Scarlet

Cinder dared to peer through the grate again and saw a ship wheeling its way beneath them, backing up toward a recessed loading bay and stopping directly between Cinder and Thorne and the storm drain.

“Morning, Ryu-jūn,” said the man as the pilot descended from the ship. The rest of their greetings were drowned out by the hydraulics hissing on an adjustable platform.

Taking advantage of the noise, Cinder used her screwdriver to remove the grate. When she gave Thorne a nod, he carefully eased it up.

Sweat trickled down Cinder’s neck and her heart was palpitating so hard she thought it might bruise the inside of her rib cage. Lowering her head, she peered around the dock, checking for any other signs of life and spotted, not arm’s distance away on the concrete ceiling, a rotating camera.

She jerked back inside, pulse hissing in her ears. Luckily the camera had been facing the other direction, but still, there was no way they would both make it down undetected. Then there were the three workers unloading the delivery to deal with, and every moment gone was one more moment toward some guard discovering their empty cells.

She shut her eyes, imagining where the camera was, before snaking her arm out. Her hand floundered, flat against the ceiling—the camera was farther than it had seemed in that momentary glance—but then her fingers found it. She grasped the lens and squeezed. The plastic was crushed as easy as a plum in her titanium fist, making a satisfying crunching sound that seemed deafeningly loud.

She listened, relieved as the same sounds of shuffling and chatting continued below.

Their time was up. It wouldn’t be more than a minute now before someone realized a camera had been disabled.

Raising her head, she nodded at Thorne and pulled herself forward over the opening.

She dropped onto the roof of the delivery ship and it clanged and shuddered beneath her. Thorne followed, landing with a muffled grunt.

The talking silenced.

Cinder spun around as three figures emerged from the loading bay, their faces contorted in confusion.

They spotted her and Thorne standing atop the ship and froze. Cinder could see them taking in the white uniforms. Her cyborg hand.

One of the men reached for the portscreen on his belt.

Clenching her jaw, Cinder held her hand out to him, thinking only of how he could not get to his port, could not send out an alarm. Thinking of his hand petrified in space just centimeters from his belt.

At her will, his hand stalled and hung motionless.

His eyes filled with terror.

“Don’t move,” said Cinder, her voice hoarse, guilt already clawing at her throat. She knew she was every bit as panicked as the three people standing before her, and yet the fear on their faces was unmistakable.

The burning sensation returned, starting at the top of her neck and spreading down through her spine, her shoulders and hips, stinging where it met her prostheses. It wasn’t painful or sudden like it had been when Dr. Erland had first unlocked her Lunar gift. Rather, it was almost comforting—almost pleasant.

She could sense the three people standing on the platform, the bioelectricity rolling off them in waves, crackling in the air, ready to be controlled.

Turn around.

In unison, the three workers turned around, their bodies stiff and awkward.

Close your eyes. Cover your ears. She hesitated before adding, Hum.

Instantly, the buzz of three people humming filled what had become a silent delivery dock. She hoped it would be enough to keep them from hearing the grate open in the concrete floor. Her only hope was that they would assume she and Thorne had left through the dock exit or smuggled themselves aboard a delivery ship.

Thorne was staring, slack jawed, when Cinder turned back to him. “What are they doing?”

“Obeying,” she said heavily, hating herself for making the command. Hating the hums that filled her ears. Hating this gift that was too unnatural, too powerful, too unfair.

But the thought to release her control over them never crossed her mind.

“Come on,” she said, half jumping, half sliding off the ship. She crawled beneath it and found the grate between the landing wheels. Though her hands were shaking, she managed to twist the grate a quarter turn and pull it up.

A shallow pool of standing water glistened up at her in the darkness.

The fall wasn’t far, but her bare feet landing in the oily water made her queasy. Thorne was beside her in a second, replacing the grate over the hole.

There was a round concrete tunnel set into the wall, barely reaching Cinder’s stomach and filled with the stench of garbage and mildew. Wrinkling her nose, Cinder crouched and crawled into it.

Seven

The cluster of icons on Emperor Kai’s netscreen was growing denser by the hour, not only because there were so many things for the new emperor to read and sign, but because he wasn’t putting much effort into reading or signing any of them. With fingers buried in his hair, he gazed blankly at the inset netscreen panel currently elevated out of his desk and watched the icons multiply with a growing sense of dread.

He should have been sleeping, but after countless hours of staring at the shadows above his bed, he’d finally given up and decided to come here instead and attempt to do something productive. He was dying for a distraction. Any distraction.

Anything to chase away the thoughts that kept rotating around in his brain.

So much for those good intentions.

