Cress (24 page)

Pressing her lips, the woman took the portscreen out of his hand. “I will do this,” she said, slipping around the counter and heading toward the front corner of the store.

“That’s what I thought,” he muttered.

Cinder propped her chin on her metal fist, eyeing him. “I never realized royal guard was a mandatory position.”

“Not for everyone. A lot of people want to be chosen. It’s a big honor on Luna.”

“Did you?”

He slid his gaze to her. “Naw. I always wanted to be a doctor.”

His tone was thick with sarcasm, and yet Cinder’s optobionics didn’t peg it as a lie. She crossed her arms. “So. Who were you protecting?”

“What do you mean?”

Something scraped against the floor—the shopkeeper shoving around dusty bins.

“When you were conscripted to be a royal guard. Who would Levana have murdered if you’d refused?”

His pale eyes frosted over. Reaching past the counter, he angled the fan toward himself. “Doesn’t matter. They’re probably going to end up dead anyway.”

Cinder looked away. Because he’d chosen to join her side, his loved ones could suffer. “Maybe not,” she said. “Levana doesn’t know that you betrayed her yet. She could think I glamoured you. That I’m forcing you to help us.”

“And you think that will make a difference?”

“It might.” She watched as the shopkeeper dug through a bin. A fly buzzed near her head and Cinder batted it away. “So how does one get chosen to be a royal guard anyway?”

“There are certain traits they look for.”

“And loyalty isn’t one of them?”

“Why would it be? She can fake loyalty. It’s like with your special-op friend. He would have shown fast reflexes, good instincts, and some amount of common sense. Match him up with a thaumaturge who can turn him into a wild animal, and it no longer matters what he thinks or wants. He just does what he’s told.”

“I’ve seen Wolf fight it,” Cinder said, feeling compelled to defend him now that Scarlet wasn’t here to do it. The first time Cinder had seen Wolf, he’d been covered in blood and crouched threateningly over Scarlet, although Scarlet had always insisted that he wouldn’t have hurt her. That he was different from the others—stronger.

Of course, that was before Wolf had gotten himself shot taking a bullet for a thaumaturge, moments before Scarlet was kidnapped.

“It’s obviously not easy to do,” she amended. “But it is possible for them to fight against the mind control.”

“Lots of good that seems to have done him.”

Locking her jaw, Cinder pressed her metal hand against the back of her neck, letting it cool her down. “He’d rather fight, and lose, than become another one of her pawns. We all would.”

“Good for you. Not everyone’s given that option.”

She noticed that his hand had settled comfortably on the knife sheathed against his thigh. “Clearly Levana didn’t want you for your chattiness. So what were the traits you possessed, that made her think you’d be a good guard?”

That look of smug amusement returned, like he was letting her in on a private joke. “My pretty face,” he said. “Can’t you tell?”

She snorted. “You’re starting to sound like Tho-Thorne.” She stumbled over his name. Thorne, who would never make jokes about his own charisma again.

Jacin didn’t seem to notice. “It’s sad, but true.”

Cinder swallowed her sudden remorse. “Levana chooses her personal guards based on who makes the best wall decorations? I’m suddenly feeling better about our chances.”

“That, and our very weak minds.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Nope. If I’d been good with my gift, I might have made thaumaturge. But the queen wants her guards to be easily controlled. We’re like puppets for her to shuffle around. After all, if we show the slightest resistance to being controlled, it could mean the difference between life and death for Her Majesty.”

Cinder thought of the ball, when she’d had the gun and had tried to shoot Levana. The red-haired guard had jumped in front of the bullet without hesitation. She’d always assumed he’d been doing his duty to protect the queen, that he’d done it willingly, but now she recognized how his movements were too jerky, too unnatural. And how the queen hadn’t even flinched.

She’d been controlling him. Jacin was right. He’d acted just like a puppet.

“But you were able to resist control on the ship.”

“Because Thaumaturge Mira was preoccupied with your operative. Otherwise, I would have been the same brainless mannequin that I usually am.” His tone was self-deprecating, but Cinder could detect bitterness beneath it. Nobody liked to be controlled, and she didn’t think anyone ever got used to it.

“And you don’t think they suspect that you’re…”

“A traitor?”

“If that’s what you are.”

