Between Burning Worlds

by Jessica Brody

  Finally, she gave her very official-sounding diagnosis.

  “You suffocated it, Chatine.”

  “Suffo-what?” Chatine had never heard this word before.

  “This box has no holes for air. It couldn’t breathe.”

  Chatine felt frustration well up inside her. And suddenly she was the one who couldn’t breathe. “But I only put it in the box so it wouldn’t run away and get killed out there. By Papa or a cat or the cold.”

  Azelle shrugged and handed the mouse coffin back to Chatine. “Looks like it was dead either way, then.”

  * * *

  Chatine stared at the fresh bandages on her left leg. In the past two days, they were the only things that had changed in this room. Everything else had remained exactly the same. The yellow lights cupped in the ceiling, the shelves of neatly stacked medical supplies, the untouched tray full of food sitting on a table next to her cot. And the numbness. The heavy, mind-crushing numbness that hung in the air like the stink of the Frets. It clung to everything. It slowed everything. Until it felt like the space between breaths lasted an entire day, and the lull between heartbeats, a lifetime.

  It was better this way, though. She preferred the numbness. A mind full of fog was easier than a mind razor-sharp with thoughts. With memories. With regrets.

  And Chatine had so many of those.

  “Azelle?” she whispered into the empty room. “Are you there?”

  But as predicted, she got no response. Azelle hadn’t spoken to her since she’d left Bastille, confirming that Chatine was alone again.

  She wanted to hope. Truly, she did. She wanted to believe that Henri wasn’t dead. That the Sols weren’t cruel enough to bring him back to her only to take him away again. But she knew hope was a dangerous game to play. To Chatine, hope was like that wounded mouse in a box. Whether you tried to hold onto it—to protect it from all the dangers of the world—or you let it go, it didn’t matter.

  It died either way.

  “Will you try to eat something for me today?” The door to the treatment center creaked open and Brigitte appeared, carrying a fresh tray of food. Through Chatine’s fog-filled vision, she could make out dried fruit and a boiled egg. She expected her stomach to rumble, to remind her that she’d barely eaten anything since her last meager ration on Bastille. But even her stomach seemed to have given up.

  Brigitte sighed and placed the tray down next to the other one. “Okay. How about a trip then?”

  Mildly interested, Chatine swiveled her gaze to the woman. “What kind of trip?”

  Brigitte smiled. “Just a chance to see more than the walls of this chalet.”

  Chatine lazily looked back at the wall. “I’m fine here,” she muttered, even though it was a lie. She wasn’t fine here. She wasn’t fine anywhere.

  Absentmindedly, she rubbed her forefinger over her thumb, searching for Marcellus’s ring, only to remember that it had disappeared when she’d first arrived at the camp. Chatine had convinced herself that the Défecteurs had stolen it, even though Brigitte had sworn she hadn’t seen it when she’d operated on Chatine. Now the absence of that ring—the notion that she might have lost it after keeping it safe for all those days and nights on Bastille—carved a hole inside of her as big as a Sol.

  “I want to show you something,” Brigitte said.

  “What is it?”

  “Ah, you see, that’s the catch. You won’t know until you agree to come with me.”

  “I can’t walk,” Chatine reminded her. “You’re the médecin. I shouldn’t have to tell you that.”

  Brigitte smiled, seemingly unfazed by Chatine’s sourness. “I’m not a médecin.”

  “Sorry,” Chatine muttered. “Healer. Whatever.”

  “I haven’t been a médecin for”—she sighed—“wow … years. But I never got to work with people, like I always wanted. The Ministère assigned me to the medical research field.”

  Chatine cut her eyes back to Brigitte. Silently, in response, Brigitte pointed to the deep grooves carved into the side of her face. They weren’t angry today. They were just there.

  Realization slammed into Chatine, momentarily stealing the breath from her lungs. “Wait, you were a—”

  “Cyborg? Yes.”

