Scarlet (30 page)

On the other side of the hangar, a small delivery ship sat with its back window busted out. Shards of glass glittered beneath the blazing lights. The hangar smelled of spilled fuel and toxic fumes, and a little bit like Cinder’s market booth.

“What a sty,” said Thorne, disgusted. “I’m not sure I can trust a pilot with such little respect for her ship.”

Cinder ignored him, busy sending her scanner over the shelves and walls. Despite the distraction of the chaos, her brain-machine interface was picking up on something. A general impression of familiarity, tinges of a long-lost memory. The way the sun angled in from the door. The combined smells of machinery and manure. The crisscrossed pattern of the exposed trusses.

She paced across the concrete, crunching through the debris. She moved slowly, lest the ghost of familiarity vanish.

“Uh, Cinder,” said Thorne, glancing back toward the farm. “What are we doing in here?”

“Looking for something.”

“In this mess? Good luck with that.”

She found a small plot of empty concrete and stalled, thinking. Examining. Knowing she’d been there before. In a dream, in a daze.

She noticed a thin metal cabinet painted a putrid brown, where three jackets hung on a rod. They all had insignias from the EF military embroidered on their sleeves. Squaring her shoulders, Cinder picked her way toward it and pushed the jackets to the side.

“Really, Cinder?” said Thorne, coming up beside her. “This is not the time to be worried about a change of clothes.”

Cinder barely heard him over the ticking in her head. The mess was no coincidence. Someone had been there, and they’d been looking for something.

They’d been looking for
her.

She wished the realization hadn’t struck, but there was no dismissing it.

Crouching in front of the cabinet, she slid her hand against the back corner until it brushed against the handle she’d known would be there. Painted the same brown color, it was invisible in the shadows. It would never be noticed unless a person knew to look. And she knew—because she’d been here. Five years ago, in a state of drugged-up delirium that she’d always mistaken for a dream, she’d emerged in this spot. Every joint and muscle aching from the recent surgeries. Crawling slowly out of endless darkness and blinking, as if for the first time, into a dizzily bright world.

Cinder braced herself against the cabinet and pulled.

The secret door was heavier than she’d expected, made of something much sturdier than tin. She heaved it up on hidden hinges and let it slam down on the concrete floor. A cloud of dust billowed up on all sides.

A square hole gaped up at them. A ladder of plastic rungs was drilled into the foundation, leading to a secret sublevel.

Thorne bent over, planting his hands on his knees. “How did you know that was there?”

Cinder couldn’t tear her gaze away from the hidden passageway.

Unable to voice the truth, she said simply, “Cyborg vision.”

She descended first, releasing her flashlight as she was hit with thick, stale air. The beam bounced around a room as big as the hangar above, with no doors and no windows. Almost afraid to know what she’d just stumbled into, she tentatively ventured, “Lights. On.”

She heard the sound of an independent generator click on first, before three long overhead fluorescents gradually brightened, one after another. Thorne’s shoes thumped on the hard floor as he skipped the last four rungs of the ladder. He spun around and froze.

“What—what
is
this?”

Cinder couldn’t answer. She could barely breathe.

A tank sat in the center of the room, about two meters long with a domed glass lid. A collection of complex machines stood around it—life monitors, temperature gauges, bioelectricity scanners. Machines with dials and tubes, needles and screens, plugs and controls.

A long operating table against the far wall held an array of moveable lights sprouting from each end like a metal octopus, and beside it a small rolling table with a near-empty jug of sterilizer and an assortment of surgical tools—scalpels, syringes, bandages, face masks, towels. On the wall were two blank netscreens.

As much as that side of the secret chamber imitated an operating room, the opposite side more closely resembled Cinder’s workshop in the basement of Adri’s apartment building, complete with screwdrivers, fuse pullers, and a soldering iron. Discarded android parts and computer chips. An unfinished, three-fingered cyborg hand.

Cinder shuddered, chilled from the air that smelled like both a sterile hospital room and a damp underground cave.

