Rebel Born (Secondborn #3)(49)

Wet, puppy-scented kisses assault my cheeks and nose, bringing me out of a dream. Rogue’s black-and-white tail beats Reykin’s pant leg before the little furry maniac hops onto my bunk and continues to bathe me in adoration.

“Rogue, you’re so big!” I try to hold him back from licking my face, but he’s so squirmy and excited that I just have to endure it. “Hi, you,” I say, rubbing my cheek against his small head. “How did you get so big?” He isn’t big by any standard of the word; he’s simply bigger than when I was taken from the Fate of Virtues.

Reykin crouches down so that he’s eye level with me in the bottom bunk. “Rogue eats everything you put in front of him, which includes the occasional boot, and he likes to snuggle.”

I stare into Reykin’s ocean eyes, and I completely get the wanting-to-snuggle-Reykin part. Heat flushes my cheeks. Ruffling Rogue’s floppy ears, I ask, “How did you rescue him from the Halo Palace? You couldn’t have gotten far on that platform.”

Reykin moves closer to sit on the edge of my bed. He reaches over and pets Rogue. “I didn’t. That ridiculous platform crashed just past the Trial Village. I almost didn’t make it to the cover of the secondborn training camps—you know, the ones we toured with Grisholm on our hoverbikes?”

“Yes.”

Tension forms lines around his mouth. He drops his hand from Rogue. “I hid out in the woods—in a bunker that one of the secondborn survivalists had erected during their training sessions. It was good camouflage—hard to see, made of moss and bark. Roving bands of zeroborns who looked like normal citizens from Virtues hunted in packs, preying on most of the people they stumbled upon. I infiltrated the industrial systems in the Fate of Virtues and acquired street footage from the drone cameras of the night you were taken.”

Reykin uses the hologram on his wrist communicator to project images of the war-torn streets of Purity. Roaming the sidewalks and pavement are groups of once ordinary looking firstborns with beams of silver light coursing from their eyes. Some are in tattered ball gowns and high-heeled shoes, others in expensive, frayed suits or blood-smeared robes and slippers. Still others are barefoot in torn negligée. All their expressions are the same snarling mask.

Reykin extinguishes the hologram. “I knew I had to lose my moniker—it was a beacon. I cut it out that night and destroyed it. My phantom orb kept my body temperature low, so the infrared scanners didn’t find me.” He digs in his pocket, extracts the small silver orb, and extends it to me.

I take it and roll it around in my palm. The device feels icy. My skin adopts its temperature, which slowly spreads over my hand and down my wrist. I shiver and hand the device back to Reykin. He takes it and shoves it in his pocket.

“I had my headset communicator with me, so I could control Phoenix,” he says. I know what he’s talking about. I’ve seen him use the compact headset while upgrading Phoenix, back at the Halo Palace. “I had to boost the signal, using the energy from my fusionblade and a hidden camera uplink that I discovered in the forest of the training grid, but finally I managed to connect with your mechadome. I took control of Phoenix, and by manipulating the bot remotely from the camps, I gently stuffed our furry friend inside Phoenix’s hull, along with supplies I needed, and then I guided Phoenix to me. Without your Class 5Z, I never would’ve made it out of the Fate of Virtues alive.”

“No one ever challenged the mechadome?”

“Well, it was chaos in Virtues, but no. Nothing challenged it. It’s like they don’t even see it. The zeroborns were too busy murdering everyone to notice a sanitation unit. And Phoenix is lined with lead, so it can transport just about anything, because scanners have a hard time seeing inside it.”

“So Phoenix made it to you in the woods?”

“Yes. Rogue thought it was a grand adventure.” He ruffles Rogue’s floppy ears. “At first we survived on the supplies Phoenix gathered from your apartment. Then we lived on whatever Phoenix foraged during forays into the nearby Trial Village. In the days after that initial night, zeroborns were either slaughtering or capturing everyone. Birth order didn’t matter. Wealth didn’t matter. Political connections didn’t matter, unless they were Census connections. Similar things were happening in other Fates to varying degrees, but nothing like what went on where we were. High-level Census agents made the city of Purity their own.”

“What about Quincy,” I ask in a terrified rush, “the little Stone-Fated girl who used to attend to Balmora? I promised her I’d take care of her. She was in my suite in the Upper Halo on the night I was captured! Maybe you saw her?”

Reykin’s expression turns bleak. “She didn’t make it.”

“How do you know?”

“I sent Phoenix to look for her. The zeroborns didn’t take prisoners, Roselle. She died with everyone else.”

“How do you know for sure?” I challenge, desperate not to believe it. “She could’ve made it—gotten out somehow. She could be hiding in the Sea Fort—”

“She’s dead, Roselle. I hacked into the surveillance logs for the Upper Halo and recovered the records from CTD. She died the night of the initial attack.”

I swallow the bile in my mouth. “Let me see it.”

“No. Not even if you beg me, Roselle. You don’t want to see what the zeroborns did to her. Please, trust me on this.”