Cress

But it was not the end. The world was made of more dunes, more sand, more nothingness.

“Really. Let’s take a break,” Thorne said, setting down the pack and stabbing the cane into the ground. He spent a moment working the kinks from his shoulders, before hunching over and undoing the bundle’s knot. He handed Cress one of the water bottles and took another for himself.

“Shouldn’t we ration it?” she asked.

He shook his head. “It’s best to drink when we’re thirsty, and just try to keep sweating to a minimum—as much as possible. Our bodies will be better able to maintain hydration that way, even if we do run out of water. And we should avoid eating until we find another water source. Digestion uses up a lot of water too.”

“That’s fine. I’m not hungry.” Which was true—the heat seemed to have stolen what appetite she’d had.

When she’d drank all she could, Cress handed the bottle back to Thorne and fantasized about collapsing into the sand and going to sleep, but she dared not, fearing she would never get up again. When Thorne lifted the pack, she took off down the hill without question.

“What do you think is happening on your ship?” Cress asked as they descended the hill. The question had been echoing in her mind for hours, but the water had finally made her capable of speech. “Do you think Mistress Sybil…”

“They’re fine,” Thorne said, with unrelenting confidence. “I pity the person who goes up against Wolf, and Cinder’s made of tougher stuff than people realize.” A pause, before a hearty laugh burst through the quiet desert air. “Literally, in fact.”

“Wolf. That must be the other man on the ship?”

“Yes, and Scarlet is his … well, I don’t really know what they call themselves, but he’s lunatic-crazy for her. Scarlet’s not a bad shot, herself. That thaumaturge had no idea what she was walking into.”

Cress hoped he was right. Mistress Sybil had found them because of her, and the guilt was as painful as the deep aches in her bones.

“So how did a girl born on Luna get stuck in a satellite and become an Earthen sympathizer, anyway?”

She wrinkled her nose. “Well. When my parents found out I was a shell, they gave me up to be killed, because of the infanticide laws. But Mistress saved me and raised me instead, along with some other shells she’d rescued. She mostly just wanted us for some sort of experiments they’re always running, but Mistress never really explained it to me. We used to live in some of the lava tubes that had been converted into dormitories, and we were always being monitored by these cameras that were connected to Luna’s communication system. It was sort of cramped, but not too bad, and we had ports and netscreens, so we weren’t entirely cut off from the outside world. After a while I got really good at hacking into the communication system, which I mostly just used for silly stuff. We were all curious about school, so I used to hack into the Lunar school system and download the study guides, things like that.”

Cress squinted up at the moon, now so far away. It was hard to believe it’s where she came from. “Then one day, one of the older boys—Julian—asked me if I thought I could find out who his parents were. It took a couple days, but I did, and we learned that his parents lived in one of the lumber domes, and that they were both alive, and that he had two younger siblings. And then we figured out how to send them a message and tell them that he was alive. He thought that if they knew he hadn’t been killed after all, they would come find him. We got so excited, thinking we could all contact our families. That we would all be rescued.” She gulped. “It was really naïve, of course. The next day, Mistress came and took Julian away, and then some technicians removed all of the monitoring equipment so we couldn’t access the net anymore. I never saw Julian again. I think … I think his parents must have contacted the authorities when they got his comm, and I think he may have been killed, to prove that the infanticide laws were being taken seriously.”

She ran her fingers absently through her hair, surprised when they slipped through it so quickly. “After that, Mistress Sybil started to pay more attention to me. She sometimes took me out of the caverns and up into the domes and gave me different tasks. Altering the coding of the broadcast system. Tapping into netlinks. Programming intelligence software to pick up on specific verbal cues and divert information to separate comm accounts. At first I loved it. Mistress was nice to me then, and it meant I got to leave the lava tubes and see some of the city. I felt like I was becoming her favorite, and that if I did what she asked me to do, eventually it wouldn’t matter that I was a shell anymore, and I would be allowed to go to school and be just like any normal Lunar.