Cress (16 page)

“I think we’re in northern Africa,” she said, turning around to scan the other constellations that were emerging from the ocean of stars. “Or possibly the Commonwealth, in one of the western provinces.”

Thorne’s brow knit together. “Could be the Sahara.” His shoulders began to slump and Cress saw the moment when he realized that it made no difference what hemisphere they were in, what country. It was still a desert. They were still trapped. “We can’t stand here stargazing all night,” he said, bending down to pick up the bag of supplies and resituate it on his shoulder. “Let’s keep heading toward those mountains.”

Cress tried to offer him her elbow again, but Thorne only gave it a gentle squeeze before letting go. “Throws off my balance,” he said, testing the length of the cane so he could walk without spearing it into the ground again. “I’ll be fine.”

Burying her disappointment, Cress started up the dune. She announced the top when they reached it, and continued down the other side.

Seventeen

Scarlet was piloting the podship. She could not recall how long she had been flying it, or where she had been before, or how she had ended up behind these controls. But she knew very well
why
she was there.

Because she wanted to be.

Because she
needed
to be.

If she did well, she would be rewarded. The thought made her feel joyful. Eager. Willing.

And so she flew fast. She flew steady. She allowed the little ship to become an extension of her. Her hands gripping the controls, her fingers dancing over the instruments. She had never flown so well, not since the day her grandmother had begun teaching her in the delivery ship around the farm. How the ship had warbled under her unskilled hands. How it rocked and sank, its landing gear brushing against the just-tilled dirt, then miraculously drifted back up toward the sky as her grandmother’s patient voice talked her through the steps …

The memory disappeared as fast as it had come, snapping her back into the podship, and she could not remember what she had just been thinking. She could only think of this flight. This moment. This responsibility.

She paid no heed to the stars blurring out in all directions. She gave no thought to the planet falling farther and farther behind her.

In the ship’s backseat, the woman was hissing and cursing as she tended to her wound. She was upset, and this alone bothered Scarlet, because she wanted the woman to be pleased.

Eventually, the angry muttering died down and then the woman was talking. Scarlet’s heart fluttered, until she realized that it was not to her that the woman was speaking. Rather, she had sent out a comm. She heard two words that sent a bolt of panic through her—
Your Majesty.

She was talking to the queen herself.

It occurred to Scarlet that this knowledge should terrify her, but she couldn’t recall why. Rather, she felt embarrassed to be listening in. It wasn’t her place to be curious. She tried to ignore the conversation, allowing her mind to muddle and wander. Inside her head, she recited childhood rhymes that she hadn’t thought of in years.

It mostly worked. Only when a name broached her consciousness did curiosity overcome her.

Linh Cinder.

“No, I could not capture her. I was overpowered. I am sorry, Your Majesty. I have failed you. Yes, I have already sent the last-known coordinates of the ship to the royal guard. I was able to capture a hostage, Your Majesty. One of her accomplices. Perhaps she has information on where Linh Cinder might go next, or what her plan could be. I know it isn’t good enough, Your Majesty. I will make this up to you, Your Majesty. I
will
find her.”

The conversation ended and Scarlet’s ears burned at having eavesdropped. She was ashamed. She deserved punishment.

In an attempt to make up for her delinquency, she refocused on her task. Flying as smooth and fast as any pilot had ever flown. She thought only of how she must fly well. She thought only of how she must make her mistress proud of her.

She felt no awe as she approached the great, crater-filled Luna with its gleaming white surface and sparkling domed cities.

Cities that were home to countless strangers.

Cities that had been
his
home, once …

She flinched at the intrusive thought. She did not know what it meant. She could not remember who
he
was.

But this was where he came from …

She suppressed the voice out of nervous panic that her mistress would sense her confusion. She did not want that. There was no confusion.

She knew precisely where she wanted to be. Precisely who she wished to be serving.

Scarlet felt no fear as the moon dwarfed the tiny ship, expanded until it was all she could see through the glass.

