Cress (31 page)

“See, it’s all just business,” continued Jamal. “You lost her, we took her. At least you got a pretty new toy out of the deal, so try not to feel too upset.”

Grimacing, Thorne tightened his grip around the cane and brought it up as hard as he could, right between Jamal’s legs.

Jamal roared. Backing up, Thorne swung the cane toward his head. It cracked hard, but was quickly jerked out of his hand as Jamal let off a stream of curses.

Thorne reached for the gun that had been nearly forgotten since he and Cress had left the satellite. He pulled it from his waistband and took aim. Screams from the other people in the hall bounced down the corridors, followed by the slamming of doors and the pounding of feet on the stairway.

“From this distance,” he said, “I’m pretty sure I can hit you a few times. I wonder how many shots I can get in before I get a fatal one.” He listed his head. “Then I guess I’ll just take your portscreen, which probably has all your business contacts in it. You said something about a doctor in … Fara-whatta? I guess we’ll try him first.”

He released the safety.

“Wait,
wait
! You’re right. They were taking her to Farafrah, just a tiny oasis, about three hundred kilometers northeast of here. There’s some doctor there who has a thing for Lunar shells.”

Thorne took a step back into the hallway, though he kept the gun up and ready. “Escort-droid, you still there?”

“Yes, Master. Can I be of assistance?”

“Get me the coordinates of a town called Farafrah, and the fastest way to get there.”

“You’re an idiot to go after her,” said Jamal. “She’ll already be sold, and that old man isn’t going to pay for her twice. You should just cut your losses and move on. She’s just a Lunar shell—she isn’t worth it.”

“If you honestly believe that,” said Thorne, stowing the gun again, “then you really don’t recognize true value when you see it.”

Thirty-Three

Cress crouched in the corner of the van, gripping her knees against her chest. She was trembling, despite the sweltering heat. She was thirsty and hungry and her shins were bruised where they’d collided with the van’s ledge. Though she’d pulled down the bolts of fabric to sit on, the constant jerking of the truck on the uneven ground made her backside ache.

The night was so dark she couldn’t see her hand in front of her face, but sleep wouldn’t come. Her thoughts were too erratic as she tried to discern what these people wanted with her. She’d played the moments before her capture over in her head a hundred times, and Jina’s expression had definitely lit up when Cress had confirmed Jina’s suspicions.

She was a shell. A worthless shell.

Why had Jina sensed value in that?

She racked her brain, but nothing made sense.

She tried her best to remain calm. Tried to be optimistic. Tried to tell herself that Thorne would come for her, but doubts kept crowding out the hope.

He couldn’t see. He didn’t know where she’d gone. He probably didn’t even know she was missing yet, and when he found out … what if he thought she’d abandoned him?

What if he didn’t care?

She couldn’t forget the image of Thorne sitting at that card table with some strange girl draped over him. He hadn’t been thinking about Cress then.

Perhaps Thorne wouldn’t come for her.

Perhaps she’d been wrong about him all this time.

Perhaps he wasn’t a hero at all, but just a selfish, arrogant, womanizing—

She sobbed, her head cluttered with too much fear and anger and jealousy and horror and confusion, all of it writhing and squirming in her thoughts until she couldn’t keep her frustrated screams bottled up any longer.

She wailed, scrunching her hair in her fists until her scalp burned.

But her screams died out fast, replaced with clenched teeth as she attempted to calm herself again. She rubbed her fingers around her wrists as if she had long strands of hair to wrap around them. She swallowed hard in an attempt to gulp down the rising panic, to keep herself from hyperventilating.

Thorne would come for her. He was a hero. She was a damsel. That’s how the stories went—that’s how they
always went.

With a groan, she settled into her corner and started to cry again, cried until no more tears would come.

Suddenly, she jolted awake.

There was salt dried on her cheeks and her back ached from being hunched over. Her butt and sides were bruised from the bumping of the van, which, she realized, had come to a stop.

She was instantly alert, the grogginess shaken off by a new wave of fear. There was a hint of light coming through the cracks around the doors, which meant they’d driven through the night. A door slammed and she could make out Jina’s chatter, no longer friendly and comforting. The van shook as the driver got out.

