Kai rubbed one hand down his face. “It doesn’t matter. Everyone, out. Please.”
Nainsi vanished out the door, but Huy and Torin lingered.
“Your Majesty,” Huy said. “With all due respect, I need your permission—”
“Yes, fine, whatever you need to do. Just, I need a moment. Please.”
Huy clicked his heels. “Of course, Your Majesty.” Though Torin looked more apt to argue, he didn’t, and soon the door was hissing behind them both.
With the click of the latch, Kai let himself crumble into his chair. His entire body was shaking.
It was suddenly so clear that he wasn’t ready for this. He wasn’t strong enough or smart enough to fill his father’s shoes. He couldn’t even keep Levana out of his own office—how was he going to protect an entire country from her—an entire planet?
Spinning his chair around, he raked his hands back through his hair. His attention swept over the city below, but was soon pulled up to the glaring blue sky, cloudless. Somewhere beyond it was the moon and the stars and tens of thousands of cargo ships, passenger ships, military ships, delivery ships, vying for space beyond the ozone. And Cinder was in one of them.
He couldn’t help it, but a part of him—maybe a large part of him—hoped Cinder would just disappear, like a fading comet’s tail. Just to spite the queen, to keep from her this one thing she so desperately wanted. It was only her vanity, after all, that had set off this tirade. Because Cinder had made that one foolish comment at the ball, suggesting that Levana wasn’t beautiful after all.
Kai massaged his temple, knowing that he had to give up these thoughts. Cinder had to be found, and soon, before millions were murdered in her place.
It was all politics now. Pros and cons, give and take, trades and agreements. Cinder had to be found, Levana had to be appeased, Kai had to stop acting cheated and indignant and start acting like an emperor.
Whatever he’d once felt for Cinder—or thought he’d felt for her—was over.
Fifteen
Cinder turned off the shower and propped herself against the fiberglass wall while the nozzle dripped onto her head. She would have liked to stay in longer but was worried about using up the water supply, and judging from the half-hour shower Thorne had taken, she clearly couldn’t rely on him for conservation.
Nevertheless, she was clean. The smell of sewage was gone, the salty sweat rinsed away. Stepping out of the communal shower, she rubbed her hair with a starchy towel, then spent a moment drying all the crevices and joints of her prosthetics to protect against rust. It was habit, even though her new limbs already had a protective coating. Dr. Erland, it seemed, hadn’t skimped on anything.
Her soiled prison uniform was balled in a corner on the tiled floor. She’d found a discarded military uniform in the crew quarters—oversize charcoal-gray pants that had to be belted in at her waist and a plain white undershirt, which wasn’t much different from the cargos and T-shirts she was used to, back before she’d become a fugitive of the law. All that was missing were her ever-present gloves. She felt na**d without them.
She threw the towel and prison uniform into the laundry chute and unlatched the shower room door. The thin corridor revealed an open doorway to the galley on her right, and the cargo bay packed full with plastic crates to her left.
“Home sweet home,” she murmured, wringing droplets from her hair as she ambled toward the cargo bay.
There was no sign of the so-called captain. Only the faint running lights along the floor were on, and the darkness and the silence and the knowledge of all the empty space around the ship, stretching out for eternity, gave Cinder the peculiar sensation that she was a phantom haunting a shipwreck. She picked her way through the obstacle course of storage bins and sank into the pilot’s seat in the cockpit.
Through the window she could see Earth—the shores of the American Republic and most of the African Union visible beneath the swirling cloud cover. And beyond it—stars, so many stars swirling and misting into countless galaxies. They were both beautiful and terrifying, billions of light-years away, and yet seeming so bright and close it was almost suffocating.
All Cinder had ever wanted was freedom. Freedom from her stepmother and her overbearing rules. Freedom from a life of constant work with nothing to show for it. Freedom from the sneers and hateful words of strangers who didn’t trust the cyborg girl who was too strong and too smart and too freakishly good with machines to ever be normal.
Now she had her freedom—but it wasn’t anything like she’d envisioned.
Sighing, Cinder pulled her left foot onto her knee, shoved up her pant leg, and opened the hollow compartment inside her calf. The compartment had been searched and emptied when she’d been admitted into prison—just one more invasion—but the most valuable contents had been ignored. No doubt the guard performing her search had thought the chips nestled into the wiring were a part of Cinder’s own programming.
Three chips. She plucked them out, one by one, laying them out on the arm of her chair.
There was the shimmering white D-COMM chip. It was a Lunar chip, made from some material Cinder hadn’t seen before. Levana had ordered it to be installed in Nainsi, Kai’s android, and used it to gather confidential information. The girl who had programmed the chip, supposedly the queen’s personal programmer, had later used it to contact Cinder and tell her that Levana was planning to marry Kai … and then kill him and use the power of the Eastern Commonwealth to invade the rest of the Earthen Union. It was this information that had sent Cinder running to the ball only a few short days ago—what seemed like a lifetime ago.
She couldn’t regret it. She knew she would do it all over again, despite what a mess her life had become since that single rash decision.
Then there was Iko’s personality chip. It was the largest and most abused of the three. One side showed a distinct greasy thumbprint, probably Cinder’s, and one corner had a hairline fracture. Nevertheless, Cinder was confident it would still function. Iko, a servant android who had belonged to Cinder’s stepmother, had long been one of her closest friends. But in a fit of anger and desperation, Adri had dismantled Iko and sold off her parts, leaving only the most useless pieces behind. Including her personality chip.
The third chip in Cinder’s stash made her heart cramp as she picked it up.
Peony’s ID chip.
Her younger stepsister had died almost two weeks ago. The plague had claimed her, because Cinder couldn’t get the antidote to her in time. Because Cinder had been too late.