Page 37 of Supernova

But nothing she had read had given much indication as to what the interior of the prison was actually like, and she had pictured tiers of jail cells stretching the length of the building, linked by narrow walkways and high rails.

The reality was nothing like that.

Walking into the cell block, she was greeted by a vast open space stretching from one stone wall to the next. Until her gaze traveled up, to where the ceiling was reinforced with steel beams nearly five stories overhead. The cells, each one a single solitary box, were suspended from the beams by thick cables.

Therewasa narrow walkway, but rather than connecting the cells, it lined the perimeter of the wall around them, where the guards could make their rounds and keep watch on the inmates.

If there were prisoners inside the suspended cells, she couldn’t see them from below. The place was silent as death, a silence made more complete by the wind howling against the outside walls, and then their footsteps.

Cell numbers were stenciled with spray paint onto the stone wall, and they paused in front of B-26. Her guard nodded toward a room on the second level, surrounded by black tinted glass. A second later, the grating noise of gears echoed around them, and one of the cells began to descend. Nova watched its slow approach, a part of her wishing that it would just fall and crush her and end this whole ordeal before it even started. Again, she cursed herself for feeling so hopeless. She was an Anarchist. She was Ace Anarchy’s niece. She was never hopeless.

But it was hard to convince herself of that now, when the cell hitthe floor with a clang and she found herself scanning an enclosure a third the size of her bedroom at the house on Wallowridge, and even that had felt cramped.

One of the guards nudged her in the back. Her lips tightened and she thought about asking if they were going to let her keep the pretty new handcuffs. But her mouth was dry and her heart wasn’t in it.

What did a few pounds of chains matter at this point?

The chains clanked as she stepped into the cell. Dark. Cold. Devoid of comfort. It felt a little bit like stepping back into the subway tunnels, but this time, there would be no reprieve from the endless gloom.

Her feet crossed the threshold, and a set of bars slid shut behind her with a reverberating thud. She turned and took in the horizontal metal grate, probably iron. Then a second series of bars, these vertical, slammed down over the first. She gulped. Carbon fiber, she guessed, probably an extra precaution for any inmates who could manipulate metal. Then she heard a hum and saw a faint flicker of red light along the edges of the cell. Her eyebrows lifted.Lasers, too?

Sweet rot.

It seemed hilarious, all of a sudden, that Nova had dreamed of breaking into this place. She’d not only dreamed of rescuing Ace from here, she’d actually thought she could succeed. She hadn’t knownhow, but failure hadn’t seemed like an option.

Now she realized how useless all her plotting had been.

They were never going to rescue Ace.

Just like no one was ever going to rescue her.

As soon as the cell was secured, an internal device on her chains clinked and the cuffs fell from her wrists, landing in a pile at her feet.

The noise of cogs and gears echoed around her and the cell began to rise upward. The guards dropped away below and all she could seebeyond the bars was the cell block’s exterior wall. Thick stone and mortar.

Though she knew that there were other cells suspended in the air only a few feet away from her own, it made no difference that they were there, or whether or not they were occupied.

She was alone.

She had only ever felttrulyalone one time in her life—in the moments that followed the murders of her parents and Evie. After she put their killer to sleep, she had stood over his unconscious body, gripping the gun still hot from his own hand, ordering herself to kill him. Kill him.Kill him.She had been alone then, and she had known it. No family. No one to take care of her. No one to help her be brave. No one to help her through this.

Until Ace had come and she had remembered—no, she wasn’t alone. She still had family. She still had Uncle Ace, and it was all she had, and she had grasped on to that small piece of comfort as tightly as her trembling little fists could.

Now Nova surveyed her cell. Gray walls, made of what material she couldn’t guess, but something told her it might be chromium. There was a sleeping pad as thick as a pencil in one corner. A washbasin against the wall, and a toilet with a small holding tank in the corner. It was so cramped that her feet would be on the mattress pad as she did her business.

Not knowing what else to do, Nova sat down on the mat and tried to think of all the choices she had made that had brought her here. All the mistakes. The failures.

She had tried to assassinate Captain Chromium. She was an Anarchist and a villain. Not long ago, she would have assumed the punishment would be life imprisonment, but she still recalled what the Captain had said the morning after her attack on headquarters.Soon, the Renegades would be revealing Agent N to the public, and part of their grand presentation would include the “public neutralization of all prodigies who have been heretofore convicted of villainous behavior.” Surely, at this point, that would include her, too.

She knew the Renegades had been testing Agent N on Cragmoor inmates, at their our discretion. No judge or jury had approved the permanent removal of their powers. The Renegades had no need of such antiquated practices—they did what served them best. Who cared what happened to a few criminals, anyway? Who cared if they were treated like nothing but disposable lab rats?

Her emotions were a jumble of anger and resentment that clouded what might otherwise have been sorrow.

Nova realized, in the midst of her self-pitying musings, that the fingers of her right hand had wrapped around her left wrist, gripping so tight that the tips of her left fingers were beginning to tingle from lack of circulation. Swallowing, she lowered her head and released her stranglehold. Her skin carried a ring of white where she’d been holding it, thicker than the faint tan line that depicted where the bracelet had sat against her skin for nearly her entire life.

It felt like someone had chopped off a limb, to be without the bracelet. And the star, too, though she’d had it for far less time. Still, the star felt like somethingshehad made. Something she had dreamed into existence. With Adrian’s help, perhaps, but that didn’t change the intense feeling of ownership she had over it. The way it had secured itself, perfectly fit, to the empty prongs of the bracelet had seemed to confirm that it was hers. She hadn’t fully realized what a comfort its steady pulsing light had brought her these past weeks, while the rest of her life had been driven into further and further turmoil.

Now they were gone. The bracelet. The star. She hated to think of them in the hands of the Renegades, being examined and inspected. Probably Callum would end up with it at some point. He would write up a description for the database. He and Snapshot would argue over how it should be classified—jewelry, historical artifact, mysterious extraterrestrial matter?

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