Between Burning Worlds

by Jessica Brody

  “Because,” Alouette said, her voice soft and pensive, “the System Alliance will never support his claim to the Regime if it looks like a military coup.”

  “She’s right,” Marcellus said, a shiver of comprehension passing through him. “The System Alliance is funded and run by the twelve heads of state of the System Divine. If they get wind of a possible plot to overthrow one of them, there will be resistance and most likely war.”

  “But,” Alouette went on, “if he mimics what happened on Usonia and makes it look like a revolution, like this is the people’s doing—”

  “—and he’s the hero who steps in to restore order …” Marcellus added.

  “Then the Alliance has no choice but to support him and back his claim to the Regime,” Alouette finished with a nod.

  “But first he needs to make it look like a people’s revolution,” said Marcellus gravely. “Once the Patriarche is gone, nothing will stand in his way.”

  A tense, grim silence fell across the little Med Center. For a moment, no one spoke. No one even dared to breathe as this heavy, noxious cloud descended upon them. Upon their home planet.

  Laterre had known clouds.

  It had known storms.

  But never one like this.

  Marcellus now understood it all. The real reason the general had to kill the Premier Enfant, the last remaining Paresse heir, was not to start a riot. That was just a convenient side effect. It was so that he could finally inherit the keys to the Regime. The Regime he believed he deserved all along.

  Check mate.

  No. It couldn’t be. This could not be the end. There had to be another way.

  Marcellus could suddenly hear his grandfather’s voice in his mind. As clear as if they were still sitting in front of that Regiment’s board, a carnage of fallen pieces scattered across the table.

  “Sooner or later, Marcellus, you’re going to have to start playing the game like someone who actually wants to win.”

  “We have to do something.” Cerise was back on her feet, pacing again. “We have to stop him.”

  “How?” Chatine asked.

  Cerise threw up her hands. “I don’t know! But if there’s a kill switch out there, then now is the time to find it.”

  “What’s a kill switch?” Chatine glanced curiously at Cerise.

  Marcellus groaned and was about to respond that they were wasting their time talking about fantasy solutions instead of trying to find a real solution, but Cerise spoke first. “Many people believe,” she shot a look at Marcellus, “that the Skins were originally designed with a switch that can disable them.”

  “All of them?” Chatine sounded dubious. “At once?”

  “It’s not unheard of,” Cerise said defensively. “Any good hacker or technicien knows that you should always build a kill switch into any large-scale system in case something goes wrong and you need to shut it down. If we can find this switch, we can disable the Skins. All of them. And stop the general from using the Third Estate as a weapon.”

  Chatine snapped her gaze to Marcellus, a hopeful twinkle in her eye. “Have you heard of this?”

  Marcellus sighed. “It’s just a conspiracy theory! Wishful thinking. There is no kill switch. It doesn’t exist.”

  “Actually, it does.”

  Everyone turned to see who had spoken, and Marcellus’s gaze landed on Brigitte. It was only now that Marcellus realized the two Défecteurs in the room—Etienne and his mother—hadn’t uttered a single word since the Universal Alert had begun. Etienne still bore a displeased expression, and the médecin was just standing there, watching them all with relaxed interest.

  “She’s right,” Brigitte went on. “There is a kill switch. It was built when the original engineers designed the TéléSkins. As a precaution.”

  Marcellus scoffed. Of all the people to believe in ridiculous Laterrian conspiracies, a former cyborg living in a Défecteur camp would be the last person Marcellus would suspect.

  “Do you know where it is?” Cerise asked eagerly.

  Brigitte gave a single, tight nod.

  Cerise’s eyes widened. “You have to tell us! You heard the Patriarche! You know what the general is planning. We have to stop him. You have to help us.”

  A shadow of regret seemed to pass over the woman’s scarred features. “It’s no use. Even if I told you where it was, there’s no way you could ever get access to it.”

  “Oh, I’ll get access,” Cerise said confidently.

  Brigitte shook her head and let out a sigh. “No, you won’t.”

  “How do you know?” Cerise sounded mildly offended. “I happen to be an expert hacker.”