She paid no attention to the hot tears as they crept down her cheeks and dripped soundlessly into her lap.

Eighteen

It didn’t take long for Cress and Thorne to fall into a pattern. As Thorne became more comfortable with the movement of the sand underneath them and the sensation of the cane in his hand, he grew more confident, and their pace increased. Three dunes. Five. Ten. Before long, Cress realized that it took a lot less energy to stay in the valleys between the dunes when they could, so she began cutting a slower, yet less exhausting zigzag route across the desert.

As she walked, the towels around her feet began to loosen and grains of sand slipped in and got caught between her toes, despite how tight Thorne had tied the ropes of hair. The soles of her feet began to burn and a cramp was threatening to overtake her left foot from the constant grab and release of her toes on the unstable ground. Her legs ached. Cress’s body began to rebel as they rambled up yet another dune. Her thighs would burn as she crested one more hill—but then her shins would cry out as they descended the other side. Her silly fitness routines aboard the satellite hadn’t prepared her for this.

But she did not complain. She panted a great deal. She swiped at the sweat drops on her temples. She clenched her jaw against the hurt. But she did not complain.

At least she could see, she reminded herself. And at least she didn’t have to carry the supplies. She heard Thorne switch shoulders from time to time, but he didn’t complain either.

Sometimes when they struck a flat spot, she closed her eyes to see how long she could go without opening them. Vertigo would set in almost immediately. Panic would blossom at the base of her spine and crawl up it until she was sure each new step would bring her in contact with a rock or a small hill and she would stumble face-first into the sand.

The fourth time she did it, Thorne asked her why they kept slowing down. She kept her eyes open after that.

“Do you need to take a break?” Thorne asked, hours later.

“N-no,” she huffed, her thighs burning. “We’re almost to the top of this dune.”

“Sure? No point passing out from exhaustion.”

She breathed a sigh of relief upon reaching the top of the dune, but dread quickly took its place. She didn’t know why she’d expected this dune to be different from the dozens they’d already crested. She didn’t know why she’d been thinking that this must have marked the end of the desert, because she didn’t think she could go much farther.

But it was not the end. The world was made of more dunes, more sand, more nothingness.

“Really. Let’s take a break,” Thorne said, setting down the pack and stabbing the cane into the ground. He spent a moment working the kinks from his shoulders, before hunching over and undoing the bundle’s knot. He handed Cress one of the water bottles and took another for himself.

“Shouldn’t we ration it?” she asked.

He shook his head. “It’s best to drink when we’re thirsty, and just try to keep sweating to a minimum—as much as possible. Our bodies will be better able to maintain hydration that way, even if we do run out of water. And we should avoid eating until we find another water source. Digestion uses up a lot of water too.”

“That’s fine. I’m not hungry.” Which was true—the heat seemed to have stolen what appetite she’d had.

When she’d drank all she could, Cress handed the bottle back to Thorne and fantasized about collapsing into the sand and going to sleep, but she dared not, fearing she would never get up again. When Thorne lifted the pack, she took off down the hill without question.

“What do you think is happening on your ship?” Cress asked as they descended the hill. The question had been echoing in her mind for hours, but the water had finally made her capable of speech. “Do you think Mistress Sybil…”

“They’re fine,” Thorne said, with unrelenting confidence. “I pity the person who goes up against Wolf, and Cinder’s made of tougher stuff than people realize.” A pause, before a hearty laugh burst through the quiet desert air. “Literally, in fact.”

“Wolf. That must be the other man on the ship?”

“Yes, and Scarlet is his … well, I don’t really know what they call themselves, but he’s lunatic-crazy for her. Scarlet’s not a bad shot, herself. That thaumaturge had no idea what she was walking into.”

Cress hoped he was right. Mistress Sybil had found them because of
her,
and the guilt was as painful as the deep aches in her bones.

“So how did a girl born on Luna get stuck in a satellite and become an Earthen sympathizer, anyway?”