“Making good time,” Cress heard a man say. “Someone want to help me back here?”

Another man laughed. “Can’t take the little waif yourself?”

Jina’s voice cut through their boasting. “Try not to bruise her. I want top payment this time, and you know how he negotiates. Nitpicking every little thing.”

Cress gulped as the boots came closer. She steeled herself. She would lunge. She would fight. She would be ferocious. Bite and scratch and kick if she had to. She would take him by surprise.

And then she would run. Fast as a cheetah, graceful as a gazelle.

It was still early. The sand would be cool on her bare feet. Her blisters were almost healed, and while her legs still ached horribly, she could ignore them. Hopefully they would deem her not worth coming after.

Or maybe they would shoot her.

She gulped down the thought. She had to take the risk.

The lock clanked. She took in a deep breath, waited for the door to open—and pounced. A guttural scream was ripped out of her, all her anger and vulnerability swelling up and unleashing in that one vicious moment as her clawed fingers scrabbled for his eyes.

The man caught her. Two hands snapped around her pale wrists. Her momentum kept her careening outside the truck and she would have tumbled to the sand if he hadn’t held her half suspended. Her war cry was abruptly cut off.

The man started to laugh—laughing at her, at her pathetic attempts to overpower him.

“She is a tiger, I’ll give you that,” he said to the man who had teased him. He twisted Cress around so he could hold both of her wrists in one firm grip. Her body still dangled from his hold as he began marching her away from the van and into the dunes.

“Let me go!” she shrieked, kicking back at him, but he was undeterred by her flailing. “Where are you taking me? Let me go!”

“Calm down, little girl, I’m not going to hurt you. Wouldn’t be worth it.” He snorted and dropped her down the other side of the dune.

She stumbled and rolled a couple times in the sand before bolting into a crouch. She swiped hair and sand from her face. By the time she looked up at the man, he had a gun pinned on her.

Her heart sputtered.

“Try to run, I shoot. And I don’t mean to kill. But you’re smarter than that, aren’t you? You’ve got nowhere to go anyway, right?”

Cress gulped. She could still hear the voices on the other side of the dune. She hadn’t been able to tell how many caravaners were still along in the group.

“Wh-what do you want from me?”

“I suspect you have business to tend to?”

Standing, she stumbled a bit down the hill, the sand unstable beneath her. The man didn’t flinch. He jerked the barrel of the gun toward her feet. “Go on. It’ll be another few hours before we stop, so better get it out of the way now. Don’t want you losing your water in the back of that nice van. We wouldn’t get our security deposit back, and Jina hates that.”

Her lower lip trembled and she cast another glance around the desert, the wide openness of this barren landscape. She shook her head. “No, I can’t. Not with…”

“Ah, I won’t watch.” To prove his point, he spun around and scratched behind his ear with the gun. “Just make it quick.”

She spotted another man over the dune, faced away from her, and suspected he was relieving himself. Cress turned away, ashamed and embarrassed. She wanted to cry, wanted to beg the man to let her be, to just leave her here. But she knew it wouldn’t work. And she didn’t want to beg this man for anything.

Thorne would come for her,
she thought as she stumbled to the base of the dune in search of what privacy she could find.

Thorne had to come for her.

Thirty-Four

“Fateen-jiĕ?”

The girl spun around, her long black braid swinging against her lab coat. “Your Majesty!”

A ghost smile flickered over Kai’s face. “Do you have a moment to assist us with something?”

“Of course.” Fateen tucked a portscreen into her coat pocket.

Kai moved toward the wall of the white corridor, allowing room for researchers and technicians to pass by. “We need access to some patient records. I realize they’re probably confidential, but…” Kai trailed off. There was no “but,” only a vague hope and a fair amount of confidence that his title was the only credential he needed.

But Fateen’s gaze darkened as they flickered between him and Torin. “Patient records?”

“A few weeks ago,” said Kai, “I came to check on Dr. Erland’s progress and Linh Cinder was here. The Lunar cyborg from—”

“I know who Linh Cinder is,” she said, her hardness fading as quickly as it had come.

