Between Burning Worlds

by Jessica Brody

  The woman, however, clearly was not fighting as hard. Because as soon as her gaze landed on Alouette, a gasp escaped her lips, and her eyes widened with a look of pure disbelief.

  Alouette self-consciously touched her hair, her face, the front of her sweater.

  The madame blinked, as though trying to disengage herself from a bad dream, and let out a tinkling laugh. “Oh my. That was rude. So sorry about that. You’ll have to excuse me. I thought—you just look like someone I used to—” The madame squinted at Alouette again before shaking her head. “It’s uncanny, really.”

  With a squeeze of her chest, Alouette suddenly understood.

  I look like her. I look like my mother.

  Straightaway, hope fluttered inside Alouette. Perhaps this hadn’t been a mistake after all.

  Alouette remained silent as the woman composed herself and then continued into the small room and took a seat in Clodie’s chair. She folded her hands regally across her lap. “I’m Madame Blanchard. I am in charge of this facility. My médecin informed me that you are an ideal candidate for extraction but are having some reservations about the process. And while that is to be understood for someone who is experiencing it for the first time, I can assure you that it’s quite safe.”

  The lie slid so easily out of the woman’s red-stained lips, it made Alouette’s teeth clench. “That’s not why I’m here, actually. I’m looking for information about—”

  “Lisole,” the madame said with a knowing smile.

  Alouette felt a tingle race through her body. Was that her name? Her mother’s name?

  How many years had she been waiting for this? Lying awake at night dreaming about it. Just one name—two syllables—and suddenly she felt more complete than she had in years.

  Lisole.

  “You must be related to her,” Madame Blanchard went on. “I feel like I’m looking at a ghost. You’re almost an exact replica. Your face, your hair, even your blood. Hers was quite rich in nutrients as well.” The madame’s gaze went wistful for a moment, as though her thoughts had snagged on some distant memory. “She was an ideal client. While she was around.” She blinked out of her brief trance and refocused on Alouette. “Are you a niece? A cousin?”

  “No,” Alouette said, slightly confused by the question. “I’m her daughter.”

  The madame flinched as though someone had slapped her. “Her daughter? Surely you can’t be—”

  “I’m Madeline.”

  Madame Blanchard’s eyes narrowed, almost distrustfully. She shifted in her chair.

  “I was hoping you could tell me a little about her,” Alouette forged on. “Where she was from. Who her family was. Even her last name would help. Anything. Please. All I know was that she used to come here and then …” Alouette dropped her gaze to the floor, trying to conceal the malice she felt toward this place, this woman, this whole operation. “And then she died.”

  “Yes,” Madame Blanchard said, although there was something suddenly cold about her tone. Distant. “I was very sorry to hear about her passing. Like I said, she was a good client. And had become somewhat of a friend. She used to rent a room from me upstairs.”

  Alouette’s small seed of hope suddenly blossomed until it filled her entire body, chasing all the resentment away. “Really? What was she like? Did you know my father? Did you ever meet me?”

  Madame Blanchard laughed at Alouette’s eagerness. “She was lovely. Bright and beautiful and very full of life. She loved you quite dearly. She used to bring you in here when she would come for her extractions. You were just a little baby then. The other girls would play with you while Lisole was in the extraction room. But I’m sorry I don’t know who your father is. She never spoke of him. And most people in here don’t use any last names. So, I’m afraid I’m not much help there either.”

  Alouette scooted to the edge of her chair, desperate to keep this woman talking. She’d had a taste of truth—her truth—and like the girls plugged into those dreadful machines in the next room, she was hooked. She wanted more. She craved it. “Do you remember anything else?”

  The madame closed her eyes, thinking. “Lisole was a sweet girl. I had grown quite fond of her.”

  Alouette reached into her sac and cradled the little titan box that had belonged to her mother, squeezing it hopefully between her fingers. She desperately wished she knew what was inside. That she could see what was hiding underneath the two majestic creatures carved onto its lid. But no matter how hard she’d tried to pry the box open, it had stayed sealed shut.

