Winter

“This rebellion has gone on quite long enough. No food or supplies are to be sent to the outer sectors unless they are prepared to beg for forgiveness. It is time the citizens of Luna were reminded how lucky they are to have me.” Her heart fluttered with anticipation. “And send for Dr. Evans. I have a special task for him.”

“And the princess, My Queen?”

“Do not worry about your darling disfigured princess.” Sneering, Levana leaned forward and dragged her thumb across Aimery’s jaw, gathering a splattered drop of wine. “I will deal with her myself, as I should have done a long time ago.”

BOOK Four

“Are you afraid of poison?” asked the old woman.

“Here, I will cut the apple in two. You eat the red half,

and I shall eat the white.”

Sixty-One

Cinder was frustrated by her own helplessness. They’d moved into the mansion’s recreational room. Until then, Cinder hadn’t known mansions came with recreational rooms. She was doing her best to dictate to the others what needed to be done in order to extract the video she’d tried to take in the throne room, and how to fix her leg and brain-machine interface. But while they were running around gathering supplies, she was seated on a lavish sofa with her useless hunk-of-metal leg. She hated knowing she could have had everything working again easily enough if she was back in her workshop in New Beijing. If she had the right tools. If she wasn’t the machinery that needed fixing.

She tried to be grateful. She had survived the queen’s attempted execution and she hadn’t drowned in Artemisia Lake. She was with her friends again and Iko hadn’t been destroyed after all—had, in fact, been helped by one of Aimery’s own guards, which confirmed what Jacin had told her once before. Not everyone in the palace was as loyal to Levana as she wanted to think.

On top of all that, she might have video footage of Queen Levana that would show what lay beneath her glamour. It could be the best weapon they had against her and her mind control.

If the footage hadn’t been destroyed in the water, that is.

“Thorne, pry off the back panel of that receiver, but gently. Jacin, what did you find in the security panel?”

“A bunch of wires.” Jacin dumped a handful of wires and a databoard onto the floor.

Cinder nudged at the wires with her good foot. “A few of these should work. Help me turn this table over. It’s similar to the holographic game boards we have on Earth, so I think…” She grabbed one of the table legs with her good hand, but her injured shoulder resisted when she tried to turn it over. Jacin grabbed it from her and did it himself, and Cinder felt a twitch developing in her left eye. She tried not to be resentful. It wasn’t his fault she was still tender from where the wolf soldier had bitten her, and at least the numbing pain salve they’d found was performing miracles.

“There’s not going to be blood when we open you up, is there?” said Thorne, carrying the receiver over to Cinder so she could pick through its inner workings. “I mean, we’re talking strictly cybernetics, right?”

“Better be.” She scanned the inner workings of the receiver while Thorne and Jacin disassembled the VR gaming table. The setup was different from anything they had on Earth—different-colored wires, different-size plugs and connectors, but it all functioned with similar technology and the same basic principles. “It’s not so much surgery as … maintenance. Our biggest concern is whether or not all the hardware will be compatible. The technology is similar, but it’s changed enough since Luna and Earth stopped trading with each other that … I guess we’ll see.” She glanced at the gaming table as Thorne pried off the side panel, revealing the inner workings. “Oh, perfect!” Leaning forward, she pried up the fiber mode converter. “We can use this.”

Iko and Cress strolled into the room, Cress carrying a wooden box.

“They have a workshop out back,” said Iko. She was wearing a shimmering pink shirt she’d found in the house, mostly to cover up the bullet hole in her torso and the slash in the back of her right shoulder. Cinder hoped that once she was fixed, she’d be able to at least make Iko’s arm functional again too.

“I found everything on your list except the demagnetized three-pronged parts retriever. But I did find some tweezers in the bathroom?” She twirled the tweezers between her good fingers.

Twisting her mouth, Cinder took the tweezers and flicked a stray eyebrow hair from their tip. “We’ll make them work.” She surveyed the pile of tools and spare parts they’d accumulated from technology all over the mansion. Without being able to see inside her own head and offer an accurate diagnosis, it was difficult to know what they were going to need to fix her, but if it wasn’t included in this pile, they had little hope of finding it here. “We’ll need a lamp so you can see what you’re doing. And what about a hand mirror? We can hold it up so I can see inside.”

Jacin shook his head. “Not in this city.”

Cinder scowled. “Right, fine. We’re going to extract the data off the vid-chip first, then we’ll focus on the retina display. My eyes are still communicating with my optical nerve, so my best guess is there’s been a disruption of data transfer from my control panel to the display. Could be as simple as a damaged wire. Once we have that working, I should be able to run my internal diagnostics and figure out what’s wrong with my hand and leg.” She pointed at a virtual reality viewing chair. “Drag that over here.”

Jacin complied, and Cinder pulled herself into the chair, facing backward so she could drape her arms over the back. She rested her forehead on them. “Cress?”

“Ready when you are.”

“All right. Let’s see what we can find.”

Iko brushed Cinder’s hair off to one side and dug a fingernail into the latch in the back of Cinder’s skull. Cinder felt the panel swing open.

“Oh, sure,” said Thorne. “When I open her head panel, she yells at me. When Iko does it, she’s a hero.”

Cinder glared at him over her folded arms. “Would you like to do this?”

He grimaced. “Not even a little bit.”

“Then back up and give them space to work.” She laid her forehead down again. “All right, Iko. There’s a cable insert on the left side of the control panel.”

Someone turned on a lamp and bright light edged around her vision.

“I see it,” said Iko. “Cress, you have that port?”

“And connector cable, right here.”

Cinder heard them shuffling behind her, brushing more of her hair out of the way. There was a click, muffled inside her own head. A shudder coursed through her. It had been a while since an external device had been plugged into her processor. The last time had been when she’d drained her power source getting the Rampion into space, right after they’d escaped from New Beijing Prison. Thorne had had to recharge her with a podship plug.

The time before that she’d been in a research lab, strapped to a table while a med-droid downloaded the statistics of her cybernetic makeup.

She really, really hated having things plugged into her head.

She forced herself to take deep breaths. It was only Iko and Cress. She knew what they were plugging into her and what data they were extracting. It was not a violation. It was not an invasion.