“We met back at the Policier Precinct,” Gabriel cut in, beaming like this was something to be proud of.
“Why were you at the Policier Precinct?”
Alouette shook her head. “It’s a long story.”
“Well, that was the most excitement I’ve had all year!” a voice squealed, pulling Marcellus’s attention toward Cerise, who was breathing heavily and fanning herself with both hands. “What a rush!”
Gabriel, who was sitting next to her, surreptitiously scooted away.
“Excitement?” Marcellus repeated in disbelief. If he didn’t know any better, he would have thought Cerise had enjoyed that. “We nearly died, Cerise.”
“But we didn’t!” Cerise pointed out.
“Those people were about to brand you,” Gabriel said condescendingly. “With a laser.”
Cerise scoffed as though everyone was being overdramatic. “They weren’t really going to brand me. It was just for show. They were trying to make a point.”
“No, I’m pretty sure they were going to brand you,” said Gabriel.
Cerise waved that away as she unlatched a nearby storage compartment, pulled out a sparkly black hat, and placed it on her head with a flourish. “I would have talked my way out of it eventually.”
“Don’t be naïve, Cerise,” Marcellus warned, already losing patience with her. “This isn’t Ledôme.”
“I know this isn’t Ledôme,” Cerise snapped back.
Alouette glanced between Cerise and Marcellus, looking uneasy. “How do you two know each other?”
Cerise refreshed her chipper tone. “Well, we don’t exactly run in the same circles, but my father works with his grandfather and I see him around from time to time. All my friends are in love with him. But seriously, can you blame them? Look at those eyelashes!”
Alouette cracked a smile and Marcellus felt his entire face grow hot. He exhaled loudly. “Cerise, I don’t know what you were doing at that inn, but you put yourself in grave danger.”
Cerise rolled her eyes. “Don’t worry about me, Officer. I can take care of myself.”
Gabriel snorted. “Yeah, right. This is Montfer,” he pronounced the name like he was teaching a toddler how to speak. “They don’t like the Second Estate here. Trust me, you wouldn’t last a day—”
“Wait, how did you know I’m Second Estate?”
Gabriel coughed. “Are you serious?”
“Yes!”
Gabriel looked her up and down, taking in her rhinestone-studded hat and belted, black jumpsuit. “You don’t exactly blend in, Sparkles.”
“What?” she asked, defensively touching her hat. “This is my spy look. I made it myself. And I happen to believe that the care of one’s personal appearance represents the care of one’s mind.” She gave Gabriel’s shabby coat and thick stubble a disdainful once-over.
Marcellus sighed. He didn’t have the time nor the energy to argue with the likes of Cerise Chevalier. “Are you going to tell me what you were doing in Montfer at a Third Estate protest?”
“Are you going to tell me how you learned to start fires?” Cerise shot back.
“Um,” Marcellus stammered before remembering that he was in charge here. He was the one who had rescued her. He got to ask the questions. “Answer me first.”
She huffed. “Fine. I was following you.”
“What?” Marcellus sputtered. He was certainly not expecting that. “Why?”
“Because you’re Vangarde,” she replied as though this were the most obvious answer in the world.
“You are?” Alouette and Gabriel asked in unison.
“Well, I … ,” Marcellus began haltingly, feeling caught out. He narrowed his eyes at Cerise. “What makes you think I’m Vangarde?”
She spat out a laugh. “Who’s being naïve now?”
Marcellus furrowed his brow. “What?”
Cerise sighed and tapped hastily on the TéléCom on her lap. Then, with a flick of her finger, she sent the contents of her screen to the cruiseur’s internal hologram unit. Suddenly, the familiar footage of an arrest warrant appeared. The Ministère emblem—a pair of crossed rayonettes protecting the planet of Laterre—glowed in the air, and just below it, hovering in the center of the cruiseur like a disembodied head on a spike, was Marcellus’s face.
“Arrest warrant for Marcellus Bonnefaçon issued on Month 7, Day 32, Year 505,” a voice announced through the cruiser’s speaker system. “Marcellus Bonnefaçon is wanted for collusion with a terrorist group known as the Vangarde. Suspect is dangerous and potentially armed. Anyone with information on his whereabouts is to contact the Ministère or their local Policier Precinct.”