“Right, of course.” He cleared his throat. “Well, at the time, the doctor told me she was there fixing a med-droid, but I was thinking about it, and I thought maybe she had actually been a…”

“A draft subject?”

“Yes.”

Fateen shrugged. “Actually, she was a volunteer. Come on, there should be a vacant lab you can use. I’m happy to pull up Linh Cinder’s records for you.”

He and Torin followed her, Kai wondering whether she would have been as accommodating had it been any other patient. Since the arrest, Linh Cinder had become a matter of public concern, and therefore her private records weren’t so private anymore.

“She was a volunteer? Really?”

“Yes. I was here the day she was brought in. They’d had to override her system to get her in here. I guess she put up quite a fight when they came for her.”

Kai frowned. “Why would a volunteer put up a fight?”

“I’m using
volunteer
in the official sense. I believe her legal guardian recommended her for the testing.” She swiped her wrist over an ID scanner, then ushered them into Lab 6D. The room smelled of bleach and peroxide and every surface glistened to a perfect shine. A counter along the far wall was set before a window overlooking a quarantine room. Kai grimaced, reminded of his father’s last days spent in a room not entirely unlike that one, although his had been equipped with blankets and pillows, his favorite music, a tranquil water fountain. The patients who came to these labs would not have received the same luxuries.

Fateen paced to the adjoining wall. “Screen, on,” she said, tapping something into her portscreen. “I do believe these records were a part of the investigation following her jailbreak, Your Majesty. Do you think the detectives may have missed something?”

He threaded his fingers through his hair. “No. I’m just trying to answer some of my own questions.”

The lab’s log-in screen faded, replaced with a patient profile.
Her
profile.

LINH CINDER, LICENSED MECHANIC

ID
#0097917305

BORN 29 NOV 109 T.E.

RESIDENT OF NEW BEIJING, EASTERN COMMONWEALTH. WARD OF LINH ADRI.

CYBORG RATIO: 36.28%

“Is there something specific you’re looking for?” Fateen asked, sliding her fingers along the screen so that the profile trekked down into blood type (A), allergies (none), and medications (unknown).

Then the plague test. Kai stepped closer. “What’s this?”

“The doctor’s notes from when we injected her with the letumosis microbe solution. How much we gave her and, subsequently, how long it took her body to rid itself of the disease.”

At the end of the study, the simple words.

CONCLUSION: LETUMOSIS IMMUNITY CONFIRMED

“Immunity,” said Torin, coming to stand beside them. “Did we know about this?”

“Perhaps the detectives didn’t think it was relevant to their search? But it’s common knowledge here in the labs. Many of us have theorized it’s a result of her Lunar immune system. There’s a long-held theory that letumosis was brought here by migrating Lunars, who are unaffected carriers of the disease.”

Kai fidgeted with his shirt’s collar. How many Lunars would have had to come to Earth to create such a widespread epidemic? If this theory was correct, they could have a lot more fugitives on the planet than he’d realized. He groaned at the thought—the mere idea of having to deal with more Lunars made him want to beat his head against a wall.

“What does this mean?” asked Torin, pointing to a box at the bottom of the profile.

ADDITIONAL NOTES: FINALLY. I’VE FOUND HER.

The words gave Kai a chill, but he wasn’t sure why.

Fateen shook her head. “Nobody knows. Dr. Erland entered it, but he gave no indication of what it meant. Probably it refers to her immunity—he finally found what he was looking for when she was brought in.” Her tone became bitter. “Though lots of good that did us when
both
of them decided to skip town.”

Fateen’s port pinged and she glanced down on it. “I’m so sorry, Your Majesty. It seems today’s draft subject has just arrived.”

Kai ripped his attention away from those haunting words. “The draft is still in effect?”

“Of course,” Fateen said with a smile, and Kai realized what a stupid question it was. Here he was, the emperor, and he had no idea what was going on in his own country. In his own research labs.

“With Dr. Erland gone, I just thought maybe it was over,” he explained.