His thumb traced around the knife handle. “My gift is pretty much worthless. I couldn’t even control an Earthen, much less a skilled Lunar. I could never do what you do. But I’ve gotten pretty good at keeping my thoughts empty when the queen or a thaumaturge is around. To them, I have about as much brains and willpower as a tree stump. Not exactly threatening.”

Near the front of the store, the woman started humming to herself as she scavenged for Cinder’s supplies.

“You’re doing it right now, aren’t you?” said Cinder, crossing her arms. “Keeping your thoughts empty.”

“It’s habit.”

Closing her eyes, Cinder felt around for him with her thoughts. His presence was there, but just barely. She knew that she could have controlled him without any effort at all, but the energy rolling off his body didn’t give anything away. No emotions. No opinions. He simply melted into the background. “Huh. I always thought your training must have taught you that.”

“Just healthy self-preservation.”

Furrowing her brow, she opened her eyes again. The man before her was an emotional black hole, according to her Lunar gift. But if he could fool Levana …

She narrowed her eyes. “Lie to me.”

“What?”

“Tell me a lie. It doesn’t have to be a big one.”

He was silent for a long time and she imagined she could hear him sifting through all the lies and truths, weighing them against each other.

Finally, he said, “Levana’s not so bad, once you get to know her.”

An orange light blinked on in the corner of her vision.

At Jacin’s mocking grin, Cinder started to laugh, the tension rising off her shoulders like heat waves off the desert sand. At least her cyborg programming could still tell whether or not he was lying to her. Which meant he hadn’t been lying when he’d said he was loyal to his princess, and his princess alone.

The shopkeeper returned and dumped an armful of different drugs on the counter, scanned the portscreen, whistled, then drifted away again.

“Now that you know all about me,” said Jacin, as if it were anywhere close to true, “I have a question for you.”

“Go for it,” she said, organizing the bottles into neat rows. “My secrets are mostly public knowledge these days.”

“I may be able to hide my emotions from the queen, but I can’t hide the fact that I’m Lunar, and that I can be controlled by her. But when you first came to that ball, your gift seemed nonexistent. Honestly, I thought you were Earthen at first. And I know that’s why the queen and Thaumaturge Mira were taunting you … treating you like a shell, which you might as well have been for how powerless you were.” He stared at Cinder, as if trying to see into the mess of wires and chips in her head. “Then, suddenly, you weren’t powerless anymore. Your gift was practically blinding. Maybe even worse than Levana’s.”

“Gee, thanks,” Cinder muttered.

“So, how did you do it? How could you hide that much power? Levana should have known immediately … we all should have known. Now when I look at you, it’s practically all I see.”

Biting her lip, Cinder glanced toward the mirror over the shop’s small sink. She caught her reflection and wasn’t surprised to find a smudge of dirt on her jaw—how long had it been there?—and strands of hair falling messily out of her ponytail. True to form, the mirror showed her just as she had always been. Plain. Dirty. A cyborg.

She tried to imagine what it would be like to see herself as she saw Levana: frighteningly gorgeous and powerful. But it was impossible with that reflection staring back at her.

That was why Levana despised mirrors so much, but Cinder found her reflection almost comforting. The shopkeeper called her brave and beautiful. Jacin called her blinding. It was kind of nice to know that they were both wrong.

She was still just Cinder.

Tucking a strand of hair behind her ear, she tried her best to explain to Jacin the “bioelectrical security system” her adoptive father had invented and installed on her spinal cord. For years it had prevented her from using her gift, which was why, until recently, she hadn’t known she was Lunar at all. The device was meant to protect her, not only by preventing her from using her gift so that Earthens wouldn’t know what she was, but also to prevent the side effects that most Lunars experienced when they didn’t use their gift for long periods of time—side effects of delusions and depression and madness.

“That’s why you might overhear Dr. Erland babbling to himself sometimes,” she said. “He didn’t use the gift for years after coming to Earth, and now his sanity is—”

“Wait.”

She paused, not only because Jacin had spoken, but because something had changed in the air around him. A sudden spike of emotion, catching Cinder off guard.

“This device kept you from losing your mental stability? Even though you weren’t using your gift for … for years?”

“Well, it
kept
me from using my gift in the first place, and also protected me from those side effects.”