Thorne crept toward the tank. It was empty, but the vague imprint of a child could be seen in the goo-like lining beneath the glass dome. “What’s this?”

Cinder went to fidget with her glove before remembering that it wasn’t there.

“A suspended animation tank,” she said, whispering as if the ghosts of unknown surgeons could be listening. “Designed to keep someone alive, but unconscious, for long periods of time.”

“Aren’t those illegal? Overpopulation laws or something?”

Cinder nodded. Nearing the tank, she pressed her fingers to the glass and tried to remember waking up here, but she couldn’t. Only addled memories of the hangar and the farm came back to her—nothing about this dungeon. She hadn’t been fully conscious until she’d been en route to New Beijing, ready to start her new life as a scared, confused orphan, and a cyborg.

The girl’s outline in the goo seemed too small to have ever been hers, but she knew it was. The left leg appeared to have been significantly heavier than the right. She wondered how long she had lain there without any leg at all.

“What do you suppose it’s doing down here?”

Cinder licked her lips. “I think it was hiding a princess.”

Thirty-Two

Cinder’s feet were cemented to the ground as she took in the underground room. She couldn’t shake the vision of her eleven-year-old self lying on that operating table as unknown surgeons cut and sewed and pieced her body together with foreign steel limbs. Wires in her brain. Optobionics behind her retinas. Synthetic tissue in her heart, new vertebrae, grafted skin to cover the scar tissue.

How long had it taken? How long had she been unconscious, sleeping in this dark cellar?

Levana had tried to kill her when she was only three years old.

Her operation had been completed when she was eleven.

Eight years.
In a tank, sleeping and dreaming and growing.

Not dead, but not alive either.

She peered down into the imprint of her own head beneath the tank’s glass. Hundreds of tiny wires with neural transmitters were attached to the walls and a small netscreen was implanted on the side. No, not a netscreen, Cinder realized. No net access could infiltrate this room. Nothing that could ever get back to Queen Levana.

“I don’t get it,” said Thorne, examining the surgical tools on the other side of the room. “What do you think they did to her down here?”

She peered up at the captain, but there was no suspicion on his face, only curiosity.

“Well,” she started, “programmed and implanted her ID chip, for starters.”

Thorne shook the scalpel at her. “Good thinking. Of course she wouldn’t have had her own when she came to Earth.” He gestured at the tank. “What about all that?”

Cinder gripped the tank’s edges to steady her hands. “Her burns would have been severe, even life threatening. Their priority would have been keeping her alive, and also keeping her hidden. Suspended animation would solve both problems.” She tapped a finger on the glass. “These transmitters would have been used to stimulate her brain while she was sleeping. She couldn’t receive life experience or learn like a normal child, so they had to make up for it with fake learning. Fake experiences.”

She bit her lip, silencing herself before she mentioned the netlink they’d planted in the princess’s brain that made for an efficient way to learn when she was finally awake, without being any the wiser that she should have known these things anyway.

It was easy to talk about the princess as if she were someone else. Cinder couldn’t stop thinking that she
was
someone else. The girl who had slept in this tank was someone different from the cyborg that had woken up in it.

It occurred to Cinder with a jolt that this was why she had no memories. Not because the surgeons had damaged her brain while inserting her control panel, but because she had never been awake to make memories in the first place.

If she thought back, could she grasp something from before the coma? Something from her childhood? And then she recalled her recurring dream. The bed of coals, the fire burning off her skin, and realized it may have been more memory than nightmare.

“Screen, on.”

Both screens over the operating table brightened at Thorne’s command—the one on the left output a holograph of a torso from the shoulders up, spinning and flickering in the air. Cinder’s heart jolted, thinking it was
her,
until she took in the second screen.

PATIENT: MICHELLE BENOIT

OPERATION: SPINAL AND NERVOUS SYSTEM BIOELECTRICITY SECURITY BLOCK, PROTOTYPE 4.6

STATUS: COMPLETE

Cinder approached the holograph. The shoulders were slender and feminine, but nothing could be seen above the line of her jaw.

