They dragged him backward and around the corner, where his voice finally faded.
“We have to go too,” Chantal said, following on Elara’s heels into the Cradle. “What are you doing with that!”
Elara brought the bottles of liquor into the hallway and dumped the contents in a line across the stones. It would burn, but not for long. Just enough to deter the police from following. Beside her, Nicolette and a handful of Fernand’s other supporters helped, adding clothes and curtains from the Cradle to the barrier.
Down the hallway, a troop of officers appeared. “Halt!”
Elara went to strike a match, but Nicolette stole it from her hand.
“What are you doing?” she hissed.
Nicolette knocked her back into the shadows. “They can’t recognize you!”
Elara frowned. “Why do you suddenly care?”
“I don’t,” Nicolette snapped. “Not about you, but about what you’ve done. What youcoulddo for us. For the Restes. Fernand’s plan is solid, but so is yours. You can support him and the Restes if you win, and you can’t do that if you’re in shackles.”
The police were nearly upon them.
“GO!”
Blai tugged Elara’s sleeve, bringing her back to reality. If the police caught her, the Counseil would have perfect reason to raze the Restes to the ground.
They left Nicolette behind, her silhouette darkened against a fiery explosion of liquor and cloth.
When they hit stifling summer air, Blai broke away. “Get back to the house.”
They fled, forcing Elara and Chantal to disappear down the narrow, twisted alleys leading back to Belleplace. Across the river, Elara turned back to face her home, which lit up the sky like a smoldering dawn.
She couldn’t ignore it any longer.
They were at war.
32ELARA
Elara only allowed herself to breathe once she and Chantal were back in the safety of Belleplace. The safety of the garden outside Nik’s home.
“Nicolette, the boy you were talking to,” Chantal said quietly, “those were rebels?”
Elara nodded.
Chantal touched her chin. “What did he say to you?”
Elara didn’t realize she’d been blinking back tears.
You don’t deserve anything.
I can’t sacrifice the hope of the resistance for one man.
Gaetan was rotting in prison right now, and it was all her fault. If Fernand refused to help, her hope rested entirely on Nik finding some way to save him. Blackmail, extortion, it didn’t matter. They had to get him out somehow, because she knew better than to believe in the justice system anymore.
Fernand had tried to make her see how broken it was for so long.
“Fernand.” Elara said his name out loud for the first time. “Fernand was a friend,morethan a friend, who grew up with the previous generation as his idols. Unlike me, he’s never given up on hope for change. He’s been trying to spark something for years.”
Movement in the kitchen caught her eye.
With aching bones and hair reeking of cinders, she forced her tired body into the kitchen.
