Scarlet (7 page)

Nothing had changed since his father’s death, except the room’s owner.

And perhaps the smell. Kai seemed to recall the aroma of his father’s aftershave, but now there was the distinct stench of bleach and chemicals—remnants of the cleaning crew scrubbing the room raw after his father first had contracted letumosis, the plague that had killed hundreds of thousands of people all over Earth in the past decade.

Kai’s attention fell from the pictures and snagged on the small metal foot that sat on the corner of his desk, its joints caked with grease. Like a revolving wheel, his thoughts came full circle yet again.

Linh Cinder.

Stomach tightening, he set down the stylus that he’d been gripping and reached for the foot, but his fingers stalled before they could get to it.

It belonged to her, the pretty young mechanic at the market. The girl who was so easy to talk to. The girl who was so authentic, who didn’t pretend to be something she wasn’t.

Or so he’d thought.

His fingers tightened into a fist and he drew back, wishing he had someone he could talk to.

But his father was gone. And now Dr. Erland was gone too, having resigned from his position, and left without even saying good-bye.

There was Konn Torin, his father’s, and now his, adviser. But Torin, with his ever-present diplomacy and logic, would never understand. Kai wasn’t sure
he
even understood what it was he felt when he thought of Cinder. Linh Cinder, who had lied to him about everything.

She was cyborg.

He couldn’t dismiss the memory of her lying at the base of the garden steps, a foot disconnected from her leg, a white-hot metal hand having melted away the remnants of a silk glove—gloves that had been his gift to her.

He should have been repulsed by her. Reliving the memory again and again, he
tried
to be repulsed by the sparking wires and her grime-packed knuckles and the knowledge that she had fake neural receptors taking messages to and from her brain. She was not natural. She was probably a charity case, and he couldn’t help but wonder if her family had paid for the operation or if it had been government funded. He wondered who had taken such pity on her that they’d determined to give her a second life when her human body had been so damaged. He wondered what had caused her body to be that damaged in the first place, or if perhaps she was born disfigured.

He wondered and wondered and knew he should have been more disturbed by each unanswered question.

But he wasn’t. It was not her being cyborg that had curdled his stomach.

Rather, his repugnance had started the moment his vision of her flickered as if she were a broken netscreen. He’d blinked, and she was no longer a helpless, rain-soaked cyborg, but the most intensely beautiful girl he’d ever laid eyes on. She was blindingly, breathtakingly stunning, with flawless tanned skin and shining eyes and an expression so ravishing it threatened to buckle his knees.

Her Lunar glamour had been even more striking than Queen Levana’s, and
her
beauty was painful.

Kai knew that’s what it had been: Cinder’s glamour, fading in and out even as he stood above her, trying to make sense of what he was seeing.

What he didn’t know was how many times she’d glamoured him before that. How many times she’d tricked him. How many times she’d made him out to be a complete fool.

Or had the girl at the market, muddied and disheveled, been the real girl after all? The girl who had risked her life to come to the ball to give Kai a warning, unsteady cyborg foot and all …

“It doesn’t matter,” he said to his empty office, the disconnected foot.

Whoever Linh Cinder was, she was no longer his concern. Soon Queen Levana would be returning to Luna, and she would take Cinder back as her prisoner. It was the arrangement Kai had agreed to.

At the ball, he had been forced to make a choice, and had refused Levana’s offer of a marriage alliance once and for all. He was determined to never subject his people to life beneath such a heartless empress, and by that point Cinder had been his last bargaining chip. Peace, in exchange for the cyborg. His people’s freedom, in exchange for the Lunar girl who had dared to defy her queen.

It was impossible to know how long such an arrangement would last. Levana still refused to sign the peace treaty that would ally Luna with the Earthen Union. Her desire to be either empress or conqueror would not be sated long by the sacrifice of a mere girl.

And next time, Kai didn’t think he would have anything else to offer.

Crumpling his hair, Kai pulled his attention back to the amendment on the netscreen and read the first sentence three times, waiting for the words to register. He had to think of something else, anything else, before the never-ending questions drove him insane.

