Cress

He looked away and dragged a palm down his face. This was an invasion, a terrible kind of voyeurism, and the sudden guilt made him wish he could erase the sight from his mind forever. “Screen, off.”

A silence engulfed them, and he wondered if Torin felt the same guilt he did, or if he’d even been caught by the same morbid curiosity.

“Are you all right, Your Majesty?”

“Fine.” He gulped. “We knew she was cyborg. None of this should be a surprise. I just hadn’t expected it to be so much.”

Torin slid his hands into his pockets. “I’m sorry. I know I haven’t always been fair where Linh Cinder was concerned. From the moment I saw you talking to her at the ball, I’ve been worried she would be an unnecessary distraction to you, and you were already dealing with so much. But it’s obvious that you did have legitimate feelings for her, and I’m sorry for all that’s happened since then.”

Kai shrugged uncomfortably. “The problem with that is that even I don’t know if I had legitimate feelings for her, or if it was always just a trick.”

“Your Majesty. The Lunar gift has limitations. If Linh Cinder had been forcing these feelings onto you, then you wouldn’t still be feeling them.”

Starting, Kai met Torin’s gaze. “I don’t…” He gulped, heat climbing up his neck. “It’s that obvious?”

“Well, as Queen Levana likes to point out, you are still young and not yet adept at disguising your emotions like the rest of us.” Torin smiled, a teasing look that crinkled the corners of his eyes. “To be frank, I feel that it is one of your better qualities.”

Kai rolled his eyes. “Ironically, I think that might be why I liked Cinder so much in the first place.”

“That she couldn’t disguise her emotions?”

“That she didn’t try. At least, that’s how it seemed.” Kai leaned back against the exam table, feeling the sterile paper crinkle beneath his fingers. “Sometimes it just seems like everyone around me is pretending. The Lunars are the worst. Levana and her entourage … Everything about them is so fake. I mean, I’m engaged to Levana, and I still don’t even know what she really looks like. But it isn’t just them. It’s the other Union leaders, even my own cabinet members. Everyone is trying to impress everyone else. Trying to make themselves out to be smarter or more confident than they actually are.”

He raked his hand through his hair. “And then there was Cinder. This completely normal girl, working this completely mundane job. She was always covered in dirt or grease and she was so brilliant when she was fixing things. And she joked about stuff with me, like she was talking to a normal guy, not a prince. Everything about her seemed so genuine. At least, that’s what I’d thought. But then it turned out she was just like everyone else.”

Torin paced to the window overlooking the quarantine room. “And yet you’re still trying to find reasons to believe in her.”

It was true. This whole escapade had been sparked by Torin’s accusations that Kai didn’t know anything about Cinder. That even now, knowing that she was cyborg, knowing that she was Lunar, he still wanted to believe that not everything about her had been based on some complicated deception.

And in coming here, he had learned some things.

He’d learned that she was immune to letumosis, that maybe all Lunars were.

He’d learned that those brown eyes that kept infiltrating his dreams had been man-made, or had at least been tampered with.

He’d learned that her guardian had sold her body off for testing, and that she hadn’t hated her sister, and that the cyborg draft was still in effect. Still ordering cyborgs to the labs every day. Still sacrificing them in order to find an antidote that Queen Levana already had.

“Why cyborgs?” he murmured. “Why do we only use cyborgs for the draft?”

Torin sighed. “All due respect, Your Majesty. Do you really think this is the best issue to be concerning yourself with right now? With the wedding, the alliance, the war…”

“Yes, I do. It’s a valid question. How did our society decide that their lives are worth less? I’m responsible for everything that happens in this government—everything. And when something affects the citizens like this…”

The thought struck him like a bullet.

They weren’t citizens. Or, they were, but it was more complicated than that, had been since the Cyborg Protection Act had been instated by his grandfather decades ago. The act came after a series of devastating cyborg crimes had caused widespread hatred and led to catastrophic riots in every major city in the Commonwealth. The protests may have been prompted by the violent spree, but they were a result of generations of growing disdain. For years people had been complaining about the rising population of cyborgs, many of whom received their surgeries at the hands of taxpayers.

Cyborgs were too smart, people had complained. They were cheating the average man out of his wages.

Cyborgs were too skilled. They were taking jobs away from hardworking, average citizens.