“No, I’m fine. Thank you.”
When he had gone, Cinder hefted herself up onto the nearest crate and rolled out her shoulders. The news was still broadcasting on the screen, muted. A ticker read, “Hunt continues for Lunar fugitive Linh Cinder and crown traitor Dmitri Erland.”
Her throat constricted—crown traitor?
She shouldn’t have been surprised. How long had she expected it to take them to figure out who had helped her escape?
Cinder sank onto her back, feet dangling off the crate, and stared at the maze of pipes and bundled wires that cluttered the ship’s rafters. Was she making a mistake by going to Europe? It was a draw she didn’t think she could resist. Not only because of what Nainsi had said, but because of Cinder’s own jumbled memories too. She’d always known that she’d been adopted in Europe and she had the faintest recollection of it. Only drug-muddled memories that she’d always thought might be part dream. A barn. A snow-covered field. A gray sky that never ended. And then a long, long train ride bringing her to New Beijing and her new family.
She felt compelled to go there now. To figure out where she had been during all those lost years and who had taken care of her, who else knew her biggest secret.
But what if she was only avoiding the inevitable? What if this was just a distraction to keep her from going to Dr. Erland and accepting her fate? At least the doctor could teach her how to be Lunar. How to protect herself from Queen Levana.
She didn’t even know how to use her glamour. Not properly anyway.
Pursing her lip, she held her cyborg hand up over her face. Its metal plating shone almost mirror-like beneath the ship’s dim lights. It was so pristine, so well crafted—it did not seem like her hand. Not yet.
Tilting her head, Cinder held up her other, human hand beside it and tried to imagine what it would be like to be fully human. Two limbs made of skin and tissue and bones. Blood pumping in faintly blue veins beneath the surface. All ten fingernails.
An electric current traipsed down her nerves and her cyborg hand began to morph in her vision. Little wrinkles appeared in her knuckles. Tendons stretched beneath her skin. The edges softened. Warmed. Turned to flesh.
She was looking at two hands, two human hands. Small and dainty with perfectly sculpted fingers and delicate, rounded nails. She flexed the fingers of her left hand, forming a fist, then stretched them out again.
An almost giddy laugh fell out of her. She was doing it. She was using her glamour.
She did not need gloves anymore. She could convince everyone that this was real.
No one would ever know she was cyborg again.
The realization was stark and sudden and overwhelming.
And then—too soon—an orange light flickered in the corner of her vision, her brain warning her that what she was seeing was a lie. That this was not real, would never be real.
She sat up with a gasp and squeezed her eyes shut before her retina scanner could start to pick up on all the little inaccuracies and falsehoods like it had done with Levana’s glamour when Cinder had begun to see through it. She was annoyed with herself—disgusted at how easily the desire had come to her.
This was how Levana did it. She kept a hold on her people by tricking both their eyes and their hearts. She ruled with fear, yes, but also with adoration. It would be easy to abuse a person when they never recognized it as abuse.
It was not so different from when she’d glamoured Thorne. She’d owned his mind without even trying to and he’d jumped at the chance to do her bidding.
She sat shivering for a while, listening to Thorne banging around in the galley and humming to himself.
If this was her chance to decide who she was, who she wanted to be, then the first decision was an easy one.
She would never be like Queen Levana.
Twenty
The track’s magnets had gone silent, replaced with the sounds of their own footsteps in the brush and the caws of migrating birds. Only a suggestion of sun filtered down through the thick tree cover, and the forest smelled of tree sap and the coming of autumn.
Time seemed to stretch on for eons, although Scarlet’s portscreen indicated that not even an hour had passed when they came across the stopped train. Scarlet first noticed sounds that didn’t belong to the forest—the crunching of treads on dirt and gravel as dozens of androids circled the perimeter.
Wolf abandoned the tracks, pushing through the brush and leading them into the security of the woods. Scarlet tucked away the port so she could use both hands to climb fallen logs and keep twigs and spiderwebs out of her hair. After a while, she tugged her hood over her head, lessening her vision but feeling better protected from the things that reached and jabbed at her.
They climbed up an embankment, using the roots of a pine tree that looked about to topple over onto the tracks. On higher ground, Scarlet could see the dappled glint of sunlight off the train’s metal roof. The occasional passenger cast a shadow against the windows. Scarlet could not imagine being among them. Surely everyone knew what the “medical emergency” was by now. How long would it take to test every passenger for the plague and determine who could be let go? How long could they keep healthy people quarantined?
Or would they let them go at all?
To prevent escapees, a small army of androids patrolled around the train, their yellow sensors shuffling over the windows and doors, occasionally darting toward the forest. Though Scarlet didn’t think they could see her so high above the tracks, she nevertheless crept back from the embankment and slowly, slowly unzipped her hoodie. Wolf glanced back just as she was pulling her arms from the sleeves, glad she was wearing a much more camouflage-worthy black tank top underneath. She cinched the hoodie tight around her waist.