Sky Without Stars Read online

  She came to another crossroads in the corridors and slowed. She tried to catch her breath as she surveyed her options, squinting into the dim light in each direction, trying to make out something—anything—familiar. But every passageway looked the same. The poorly lit hallways of the Frets were an endless maze, and she was lost. Completely lost.

  The sound of metal pounding against metal grew louder. The droid was getting closer. What would happen if it caught her? What would it do to her? Where would it take her?

  She didn’t want to know.

  She could never know.

  In a split-second decision, Alouette turned left, sprinting down another hopelessly long hallway. She had no idea if she was getting closer to the mechanical room or farther away. But she couldn’t stop. She had to get back to the Refuge.

  Back to safety.

  As she ran, she kept her gaze trained on the ground, trying to find some trace of those droplets of blood. The ones that had first led her to the boy—Marcellus. But only grime and mud coated the floor. She couldn’t make out one single drop.

  For the first time in her life, Alouette wished she still had a Skin to guide her. She’d read in the Chronicles about Skins—or TéléSkins, as they were formally called—and how they could be used to track people and locate destinations. But all she had now was this useless scar.

  “By the order of the Patriarche, you are commanded to halt.” The droid’s voice boomed out again.

  Alouette braved another glance behind her and that’s when she saw it. All of it. Its terrifying silver body seemed to fill the entire hallway. Its head clicked toward her, two menacing orange eyes zeroing in on her. Then, a weapon extended from its arm.

  A rayonette.

  “Sols!” she cried aloud. Her knees buckled and she nearly crashed to the ground. But she managed to fling herself around another corner.

  Up ahead, she noticed an open doorway. She had no other choice. She flew toward it and ducked inside to find a stairwell. She crouched into a dark crevice under the stairs as she tried desperately to remember everything she’d read about droids in the Chronicles. Were they programmed to follow movement or sound? Or both?

  Regardless, she sucked in a breath and held it, keeping her body as still and as quiet as possible. Outside, she could hear the thud and clank of the droid’s footsteps. The floor vibrated as it got closer and closer. She shut her eyes tight.

  And then, suddenly, she was no longer in the stairwell.

  She was somewhere else. Somewhere cold and dark. Somewhere in the deep recesses of her memory.

  And yet she could hear the same terrifying footsteps moving closer. Shaking the ground.

  Something was looming over her head. A tree? No, a rock. It was enormous. Threatening to press down on her. On them.

  She wasn’t alone. Her father was with her. Next to her. They were huddled together on the cold, damp ground. She could just make him out in the gloomy light. He was holding his finger to his lips.

  “Hush, ma petite. Hush.”

  Alouette gasped and opened her eyes. What was that? A memory from before she came to the Refuge? But she knew nothing about before. Everything before was a murky darkness. Her memories stretched back no further than the Refuge and the sisters and her father cooking in the small kitchen.

  But those footsteps. The sound of the clanking droid. It was so familiar.

  “Go! Don’t look back! The bashers are right on us!”

  Alouette startled out of her reverie and listened to the voice coming from outside the stairwell. It wasn’t the robotic monotone of a droid. That was a human voice.

  Alouette steeled herself, crept out from her hiding place, and peered around the doorway just in time to see two men rounding a corner, breathing hard. Their clothes were shabby and their foreheads glistened with sweat.

  What on Laterre?

  Before she even had time to process what was happening, a droid rounded the corner. The same one? Or a second? She couldn’t be sure. They all looked the same. Alouette scrabbled back into the darkness of the stairwell, pressing herself against the wall.

  “By the order of the Patriarche, you are commanded to halt.” The same command reverberated through the hallway. Alouette held her breath again.

  Had it seen her?

  “Halt!” the droid thundered again. “Or I have permission to paralyze you.”

  Then Alouette heard a commotion, a scuffling of feet, someone yelling, followed by two muffled thumps. With her heart still racing, she took a tentative step forward and stole another peek around the doorframe.

