android?” Iko said, excitedly changing the screen to one of Kai’s fan pages.
Cinder sighed. “Yes, His Majesty’s android.”
Unbeknownst to her at the time, her cyborg brain had recorded every word that the android, Nainsi, had spoken, as if it had known that Cinder would someday need to draw on this information again.
According to Nainsi’s research, a Lunar doctor named Logan Tanner had brought Cinder to Earth when she was still a child, after Levana’s murder attempt had failed. He’d eventually been incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital and committed suicide, but not before passing her off to someone else. Nainsi had thought that someone else was an ex–military pilot from the European Federation.
Wing Commander Michelle Benoit.
“A royal android,” Thorne said, showing the first sign of speculation. “And how did it get this information?”
“That, I have no idea. But I want to find this Michelle Benoit and see if it was right.”
And hope that Michelle Benoit had some answers that Dr. Erland didn’t. Perhaps she could tell Cinder about her history, about those eleven long years lost to her memory, about her surgery and the surgeons and Linh Garan’s invention that had kept Cinder from using her Lunar gift until Dr. Erland had disabled it.
Perhaps she had her own ideas about what Cinder should do next. Ideas that left her some choices for the rest of her life.
“I’m in.”
She started. “You are?”
“Sure. This is the biggest unsolved mystery of the third era. There’s got to be someone out there offering a reward for finding this princess, right?”
“Yeah, Queen Levana.”
Thorne tilted toward her, nudging her with his elbow. “In that case, we already have something in common with the princess, don’t we?” He winked, setting Cinder’s nerves on edge. “I just hope she’s cute.”
“Could you at least try to focus on the important things?”
“That would be important.” Thorne pulled himself up with a groan, still sore from all the rearranging. “Hungry? I think there’s a can of beans in there calling my name.”
“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