  The madame opened her eyes and smiled at Alouette, but it was a crooked smile that never seemed to reach her eyes.

  “I was very sorry when she left town,” Madame Blanchard went on.

  “Left?” Alouette withdrew her hand from the bag. “What do you mean? When did she leave? Where did she go?”

  Alouette knew her mother had left her with the Renards because she couldn’t afford to take care of her, but she’d always assumed her mother had stayed in Montfer. After all, Sister Jacqui had told her that her mother had died in Montfer.

  “I don’t know where she went. She just left. Skipped out on the rent. Four months of rent, actually.” There was a sudden edge to the madame’s voice.

  “When was this?” Alouette asked.

  The madame sighed. “Let’s see. It was about two years after the end of the rebellion. Probably around Month 7 or 8 of 490.”

  Alouette quickly did the calculations in her head. Month 7 or 8 of 490, she would have been not quite two years old. Which means her mother had left Montfer right after she’d dropped Alouette at the Renards.

  “Do you know why she left?”

  The madame shifted in her seat, suddenly looking uncomfortable with the question.

  “Do you?” Alouette pressed.

  “I always assumed she left because she was in mourning and wanted to escape her grief.” The madame stared down at her hands, trying to avoid eye contact with Alouette. “But now I’m not so sure.”

  “In mourning? Over who?”

  The madame tittered uneasily. “See, that’s where my confusion starts. Up until five minutes ago, I thought—and with good reason—that she was mourning you.”

  Alouette’s stomach dropped. “Me?” she whispered, hardly able to form the word. “B-b-but why would she be mourning me?”

  “Good question.” The madame clucked her tongue. “One I’ve been trying to answer since you claimed to be Madeline.”

  Alouette’s heart raced at the madame’s accusatory tone. She was Madeline, wasn’t she? She was the daughter of Lisole, the woman they’d been talking about.

  The madame went on. “And if you are who you claim to be—which, let’s face it, how could you not be, looking like that—then the next obvious question is, whose funeral did I attend in 490?”

  The small room began to spin.

  Dead.

  She was supposed to be dead. There had been a funeral. For her?

  Alouette barely had time to register the madame’s words before she heard a soft click of the door opening behind her. She turned around but Clodie was already there. Already upon her. By the time Alouette felt the pinch at her neck, it was too late. Dizziness instantly overtook her, and she fell straight into clouds.

  - CHAPTER 14 - MARCELLUS

  “ARRIVAL ON BASTILLE IN SEVENTEEN minutes.” The voice of Capitaine Apolline Moreau blasted into Marcellus’s audio patch, making him feel as though the combatteurs were soaring through the next room, as opposed to thousands of kilomètres away en route to Bastille.

  Marcellus tried to inhale, but it felt like he was drowning on dry land. He hadn’t been able to take a proper breath since it was announced that Citizen Rousseau was dead. And then, not dead. He felt helpless. Out of control. He didn’t know what the Vangarde were up to on Bastille, but he knew, that in seventeen minutes, they would be in for a very big surprise. And Marcellus had no way to warn them.

  “Seventeen minutes?” the Patriarche b
arked. “Can’t those blasted things move any faster?”

  Marcellus saw his grandfather flinch. “These are state-of-the-art crafts,” the general explained defensively. “Bastille is more than a hundred thousand kilomètres from the spacecraft carrier. It takes time to get there.”

  The Patriarche harrumphed. “Well, meanwhile, the Vangarde are getting away with Citizen Rousseau!”

  Marcellus retreated back to his corner, tucking himself next to the table that held the giant lit-up model of the System Divine. It was the only place in the room that felt relatively safe right now.

  The general turned to Rolland. “Have you located the source of the hack yet?”

