s the kill switch?” Alouette asked.

“It’s a master switch that can deactivate all the Skins,” Cerise explained at the exact same moment as Marcellus said, “It’s a hoax that only extremely gullible people believe.”

Alouette swung her gaze from Cerise to Marcellus and then finally to Gabriel.

“I’m going to side with fire boy here,” Gabriel said. “It’s totally a hoax.”

“No, it’s not,” Cerise insisted. “It’s real.”

Marcellus rolled his eyes. “No. It’s an urban legend that’s been around for years. A fantasy. It’s just fodder for conspiracy theorists.”

“Yeah. You’ve got to be pretty stupide to believe that all the Skins on the planet can be shut down with one button.” Gabriel snorted and then muttered under his breath. “Expert hacker, my foot.”

Cerise’s jaw visibly clenched. “I’m not stupide. A lot of people believe the kill switch is real. And as an expert hacker”—she shot Gabriel a steely look—“I know from personal experience that you should never build any system without some kind of emergency shut-off mechanism, in case anything goes wrong.”

Marcellus clenched his fists against the seat. This conversation was going nowhere. He was this close to ordering the cruiseur to stop so he could jump out. “Trust me, Cerise,” he said with a sigh, “if such a thing existed, I would know about it. I’m second-in-command of the Ministère after General Bonnefaçon.” He glanced at the arrest warrant still displayed on the hologram unit and cleared his throat. “Or, was anyway.”

“But what if the general doesn’t even know about it?” she countered. “I mean, it makes sense to hide it, right? So, no one can ever use it? But I figured, if there is a switch somewhere, it has to be connected to a network, so it can reach all the Skins at once. That’s why I was scanning the satellites. I thought that if I could locate the right signal, I could track it back to the switch.”

Gabriel crossed his arms over his chest. “And? Did you find it?”

Cerise deflated. “Well, no.”

“Okay, that was a charming story,” Gabriel said. “How about you just drop me off somewhere and I’ll walk home.”

“I’m not finished,” Cerise said through gritted teeth. Then, she refreshed her breezy smile again and continued. “I may not have located the kill switch”—she flashed another scathing look at Gabriel—“yet. But I did end up stumbling upon something else. Something very, very interesting.”

“And that would be?” Marcellus prompted. He was getting a little fatigued by Cerise’s flair for the dramatics. And he still wasn’t entirely convinced he should believe anything she had to say. Cerise Chevalier? A sympathizeur? A hacker? And now a conspiracy theorist, too? Just the other day she was whining about dresses for a fête like it was the end of the world.

“I found an encrypted message being sent through one of the old Human Conservation Commission probes.”

“Those probes still exist?” Alouette cut in, staring wide-eyed at Cerise. “I thought they were all destroyed once the planets of the System Divine were inhabited.”

“Me too,” Cerise said, sounding thrilled to have someone in this cruiseur who seemed as excited about this development as she was.

“What’s this about probes?” Gabriel asked.

Cerise let out a huff, but Alouette turned patiently to Gabriel and explained, “Before the Last Days, the Human Conservation Commission sent probes from the First World into space to locate a new place for human beings to live. That’s how they found the twelve planets of the System Divine. But after the planets were terraformed and inhabited, the probes weren’t needed anymore, and they just sort of disappeared.”

“But not all of them,” Cerise said. “One, I’ve discovered, is apparently still floating around in the Asteroid Channel, and someone is using it to send messages through an abandoned First World communication network.” Cerise leaned forward and swiveled her gaze purposefully between Alouette and Marcellus. She