  For a blissful second, Chatine’s mind emptied of everything else except those strange, miraculous scars. She didn’t know a cyborg could have their circuitry removed. And then what? They were just normal people again? The only cyborgs she’d ever known were cruel and cold and heartless. As though the circuitry had been implanted as a blocker to their emotions. Because, as Chatine well knew, emotions only impeded your ability to do your job well.

  A thousand questions flooded her mind, and they all seemed to be forcing their way out of her mouth at once. “What … How … Do …” She took a deep breath and plucked the simplest one from the stack. “Why?”

  Brigitte chuckled. “Have you ever met a cyborg?”

  The faintest ghost of a smile passed over Chatine’s face, only to vanish a second later.

  “I was recruited into the Cyborg Initiation Program when I turned eighteen. I quickly climbed the ranks and eventually became a very prominent and well-respected research médecin.”

  “And then you just left?” she asked, gesturing around the chalet. “For this?”

  Brigitte’s eyes twinkled. “I’ll tell you what. I will answer all of your questions… if you agree to leave this chalet with me.”

  Chatine considered. Her curiosity was strong, and she soon realized her desire to get out of this room was equally strong. She glanced down at her bandaged leg and was about to remind Brigitte once again that she was in no condition to walk when Brigitte made her way to a cabinet on the far side of the room, opened the door, and removed a pair of metal crutches. “These will help you get around the camp.”

  Chatine eyed them with skepticism. She’d seen maimed Third Estaters hobbling around the Frets on crutches before, but she’d never actually used any herself. For their simplistic construction, they looked oddly complicated.

  “Don’t worry,” Brigitte assured her, clearly interpreting her hesitation. “You’ll get the hang of them quickly. I’m sure you’re looking forward to being mobile again.”

  Mobile.

  It was the magic word. Chatine had never felt so trapped in her life. And she had been to prison. She continued to eye the crutches still in Brigitte’s hands, her Fret-rat determination returning like a punch of cold air. If she could scale walls and dangle from rafters, she could certainly manage a pair of Défecteur crutches.

  With Brigitte’s help, she pushed herself up to sitting and swung her legs off the bed. Her bandaged leg pulsed in response, but the pain was minimal.

  “Put this on.” Brigitte pulled an odd piece of clothing from the closet where she’d retrieved the crutches. “It will keep you warm outside.”

  Chatine stared warily at the strange garment. It looked like a coat, but it was unlike any coat she’d ever seen before. It was patched together, like the pants she used to wear back in the Frets. But these patches were thick and tough and so shiny they seemed to reflect everything in the room like a jumble of undulating mirrors. And unlike her old threadbare clothes, the moment this jacket was on and the hood was pulled up, Chatine felt nothing but rich, glowing warmth.

  “These, too,” Brigitte said, holding out a pair of mittens made of the same material.

  “Does all this really keep you warm out there?” Chatine asked, still skeptical but slipping on the mittens anyway. She’d known cold in Vallonay and on Bastille. But she knew it was nothing compared to the cruel, biting winds that swept through the Terrain Perdu.

  Brigitte extended the pair of crutches toward Chatine with a smile. “I guess there’s only one way to find out.”

  * * *

  The jacket was magic. Ridiculously puffy but impossibly warm. As Chatine hobbled on her crutches through the intricate grid of box-shaped structures and roofed walkways that made up the Défe
cteur camp, she felt none of the chill of being outside. Brigitte walked slowly beside her, pointing out the various buildings—which the Défecteurs called “chalets.”

  “Every roof in our camp is built with stealth technology,” Brigitte explained as they continued down the walkway. “Just like our ships. This allows us to stay hidden from any passing crafts.”

  Chatine stared in awe at the structure above her head. If she hadn’t seen it with her very own eyes, she wouldn’t have believed that the roof of the passageway was invisible from above.

  “How did you figure out how to do that?” she asked.

  “The technology is actually not complicated. The Ministère has had the resources to develop it for more than five hundred years.”

  Chatine’s brow furrowed as she continued to maneuver down the walkway on her crutches. They were nearing a cluster of chalets that was much larger than the others in the camp. “The Ministère has stealth tech?”