A monotone voice interrupted him, making him jump. “Entrance requested for Royal Adviser Konn Torin and Chairman of National Security Huy Deshal.”

Kai glanced at the time. 06:22.

“Entrance granted.”

The office door breezed open. Both men were dressed for the day, though Kai had never seen either of them so disheveled. It was clear they’d gotten up in a hurry, although he suspected from the dark circles beneath Torin’s eyes that he hadn’t gotten much more sleep than Kai had.

Kai stood to greet them, tapping the corner of the netscreen that sent it sinking back into the desktop. “You’re both getting an early start.”

“Your Imperial Majesty,” said Chairman Huy with a deep bow. “I’m glad to find you awake. I’m sorry to inform you of a breach of security that requires your immediate attention.”

Kai froze, his thoughts racing ahead to terrorist attacks, out-of-control protestors … Queen Levana declaring war. “What? What happened?”

“There’s been a jailbreak from New Beijing Prison,” said Huy. “Approximately forty-eight minutes ago.”

Nerves knotting up his shoulders, Kai glanced at Torin. “A jailbreak?”

“Two inmates have escaped.”

Kai pushed his fingertips into the desk. “Don’t we have some sort of protocol in place for this?”

“Generally speaking, yes. However, this is an extraordinary circumstance.”

“How so?”

The lines deepened around Huy’s mouth. “One of the escapees is Linh Cinder, Your Majesty. The Lunar fugitive.”

The world turned over. Kai’s gaze dropped to the cyborg foot, but he snapped it back up. “How?”

“We have a team analyzing the security footage in order to determine her exact method. We understand she was able to glamour a guard and persuade him to move her to a separate wing of the prison. From there, she was able to breach the air duct system.” Suddenly embarrassed, Huy held up two clear bags. One contained a cyborg hand, the other a small, blood-crusted chip. “These were found in her cell.”

Kai’s jaw worked, but he was dumbfounded by the sight. He was simultaneously intrigued and unnerved by the dismembered limb. “Is that her
hand
? Why would she do that?”

“We’re still working on the details. We do know, however, that she made her way into the prison’s loading dock. We are working to secure all possible escape routes from there.”

Kai paced toward the floor-to-ceiling windows that overlooked the palace’s west-facing gardens. The whispering grasses still glittered with morning dew.

“Your Majesty,” said Torin, the first he’d spoken, “I would advise you to deploy military reinforcements to track down and recover the fugitives.”

Kai massaged his brow. “Military?”

Torin spoke slowly. “It is in your best interest to do everything in your power to recover her.”

Kai found it difficult to swallow. He knew that Torin was right. Any hesitation would be seen as a sign of weakness, and possibly even suggest that he’d assisted with the escape. Queen Levana would not take kindly to it.

“Who’s the other fugitive?” he asked, stalling for time while he struggled to grasp the implications. Cinder—a Lunar, a cyborg, a fugitive, who he’d all but sentenced to death.

Escaped.

“Carswell Thorne,” said Huy, “an ex-cadet for the American Republic air force. He deserted his post fourteen months ago after stealing a military cargo ship. At this time we don’t consider him dangerous.”

Kai neared his desk again, seeing that the fugitive’s profile had been transferred to the screen. His frown deepened. Perhaps not dangerous, but young and inarguably good-looking. His prison photo showed him flippantly winking at the camera. Kai hated him immediately.

“Your Majesty, we need you to make a decision,” said Torin. “Do you grant permission to send in military reinforcements to secure the fugitives?”

Kai stiffened. “Yes, of course, if that’s what you think the situation requires.”

Huy clicked his heels and marched back toward the door.

Kai wanted to call him back immediately as a thousand questions filled his brain. He wanted the world to slow down and give him time to process this, but the two men had both gone before the hesitant “wait” fell from his mouth.

The door shut, leaving him alone. He stole a single glance at Cinder’s abandoned foot before collapsing over his desk and pressing his forehead onto the cool netscreen.

He couldn’t help but imagine his father sitting at this desk, faced with this situation, and knew he would have been sending comms already, doing everything he could to find the girl and apprehend her, because that’s what would be best for the Commonwealth.