  Two droids now stood in the hallway, looming over two crumpled bodies that were lying lifeless on the ground.

  Dead?

  Alouette bit her lip.

  One droid extended a long, bionic arm and picked up one of the men by the back of his neck. The man twitched slightly, and Alouette swallowed with relief. Not dead. But there was definitely something wrong with him. The man hung in the droid’s grasp, his useless legs dangling beneath him. His eyes were open, but they seemed sleepy, confused.

  The droid’s orange gaze flashed across the inside of the man’s arm—right over his Skin. But Alouette was barely paying attention. Because she was momentarily distracted by something on the ground. She had to squint in the low light, but she could definitely make out three tiny droplets of crimson.

  Marcellus’s blood?

  Her gaze darted up and landed on a rusty sign on the opposite wall. The words were scratched and faded with time, but she could just make out the letters spelling out, “Mec anic l R m” with an arrow pointing right.

  Thank the Sols!

  The entrance to the Refuge was only a few mètres away.

  “Clement Dinard,” the droid’s voice announced. “Third Estate. Residence in Fret 10. Prisoner number 48590. Previous incarcerations: two.”

  Prisoner?

  Alouette’s attention was pulled back to the droid in the hallway. She stared at the man dangling from its metal fist with sudden fascination.

  He’d served time. He’d survived the harsh climate of Laterre’s moon . . . twice. She knew from reading the Chronicles that Bastille was a hostile, unforgiving place. Even more so than the Frets.

  The other droid reached for the second man, scanning him in the same way. “Gaspard Nevers. Third Estate. Residence in Fret 17. Previous incarcerations: zero.”

  But Alouette couldn’t stop staring at the first man, still clutched in the grasp of the droid. His ripped shirt sleeve had ridden all the way up, revealing five silver bumps embedded into the flesh of his right arm.

  Alouette felt the air seep out of her lungs.

  As the droids carried the two men away, Alouette stood motionless in the stairwell. She was finally alone. The mechanical room was just a few paces away. And yet she couldn’t bring herself to move. She couldn’t tear her thoughts from what she had just seen.

  She knew those bumps. She’d spent countless nights when she was little tracing them with her small fingers as she fell asleep. She’d memorized every dimple in their surfaces.

  She just never thought she’d see them on another man.

  A man who wasn’t her father.

  - CHAPTER 15 -

  MARCELLUS

  THE GIRL WAS GONE. AS suddenly and ghostlike as she’d appeared. There one minute, tending to the wound on his head and reading messages in the Forgotten Word, and disappeared the next.

  “Search person,” Marcellus instructed his TéléCom.

  He was still sitting in the musty hallway of Fret 7. Water dripped from the ceiling, puddling near his feet, and steam was hissing from a broken pipe nearby.

  The TéléCom beeped, signaling for him to proceed.

  “Alouette,” Marcellus pronounced.

  He just wished he knew her last name. It would make tracking her down so much easier.

  “Searching . . . ,” the friendly voice of the TéléCom replied through his audio patch. Faces began to flash rapidly across the scr
een as the search function cycled through every profile in the Communiqué, the Ministère’s central database. First, Second, and Third Estates. Living and dead.

  Countless eyes, noses, and lips blurred and morphed into one unrecognizable jumble, until finally a handful of images populated on his screen.

  “Forty-two results found,” the TéléCom announced, concluding its search.

  Marcellus quickly scanned the profile images. None of them looked like the girl he had just met. None of them had her wide eyes with that otherworldly gaze.

  He tossed the TéléCom aside.

  Who was this girl? Where did she come from? Why was she not in the Communiqué?

  As Marcellus sat in the now-empty hallway, he could almost believe the whole encounter with Alouette had been a vision, dreamed up inside of his bruised and battered head. But then his gaze fell upon the prisoner shirt in his lap, and he knew it couldn’t have been a dream. The garment was soaked with his blood from when she had dabbed it against his forehead. The crooked letters and words that she had read to him were still stitched into the fabric.

  A message written . . . for him.