Marcellus felt his whole body melt right into the seat.
Of course, his grandfather and Chacal would have issued a warrant. The entire planet knew he was Vangarde now.
“I mean, I had my suspicions earlier,” Cerise went on breezily. “You are the son of Julien Bonnefaçon, the famous Vangarde traitor, after all.”
Again, Alouette’s expression was incredulous. “Is that true?”
Marcellus nodded, a familiar flicker of pain clutching at his chest. “Yeah. It’s true.”
“And then, when you went to the copper exploit—”
“Wait.” Marcellus gaped at Cerise. “You followed me there too? Those were your footsteps I heard?”
“But I wasn’t entirely convinced until the arrest warrant was issued earlier,” Cerise went on, relishing in Marcellus’s disbelief. “That’s when I decided to follow you here.”
“B-b-but why?” Marcellus asked, feeling like his brain might explode.
“Oh,” Cerise said, “Right. Because I’m a sympathizeur and I—”
“A what?” asked Gabriel in a deadpan voice.
“A sympathizeur. I’m sympathetic. To the Third Estate cause.”
“That’s not a thing,” Gabriel protested.
“Of course it is. What I said back there at the inn wasn’t just a lie to convince them to let me go.” She turned and flashed Gabriel a winning smile. “I’m on your side. I want change on Laterre. I want justice for the Third Estate. There are tons of us. We’re starting a movement.”
Gabriel scoffed. “A movement of what? Wearing ridiculous hats?”
Cerise’s nostrils flared. “It’s not a hat. It’s a beret.”
“Whatever it is,” Gabriel snapped, “we don’t need your ‘sympathy.’ ”
Cerise glared at him. “What exactly are you doing in my cruiseur?”
“I’ve been asking myself the same question,” he grumbled.
Cerise turned back to Alouette and Marcellus. “Shall I eject him?” She looked hopeful at the proposition.
“No!” Alouette said. She cast a glance at Gabriel. “He’s … He helped me. I trust him.”
Marcellus still wasn’t sure what to make of that. Since when did Alouette hang out with Third Estate criminals? And why had she been in the Policier Precinct? But he decided to file all those questions away until a time when he had more brain space to devote to them.
“Fine,” Cerise said, looking slightly disappointed that she didn’t get to eject anyone. “Then, at least give me back my hairbrush.” She narrowed her eyes at Gabriel.
“What?” Gabriel asked, confused. “What are you talking about?”
Cerise said nothing, just extended her hand, palm up, across the cruiseur.
Gabriel flashed her an exaggerated sad face before reaching into his pocket and retrieving a small titan-backed brush studded with twinkling gemstones. He handed it to Cerise, who returned it to one of the many pockets of her jumpsuit.
Marcellus watched the whole spectacle with fascination.
Gabriel shot Alouette a sheepish look. “It’s not like she needed it. I’m sure she has a hundred just like it.”
Cerise let out an exasperated huff before turning back to Marcellus. “Anyway,” she said emphatically, “I followed you to Montfer because I have recently come into possession of some very important
intel that the Vangarde will definitely want to know about.”
Marcellus eyed her dubiously. “What do you mean you’ve ‘come into possession’?”
She leaned back in her seat with a self-satisfied smile. “I have a lot of skills that you don’t know about, Marcellus Bonnefaçon.” She motioned to the TéléCom in her lap. “For instance, I happen to be an expert hacker.”
Gabriel rolled his eyes. “Yeah, and I’m the Matrone’s little white dog, Fluffy.”
“Well, Fluffy,” Cerise shot back, her tone heavy with sarcasm. “You’re certainly in need of a groom.”
“Look, Sparkles—” Gabriel began.
“My name is Cerise,” she snapped.
“Sparkles,” Gabriel continued unfazed. “You may think you’re on our side, but until you’ve gone to bed hungry and slept in the mud and worked until your fingers bled, you cannot claim to be sympathetic to the Third Estate ‘cause.’ Which, by the way, is not a cause. It’s not something for you to discuss over champagne and gateaux while you glue rhinestones to hats. It is our life. Not an idle hobby for bored Second Estaters.”