But Kai wasn’t his father. He wasn’t that selfless.

Knowing it was wrong, he couldn’t help but wish that wherever Cinder had gone, they would never find her.

Eight

The Morels
were
all dead. Their farm had been deserted for seven years, since both parents and a troop of six children had all been carted to the Toulouse plague quarantines during a single October, leaving behind a collection of rotting structures—the farmhouse, the barn, a chicken coop—along with a hundred acres of crops left to fend for themselves. An arched storage building that had once housed tractors and hay bales remained intact, standing solitary in the midst of an overgrown grain field.

An old, dusty pillowcase, dyed black, still flapped off the house’s front porch, warning neighbors to stay away from the diseased house. For many years, it had done its job, until the ruffians who ran the fights had sought it out and claimed it for their own.

The fights were already underway when Scarlet arrived. She sent a hasty comm to the Toulouse police department from her ship, figuring she had at least twenty or thirty minutes before they responded, useless as they were. Just enough time to get the information she needed before Wolf and the rest of society’s outcasts were taken into custody.

Downing a few breaths of chilled night air that did nothing to settle her rapid-fire heartbeat, she marched into the abandoned storage building.

A writhing crowd shouted up at a hastily constructed stage, where one man was beating his opponent in the face, fist flying over and over with sickening steadfastness. Blood started to leak from his opponent’s nose. The crowd roared, egging on the dominating fighter.

Scarlet skirted around the audience, hanging close to the sloping walls. Every surface within reach was covered in vivid graffiti. Straw littered the ground, trampled nearly to dust. Rows of cheap lightbulbs were strung on bright orange cords, and more than a handful of them were flickering and threatening to burn out. The hot air reeked of sweat and bodies and a sweetness from the fields that didn’t belong.

Scarlet hadn’t expected there to be so many people. There were well over two hundred onlookers, and she didn’t recognize any of them. This crowd wasn’t from small-town Rieux—likely many of them had come in from Toulouse. She spotted a number of piercings and tattoos and surgical manipulations. She passed a girl with hair dyed like a zebra’s and a man on a leash being dragged around by a curvy escort-droid. There were even cyborgs in the crowd, the rarity made stranger by the fact that none of them were hiding their cyborgness. They flaunted everything from polished metal arms to black, reflective eyeballs that protruded eerily from their sockets. Scarlet did a double take when she passed a man showing off a small netscreen implanted into his flexed bicep, laughing at the stiff news anchor inside it.

The crowd roared suddenly—guttural and joyful. A man with the tattoo of a spine and rib cage tracking down his back was left standing on the stage. Scarlet couldn’t see his opponent beyond the dense crowd.

She tucked her hands into the pockets of her hooded sweatshirt and continued her search of the unfamiliar faces, the strange fashions. She was drawing attention in her plain jeans with the ripped knees and ratty red sweatshirt that her grandma had given her years ago. Usually the hoodie was like camouflage in a town of equally careless dressers, but now she was dressed like a chameleon in a room full of Komodo dragons. Everywhere she turned, curious gazes followed her. With ruthless defiance, she glared back at them all, and kept searching.

She reached the back wall of the building, still stacked high with plastic and metal crates, without spotting Wolf. She backed herself into a corner for a better viewpoint and tugged the hood forward over her face. Her handgun dug into her hip.

“You came.”

She jumped. Wolf had materialized out of the graffiti and was suddenly beside her, green eyes catching the dusty flickers of the lightbulbs.

“I’m sorry,” he said, shuffling back half a step. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

Scarlet ignored the apology. In the shadows she could just make out the edge of the tattoo on his arm, which had seemed so unimportant hours before but was now burned into her memory.

The one who handed me the poker had a tattoo.…

Heat rushed to her face, the rage she’d buried in return for calm practicality rising to the surface. She closed the distance between them and thumped her locked fist into his sternum, ignoring how he towered a full head above her. Her hatred made her feel like she could crush his skull with her bare hands.

“Where is she?”

Wolf’s expression was blank, his hands limp at his sides. “Who?”