  “No.” Brigitte shook her head. “That’s the thing. They’ve been so focused on using those resources for another purpose, they failed to recognize what they had.”

  “What resources?”

  Brigitte nodded ahead of them, and when Chatine looked up, her crutches nearly slipped out from under her. She froze, staring in awe at the large structure. Along the chalet’s frontside, there was a long row of slitted windows through which glowed a shimmering, iridescent blue.

  “Zyttrium,” Chatine murmured numbly.

  She suddenly remembered the transparent boxes in the cargo hold of Etienne’s ship. Processed zyttrium stolen from Bastille. Evidently, it hadn’t been the first batch.

  “As you probably already know, the Regime uses the metal to manufacture the Skins. We found another purpose for it.”

  Chatine gaped. “So you steal it from them?”

  Brigitte let out a tinkling laugh. “One could argue that they steal it from Bastille. And that they steal the thousands of lives lost in mining it.”

  “Oh, I’m not judging you,” Chatine was quick to say. She was the last person on the planet to condemn a thief. “I’m just … impressed.”

  “Well, merci.” Brigitte continued down the walkway. Chatine hobbled beside her, unable to take her eyes off the blue light radiating from the windows. “Stealth technology is crucial to our way of life. As you probably know, we have a long history of … well, I guess you could call it ‘conflict’ with the Regime.”

  Chatine did know. For years, General Bonnefaçon and his minions at the Ministère had been rounding up Défecteurs all over the planet. Those who resisted the raids were either killed or sent to Bastille, while those who cooperated were Skinned and assimilated into society.

  And others, it would seem, had somehow managed to escape. To live here.

  “We are the last of the communities,” Brigitte continued. “After the most recent roundups, there were so few of us left, we decided to join together and create this camp. It was a challenging adjustment. Not all the communities operated the same way. We’ve had to make many compromises, but all in all it seems to work.”

  Brigitte paused to point to a chalet to their left. “This is the lodge. When you feel well enough, you can join us there for meals, if you’d like.”

  Chatine peered through the window at a room filled with large, round tables and a kitchen at the far end. It was evidently mealtime right now, because each table was crammed full of people. Everyone talked and laughed as they ate from plates bursting with food. And at one of the tables, she spotted Etienne. He was seated between two younger girls. Both looked no older than seven. He was pretending not to notice while they each snuck pieces of meat from his plate. Then he glanced down and acted astonished to find the food gone. The girls giggled in delight at the charade.

  Chatine felt something harden inside of her, and she tore her gaze away.

  “Is this the trip?” she asked sharply. “Did you trick me into going on a tour of your camp so you could give me a Défecteur history lesson?” Chatine immediately felt guilty for the edge in her voice. Brigitte had been nothing but kind to her since she’d arrived. And she was, admittedly, somewhat interested in what Brigitte was saying. Chatine had always considered the Défecteurs to be backward and ignorant. But walking around this camp, she could see they were just the opposite.

  Despite Chatine’s venom, Brigitte still offered her a smile. “Maybe,” she admitted. “But what I really wanted to show you is up here.”

  Balancing on her crutches, Chatine followed after her, surprised when the woman reached the end of the covered walkway and kept going, straight out from under the protective shields of the roofs and into the wild, frozen tundra of the Terrain Perdu. Chatine could see nothing in front of her for kilomètres except the ice, the frozen grass, a few scraggly bushes, and rocks that made up this endless landscape. With no roofs or chalets out here, the wind was brutal and relentless. It stung Chatine’s cheeks and eyes, but the giant padded coat Brigitte had given her miraculously still kept out most of the cold.

  “This is what you wanted to show me?” Chatine asked, confused. “The Terrain Perdu?”

  “It’s beautiful isn’t it?”

  Chatine shot Brigitte a strange look. Was the woman on goldenroot? “Sure, yeah. It’s also very cold. So …” She dug her crutches into the ground and started to turn back toward the camp, but her foot snagged over something, drawing her attention to the pile of rocks she’d nearly tripped over.

