Three seconds of staring at that clock made Cinder sick with anxiety. She tore her gaze away, scanning the rest of the netscreen and their ongoing master plan for putting a stop to the wedding between Kai and Queen Levana. A list of needed supplies was jotted down the left side of the screen—weapons, tools, disguises, and now tranquilizer darts.
In the middle of the screen was a blueprint of New Beijing Palace.
On the right, a ridiculously long preparation checklist, none of which had yet to be checked off, though they’d been planning and plotting for days.
Number one on the list was to prepare Cinder for when she would inevitably come face-to-face with Queen Levana and her court again. Though Wolf hadn’t said it outright, she knew her Lunar gift wasn’t improving fast enough. Cinder was beginning to think that item could take years to reach satisfactory completion, and they had only two more weeks.
The rough plan was to cause a distraction on the day of the wedding that would allow them to sneak into the palace during the ceremony and announce to the world that Cinder was truly the lost Princess Selene. Then, with all the world’s media watching, Cinder would demand that Levana relinquish the crown to her, ending both the wedding and her rule in one fell swoop.
Everything that was supposed to follow the wedding blurred in Cinder’s mind. She kept imagining the reactions of the Lunar people when they discovered that their lost princess was not only cyborg, but also entirely ignorant of their world, culture, traditions, and politics. The only thing that kept her chest from being crushed by the weight of it all was the knowledge that, no matter what, she couldn’t possibly be any worse of a ruler than Levana.
She hoped they would see it that way too.
The glass of water sloshed in her stomach. For the thousandth time, a fantasy crept into her thoughts of crawling beneath the covers of her crew-issued bunk bed and hiding until all the world forgot there had ever been a Lunar princess in the first place.
Instead, she turned away from the screen and shook out her muscles. “All right, I’m ready to try again,” she said, settling into the fighting stance that Wolf had taught her.
But Wolf was now sitting beside Scarlet and polishing off her oatmeal. Mouth full, he dipped his eyes to the floor and swallowed. “Push-ups.”
Cinder dropped her arms. “What?”
He gestured at her with the spoon. “Fighting isn’t the only type of physical exertion. We can build your upper body strength and train your mind at the same time. Just try to stay aware of your surroundings. Focus.”
She glowered for five full seconds before dropping to the ground.
She’d counted to eleven when she heard Thorne push himself away from the crate. “You know, when I was a kid, I was tricked into thinking that princesses wore tiaras and hosted tea parties. Now that I’ve met a real princess, I must say, I’m kind of disappointed.”
She didn’t know if he meant it as an insult, but these days the word princess set every one of Cinder’s nerves on edge.
Exhaling sharply, she did just as Wolf had instructed. She focused—easily picking up on Thorne’s energy as he passed by her on his way toward the cockpit.
She was lowering into the fourteenth push-up when she forced his feet to stall beneath him.
“Wha—”
Cinder pushed up and swung one leg forward in a half circle. Her ankle collided with the back of Thorne’s calves. He cried out and fell, landing on his backside with a grunt.
Beaming, Cinder glanced up at Wolf for approval, but both he and Scarlet were too busy laughing. She could even see the sharp points of Wolf’s canine teeth that he was usually so careful to keep hidden.
Cinder stood and offered Thorne a hand. Even he was smiling, though it was coupled with a grimace as he rubbed his hip.
“You can help me pick out a tiara when we’re done saving the world.”
Three
The satellite shuddered as Sybil’s podship disconnected from the docking clamp, and Cress was left alone again in the galaxy. Despite how Cress yearned for companionship, it was always a relief when Sybil left her, and this time even more than usual. Normally her mistress only visited every three or four weeks, just often enough to safely take another blood sample, but this was the third time she’d come since the wolf-hybrid attacks. Cress couldn’t remember her mistress ever seeming so anxious. Queen Levana must have been growing desperate to find the cyborg girl.
“Mistress’s ship has detached,” said Little Cress. “Shall we play a game?”
If Cress hadn’t been so flustered from yet another visit, she would have smiled, as she usually did when Little Cress asked this question. It was a reminder that she wasn’t entirely without companionship.
Cress had learned, years ago, that the word satellite came from a Latin word meaning a companion, or a minion, or a sycophant. All three interpretations had struck her as ironic, given her solitude, until she’d programmed Little Cress. Then she understood.
Her satellite kept her company. Her satellite did her bidding. Her satellite never questioned her or disagreed or had any pesky thoughts of her own.
“Maybe we can play a game later,” she said. “We’d better check the files first.”
“Certainly, Big Sister.”
It was the expected response. The programmed response.
Cress often wondered if that’s what it would be like to be truly Lunar—to have that sort of control over another human being. She would fantasize about programming Mistress Sybil as easily as she’d programmed her satellite’s voice. How the game would change then, if her mistress was to follow her orders for once, rather than the other way around.
“All screens on.”
Cress stood before her panorama of invisi-screens, some large, others small, some set on top of the built-in desk, others bracketed to the satellite walls and angled for optimal viewing no matter where she was in the circular room.
“Clear all feeds.”
The screens went blank, allowing her to see through them to the satellite’s unadorned walls.
“Display compiled folders: Linh Cinder; 214 Rampion, Class 11.3; Emperor Kaito of the Eastern Commonwealth. And…” She paused, enjoying the rush of anticipation that passed through her. “Carswell Thorne.”
Four screens filled up with the information Cress had been collecting. She sat down to review the documents she’d all but memorized.
On the morning of 29 August, Linh Cinder and Carswell Thorne escaped from New Beijing Prison. Four hours later, Sybil had given Cress her orders—find them. The command, Cress later discovered, came from Queen Levana herself.
Scrounging up information on Linh Cinder had taken her only three minutes—but then, almost all the information she’d found was fake. A fake Earthen identity written up for a girl who was Lunar. Cress didn’t even know how long Linh Cinder had been on Earth. She’d simply popped into existence five years ago, when she was (supposedly) eleven years old. Her biography had family and school records prior to the “hover accident” that had killed her “parents” and resulted in her cyborg operation, but that was all false. One had to follow Linh Cinder’s ancestry back only two generations before they hit a dead-end. The records had been written to deceive.
Cress glanced at the folder still downloading information on Emperor Kaito. His file was immeasurably longer than the others, as every moment of his life had been recorded and filed away—from net fangroups to official government documentation. Information was being added all the time, and it had exploded since the announcement of his engagement to the Lunar queen. None of it was helpful. Cress closed the feed.