He turned his face away from her and took a minute to school his features back into nonchalance, but it was too late. There was a new intensity behind his eyes as he grasped the implications.

A device that could take away a person’s Lunar gift would make them all equal.

“Anyway,” said Cinder, rubbing the back of her neck where the device was still installed, though now broken. “Dr. Erland disabled it. My gift had been coming and going for a couple weeks before the ball, but then all the emotional stress overwhelmed my system, and the device, and—there I was. Fully Lunar. Not a moment too soon.” She cringed, recalling the sensation of a gun pressed against her temple.

“Do any more of these devices exist?” he said, his eyes strangely bright.

“I don’t think so. My stepfather died before it was fully tested, and as far as I know he didn’t manufacture any others. Although he may have left behind some plans or blueprints that explain how it works.”

“Doesn’t seem possible. An invention like that … it could change everything.” He shook his head, staring into space as the shopkeeper returned and set a basket full of supplies on the counter. She grabbed the bottles from before and threw them on top, along with Cinder’s portscreen.

“This is perfect,” said Cinder, pulling the basket toward her. “Thank you so much. The doctor said you could put it on his tab?”

“No payment from Cinder Linh,” said the woman, waving one hand, while she pulled a portscreen out of her apron pocket. “But—may I take your picture for my net profile? My first celebrity!”

Cinder flinched away from her. “Er … I’m sorry. I’m not really doing the picture thing these days.”

The woman wilted in disappointment, tucking her port back into her pocket.

“Sorry, really. I’ll talk to the doctor about paying you, all right?” She hauled the basket off the counter without waiting to hear another argument.

“Not doing pictures these days?” Jacin muttered as they hurried through the shop. “How very Lunar of you.”

Cinder glared against the sudden, burning sunlight. “Very wanted criminal of me too.”

Twenty-Six

Although Scarlet’s thoughts were as thick as mud, her fingers were nimble and fast, dancing through the familiar motions of powering down the podship. Just like all those nights she returned to the farm after finishing her deliveries. She could almost smell the musty tang of her grandmother’s hangar, combined with the fresh, earthy breeze coming off the fields. She lowered the landing gear and eased down the brakes. The ship settled, humming idly for a moment before she shut down the engine, and it fell silent.

Something thumped behind her. A woman began to yell shril-ly, her anger made sticky and confusing in Scarlet’s cobwebbed brain.

A headache began to throb in the front of her skull, gradually taking over her entire head. Scarlet flinched and leaned back in the pilot’s seat, pressing her palms over her eyes to block out the pain, the swamp of confusion, the sudden piercing light that burst through her vision.

She groaned, slumping forward. No harness caught her like she’d expected and soon she was hunched over her knees, taking full, gasping breaths as if she’d nearly drowned.

Her mouth was dry, her jaw aching as if she’d been grinding her teeth for hours. But as she held very still, and choked on very deep breaths, the throbbing in her head began to subside. Her thoughts cleared. The muffled yelling sharpened and spiked.

Scarlet opened her eyes. A surge of nausea passed over her, but she swallowed hard and let it pass.

She knew instantly that this was not her delivery ship, and she was not in her grandmother’s hangar. The smell was all wrong, the floorboards too clean.…

“… want Lieutenant Hensla sent down immediately, along with a full team for scouting and ship identification…”

The woman’s voice shot like electricity through Scarlet’s nerves, and she remembered. The ship, the attack, the gun in her hand, the bullet hitting Wolf in the chest, the sense of hollowness as the thaumaturge burrowed into her brain, took over her thoughts, took away all sense of identity and will.

“… use the shuttle’s history to track the last location, and see if it has any lingering connectivity to the main ship. They may have gone to Earth. Figure it out.
Find her.
”

Scarlet raised her head enough that she could peer out of the podship’s side window. Luna. She was on Luna, docked in an enclosed space that was nothing at all like the hangars she had known or the podship dock of the Rampion. It was large enough to house a dozen shuttles, and a few were already lined up alongside hers, their sleek shapes ornamented with the royal Lunar insignia. The walls were jagged and black, but speckled with small glowing lights, to mimic a nonexistent sky. A faint light was glowing up from the ground, so that the shadows of the podships stretched like birds of prey along the cavernous walls.