“At least what I’m doing is honest!” Cerise fired back. “Do you really expect to improve your lot in life by stealing?”
“Hey, I don’t need some sparkle-headed bimbo telling me how to improve my life. I’m doing just fine on my own.”
Cerise’s eyes flashed with fury and Marcellus quickly intervened. “Cerise, why don’t you just tell us what you found?”
Cerise took a moment to calm herself down. Then, once she’d gathered her face back into a smile, she exhaled and said, “Well, two days ago, I was out in Céleste, on the Southern Peninsula, scanning signals from the satellites—”
“Wait, you were what?” spat Marcellus.
“Scanning signals from the satellites,” Cerise repeated, slowly enunciating each word.
“In the Southern Peninsula?”
“Céleste is gorgeous this time of year. Have you been? Brilliant pure white skies. And it’s where the Laterrian cloud coverage is thinnest, so you get the best signal strength from the satellites.”
“Really?” Alouette asked, sounding genuinely interested. “I never read about—” she caught herself and cleared her throat. “I mean, I’ve never heard that before.”
“Why were you scanning satellite signals?” Marcellus asked.
“Because I was looking for the kill switch,” Cerise replied matter-of-factly.
Marcellus fought back a groan. “Seriously, Cerise?”
“What’s the kill switch?” Alouette asked.
“It’s a master switch that can deactivate all the Skins,” Cerise explained at the exact same moment as Marcellus said, “It’s a hoax that only extremely gullible people believe.”
Alouette swung her gaze from Cerise to Marcellus and then finally to Gabriel.
“I’m going to side with fire boy here,” Gabriel said. “It’s totally a hoax.”
“No, it’s not,” Cerise insisted. “It’s real.”
Marcellus rolled his eyes. “No. It’s an urban legend that’s been around for years. A fantasy. It’s just fodder for conspiracy theorists.”
“Yeah. You’ve got to be pretty stupide to believe that all the Skins on the planet can be shut down with one button.” Gabriel snorted and then muttered under his breath. “Expert hacker, my foot.”
Cerise’s jaw visibly clenched. “I’m not stupide. A lot of people believe the kill switch is real. And as an expert hacker”—she shot Gabriel a steely look—“I know from personal experience that you should never build any system without some kind of emergency shut-off mechanism, in case anything goes wrong.”
Marcellus clenched his fists against the seat. This conversation was going nowhere. He was this close to ordering the cruiseur to stop so he could jump out. “Trust me, Cerise,” he said with a sigh, “if such a thing existed, I would know about it. I’m second-in-command of the Ministère after General Bonnefaçon.” He glanced at the arrest warrant still displayed on the hologram unit and cleared his throat. “Or, was anyway.”
“But what if the general doesn’t even know about it?” she countered. “I mean, it makes sense to hide it, right? So, no one can ever use it? But I figured, if there is a switch somewhere, it has to be connected to a network, so it can reach all the Skins at once. That’s why I was scanning the satellites. I thought that if I could locate the right signal, I could track it back to the switch.”
Gabriel crossed his arms over his chest. “And? Did you find it?”
Cerise deflated. “Well, no.”
“Okay, that was a charming story,” Gabriel said. “How about you just drop me off somewhere and I’ll walk home.”
“I’m not finished,” Cerise said through gritted teeth. Then, she refreshed her breezy smile again and continued. “I may not have located the kill switch”—she flashed another scathing look at Gabriel—“yet. But I did end up stumbling upon something else. Something very, very interesting.”
“And that would be?” Marcellus prompted. He was getting a little fatigued by Cerise’s flair for the dramatics. And he still wasn’t entirely convinced he should believe anything she had to say. Cerise Chevalier? A sympathizeur? A hacker? And now a conspiracy theorist, too? Just the other day she was whining about dresses for a fête like it was the end of the world.
“I found an encrypted message being sent through one of the old Human Conservation Commission probes.”
“Those probes still exist?” Alouette cut in, staring wide-eyed at Cerise. “I thought they were all destroyed once the planets of the System Divine were inhabited.”