“What’s a bioelectricity security block?”

Cinder pointed at the holograph as it spun away from her and a dark square spot appeared on the spine, just beneath her skull. “This. I had one implanted too, so I wouldn’t accidentally use my Lunar gift when I was growing up. In an Earthen, it makes it so you can’t be brainwashed by Lunars. If Michelle Benoit did have information about Princess Selene, she would have had to protect herself, in case she ever fell into Lunar hands.”

“If we have the technology to nullify the Lunar’s craziness, why doesn’t everyone have one of these?”

A wave of sadness washed over her. Her stepfather, Linh Garan, had invented the bioelectricity block, but he’d died of the plague before seeing it past the prototype stage. Though she’d barely known him, she couldn’t help feeling that his life had been cut far too short. How different things could have been if he’d survived—not only for Pearl and Peony, but for Cinder too.

She sighed, tired of thinking, and said simply, “I don’t know why.”

Thorne grunted. “Well, this proves it, doesn’t it? The princess really was here.”

Cinder scanned the room again, her attention catching on the table of mechanics. The tools that had made her cyborg. Thorne either hadn’t noticed them, or hadn’t yet figured out what they would have been used for. The confession settled on the tip of her tongue. Maybe he should know. If she was going to be stuck with him, he deserved to know who he was traveling with. The true danger she’d put him in.

But before she could speak, he said, “Screen, show Princess Selene.”

Cinder spun back around, pulse rushing, but it was not an eleven-year-old version of herself that greeted her. What she saw was hardly recognizable as human at all.

Thorne stumbled back, clapping a hand to his mouth. “What the—”

Cinder’s stomach heaved once before she shut her eyes, tempering the revulsion. She swallowed hard and dared to look at the screen again.

It was the photo of a child.

What was left of a child.

She was wrapped in bandages from her neck to the stump of her left thigh. Her right arm and shoulder were uncovered, showing the skin that was gouged bloody red in spots, bright pink and glossy in others. She had no hair and the burn marks continued up her neck and across her cheek. The left side of her face was swollen and disfigured, only the slit of her eye could be seen, and a line of stitches ran along her earlobe before cutting across to her lips.

Cinder raised trembling fingers to her mouth, smoothing them over the skin. There was no scar, no sign of these wounds. Only some scar tissue around her thigh and wrist, where the prostheses had been attached.

How had they fixed her? How could they possibly fix this?

But it was Thorne who asked the true question.

“Who would do this to a child?”

Goose bumps covered Cinder’s skin. There was no memory of the suffering those burns must have caused her. She couldn’t connect the child with herself.

But Thorne’s question lingered, haunting the cold room.

Queen Levana had done this.

To a child, barely more than a baby.

To her own niece.

And all so she could rule. So she could claim the throne. So she would be queen.

Cinder clenched her fists at her sides, her blood boiling. Thorne was watching her, his expression equally dark.

“We should go talk to Michelle Benoit,” he said, setting down the scalpel.

Cinder blew a strand of hair out of her face. The ghost of her child self lingered in the air here, a victim struggling to stay alive. How many people had helped rescue and protect her, had kept her secrets? How many had risked their lives because they believed hers was worth more? Because they believed she could grow into someone powerful enough to stop Levana.

Nerves scratching at her stomach, she followed Thorne back up into the hanger, making sure to close the hidden door behind them.

As they walked back into the daylight, the house still towered eerily still and silent above a small garden. The Rampion stood enormous and out of place in the fields.

Thorne checked his portscreen, and his voice was tight when he spoke. “She hasn’t moved since we got here.”

He didn’t try to hide his stomping footsteps across the gravel. He pounded on the front door, every strike bouncing around the courtyard. They waited for the telltale footsteps within, but only the sound of chickens scratching in the yard greeted them.

Thorne checked the knob and the door swung open, unlocked.

Stepping into the foyer, Thorne peered up the wood-paneled stairway. To their right was a living room, filled with rugged furniture. To their left a kitchen with a couple dirty plates left at the table. All the lights were off.