  The technicien was currently sitting in the midst of what looked like the wreckage of a tornado. Monitors had been stripped from the walls, plastique panels had been yanked from consoles, and wires and motherboards hung in twisted loops. Rolland had torn apart the entire left side of the warden’s office, trying to figure out what was corrupting the morgue security feeds. Meanwhile, the archived footage of “dead” Citizen Rousseau was still playing on a loop on the center monitor, and all around it were views from other parts of the prison compound: the spaceport, the cantine, the cell blocks, the dispatch bunker, even the washrooms.

  They all looked normal. But it was now impossible to tell if any of them had been looped as well.

  “Negative,” Rolland replied, the circuitry in her cheek and forehead humming calmly. “I can’t isolate the breach. There is no evidence of any tampering.”

  “We already checked the integrity of the security systems after the two Vangarde operatives were arrested,” the warden reminded the general. “Nothing had been compromised.”

  “Well, they’re managing to hack that morgue feed somehow!” the general thundered to Rolland. “And Sols know how many others. Find out how!”

  Rolland nodded and disappeared back into her tangle of wires.

  “What are the droids reporting?” the general asked Warden Gallant.

  The small, stocky man wiped sweat from his brow. “No unusual activity reported. And there are currently droids stationed all over the spaceport. If the Vangarde try to land a ship on Bastille—”

  “Who says they’ll use the spaceport?” the general snapped. “Our own ships can land on almost any flat surface. They could be on the far side of the moon for all we know.”

  The warden’s lips puckered like a fish. He clearly hadn’t thought of that.

  “Continue to search everywhere,” the general commanded. “I want droids covering every square centimètre of that moon. Tell them to fire on anyone and any ships on sight. Lethal mode only.”

  The warden nodded and returned to his desk to relay the orders into his TéléCom.

  “Arrival on Bastille in fourteen minutes,” Capitaine Moreau reported.

  “Tell them to speed up!” The Patriarche stepped forward but soon retreated after a sharp but mollifying look from his advisor.

  “Rolland,” the general said suddenly, as though an idea had just occurred to him. “Don’t the satellite feeds for Bastille run through a different network? Which means it’s likely they wouldn’t be compromised by the same hack?”

  Rolland nodded and the general was immediately in motion, his fingers flying across the screen of his TéléCom. A moment later, one of the monitors on the wall filled with a grainy, distorted view of the prison compound from space. As the general zoomed in, the image got closer but only slightly less blurry.

  “How are you going to find them?” the Patriarche asked incredulously, echoing Marcellus’s own thoughts. “They could be anywhere!”

  The general ignored him and continued dragging his fingertip across the screen of his TéléCom. The satellite imagery shifted around, showing what looked like nothing more than a quiet, sleeping prison.

  Are the Vangarde even there? Marcellus wondered. Whatever was happening on that moon, the Vangarde were doing a stellar job of making it look like just another night on Bastille. But he supposed he should expect nothing less from a rebel group that had spent the past seventeen years in hiding.

  “Arrival on Bastille in eleven minutes,” Moreau reported to the room.

  Marcellus returned his attention to the large replica of the System Divine sitting on the table next to him, trying to imagine that fleet of combatteurs racing through the skies, getting closer and closer to Bastille with each passing second.

  “The droids are currently searching the exterior of the main prison building, and multiple teams are en route to the zyttrium exploits,” the warden reported from his desk.

  Marcellus was about to pull his gaze away from the model when something strange caught his eye. There was something off about it. He couldn’t quite put his finger on what it was, but the model looked different somehow. If he hadn’t spent countless hours over the years staring at that thing, wishing he were on any other planet but this one, he probably wouldn’t have noticed. But now he couldn’t un-notice.

  Inconspicuously, he hunched down, trying to get a better look at the model. It wasn’t the alignment of the planets that was off. They all looked intact, all twelve of them hovering in perfect orbit around Sol 1 at the center, with Sols 2 and 3 dancing alone in the farthest reaches of the system. Laterre hung perfectly positioned between the ice-white planet of their ally Reichenstat and the marbled blue-and-green globe of their enemy, Albion. But it was the luminous, amber-colored moon suspended next to Laterre that seemed altered somehow.

