Cress (The Lunar Chronicles #3) - Marissa Meyer Page 0,74
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.
At the end of the row of ships was an enormous arched doorway, embedded with glittering stones that depicted a crescent moon rising above planet Earth.
“… took this D-COMM from the programmer who betrayed us. See if the software techs can use it to trace the companion chip…”
The podship door behind her was still open, and the thaumaturge was standing just outside the ship, yelling at the people who had gathered around her—two guards in red and gray uniforms and a middle-aged man who wore a simple belted robe and was hastily plugging information into a portscreen. The thaumaturge’s long white coat was smeared with blood, and soaked through where it draped over her thigh. She stood slightly hunched, her hands pressed over the wound.
The arched door began to open, cutting a slit through the center of the glittering Earth as the doors peeled back. Scarlet ducked back down. She heard the subtle click and hum of magnets, the clatter of footsteps.
“Finally,” the thaumaturge seethed. “The uniform is ruined—cut away the material and be quick. The bullet didn’t pass through, and the wound hasn’t—” She cut off with a hiss.
Daring to glance up, Scarlet saw that three new people had arrived, dressed in white lab coats. They brought a hovering gurney with them, stocked with a full lab’s worth of medical supplies, and were all crowded around the thaumaturge, one unbuttoning her coat while another tried to cut a square of fabric away from her pants, though the material seemed to have cemented itself to the wound.
The thaumaturge recovered and rearranged her features to disguise how much pain she was in, though her olive skin had taken on a yellowish pallor. One of the doctors managed to peel the material away from the wound.
“Have Sierra send for a new uniform, and contact Thaumaturge Park to inform him that there will soon be changes to our procedures for gathering intelligence in relation to the Earthen leaders.”
“Yes, Thaumaturge Mira,” said the middle-aged man. “Speaking of Park, you should know that he already had a meeting with Emperor Kaito regarding our fleet of operatives that appears to no longer be in