Scarlet

Nineteen

“What is all this junk?” Cinder locked her jaw, straining to push a plastic crate that was almost as tall as she was.

Thorne grunted beside her. “It’s—not—junk.” The tendons in his neck bulged as the crate collided with the cargo bay wall.

Thorne tossed his arms over the top with a groan and Cinder collapsed against it. Her shoulders ached, as tense as the metal that made up her left leg, and her arms felt like they were about to fall off. But when she allowed herself to look around the cargo bay, a sense of accomplishment settled around her.

All the crates had been slid to the walls, clearing an actual path from the cockpit to the living quarters. The smaller, lighter ones had been stacked on top of one another and some were left out as makeshift furniture in front of the main netscreen.

It bordered on cozy.

The next job would be to actually unpack the crates—the ones that were worth unpacking—but that would be a job for another day. “No, really,” she said when she’d found her breath. “What is all this?”

Thorne slid down beside her and wiped his brow with his sleeve. “I don’t know,” he said, eyeing the stamped labels on the side of the nearest crate: an unhelpful code. “Supplies. Food. I think there are some guns in one of them. And I know I had a few sculptures from this really collectible second-era artist—I was going to make a fortune off of them, but I got arrested before I had a chance.” He sighed.

Cinder squinted at him. Sure that the sculptures were stolen, she found it difficult to muster any sympathy. “Shame,” she muttered, thumping her head back against the crate.

Thorne pointed at something on the far wall, his forearm jutting beneath Cinder’s nose. “What’s that?”

She followed his gesture, frowned, and with a cranky moan pushed herself back to her feet. The corner of a metal frame could be seen behind a tall stack of crates they’d left against the wall. “A door.” She drew up the ship’s blueprint on her retina display. “The medbay?”

Realization brightened Thorne’s face. “Oh, right. This ship does have one of those.”

Cinder settled her fists on her hips. “You covered up the medbay?”

Thorne pulled himself up. “Never needed it.”

“Don’t you think it might be good to have access to, just in case?”

Thorne shrugged. “We’ll see.”

Rolling her eyes, Cinder reached for the uppermost crate and hauled it down onto the floor, already disrupting their hard-won pathway. “How can we be sure there’s nothing in these boxes that can be tracked?”

“What do you think I am, an amateur? Nothing entered this ship without being thoroughly inspected. Otherwise the Republic would have reclaimed it all a long time ago rather than let it idle in that warehouse.”

“There may not be any trackers,” said Iko, making Cinder and Thorne both jump. They still weren’t used to their invisible, omnipresent companion. “But we can still be detected on radar. I’m doing my best to keep us out of the path of any satellites or ships, but it’s surprisingly crowded up here.”

Thorne unrolled his sleeves. “And it’s next to impossible to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere without detection. That’s how they nabbed me last time.”

“I thought there was a trick to it,” said Cinder. “I’m sure I heard once about a way people could sneak into Earth’s atmosphere without notice. Where did I hear that?”

“News to me. I got pretty good at sweet-talking my way into public hangars, but I don’t think that’s going to work with such a high-profile convict on the loose.”

Having found an old rubber band in the galley, Cinder fished it from her pocket and tossed her hair up in a ponytail. Her brain ticked through her memories until, with a snap, it came to her. Dr. Erland had told her that there were more Lunars on Earth than people suspected, and that they had a way of getting to Earth without the government taking notice.

“Lunars know how to cloak their spacecrafts.”

“Huh?”

She pulled herself from the daze, blinking at Thorne. “Lunars can cloak their spacecrafts. Keep Earthen radars from picking up on them. That’s how so many are able to make it to Earth, if they manage to get away from Luna in the first place.”

“That’s terrifying,” said Iko, who had acknowledged the truth of Cinder’s race much as she’d acknowledged Thorne’s convict status: with loyalty and acceptance, but without changing her opinion that Lunars and convicts remained untrustworthy and unredeemable as a general rule.

Cinder had not yet figured out how to tell her that she also happened to be the missing Princess Selene.

“I know it is,” said Cinder, “but it would be awfully convenient if I knew how they did it.”

“Do you think it’s with their”—Thorne rolled his wrist toward her—“crazy Lunar magic stuff?”

“Bioelectricity,” she said, quoting Dr. Erland. “Calling it magic only empowers them.”

“Whatever.”

“I don’t know. It could be some special technology they install on their ships.”

“Optimistically hoping it’s magic, maybe you should start practicing?”

Cinder bit the inside of her cheek. Start practicing what?