Taking in a measured breath, Kai glanced up at the empty office. It was supposed to be his father’s office, but the room struck Kai as far too extravagant to be a place for work. Three ornate tasseled lanterns were lined up on a red-and-gold ceiling, hand-painted with elegant dragons. A holographic fireplace was set into the wall to his left. A sitting area with carved cypress furniture surrounded a miniature bar in the far corner. Silent videos of Kai’s mother shimmered from picture frames by the door, sometimes paired with flashes of Kai growing up, and sometimes all three of them together.

Nothing had changed since his father’s death, except the room’s owner.

And perhaps the smell. Kai seemed to recall the aroma of his father’s aftershave, but now there was the distinct stench of bleach and chemicals—remnants of the cleaning crew scrubbing the room raw after his father first had contracted letumosis, the plague that had killed hundreds of thousands of people all over Earth in the past decade.

Kai’s attention fell from the pictures and snagged on the small metal foot that sat on the corner of his desk, its joints caked with grease. Like a revolving wheel, his thoughts came full circle yet again.

Linh Cinder.

Stomach tightening, he set down the stylus that he’d been gripping and reached for the foot, but his fingers stalled before they could get to it.

It belonged to her, the pretty young mechanic at the market. The girl who was so easy to talk to. The girl who was so authentic, who didn’t pretend to be something she wasn’t.

Or so he’d thought.

His fingers tightened into a fist and he drew back, wishing he had someone he could talk to.

But his father was gone. And now Dr. Erland was gone too, having resigned from his position, and left without even saying good-bye.

There was Konn Torin, his father’s, and now his, adviser. But Torin, with his ever-present diplomacy and logic, would never understand. Kai wasn’t sure he even understood what it was he felt when he thought of Cinder. Linh Cinder, who had lied to him about everything.

She was cyborg.

He couldn’t dismiss the memory of her lying at the base of the garden steps, a foot disconnected from her leg, a white-hot metal hand having melted away the remnants of a silk glove—gloves that had been his gift to her.

He should have been repulsed by her. Reliving the memory again and again, he tried to be repulsed by the sparking wires and her grime-packed knuckles and the knowledge that she had fake neural receptors taking messages to and from her brain. She was not natural. She was probably a charity case, and he couldn’t help but wonder if her family had paid for the operation or if it had been government funded. He wondered who had taken such pity on her that they’d determined to give her a second life when her human body had been so damaged. He wondered what had caused her body to be that damaged in the first place, or if perhaps she was born disfigured.

He wondered and wondered and knew he should have been more disturbed by each unanswered question.

But he wasn’t. It was not her being cyborg that had curdled his stomach.

Rather, his repugnance had started the moment his vision of her flickered as if she were a broken netscreen. He’d blinked, and she was no longer a helpless, rain-soaked cyborg, but the most intensely beautiful girl he’d ever laid eyes on. She was blindingly, breathtakingly stunning, with flawless tanned skin and shining eyes and an expression so ravishing it threatened to buckle his knees.

Her Lunar glamour had been even more striking than Queen Levana’s, and her beauty was painful.

Kai knew that’s what it had been: Cinder’s glamour, fading in and out even as he stood above her, trying to make sense of what he was seeing.

What he didn’t know was how many times she’d glamoured him before that. How many times she’d tricked him. How many times she’d made him out to be a complete fool.

Or had the girl at the market, muddied and disheveled, been the real girl after all? The girl who had risked her life to come to the ball to give Kai a warning, unsteady cyborg foot and all …

“It doesn’t matter,” he said to his empty office, the disconnected foot.

Whoever Linh Cinder was, she was no longer his concern. Soon Queen Levana would be returning to Luna, and she would take Cinder back as her prisoner. It was the arrangement Kai had agreed to.

At the ball, he had been forced to make a choice, and had refused Levana’s offer of a marriage alliance once and for all. He was determined to never subject his people to life beneath such a heartless empress, and by that point Cinder had been his last bargaining chip. Peace, in exchange for the cyborg. His people’s freedom, in exchange for the Lunar girl who had dared to defy her queen.

It was impossible to know how long such an arrangement would last. Levana still refused to sign the peace treaty that would ally Luna with the Earthen Union. Her desire to be either empress or conqueror would not be sated long by the sacrifice of a mere girl.

And next time, Kai didn’t think he would have anything else to offer.

Crumpling his hair, Kai pulled his attention back to the amendment on the netscreen and read the first sentence three times, waiting for the words to register. He had to think of something else, anything else, before the never-ending questions drove him insane.

A monotone voice interrupted him, making him jump. “Entrance requested for Royal Adviser Konn Torin and Chairman of National Security Huy Deshal.”

Kai glanced at the time. 06:22.