She wrinkled her nose. “Well. When my parents found out I was a shell, they gave me up to be killed, because of the infanticide laws. But Mistress saved me and raised me instead, along with some other shells she’d rescued. She mostly just wanted us for some sort of experiments they’re always running, but Mistress never really explained it to me. We used to live in some of the lava tubes that had been converted into dormitories, and we were always being monitored by these cameras that were connected to Luna’s communication system. It was sort of cramped, but not too bad, and we had ports and netscreens, so we weren’t entirely cut off from the outside world. After a while I got really good at hacking into the communication system, which I mostly just used for silly stuff. We were all curious about school, so I used to hack into the Lunar school system and download the study guides, things like that.”

Cress squinted up at the moon, now so far away. It was hard to believe it’s where she came from. “Then one day, one of the older boys—Julian—asked me if I thought I could find out who his parents were. It took a couple days, but I did, and we learned that his parents lived in one of the lumber domes, and that they were both alive, and that he had two younger siblings. And then we figured out how to send them a message and tell them that he was alive. He thought that if they knew he hadn’t been killed after all, they would come find him. We got so excited, thinking we could all contact our families. That we would all be rescued.” She gulped. “It was really naïve, of course. The next day, Mistress came and took Julian away, and then some technicians removed all of the monitoring equipment so we couldn’t access the net anymore. I never saw Julian again. I think … I think his parents must have contacted the authorities when they got his comm, and I think he may have been killed, to prove that the infanticide laws were being taken seriously.”

She ran her fingers absently through her hair, surprised when they slipped through it so quickly. “After that, Mistress Sybil started to pay more attention to me. She sometimes took me out of the caverns and up into the domes and gave me different tasks. Altering the coding of the broadcast system. Tapping into netlinks. Programming intelligence software to pick up on specific verbal cues and divert information to separate comm accounts. At first I loved it. Mistress was nice to me then, and it meant I got to leave the lava tubes and see some of the city. I felt like I was becoming her favorite, and that if I did what she asked me to do, eventually it wouldn’t matter that I was a shell anymore, and I would be allowed to go to school and be just like any normal Lunar.

“Well, one day Sybil asked me to hack a communication between a couple of European diplomats and I told her that the signal was too weak. I needed to be closer to Earth, and I required better net connectivity, and advanced software…”

Cress shook her head, remembering how she had told Sybil exactly what Sybil would need to craft the satellite for her young prodigy. Cress had practically designed her own prison.

“A few months later, Mistress came to get me, and told me we were going on a trip. We boarded a podship, and I was so, so excited. I thought she was taking me to Artemisia, to be presented to the queen herself, to be forgiven for being born a shell. It feels so stupid now. Even when we started flying away from Luna, and I saw that we were heading toward Earth, I thought that’s where we were going. I figured, all right, maybe Lunars really can’t accept me this way, but Mistress knows that Earthens will. So she’s letting me go to Earth, instead. The trip took hours and hours and by the end of it I was shaking with excitement, and I’d worked up this whole story in my head, how Mistress was going to give me to some nice Earthen couple, and they would raise me as their own, and they lived in an enormous tree house—I don’t know why I thought they would live in a tree house, but for some reason that’s what I was hoping for. I mean, I’d never seen real trees.” She frowned. “Still haven’t, actually.”

There was a short silence, before Thorne said, “And that’s when she took you to the satellite, and you became the queen’s programmer.”

“Programmer, hacker, spy … somehow, I never stopped believing that if I did everything she asked, someday they would let me go.”

“And how long before you decided that you’d rather be trying to save Earthen royalty than spy on them?”

“I don’t know. I was always fascinated by Earth. I spent a lot of time reading Earthen news and watching their dramas. I started to feel connected to the people down there … down here. More than I ever did to Lunars.” She wrung her hands. “After a while, I started to pretend that I was a secret guardian, and it was my job to protect Earth and its people from Levana.”