With an ironic smile, she slumped into her desk chair for the last time. Pulling off her gloves, she eyed her left wrist, trying to picture the small chip just beneath the surface. The thought brought Peony to mind. Her blue-tipped fingers. The scalpel against her pale white skin.
Cinder shut her eyes, forcing the memory away. She had to do this.
She reached for the utility knife on the corner of her desk, the blade soaking in a tin can filled with alcohol. She shook it off, took a deep breath, and rested her cyborg hand palm up on the desk. She recalled seeing the chip on Dr. Erland’s holograph, less than an inch away from where skin met metal. The challenge would be getting it out without accidentally splicing any important wires.
Forcing her mind to quiet, her hand to still, she pressed the blade into her wrist. The pain bit into her, but she didn’t flinch. Steady. Steady.
A beep startled her. Cinder jumped, pulling the blade away and spinning around to face the wall of shelving. Her heart pummeled against her ribs as she scanned all the parts and tools that would be left behind.
It beeped again. Cinder’s eyes dropped to the old netscreen that was still propped against the shelves. She knew it was disconnected from the net, and yet a bright blue square was flashing in the corner. Another beep.
Setting down the knife, Cinder slinked away from her chair and kneeled before the screen.
On the blue square was scrawled:
DIRECT LINK REQUEST RECEIVED FROM UNKNOWN USER. ACCEPT?
Tilting her head, she spotted the D-COMM chip still inserted in the screen’s drive. The small green light beside it glowed. In the shadow of the screen, it looked like any other chip, but Cinder remembered Kai’s response when she’d described the chip’s shimmery silver material. A Lunar chip.
She grabbed a dirty rag from the pile of junk and pressed it against the barely bleeding wound. “Screen, accept link.”
The beeping stopped. The blue box disappeared. A spiral turned over on the screen.
“Hello?”
Cinder jumped.
“Hello hello hello—is anybody there?”
Whoever she was, she sounded on the verge of a breakdown. “Please, oh, please, someone answer. Where is that stupid android? HELLO?”
“Hell-o?…” Cinder leaned in toward the screen.
The girl gasped, followed by a short silence. “Hello? Can you hear me? Is somebody—”
“Yes, I can hear you. Hold on, something’s wrong with the vid-cable.”
“Oh, thank heavens,” the voice said as Cinder set aside the rag. She set the screen facedown on the concrete and opened the door to its control panel. “I thought maybe the chip had gotten damaged or I’d programmed it with the wrong connection ID or something. Are you in the palace now?”
Cinder found the vid-cable disconnected from its plug; it must have come loose when Adri had knocked it off the wall. Cinder screwed it in and a flood of blue light splattered across the floor. “There we are,” she said, righting the screen.
She jolted back when she saw the girl on the other side of the connection. She must have been close to Cinder’s age and had the longest, waviest, most unruly mess of tangled blonde hair imaginable. The golden nest around her head was tied in a big knot over one shoulder and cascaded in a jumble of braids and snarls, wrapping around one of the girl’s arms before descending out of the screen’s view. The girl was fidgeting with the ends, fervently winding and unwinding them around her fingers.
If it weren’t for the mess of hair, she would have been pretty. She had a sweet heart-shaped face, giant sky-blue eyes, and a sprinkle of freckles across her nose.
She was somehow not at all what Cinder had been expecting.
The girl looked equally surprised at seeing Cinder and her cyborg hand and dreary T-shirt.
“Who are you?” the girl asked. Her eyes darted behind Cinder, taking in the dim lighting and the chicken wire. “Why aren’t you at the palace?”
“I wasn’t allowed to go,” Cinder answered. She squinted at the room behind the girl, wondering if she were looking at a home on the moon…but it did not look like any home at all. Rather, the girl was surrounded by metal walls and machines and screens and computers and more controls and buttons and lights than a cargo ship’s cockpit.
Cinder folded her legs, letting her footless calf dangle more comfortably over her thigh. “Are you Lunar?”
The girl’s eyes fluttered, as if caught off guard by the question. Instead of answering, she leaned forward. “I need to speak with someone at New Beijing Palace right away.”
“Then why don’t you comm the palace information board?”