  She silently cursed the stones and prepared to maneuver around them when she noticed the rocks weren’t arranged in a pile, as they’d first appeared. They were arranged in a shape.

  Chatine tilted her head to the side to get a better look.

  Is that a …

  “It’s a star,” Brigitte said, evidently reading her mind. She did that far too often for Chatine’s liking. “It represents hope.” Brigitte pointed to another cluster of stones a few mètres away. “And that one is a circle, which to us represents the interconnectedness of all things.”

  Chatine glanced around her, suddenly seeing the landscape with new eyes and new wonderment. There were hundreds of them. Tiny clusters of stones arranged in so many different shapes. Squares, triangles, crosses, parallel lines, and several more that Chatine couldn’t even begin to identify.

  “What are they?” she asked, jutting her chin toward the mètres and mètres of stone patterns that surrounded them.

  “They’re memories.”

  “Memories?” Chatine was certain she’d misheard.

  “Of those we’ve lost.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Brigitte walked over to one of the clusters. It was a simple design. Just eight tiny pebbles in the shape of an arrow. She knelt down reverently in front of it. “We bury our dead.”

  Horrified, Chatine tried to leap back, but the crutches made it impossible. Instead she found herself hobbling away from the stone cluster by her feet. But another cluster was only a few paces behind her. She yelped and tried to escape that one as well. But it was no use. The patterns were everywhere. She was surrounded.

  “So … ,” she stammered. “So these are all … There are cavs under the ground?”

  Brigitte looked somewhat amused by Chatine’s reaction. “Are you afraid of the dead?”

  “No,” Chatine asserted. But they both knew it was a lie. She was terrified of the dead. She’d spent far too much time sneaking around Third Estate morgues. She’d seen enough cavs to last a lifetime.

  “The dead can’t hurt you.”

  “I’m not sure that’s true,” Chatine muttered under her breath. The dead most definitely could hurt you. They could hurt you a lot.

  Brigitte stared at her for so long, Chatine began to squirm.

  “These stones don’t mark actual graves,” the woman went on. “At least not all of them. During the roundups, we were forced to leave many of our graveyards behind. We placed these stones as a reminder of those we lost.” Brigitte ran her fingertip across
a stone by her feet, and for a moment Chatine could swear she saw something that looked like longing cross Brigitte’s face.

  The wind swept over the great, barren landscape and bit at Chatine’s ears and the tip of her nose. She shivered and stared down at the pattern next to Brigitte. “Whose memory is that?” she asked, although her voice was so small, she was surprised that Brigitte even heard her over all that wind.

  “Etienne’s father.” She didn’t look up as she spoke. “He died in the last roundup.”

  Chatine’s stomach turned. “I’m … ,” she started to speak, but she quickly realized she didn’t know what to say. The polite way to finish that sentence was to say “I’m sorry.” But sorry wasn’t enough. If anyone understood that, it was her.

  Sorry wasn’t enough for Azelle.

  It wasn’t enough for Henri, the first time he left her.

  And now—if, Sols forbid, he was gone again—she knew, with the certainty of the clouds in the Laterrian sky, that it would never, ever be enough.

  Chatine swallowed, finding her voice again. It was no longer small and uncertain. It was strong and tempestuous. “I don’t get it. Why aren’t you angrier? Why didn’t you fight back against the Ministère? They took your people. They killed your people. Why do you act like it’s all some magical gift from the Sols?”

  “I was angry,” Brigitte admitted. “Very angry. At first. But I—like the rest of our community—chose to confront the anger instead of the Ministère.”

  Chatine scowled at her. “What?”

  “Life is full of monsters, Chatine. We can’t fight them all. We have to choose. Some monsters are not worth confronting. Some we are better off stepping away from. We choose to step away from the Ministère. From the Regime. By not engaging in their battles and their politics and their wars, by not participating, we are making a silent stand against them. Our lives out here,” she gestured to the wild, rugged terrain around her, “away from their power cells and technology and food source and rules, is an opposition in and of itself. So you see, sometimes not fighting is fighting. Do you understand?”