Cress (The Lunar Chronicles #3) - Marissa Meyer Page 0,56

cry, are you?” he said, his tone a mixture of gentle and stern. Crying was not allowed, not with water so precious.

“No,” she whispered, and she meant it. Not that she didn’t want to cry, but because she wasn’t sure her body could make enough tears.

“Good, come on. Find us a sand dune to sit down for a while.”

Cress peeled her attention away from the fleeting, bitter illusion. Scanning the nearest dunes, she led him toward a southward-facing slope. The moment she was over the crest, it was as if a thin string that had been holding her up snapped. Cress let out a pained groan and collapsed into the sand.

Thorne brought the blanket and parachute square out of the pack and laid it out for them to sit on, to keep them off the hot sand, then pulled the corners over their heads like a canopy that blocked out the sun’s brightness.

He put an arm around Cress’s shoulders and tugged her against him. She felt so dumb, so betrayed—by the desert, by the sun, by her own eyes. And now the truth was settling upon her.

There was no water.

There were no trees.

Nothing but endless sand, endless sun, endless walking.

And they may never make it out. They couldn’t go on forever. She doubted she could go on for another day like this, and who knew how long it would take to reach the end of the desert. Not when every sand dune multiplied into three more, when every step toward the mountains seemed to send them even farther into the distance, and they didn’t even know that the mountains would offer any protection when they got there.

“We are not going to die here,” Thorne said, his voice soft and reassuring, like he’d known exactly where her thoughts had been taking her. “I’ve been through much worse than this and I’ve survived just fine.”

“You have?”

He opened his mouth, but paused. “Well … I was in jail for a long time, which wasn’t exactly a picnic.”

She adjusted the towels on her feet. The hair-ropes had begun to cut into her skin.

“The military wasn’t much fun either, come to think of it.”

“You were only in it for five months,” she murmured, “and most of that was spent in flight training.”

Thorne tilted his head. “How’d you know that?”

“Research.” She didn’t tell him just how much she’d researched into his past, and he didn’t ask.

“Well—so maybe this is the worst I’ve been through. But it doesn’t change the fact that we’re going to survive. We’ll find civilization, we’ll comm the Rampion, and they’ll come get us. Then we’ll overthrow Levana and I’ll get loads of reward money and the Commonwealth will pardon my crimes or whatever and we’ll all live happily ever after.”

Cress nestled against Thorne’s side, trying to believe him.

“But first, we have to get out of this desert.” He rubbed her shoulder. It was the kind of touch that would have filled her with giddiness and yearning if she hadn’t been too tired to feel anything. “You have to trust me, Cress. I’m going to get us out of this.”

Twenty-One

“There,” said Dr. Erland, snipping off the ends of the surgery thread. “That’s all I can do for him.”

Cinder wet her lips and found that they had begun to split from dryness. “And? Will he … is he going to…?”

“We have to wait and see. He’s lucky the bullets didn’t puncture a lung, or he wouldn’t have made it this far, but he did lose a lot of blood. I’ll monitor the anesthetics closely for the next day or two. We want to keep him sedated. Levana’s soldiers are designed as disposable weapons—they are very effective when they’re in good health, but their genetic alterations make it difficult for them to rest, even when their bodies need time to recover from injury.”

She stared down at Wolf’s wounds, now sewed together with dark blue thread that formed ugly bumps and ridges where open flesh had been before. Numerous other scars littered his bare chest, long since healed. It was obvious that he had been through a lot. Surely this wouldn’t be the end of him, after everything?

A table beside her held a tray with the two small bullets the doctor had removed—they seemed too small to have done so much damage.

“I can’t let anyone else die,” she whispered.

The doctor looked up from cleaning the surgical tools. “They may be treated as disposable assets to the queen, but they are also resilient.” He dropped the