“I guess I can try.” Turning her attention back to the crate, she pulled up the lid and was met with a box of packing chips. She stuffed her metal hand into it and emerged with a skinny wooden doll bedecked in feathers and painted with six eyes. “What is this?”

“Venezuelan dream doll.”

“It’s hideous.”

“It’s worth about twelve thousand univs.”

Heart skipping, Cinder lowered the doll back into the protective packaging. “You don’t think you might have something useful in all of these? Like, I don’t know, a fully charged power cell?”

“Doubtful,” said Thorne. “How much longer will ours hold out?”

Iko chimed, “Approximately thirty-seven hours.”

Thorne gave Cinder a thumbs-up. “Plenty of time to learn a new Lunar trick, right?”

Cinder shut the crate’s lid and slid it back against the others, trying not to show panic at having to use her new gift for anything, much less something as huge as disguising a cargo ship.

“In the meantime, I’ll do a little research, try to determine the best place for us to land. Not the Commonwealth, obviously. I hear Fiji’s nice this time of year.”

“Or Los Angeles!” Iko practically sang. “They have a huge escort-droid outlet store there. I wouldn’t mind having an escort-droid body. Some of the newer models come with color-changing fiber-optic hair.”

Cinder slumped onto the floor again and scratched at her wrist—a tick that was becoming awkward now that she had no gloves to fiddle with. “We’re not landing a stolen American ship in the American Republic,” she said, fixing her attention on the netscreen, where her own prison picture hovered in the corner. She was so sick of that picture.

“Do you have any suggestions?” said Thorne.

Africa.

She heard herself saying it, but nothing came out.

That’s where she was supposed to go. To meet Dr. Erland, so that he could tell her what to do next. He had plans for her. Plans to make her a hero, a savior, a princess. Plans to overthrow Levana and instate Cinder as the true queen.

Her right hand started to shake. Dr. Erland had set up the cyborg draft and treated dozens, perhaps hundreds of cyborgs like throwaways, all for the sake of finding her. And then, when he found her, he kept the secret of her identity until he had no other choice but to tell her, all the while planning out the rest of her life. He had made his need for revenge the highest priority.

But what the doctor hadn’t considered was that Cinder had no desire to be queen. She didn’t want to be a princess or an heir to anything. All her life—at least, all the life she could remember—all she’d ever wanted was freedom. And now, for the first time, she had it, however tenuous it was. There was no one telling her what to do. No one to judge or criticize.

But if she went to Dr. Erland, she would lose all that. He would expect her to reclaim her rightful place as the queen of Luna, and that struck her as the most binding shackles of all.

Cinder gripped her shaking hand with the steady cyborg one. She was tired of everyone deciding her life for her. She was ready to figure out who she really was—not what anyone else told her to be.

“Uh … Cinder?”

“Europe.” She pressed her back into the crate, forcing herself to sit straight, to feign certainty. “We’re going to Europe.”

A brief silence. “Any reason in particular?”

She met his gaze and pondered a long moment, before choosing her words. “Do you believe in the Lunar heir?”

Thorne propped his chin on both palms. “Of course.”

“No, I mean, do you believe she’s still alive?”

He peered at her as if she were being cute. “Because it was so vague the first time. Yes, of course I think she’s alive.”

Cinder drew back. “You do?”

“Sure. I know some people think it’s all conspiracy theories, but I’ve heard that Queen Levana was really paranoid for months after that fire, when she should have been ecstatic because she was finally queen, right? It’s like she knew the princess had gotten away.”

“Yeah, but … those could only be stories,” Cinder said, not knowing why she was trying to dissuade him. Perhaps because she’d never believed any of it, until she’d known the truth.

He shrugged. “What does this have to do with Europe?”

Cinder shifted to face him more fully, crisscrossing her legs. “There’s a woman who lives there, or at least, she used to live there. She used to be in their military. Her name is Michelle Benoit, and I think she might be connected to the missing princess.” She took in a slow breath, hoping she hadn’t said anything that could give her secret away.

“Where did you hear this?”

“An android told me. A royal android.”

“Oh! Kai’s android?” Iko said, excitedly changing the screen to one of Kai’s fan pages.

Cinder sighed. “Yes, His Majesty’s android.”

Unbeknownst to her at the time, her cyborg brain had recorded every word that the android, Nainsi, had spoken, as if it had known that Cinder would someday need to draw on this information again.

According to Nainsi’s research, a Lunar doctor named Logan Tanner had brought Cinder to Earth when she was still a child, after Levana’s murder attempt had failed. He’d eventually been incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital and committed suicide, but not before passing her off to someone else. Nainsi had thought that someone else was an ex–military pilot from the European Federation.

