For a long, tense moment, both of them just stared down at it.
Finally, his grandfather spoke. “You need to come with me.”
The room tilted. Marcellus wished he could grab on to something for balance. For a moment, he considered running. He eyed the balcony, trying to gauge how far down it was to the forecourt below. Would he survive the jump?
“Why?” he whispered.
The general released a heavy sigh. “The Patriarche has summoned us to go hunting.”
Hunting?
For a full three seconds, Marcellus was certain he had misunderstood.
“Prepare your status report on the investigation and make yourself presentable.” The general nodded dismissively toward Marcellus’s face and then strode toward the hallway. “And meet me in the foyer in thirty minutes.”
The moment the door slid shut behind the general, Marcellus let out a shuddering breath. The beautiful air flooded back into his lungs. He darted to the bathroom and splashed ice-cold water on his face, trying to bring the sensation back to his skin. Tilting his chin at various angles, he searched for any more traces of mud before drying his face with a towel and turning back toward the door. But something out of the corner of his eye caught his attention and pulled him up short.
He spun around and stared down into the corner of the bathroom. Beside the toilette, a single floor tile glinted in the light. He’d accidentally wrenched it loose when he was a little boy, and it had been his secret hiding place ever since. When he was younger and Mabelle was teaching him the Forgotten Word, he used to hide folded-up pieces of paper in there, lines and lines of practiced letters and shaky misspelled words. Now the small nook under the tile held the microcam he’d found two weeks ago, hidden in the painting in Mabelle’s old room. Proof that his grandfather was guilty in the bombing of that copper exploit seventeen years ago.
His heart started to pound again in his chest as he glared at the tile.
What had his grandfather really been doing in his rooms? Looking for Marcellus, as he’d said? Or looking for something else?
Slowly, tentatively, Marcellus walked over to the toilette, crouched down, and used his fingernails to peel up the loose floor tile. He almost didn’t have to look. He almost knew what he would find before he saw it.
Nothing.
He found nothing.
Because the microcam was gone.
- CHAPTER 3 - CHATINE
CHATINE RENARD HAD KNOWN DARKNESS all her life. From the moment she was born eighteen years ago, it had surrounded her, clinging to her like a cloak. But nothing compared to the darkness that lurked two hundred mètres below the surface of Bastille. This was a darkness like Chatine had never known. It was a living, breathing thing. A murkiness that seeped into her bones and coated her lungs.
This was the kind of darkness that brought the dead back to life.
The droid closed the metal cage with a bang that reverberated down Chatine’s spine. The lift started to descend, slow and painful and creaking, into the ground. With every centimètre they lowered, Chatine’s teeth chattered harder. Not because of the temperature. It was mercifully warmer down here than on the surface of the moon. But if Chatine had learned anything since arriving on Bastille, it was that the cold wasn’t the only thing here that could make you shiver.
The lift wrenched to a stop and the door of the cage creaked open, revealing a warren of gloomy passageways that extended out from the main shaft. Two more bashers stood watch, their bright orange eyes cutting through the darkness. No human guards dared set foot on this wretched moon. The prison was manned entirely by droids while some overpaid warden supervised from his plush, cushy office back in Ledôme.
“Single-file line,” one of them droned. “Look down. No talking. No running.”
Chatine almost snorted aloud at the warning. Running? Seriously? Where would they even run to? The craggy walls and looming ceilings of the exploit tunnels snaked and dipped, burrowed and crisscrossed through the Bastille rock, going nowhere. Always ending in cold, dark nothingness.
And even if it weren’t for the dead-end tunnels, Chatine was barely capable of crawling out of her bunk each morning, let alone running. Her body had never felt so useless and heavy and beaten. Her head was almost always pounding, her mouth was constantly dirt dry, every centimètre of her ached, and no matter how tired she was at the end of her twelve-hour shift down here in the darkness, she could never ever seem to get enough sleep.
The inmates called the condition the “grippe.” Chatine could certainly understand why. It felt like every organ in her body—including her mind—had been placed in a merciless vise. It was the result of the thinner air on Bastille. Chatine had heard that it could take up to six months for your body to adapt to the climate.
She had been here two weeks.
The inmates formed a line and began to shuffle into the tunnel. Beside them, the droids paced, their heavy metal footsteps clanking, the rayonettes embedded in their arms glowing menacingly in the dim light. After grabbing a headlamp and a pick, Chatine followed the procession into the tunnel. With each collective step they took, the walls and ceilings rumbled ominously around them.
Chatine hated the crackles and pops that came from above, rippling through the ground and threatening to bring two hundred mètres of hard rock crashing down on top of her. She’d heard stories of prisoners dying in the zyttrium exploits. They were some of the first stories told to newcomers on Bastille.
She paused, glanced up, and cringed as a scattering of loose dust and debris rained down on her face.
“Prisoner 51562,” one of the droids boomed, “look down and keep walking.”
Chatine lowered her gaze and scuffled forward. They seemed to be walking forever today. Much farther than Chatine had ever ventured into the tunnels. The light from the headlamp clipped onto her helmet was a poor contender for the murky depths of the exploit. And the farther away they got from the main shaft, the darker the tunnel became.
Chatine pushed back the sleeve of her prison uniform and touched the darkened screen just above her wrist. It blinked to life, providing a dim halo of light. The Skins had limited functionality on Bastille. There were no broadcasts, no AirLink messages, no Universal Alerts, no Ascension points or tokens. Up here on the moon, the Skins were only used to track time and people. Including, now, Chatine. All her former Skin hacks had been removed by the droids when she’d first arrived. But Chatine liked to look at her Skin from time to time, if for no other reason than to remind her of why she was really here. Why all of them were here. This small rectangular device that had been implanted in her flesh since childhood was the reason the Regime spent millions of tokens a year running this Sol-forsaken prison.
The Skins were needed to keep the Third Estate in line.
Zyttrium was needed to make the Skins.
And the dusty craters of Bastille held the last known deposits of zyttrium in the entire System Divine.
Chatine spotted the glint of metal up ahead, and the procession finally slowed to a stop. In front of them, the giant machines that dug the tunnels and secured the supports stood motionless, idling like sleeping silver beasts.
“Every inmate is required to excavate one hundred grammes of zyttrium,” the nearest droid announced, causing a stirring among the prisoners.
“One hundred grammes?!” shouted one of the inmates. “That’s double what we had to dig yesterday.”