  There was no other explanation. His father had somehow learned to write on Bastille, and he had sent him this message. But how did he know that nickname? That was Mabelle’s nickname for Marcellus when he was a child.

  Her special nickname.

  My dear Marcellou . . .

  Mabelle had been Marcellus’s governess for almost his entire childhood. She had come to take care of him when he was six months old, after his mother died and his father was disowned for joining the Vangarde. It was shortly before his father bombed the copper exploit, killing those hundreds of workers. The only good thing to come out of that explosion was that it eventually put an end to the Rebellion of 488. Citizen Rousseau’s followers were finally able to see her precious Vangarde for what it really was: a terrorist organization. Her numbers plummeted, and the Ministère was able to squash the rebellion once and for all.

  Mabelle had raised Marcellus, fed him, taught him to speak, to walk, even to read and write the Forgotten Word.

  Growing up in the Frets, Mabelle had cleverly taught herself the language by piecing together the cryptic symbols on old signs in the hallways and on the rusting freightship machinery.

  Marcellus had loved Mabelle like she was his own mother.

  Until she was discovered to be a spy for the Vangarde.

  Until she was dragged from their wing in the Grand Palais, screaming and begging for Marcellus to stop them.

  Until Marcellus learned she was a traitor. Just like his father.

  The day she was taken away was the day the Forgotten Word became forgotten to Marcellus, too. After she was gone, the words and letters slowly disappeared. There was no one else to practice with. No one to write secret notes to anymore. No one to leave him a trail of written clues where, at the end, he’d find a little prize.

  Now, sitting in the cold, dark hallway of the Frets, holding his father’s shirt, Marcellus ran his fingers over the stitching, remembering what the girl had read.

  My dear Marcellou, Mabelle is in Montfer. Go to her.

  He leaned forward, trying desperately to see what the mysterious girl had seen, to try to make sense of the swirling loops and lines. Some of the letters seemed impossibly unfamiliar to him. Unreachable memories tucked into the corners of his mind. And yet, surprisingly, some of the letters came back to him easily. The crescent-moon curve of the C, the deep valley of the U, the mountainous peaks of the M.

  “M is for Marcellus . . . and mountain. See how it looks like the top of a mountain?”

  Marcellus felt his weak hands tighten around the shirt. He’d tried so hard to forget—so hard to erase her from his mind—and yet the memories kept creeping back in, like shadows that never fully went away, even when the lights were turned on.

  The girl must have been wrong. There was no other explanation. She’d misread the message. She’d mistaken the letters. Mabelle wasn’t in Montfer. She was on Bastille. He couldn’t go to her. No humans went to the moon unless they were convicted. The prison was run by droids and supervised by Warden Gallant from a safe office in Ledôme.

  The whole thing had been one giant misunderstanding.

  And Marcellus would prove it to himself.

  Still shaky, he pulled the TéléCom back onto his lap. “New search,” he instructed the device, and after another soft beep, he pronounced the name he never thought he would ever say aloud again, “Mabelle Dubois.”

  “Searching . . . ,” the TéléCom repeated, and once again, countless faces spun across his screen.

  Finally, the wheel slowed as, this time, the Communiqué came up with an exact match. The image of his governess filled the screen. The picture had obviously been taken in her younger days because she looked exactly as he remembered her. Smooth skin. Long neck. Soft brown waves framing her face. Marcellus had to look away, unable to peer into her soulful eyes, even through the thin plastique of the TéléCom.

  “Mabelle Dubois,” the TéléCom recited the highlights of the profile. “Third Estate. Former employee of General Bonnefaçon. Convicted of treason against the Laterrian Regime in 498 ALD. Prisoner number 47161. Current location unknown.”

  The breath caught in Marcellus’s throat, making him feel as though he were being strangled.

  Current location unknown? How could that be? She had been given a prisoner number. Marcellus himself had seen her being arrested by the droids.

  “Marcellou! Help! Please! You must stop them!”

  “More information,” Marcellus commanded the TéléCom. “Filter: postarrest.”