  “Because the kill switch is guarded by a very special technology. A unique DNA lock. To be opened only by someone who possesses a direct ancestral link to the Paresse line. It’s completely unhackable.”

  Marcellus could feel the room turn very cold. Colder, dare he say, than even the Terrain Perdu outside. “What are you talking about?”

  Brigitte turned to him. “I’m talking about a vault so secure that only the Patriarche or his descendants can ever get inside.”

  Marcellus squeezed his temples. This couldn’t be real. This woman was delusional. Insane. If there was a kill switch for the Skins, wouldn’t he have been told about it?

  “Maman?” a voice broke into Marcellus’s thoughts. It was Etienne. He was staring incredulously at Brigitte, speaking for the first time in what felt like hours. “How do you know all of this? How do you know about this DNA lock?”

  Brigitte flashed a weak smile that caused her scars—the ghosts of her vanquished circuitries—to glint and stretch. “Because, chéri, I invented it.”

  - CHAPTER 61 - CHATINE

  CHATINE WAS AWARE OF THE muffled voices around her, but for a full minute, all she could hear was the sound of her own heavy, uneven breaths. And the hazy echoes of her disbelief hanging in the air.

  A switch that disables the Skins?

  An Ascension banquet for fifty winners?

  A weapon that will give the general command of the entire Third Estate?

  She glanced down again at the inside of her left arm, at the long, rectangular scar where her Skin used to be. Where this weapon would have been if Brigitte hadn’t removed it. And now she understood why the Défecteurs didn’t trust any of the Ministère technology, especially not the Skins.

  “I knew it! I knew it was real!” a screeching voice yanked Chatine out of her reverie and back into the treatment center. She turned to see who had spoken. It was the girl Marcellus had introduced earlier as Cerise.

  “I don’t understand.” Marcellus was holding his head in his hands like he was afraid his brain might explode. “There’s a kill switch for the Skins hidden behind a DNA-locked vault?”

  “Yes,” said Brigitte, and Chatine swung her gaze back to Etienne’s mother. “It’s called the Forteresse. It was the last project I worked on before I left the Ministère.”

  “That was the special assignment you refuse to talk about?” Etienne sounded stunned and almost disgusted. “You built a lock that protects the Skins?”

  Brigitte lowered her eyes. “I’m not proud of it. That’s why I left. And I vowed to spend the rest of my life removing as many of those evil devices as I could.”

  “So, this Forteresse,” Cerise said, sounding somewhat hopeful. “If you built it, then you must know how to break into it. A backdoor? A loophole? If we can access it, we can shut down the Skins before the general can—”

  Brigitte shook her head. “There is no backdoor. There is no loophole.”

  Cerise frowned. “But every good hacker puts in a backdoor.”

  “Not cyborgs,” Brigitte said solemnly. “It goes against their programming. By the time we realized what we’d done, it was too late. The Forteresse—and the kill switch for the Skins—was locked to anyone who wasn’t a Paresse descendant. Even us.”

  “Us?” Cerise repeated. “You were working with someone?”

 
Brigitte nodded. “There were two of us on the project. We left together. Her name was—”

  “Vanessa,” Alouette said quietly, and Chatine could swear she saw the girl shiver.

  Brigitte’s eyebrows shot up. “How did you know?”

  “She goes by Denise now.” Alouette kneaded her hands in her lap. “She … She was one of the women who raised me.”

  “You were raised by the Sisterhood?” Brigitte asked.

  “How do you know about the Sisterhood?” Marcellus shot back.

  “I told you.” Brigitte flashed him a smile. “We have some of the same friends.”

  “Yes. They raised me.” Alouette nodded, but in her eyes, Chatine saw a hint of grief.

  “Vanessa—or Denise as you call her—was a dear friend,” Brigitte explained. “We were placed on the Forteresse assignment together because of our mutual expertise in the field of genetics. Patriarche Claude wanted to safeguard the Skins and his family’s sovereignty over the Third Estate. The Rebellion of 488 was still three years away, but unrest was already rumbling. The kill switch was originally located in a bunker inside the Grand Palais, but Claude didn’t think that was safe enough. He worried about the Palais being stormed and the bunker raided. He wanted to make sure that, even in the face of a rebellion, no one could shut down the Skins. Because he knew, as I’m sure you do, that the Skins are the only way to keep the Third Estate controlled.”

