even if that was only a sign of pathetic self-preservation. She simply couldn’t handle any more loss.
On the seventeenth day of her imprisonment, Nova stood at the trough of sinks, her mouth full of baking soda and suds as she brushed her teeth, trying to be as thorough as she could in the time allotted. The muscles in her back where the tracker had been embedded had finally stopped aching.
She was doing her best to appreciate these small things when, for the first time since she’d arrived, there was a disturbance in the routine. The warden stepped into the sanitation room and was speaking quietly with one of the guards.
It was so unusual to break from the pattern that all the inmates froze.
Then the guard’s attention cut to her, meeting Nova’s gaze in the long, dingy mirror.
Nova bent forward and spat. She quickly rinsed her mouth, and the toothbrush was plucked from her hand a second later by the same guard who always took it, because, evidently, a toothbrush was a potential weapon.
For good reason, she supposed. She could definitely do some harm with one if she wanted to.
As she was standing up, her attention caught on a face in the mirror. Not her face and not the prisoner beside her.
Her gut lurched. Narcissa. She was still behind the glass, watching Nova with an unsettling intensity. She raised a finger to her lips and gave a quick shake of her head.
Then she was gone.
Nova stood blinking at her own startled expression, wondering whether she’d imagined it. Why would Narcissa show herself to Nova here, now? And what did she mean by shushing her like that? What did she think Nova was going to say?
“Seven-nine-two!” barked the guard.
Nova startled and faced him, glaring. “Nova,” she said through her teeth. “My name is Nova.”
Beside the guard, the warden gave her an appraising look. “You have a visitor … Seven-nine-two.”
The rest of the inmates studied her, which was more attention than she’d received since the day she arrived. She wondered what the rumors would be. She wondered what it meant to have a visitor in this place. Would they be jealous of her, or were visitors a sign of trouble?
She used the sleeve of her jumpsuit to dry her mouth and, hair still damp from the shower, stepped toward the warden. The guards met her halfway and clamped the familiar cuffs around her hands.
Nova’s thoughts were still churning from Narcissa’s appearance, and it wasn’t until they were halfway across the yard, heading toward a building she hadn’t yet been inside, that it occurred to her that her visitor might be Adrian.
Suddenly, her lungs were struggling to hold air.
Her palms began to sweat inside the hard-shelled gloves.
She hoped it would be Adrian.
And, equally, she hoped it wouldn’t be him.
Because how could she face him? How could she look him in the eye and lie again? Lie more than she already had? Lie in the face of so many truths?
She thought of Narcissa. The finger to her lips. The shake of her head.
The timing was too coincidental—she must have known about Nova’s visitor. What had she been trying to tell Nova? To stay quiet? To keep her secrets, even now?
Her thoughts swam. If that was the case, Narcissa needn’t have bothered. Nova had determined from the moment she’d been arrested—no, from the moment she’d decided to enter the trials and join the Renegades—that she would never admit to her deceit. She would give them nothing that could be used against her or the Anarchists.
As far as Nova was concerned, she was still Nova Jean McLain, and all she had ever wanted to be was a Renegade.
She knew the lies would come as easily as they always had. She could face Captain Chromium without blinking. She could even stare down her own teammates—Oscar, Ruby, even Danna, despite all she’d done to her—and she could insist on her innocence with trembling lip and pleading eyes. She would shake their resolve, even if she couldn’t destroy it entirely.
At least until she knew what they had against her.
But if it was Adrian …
Please don’t let it be Adrian.
And yet—
Please, please let it be Adrian. Let me see him one more time.
The guards led her to a room on which a circular metal platform stood with a hard-edged chair bolted to its center. An open chasm had been left all around the platform, save only for the narrow plank connecting it to the barred doorway, to keep the prisoners away