Wing Commander Michelle Benoit.

“A royal android,” Thorne said, showing the first sign of speculation. “And how did it get this information?”

“That, I have no idea. But I want to find this Michelle Benoit and see if it was right.”

And hope that Michelle Benoit had some answers that Dr. Erland didn’t. Perhaps she could tell Cinder about her history, about those eleven long years lost to her memory, about her surgery and the surgeons and Linh Garan’s invention that had kept Cinder from using her Lunar gift until Dr. Erland had disabled it.

Perhaps she had her own ideas about what Cinder should do next. Ideas that left her some choices for the rest of her life.

“I’m in.”

She started. “You are?”

“Sure. This is the biggest unsolved mystery of the third era. There’s got to be someone out there offering a reward for finding this princess, right?”

“Yeah, Queen Levana.”

Thorne tilted toward her, nudging her with his elbow. “In that case, we already have something in common with the princess, don’t we?” He winked, setting Cinder’s nerves on edge. “I just hope she’s cute.”

“Could you at least try to focus on the important things?”

“That would be important.” Thorne pulled himself up with a groan, still sore from all the rearranging. “Hungry? I think there’s a can of beans in there calling my name.”

“No, I’m fine. Thank you.”

When he had gone, Cinder hefted herself up onto the nearest crate and rolled out her shoulders. The news was still broadcasting on the screen, muted. A ticker read, “Hunt continues for Lunar fugitive Linh Cinder and crown traitor Dmitri Erland.”

Her throat constricted—crown traitor?

She shouldn’t have been surprised. How long had she expected it to take them to figure out who had helped her escape?

Cinder sank onto her back, feet dangling off the crate, and stared at the maze of pipes and bundled wires that cluttered the ship’s rafters. Was she making a mistake by going to Europe? It was a draw she didn’t think she could resist. Not only because of what Nainsi had said, but because of Cinder’s own jumbled memories too. She’d always known that she’d been adopted in Europe and she had the faintest recollection of it. Only drug-muddled memories that she’d always thought might be part dream. A barn. A snow-covered field. A gray sky that never ended. And then a long, long train ride bringing her to New Beijing and her new family.

She felt compelled to go there now. To figure out where she had been during all those lost years and who had taken care of her, who else knew her biggest secret.

But what if she was only avoiding the inevitable? What if this was just a distraction to keep her from going to Dr. Erland and accepting her fate? At least the doctor could teach her how to be Lunar. How to protect herself from Queen Levana.

She didn’t even know how to use her glamour. Not properly anyway.

Pursing her lip, she held her cyborg hand up over her face. Its metal plating shone almost mirror-like beneath the ship’s dim lights. It was so pristine, so well crafted—it did not seem like her hand. Not yet.

Tilting her head, Cinder held up her other, human hand beside it and tried to imagine what it would be like to be fully human. Two limbs made of skin and tissue and bones. Blood pumping in faintly blue veins beneath the surface. All ten fingernails.

An electric current traipsed down her nerves and her cyborg hand began to morph in her vision. Little wrinkles appeared in her knuckles. Tendons stretched beneath her skin. The edges softened. Warmed. Turned to flesh.

She was looking at two hands, two human hands. Small and dainty with perfectly sculpted fingers and delicate, rounded nails. She flexed the fingers of her left hand, forming a fist, then stretched them out again.

An almost giddy laugh fell out of her. She was doing it. She was using her glamour.

She did not need gloves anymore. She could convince everyone that this was real.

No one would ever know she was cyborg again.

The realization was stark and sudden and overwhelming.

And then—too soon—an orange light flickered in the corner of her vision, her brain warning her that what she was seeing was a lie. That this was not real, would never be real.

She sat up with a gasp and squeezed her eyes shut before her retina scanner could start to pick up on all the little inaccuracies and falsehoods like it had done with Levana’s glamour when Cinder had begun to see through it. She was annoyed with herself—disgusted at how easily the desire had come to her.

This was how Levana did it. She kept a hold on her people by tricking both their eyes and their hearts. She ruled with fear, yes, but also with adoration. It would be easy to abuse a person when they never recognized it as abuse.

It was not so different from when she’d glamoured Thorne. She’d owned his mind without even trying to and he’d jumped at the chance to do her bidding.

She sat shivering for a while, listening to Thorne banging around in the galley and humming to himself.

If this was her chance to decide who she was, who she wanted to be, then the first decision was an easy one.

She would never be like Queen Levana.