  Chatine scoffed, feeling a familiar hatred for the First Estate roll through her. Arrogant pomps.

  “So,” Brigitte went on, “Vanessa and I built the Forteresse to protect the kill switch. And Patriarche Claude had a special tower erected to house it.”

  “The Paresse Tower?” Cerise asked in astonishment.

  Brigitte nodded. “It was a clever decision on Claude’s part: to hide the kill switch in plain sight but protect it by the most advanced lock on the planet. Most people think the tower is just decorative. A symbol of the Regime. But there’s a small chamber at the top that only a few people know about.”

  “Who?” Cerise insisted. “Who else knows about it?”

  Brigitte let out an unsteady breath. Chatine could tell that recounting this story was making her anxious, dredging up old regrets. “The current Patriarche, of course. General Bonnefaçon, who was there when the project was initiated. Vanessa—or Denise. Me. And now the people in this room.”

  “The general knows,” Cerise repeated numbly, casting a glance at Marcellus, but he appeared to be lost in thought.

  “How does a lock like that even work?” Alouette asked.

  Brigitte wrung her hands together. “Well, as a cyborg, Vanessa had been a frontrunner in the field of gene editing—the process of modifying targeted strands of the human genome. It would have been easy to build a lock that opens to anyone with Paresse DNA, but the Patriarche didn’t want that. Most members of the First Estate have at least some Paresse DNA, and he didn’t want a disgruntled cousin or uncle shutting off the Skins. He wanted this lock to only open for his direct descendants. He also wanted to make sure that someone couldn’t just snatch a strand of hair from his head and use it to unlock the Forteresse and gain access to the kill switch. So Vanessa figured out a way to edit the Patriarche’s genetic code and create a modified gene. We called it the Sovereign gene.”

  Brigitte seemed to shudder at the name. “This modified gene can only be found in certain cells of the brain, and the modification is only triggered once a Paresse heir has come of age. If she’d lived, little Marie Paresse would have eventually had the ability to open the Forteresse.” Brigitte paused, as though taking a moment of silence to mourn the lost child. “Once the creation of the Sovereign gene was complete, the DNA of Claude’s young son, Lyon, was also edited. And I started work on the lock itself. I was able to develop a technology that can not only read the modified Sovereign gene in the brain and confirm its validity, but also eliminate any chance of sabotage. The lock on the Forteresse, for example, can’t be accessed if more than one person is present, eliminating the chance of the Patriarche being coerced into opening it. The person accessing the lock must also be alive and not under duress.” She sighed and looked to Cerise with apologetic eyes. “In other words, we did our job too well.”

  “So it’s hopeless, then.” Cerise collapsed back down onto the cot, a darkness seeming to descend over her. “The kill switch exists, but we can’t get to it. And now we just have to sit idly by and watch the general take control of the planet.”

  “We don’t need the kill switch,” Marcellus said quietly. He was leaning against the wall with his arms crossed over his chest. It was the first time he’d spoken in several minutes.

  Cerise peered at him. “What do you mean?”

  Marcellus stood up straighter, as though waking from a dream. “Think about it,” he said, his gaze fierce and determined. “For the very first time in …well, forever, we’re not three moves behind him.”

  “What?” Chatine asked.

  “Don’t you see?” Marcellus’s face was flushed with adrenaline. “We know exactly what the general is going to do next. We know he plans to use the Ascension banquet to bring two hundred Third Estaters into Ledôme to kill the Patriarche. And now that we know his strategy, we can stop him. We can defeat him.”

  Chatine and Cerise exchanged a wary look. But Alouette somehow seemed to be following what Marcellus was saying. She was gazing up at him, her own eyes alight with something that looked like pride.

  “How?” Chatine asked, still trying to keep up.

  “My grandfather always says that the only way to win is to analyze your opponent and plan your attack accordingly.”

