Renegades (Hotbloods #3)

I frowned at him. “Aren’t you worried?”

“I doubt it’ll be anything I haven’t fought before,” he said calmly, though I could see a flicker of doubt in his slate eyes. Once again, I realized he was putting on a show of bravery to ease my nerves. “We’ll be fine, don’t worry,” he added, sipping from his drink.

As the hour grew later, we stole out of the apartment and headed down to the lower floors of the palace, thinking we might sneak out through the gardens. From our balcony, I’d spotted a sheltered grove at the back of the beautiful building. It seemed overgrown and forgotten about, like somewhere we could take off under the cover of darkness, undisturbed by prying eyes. Once in the air, we could fly low, sticking to the shadows of the mountainside. Navan had already warned that, if we flew from the balcony itself, we would be spotted immediately, given the bright lights that shone onto the sides of the palace to show off its grandeur, even at night.

Navan led the way as we crept through the empty hallways, ducking into doorways whenever a guard passed by. I knew the overgrown grove had to branch off from one of the older rooms at the farthest edge of the palace—it was just a case of figuring out which one.

“Are we going the right way?” I asked as we entered a gloomy corridor that smelled of dust and decay. It was clear nobody came this way anymore.

Navan nodded. “If this palace is anything like Queen Gianne’s, then all the old halls and galleries will be closed up. They’re a reminder of bygone days, when the planet was unified, and neither queen particularly likes to dwell on that,” he muttered, squinting against the dim light. “In Gianne’s palace, these halls and galleries were on the first or second floors, where they could easily be accessed by the public, in the old days. Royalty didn’t want members of the public snooping around their private quarters, so everything intended for normal citizens was on the lower floors.”

“There!” I whispered, pointing at a door at the end of the hallway. It still bore the first four letters of the word “gallery,” though the last three seemed to have been swallowed up by years of abandonment.

As we walked toward it, we froze. A figure emerged from the doorway. Her eyes snapped in our direction, narrowing with suspicion.

“Riley, Navan, what in Rask’s name are you doing down here?” Pandora barked, covering the gap between us in a matter of strides. I looked to Navan, my mind racing a mile a minute, yet unable to come up with a suitable excuse.

He smiled sweetly. “You caught us,” he said, with a note of apology in his voice. “We were hoping to sneak out for date night. With training and everything, we haven’t really had much alone time. I overheard one of the guards talking about taking his wife to the midnight artisan market, and I thought I might do the same for Riley, as a little surprise,” he explained, not missing a beat. Even I believed him.

Pandora frowned, though her features softened a moment later. “The midnight artisan market in Paloma Square?” she asked.

“If that’s the one near the old university building, then yes,” Navan said. “I’m still getting used to where things are around here.”

“That’s the one. Do you need directions?”

“Bashrik already gave me some,” he replied, brandishing the folded piece of paper that contained the map to the Fazar Mountains. What if Pandora tried to take a closer look at it? My heart hammered in my throat.

“Fair enough. After all, who am I to stand in the way of true love?” She smirked, although the humor didn’t quite reach her eyes. “While you’re there, do you think you could do me a little favor?”

“Sure, what can we do for you?” I asked, knowing it was better to stay on Pandora’s good side, given her standing with the queen.

“Could you get me a list of ingredients that the queen has requested?” she replied.

I looked at her curiously, realizing that she was essentially passing off her responsibility to us. Maybe she couldn’t be bothered? Then again, it was probably a tough job being the queen’s advisor, constantly at her beck and call, doing her bidding. In Pandora’s position, I might have been tempted to do the same.

“Of course. Do you have the list on you, or do you want me to write it down?” Navan asked, patting down his pockets for a pen he didn’t have.

“Everything you’ll need to get is on here,” she replied, flashing Navan an almost derisive look as she handed over a small black device. When she tapped the center, a hologram flickered to life, listing all the items the queen desired. “Don’t you have these in the South?” she asked, narrowing her eyes again.

Navan grinned. “We do, Pandora. I was just teasing. I can’t even remember the last time I wrote something down.” He took the device and slipped it into his pocket.

“You’d better get going. You shouldn’t be out too late,” Pandora said brusquely. “If the queen finds out you’re gone, I won’t be able to cover for you.” She dipped a hand into her pocket and pulled out a ring of keys, removing a small silver one and placing it in my hand. “There’s an old emergency exit in the storage closet at the back of this galleria. This key will let you out.”

With that, she strode off and disappeared into the gloom. Navan and I let out a sigh of relief. I liked Pandora, but there was something about her that set my nerves on edge. Whether it was her impressive stature, her brusque manner, or her position as Brisha’s right-hand woman, I wasn’t sure. Whatever it was, I found her intimidating.

“We’ll have to be quick if we’re going to get all of this stuff.” Navan sighed, still looking toward the spot where Pandora had disappeared. “I hadn’t planned for us to stop by the market, but I guess we’re going to have to now.”

“Will we have enough time to do both?” I asked, worried.

Navan grimaced. “We’ll have to be fast, especially if we want to be back before dawn, but it should be okay,” he said, though he didn’t sound sure.

He took my hand and led me through the door of the ancient gallery, where dustsheets draped countless ghostly shapes and motheaten tapestries hung from moldering walls. I wondered what this place might have looked like in its glory days, though it was clear they were long gone.

We found the storage closet and descended the rickety staircase hidden at the back of it. Navan unlocked the door at the bottom, and a second later, we were stepping out into the cold night, into the forgotten garden I had seen from the balcony. From the shadows of the overgrown bushes and the boughs of skeletal trees, I could have sworn there were eyes watching me.

Shaking off my fears, I plucked the wing serum from my pocket. I still had two thirds of the first vial left, but I had the second one with me just in case.