  “Mabelle Dubois,” the TéléCom continued, “served seven years on Bastille before escaping in the sixth month of 505 ALD.”

  Escaped? In the sixth month of 505? That was just last month. Why was Marcellus never told? He didn’t even know anyone could escape from Bastille.

  The sound of approaching footsteps crashed into Marcellus’s thoughts. He blinked and glanced down the hallway, squinting into the low light to try to make out who was coming.

  Droids? Inspecteur Limier?

  Then he remembered what was lying on his lap.

  The shirt.

  The message.

  From a traitor.

  About a traitor.

  Marcellus scrambled to bunch up the fabric and stuff it back down the front of his uniform. He forced himself to stand up again—to act like a commandeur and not a weak little boy—but as soon as he was on his feet, his forehead throbbed and the blackness started to curtain his vision again. His knees buckled, and he reached for the wall to steady himself.

  A moment later, a figure rounded the corner. Marcellus let out a sigh, relieved to see it was not Inspecteur Limier but rather a young boy in an oversized black coat and pants. His clothes were so old they were held together with strange clips and wires.

  “It’s you,” Marcellus said, recognizing the boy he’d met in the morgue earlier.

  The boy rushed forward, and Marcellus’s hand went instinctively to the shirt stuffed inside his jacket. The boy ducked under Marcellus’s arm, taking some of the weight off Marcellus’s feet.

  “Easy there, Officer,” the boy said with that same mocking tone Marcellus remembered from the morgue. “I don’t think you should be standing. We wouldn’t want you to mess up that glossy hair of yours.” He snorted. “Although it looks like that bateau has already sailed on your fancy coat.”

  Marcellus glanced down, just now noticing how dirty his silver raincoat was.

  When he looked up again, he saw the smirk on the boy’s face.

  “I was—” Marcellus started to defend himself. “There was a riot. Someone threw something at my head.”

  “Awww,” the boy cooed as he helped Marcellus back down to the ground. “Poor bébé. Was it something really hard? Like a loaf of bread?”

  Marcellus huffed and tried to think of something to say in response, but the lack of
blood to his brain was making all words difficult. Instead, he felt his eyes start to close again. He was so sleepy.

  “Hey!” The boy was shaking him. “You can’t go to sleep right now. It’s not safe.”

  “Because you’ll rob me?” Marcellus asked, his words slurring slightly.

  The boy laughed. “Well, that too. But mostly because—”

  Flash!

  The boy’s words were cut off as a troop of four Policier droids clanked around the corner. The bright orange light from their robotic eyes momentarily blinded Marcellus.

  Panic flashed across the boy’s dirty face. He scrambled to his feet and tried to take off at a run, but it was no use. The droids immediately surrounded him. The boy fought, shoving himself hard against the droids’ PermaSteel bodies, but he may as well have been ramming himself against a wall for how much good it did.

  “Ah, Théo Renard,” came a chilling voice. Marcellus glanced up to see Inspecteur Limier approaching them. “Just the boy I’ve been sent to find. How nice of you to make my job easier for me.”

  “Théo,” Marcellus repeated the name, silently remarking that it somehow didn’t seem to fit the boy.

  From beneath his low-hanging dark hood, the boy’s clear gray eyes cut to Marcellus, a look of betrayal flashing on his face. “Did you do this?” he cried. “Did you send for them?”

  “W-w-what?” Marcellus stammered, trying to make sense of the accusation. But before he could negate it, or even think how to intervene, a paralyzeur pulse shot out of one of the droids’ rayonettes, rippling through the air and finding its target in the boy’s left leg. As the boy—Théo—collapsed to the ground in pain, he caught Marcellus’s eye once again, and this time, there was nothing but fury in the boy’s eyes. The look hit Marcellus even harder than Théo’s earlier punch to the gut.

  “Wait.” Marcellus finally found his voice and turned toward the inspecteur. “Stop. What are you doing to him?”

  “This business doesn’t concern you, Officer,” Limier said. “This is a Policier matter.”