  “But couldn’t we just, I don’t know, warn the Patriarche?” Chatine asked. “If he knew what the general was planning, he’d probably cancel the banquet and have the general arrested.”

  “It won’t work,” said Marcellus. “We’d never be able to get close enough to the Patriarche in time to warn him, and the general has installed guardian controls on the Patriarche’s TéléCom, making it impossible to send him an AirLink without the general knowing about it. Which means we have to stop him another way.”

  Marcellus turned to Chatine, his eyes as grave and unwavering as his voice. And in that moment, she suddenly understood. This tall, determined man standing before her was not the same Marcellus Bonnefaçon she’d met less than a month ago in the Vallonay Med Center morgue. That shiny-haired, goofy-smiled, inept young officer was gone. And in his place, Chatine saw what she knew his grandfather had always hoped to see.

  His protégé.

  A little sliver of General Bonnefaçon.

  Chatine felt a shiver ripple through her. “So,” she began warily, “does that mean you have a plan?”

  - PART 6 - THE PATRIARCHE

  High over the boulevards, the ornate gardens, the gushing fountains, and the bustling boutiques, the Paresse Tower soared above all else. A beautiful curving crescendo of crisscrossing metal, which dazzled in the artificial Sol-light of Ledôme. It honored the ruling family with its name, and under its twinkling antenna, their supremacy was safeguarded. Protected, locked up, and secured for generations to come.

  A vault in the skies.

  That only a bird could reach.

  —From The Chronicles of the Vangarde, Volume 13, Chapter 2

  - CHAPTER 62 - CHATINE

  A SHARP WIND WHIPPED OFF the icy land, causing Chatine to yank the hood of her puffy coat tighter under her chin. The Sols had risen just a few minutes ago, lighting up the blanket of clouds above and the frigid ground below. Idling nearby was Etienne’s ship, which had delivered them all the way out here, far from the camp and its hidden location. Out in the distance, somewhere beyond all this frozen nothingness, was Vallonay. Beckoning them. Waiting for them. And behind, past kilomètres of craggy rocks and sweeping bluffs, was the community that had welcomed Chatine with open arms. She didn’t dare look over her shoulder. If she looked back, toward the memory of their chalets, and walk
ways, and the warm glowing lights of the lodge, she might lose her nerve. She might never leave.

  Two worlds. One in front of her. One behind her. Both somehow hers and somehow not.

  “He’s nearly here,” Cerise said. Chatine looked over to see the Second Estate girl jabbing at a TéléCom with gloved fingers. Beside her stood Marcellus and Alouette, both bundled in thick, glimmering jackets. And nearby, huddled by themselves next to the ship, were Etienne and Brigitte.

  “Do you really think this plan is going to work?”

  Chatine recognized Alouette’s voice, but it took a moment for her to realize she was talking to her. She glanced over to see Alouette shivering slightly in the coat she’d borrowed from Brigitte. Her hands were wrapped around a silver canister, which Chatine had been told held the last remaining vial of this miraculous inhibitor that was supposed to somehow neutralize the general’s weapon.

  Chatine took a deep breath, pondering the question. Do I really think this plan is going to work? She stole a glance over at Marcellus. There was an intense flicker in his hazel eyes as he stared out at the frozen wilderness, pensive yet determined, brave yet terrified.

  “I think … ,” she began haltingly, “I think it has to work.”

  “There he is!” Cerise called out as a sudden gust of frigid morning wind kicked up and the purr of an engine pulled Chatine out of her thoughts. She looked up to see a cargo transporteur emerging from the frozen mist. The vehicle looked like a giant insect with its sleek black sides shimmering in the early light. It slowed to an idling hover in front of them, and then the massive loading door hissed open in a plume of warm steam and glowing light.

  “Didn’t I just put you on a voyageur?” said a voice from inside.

  Blinking against the brightness, Chatine could just make out a slender-framed man with neatly parted hair who had swiveled around in his seat to grin broadly at Cerise.

  “Grantaire!” Cerise said, looking relieved. “You are seriously the hero of the hour.”