“Me too,” Cerise said, sounding thrilled to have someone in this cruiseur who seemed as excited about this development as she was.
“What’s this about probes?” Gabriel asked.
Cerise let out a huff, but Alouette turned patiently to Gabriel and explained, “Before the Last Days, the Human Conservation Commission sent probes from the First World into space to locate a new place for human beings to live. That’s how they found the twelve planets of the System Divine. But after the planets were terraformed and inhabited, the probes weren’t needed anymore, and they just sort of disappeared.”
“But not all of them,” Cerise said. “One, I’ve discovered, is apparently still floating around in the Asteroid Channel, and someone is using it to send messages through an abandoned First World communication network.” Cerise leaned forward and swiveled her gaze purposefully between Alouette and Marcellus. She paused for a second, making sure her next words carried the weight she wanted. “Someone on Albion.”
Marcellus felt as though the cruiseur had suddenly lost altitude and they were falling. Plummeting straight to the ground.
“And you found one of these messages?” Marcellus asked.
Cerise crossed her arms over her chest. “Mmm-hmm.”
“What did it say?” Alouette and Marcellus blurted out at the same moment.
Cerise’s eager expression slid right off her face. She uncrossed her arms. “Well, see, that’s the problem. I can’t interpret it.”
“Why not?” Gabriel chided. “I thought you were an expert hacker.”
“I am,” she snapped. “But this isn’t about hacking. The message was transmitted in some kind of code that I can’t decipher. I even tried running it through my father’s TéléCom because he has access to more advanced decryption software, but it didn’t work.”
Comprehension flashed in Marcellus’s mind. “That’s why you needed his TéléCom the other day? It wasn’t about a dress for a fête?”
Cerise rolled her eyes. “Keep up, Marcellus. I don’t give a fric about a fête. I was trying to figure out who had transmitted a message from Albion through an old space probe. But every time I listen to it, it just sounds like a bunch of beeps. I thought maybe the Vangarde could help.”
Marcellus pressed his fingertips into his temples. None of this was making any sense. “But … you always seemed so … so �
��”
“Spoiled and sparkle-headed?” Cerise suggested.
Marcellus balked, uncomfortable. “Well, yes.”
“Yeah, that’s just an act. To keep Papa from getting too suspicious. He’s the last person I want knowing what I can do.”
“So you pretend to be … superficial?”
Cerise rolled her eyes. “Trust me, when your father is the head of the Cyborg and Technology Labs, superficial is the safest thing to be.”
“What does that mean?” Marcellus asked.
“Never mind,” Cerise muttered, looking almost uncomfortable.
“What kind of beeps?” Alouette suddenly asked, and Marcellus turned to see her eyes were locked on Cerise.
“Huh?” said Cerise.
“You said the message was encoded, and it sounded like a bunch of beeps.”
“Oh.” Cerise shrugged. “I don’t know. Just beeps.”
“Were they different lengths?”
Marcellus glanced curiously between Alouette and Cerise as Cerise considered the question.
“Yeah,” she said slowly. “Actually, they were.”
“Can you play it?”
“Why?” Cerise’s gaze roved over Alouette as though she were seeing her for the first time.
“Just play it.”
Hesitantly, Cerise pulled her attention from Alouette and focused back on her TéléCom. Marcellus sensed something in the air. A buzzing anticipation. It made his heart beat faster. Cerise tapped proficiently on the screen until, finally, a soft crackle emanated from the speakers, like an AirLink being sent over a faulty connection. Then, a moment later, the cruiseur was filled with the most peculiar series of sounds Marcellus had ever heard.
Dah … Dit … Dit … Dit … Dit … Dit … Dit .… . . Dit … Dah … Dah …Dit …
It seemed to go on forever. How was anyone supposed to make sense of this? But when he glanced over at Alouette, he saw she was staring, with slightly glazed eyes, at some invisible space in front of her. Her lips were moving ever so slightly with each beep, as though she were mouthing along to a song she’d memorized.
The beeps came to an abrupt end, and the cruiseur filled with heavy silence.
“Alouette,” Marcellus began hesitantly. “Do you know what that—”
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