  Bastille.

  “Still no progress on locating the source of the breach,” Rolland reported from her position in front of the open control panel. “I’ve tried rebooting the system and reconfiguring all connections, but nothing has worked. The Vangarde must somehow be overriding the signals from the outside.”

  “How on Laterre are they doing that?” the warden asked.

  “I do not know, sir,” replied Rolland. “But I’m working on it.”

  Marcellus squinted at the glowing miniscule replica of Laterre’s moon. There was definitely something different about it. The color was off. It was just a tad too orange. And the size was just a touch too large. He reached out a finger and curiously pushed the tiny sphere around its orbit.

  “What was that?” the Patriarche shouted, and Marcellus glanced up to see him staring at the center monitor, where Citizen Rousseau’s body still filled the screen.

  “What was what?” the general asked impatiently.

  “The footage from the morgue. It just … flickered.”

  The general turned to Rolland. “Did you do that?”

  Rolland’s circuitry flashed in concentration as her gaze darted between the monitor and the control panel. “I don’t believe so, sir.”

  Marcellus glanced down at his hand which was still lingering near the replica of Bastille. A shiver ricocheted down his spine.

  Could it be … ?

  Careful to make sure everyone’s back was still turned to him, he reached out and touched the model again, this time, wrapping his entire hand around the tiny illuminated sphere of Bastille.

  The center monitor filled with static. Everyone reacted at once. Marcellus released the replica as though it were hot to the touch and the screen instantly returned to normal.

  “Damn the Sols!” the general swore. “Rolland, what is going on? We need those feeds fixed. We are completely blind here!”

  Marcellus’s gaze darted suspiciously back to the model. He thought of those two women who had been caught breaking into this very office two weeks ago. Jacqui and Denise.

  “We already checked the integrity of the security systems after the two Vangarde operatives were arrested. Nothing had been compromised.”

  That’s what the warden had just said. And the general had told Marcellus something similar two weeks ago. Everyone was so certain the two operatives had failed in their mission.

  But what if they hadn’t?

  “Arrival on Bastille in nine minutes.”

  The gen
eral stood up straighter. “Moreau, connect me to your cockpit cam.”

  “Copy. Connecting.”

  A second later, one of the monitors on the wall switched to the view from Capitaine Moreau’s combatteur.

  And there it was. Embedded in a vast mantle of blackness and surrounded by a thousand shimmering stars, Bastille glowed a goldish-yellow. Its amber rocks like the burning embers of a fire. Marcellus felt like his heart might thud right out of his chest.

  “General!” the warden shouted, jumping up from his desk. “There’s an update from the droids. The power has just gone out in the Trésor tower.”

  “WHAT?” the Patriarche boomed. “What does that mean?”

  “What caused the outage?” the general asked with impressive composure.

  The warden paused to listen to the rest of the update. “Source of the outage is unclear. There was a disturbance in the nearest power cell. The droids are currently running diagnostics on the grid, but this can’t be a coincidence, right?”

  Marcellus watched as his grandfather calmly and thoughtfully approached the center monitor, which was still displaying the looped footage from the morgue. He stood before it, hands clasped behind his back, and stared deeply into the screen, as though he were trying to look through the Vangarde’s hack and see what was really happening on that moon. The light from the monitor’s screen lit up the harsh lines and crevices of the general’s face, making him suddenly look ten years older than he was, and ten years more hardened.

  “Where is the morgue?” the general finally asked, turning toward the warden.

  Gallant’s eyes went wide as everything seemed to clatter into place in his mind. “It’s on the top floor of the Trésor tower, sir.”

  The general was back on his TéléCom in a flash, whisking his fingertip across the screen. The satellite imagery on the monitor blurred and fuzzed in response. Then, a moment later, the view came to a juddering stop and the general zoomed in as far as the distant cam would allow.