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