Renegades (Hotbloods #3)

“The rebels won’t come back here until they have the immortality elixir,” Navan said sullenly.

“What if we told them that the elixir can only be made here? That there’s a certain ingredient or something that can only be taken from Vysanthean soil?” I said, though I knew it was a longshot.

Navan shook his head. “They’d get us to box it up and bring it back to them one way or another. Until they have a working elixir, they aren’t coming back to Vysanthe. I guarantee it,” he replied, making it clear he’d already thought through most scenarios. But then, something glittered in his slate eyes, and he sat up taller in his chair. “Unless… If we could find a way to reverse the effects of the elixir, once the rebels arrive on Vysanthe, then we could destroy them that way.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, frowning.

A moment later, his face fell once more, and he exhaled. “Actually, it doesn’t matter. Because without knowing how a successful immortality elixir works, we can’t hope to come up with a counteracting agent,” he muttered, throwing his head back in annoyance. “We’d need to take a live specimen and figure out an anti-elixir from that…”

A gruff voice spoke from behind us.

“How did you get clearance to be here?” a guard asked, curling back his lips to reveal sharp fangs. My heart leapt to my throat. I glanced at Navan, but he made a subtle gesture toward his pockets, revealing that he was out of any useful serums, aside from the Elysium we’d need to knock out the intelligence officer.

“We have permission,” Navan replied firmly.

Panic coursed through my veins as the guard drew closer. Unless this guy backed down, if we wanted to leave the control room unnoticed, we were going to have to kill him. But, in doing so, I knew we’d only end up drawing more attention to ourselves, the way we had with Queen Gianne and Kalvin. Someone would inevitably find his body or sound an alarm that he was missing, and then we’d be in serious trouble.

“Who gave you permission?” the guard pressed, his face stern.

“I did,” a voice called from across the room, making us all whip around in surprise.

Pandora made her way through the stations, her boots thudding on the hard ground, her eyes cold and focused. “They are here under my jurisdiction, Bartok. I should have sent word earlier, but I had some misdemeanors to attend to at the party. My apologies.”

The guard bowed anxiously, suddenly nervous in Pandora’s presence. “No need to apologize, ma’am. I should have known better than to question guests of yours,” he mumbled, before backing away, hurrying as far from her as possible.

I looked at her suspiciously as she waited for Bartok to fully disappear, her shoulders tensed, her eyes homing in on him like a predator watching prey. What was she doing here? And, more importantly, why was she helping us? Surely, she knew we were up to something, if we were down here in stolen clothes, while everyone else was up at the party.

“So,” Pandora said, turning slowly back around with a knowing smile on her lips. “How’s Chief Orion?”





Chapter Sixteen





“I don’t know what you mean,” Navan replied, our stunned silence dragging on a moment too long. “We were just trying to find some video footage from Gianne’s attack, to see if there’s anything we can do to fortify the new lab against that same kind of onslaught,” he explained, leaving me speechless at the sharpness of his mind. I was still reeling from the sound of Orion’s name coming from Pandora’s lips.

She smiled tightly. “Relax, you don’t need to lie to me,” she said, peering over Navan’s shoulder to look at the screen, which the hypnotized intelligence officer was still working away on. “Orion and I are… Let’s just say we’re close acquaintances. I had a feeling you were gathering some kind of intel out in the garden, although I had to keep up pretenses around the other guards. You ran off before I could speak with you in private.”

I gaped at her. How could she be on Orion’s side? She was Queen Brisha’s most trusted advisor! Was she double-bluffing, trying to trick us into giving something away so she could arrest us? I couldn’t tell. Her face was a confusing, blank canvas. How had she managed to reach such a prime spot in Brisha’s court without alerting suspicion? A million questions raced through my mind, but Pandora spoke again before I could ask one.

“I would gladly have sent your information to Orion myself, since I am aware he’s expecting news from you. You certainly did not need to go through all of this rigmarole, drugging defenseless intelligence officers and knocking out guards,” she muttered, glancing back over her shoulder. “The pair of you draw too much attention to yourselves.”

“If you wanted things done your way, you should have revealed yourself to us earlier,” Navan replied defensively, scrutinizing her. I could sense that neither of us knew what to make of her now; she had thrown us completely off guard.

Pandora shook her head, her purple ponytail swinging from side to side, jangling the golden trinkets woven within the strands. “Get him to stop what he’s doing and delete everything from the system. I’ll use my own device to set up a connection with Orion. This is much too risky.”

A frosty stalemate stretched between Navan and Pandora, the two of them facing off against one another, though neither said a word.

“I suggest you do it now, before your serum wears off. I know you don’t have any left,” Pandora said with a slight smirk.

Navan remained frozen for a moment, before he finally relented. Turning to the intelligence officer, he instructed him to delete all memory of the event in the system. The officer nodded and set to work, his hands dancing across the screen. His eyes were still blank, his shoulders slumped.

I eyed Pandora curiously, every word she said making me more and more uneasy. All those times I’d been sure I could feel the burn of eyes on me… Now, I knew why. This whole time, Pandora had been watching us. It also made sense that she had been so lenient about our suspicious activity. When she had found us creeping around the ancient wing of the palace, she’d given us the key because she had wanted us to leave. She might not have known where we were headed, but she would’ve suspected it was part of our mission for Orion. That was why word never got back to Queen Brisha. It had all been a ruse. I was glad, at least, that Pandora hadn’t overheard the conversation Navan and I had been having moments before her arrival.