handed a striped jumpsuit. The cuffs were removed fully and Nova rubbed her wrist, not just because of the soreness brought on by the restraints, but to confirm that the emptiness she felt was real. Her bracelet was gone. Adrian really had taken it from her, the last connection she had to her father.
A female guard stood by while she changed, instructing her to put all her belongings in a bin that appeared in a small slot in the wall. It didn’t matter. They could burn her clothes and fancy Renegade-issued boots for all she cared. The one thing that mattered had already been taken.
Well, the one thing besides her freedom. Her family. Her future.
She ground her teeth, chastising herself for thinking it. She hadn’t even been there a day. Hadn’t even seen her cell. It was too soon to be giving up.
She was just stepping into the jumpsuit when something punctured her in the back, right between her spine and left shoulder blade. She cried out and spun around. The guard was holding a device that looked a bit like Nova’s homemade stun gun.
“What was that?” Nova yelled, reaching for the burning spot on her back. She felt something hard embedded into her skin.
“Tracker,” said the guard in a bored voice, setting the gun to the side. “Prisoners used to try and escape. Now, we almost welcome it. They don’t get far with those, and it can liven things up around here for a day or two.”
Nova shoved her arms through the sleeves and did up the buttons. “You could have warned me.”
“Oh? And you would have just stood still and said, ‘Thank you, ma’am,’ when I was done? You’d be the first.”
Cuffed again, with the same guards flanking either side, Nova was finally led through the muddy yard and into the cell block. Since Ace had been captured, she had spent a lot of time trying to imagine what it must be like inside Cragmoor Penitentiary, and now she tried to be amused that, after everything, she was being given a VIP tour. She knew the exterior shell of the original building had been relatively untouched, but the interior had been demolished and reconfigured a number of times since they had started housing prodigies. She knew that the prison was constantly being altered and remodeled to contain new superpowers and the many complications they afforded their captors.
But nothing she had read had given much indication as to what the interior of the prison was actually like, and she had pictured tiers of jail cells stretching the length of the building, linked by narrow walkways and high rails.
The reality was nothing like that.
Walking into the cell block, she was greeted by a vast open space stretching from one stone wall to the next. Until her gaze traveled up, to where the ceiling was reinforced with steel beams nearly five stories overhead. The cells, each one a single solitary box, were suspended from the beams by thick cables.
There was a narrow walkway, but rather than connecting the cells, it lined the perimeter of the wall around them, where the guards could make their rounds and keep watch on the inmates.
If there were prisoners inside the suspended cells, she couldn’t see them from below. The place was silent as death, a silence made more complete by the wind howling against the outside walls, and then their footsteps.
Cell numbers were stenciled with spray paint onto the stone wall, and they paused in front of B-26. Her guard nodded toward a room on the second level, surrounded by black tinted glass. A second later, the grating noise of gears echoed around them, and one of the cells began to descend. Nova watched its slow approach, a part of her wishing that it would just fall and crush her and end this whole ordeal before it even started. Again, she cursed herself for feeling so hopeless. She was an Anarchist. She was Ace Anarchy’s niece. She was never hopeless.
But it was hard to convince herself of that now, when the cell hit the floor with a clang and she found herself scanning an enclosure a third the size of her bedroom at the house on Wallowridge, and even that had felt cramped.
One of the guards nudged her in the back. Her lips tightened and she thought about asking if they were going to let her keep the pretty new handcuffs. But her mouth was dry and her heart wasn’t in it.