Cress

Instead, she spent the agonizing hours wondering whether she was to become a slave, a servant, a feast for cannibals, a human sacrifice, or whether she would be returned to Queen Levana and tortured for her betrayal.

Eventually, late in the second day of her entrapment, the vans stopped and the doors were thrown open. Cress cringed at the brightness and tried to scuffle away, but she was grabbed and hauled outside. She landed on her knees. Pain shot up her spine, but her captor ignored her whimpering as he tugged her to her feet and bound her wrists.

The pain soon faded, trounced by adrenaline and curiosity. They’d arrived at a new town, but even she could tell this one had never been as wealthy or populated as Kufra. Modest buildings the color of the desert stretched down a sand-spotted road. Walls of red clay, painted indigo and pink, had long been bleached in the sun, their roofs covered with broken tiles. A fenced area not far away held half a dozen camels and there were a few more wheeled, dirty vehicles stationed along the street, and—

She blinked the sun and sand from her eyes.

A spaceship sat in the center of town. A Rampion.

Her heart skipped with frenzied hope, but it was quickly smothered. Even from this distance she could see that the Rampion’s main hatch was painted black, not adorned with a lounging lady as had been reported when Thorne’s ship landed in France.

She whimpered, tearing her eyes away as her captors herded her into the nearest building. They entered a dark hallway. Only a small window in the front let in any light, and it had been caked with windblown sand over the years. There was a tiny desk set into a corner with a board of old-fashioned keys hanging on the wall. Cress was shuffled past it and taken to the end of the corridor.

The walls reeked with something pungent—not a bad scent, but too overpowering to be pleasant. Cress’s nose tickled.

She was pushed up a staircase, so thin that she had to follow behind Jina, with Niels behind her. An eerie silence haunted the sand-colored walls. The stench was stronger up here and a shiver raced down her spine, making goose bumps bloom across her arms. Her fear had bundled itself up in a cluster of nerves at the base of her spine.

By the time they reached the last door in the hallway and Jina raised her fist to knock, Cress was shaking so hard she almost couldn’t stand. She was surprised to find herself longing for the security of the van.

Jina had to knock twice before they heard footsteps and the creak of the door. Niels kept Cress tucked securely behind Jina, and all she could see were the cuffs of a man’s brown trousers and worn white shoes with fraying laces.

“Jina,” said a man—sounding like he’d just woken from a nap. “I heard a rumor out of Kufra that you were on your way.”

“I’ve brought you another subject. Found her wandering in the desert.”

A hesitation. Then the man said, without question, “A shell.”

His certainty made Cress squirm. If he had not had to ask, that meant he could sense her. Or, rather, couldn’t sense her. She remembered Sybil complaining that she could not sense Cress’s thoughts—how much more difficult it was to train and command a person like her, as if it were all Cress’s doing.

This man was Lunar.

She flinched away, wanting to curl up until she was no larger than a grain of sand, until she blew away into the desert and disappeared.

But she could not disappear. Instead, as Jina stepped aside, she found herself face-to-face with a man well into his years.

She started. They were face-to-face—he was barely taller than her.

Behind a pair of thin wired spectacles, his blue eyes widened, looking remarkably lively despite the wrinkles that folded and creased around them. He was balding, with tufts of untamed gray hair that stuck out above his ears. A bizarre déjà vu struck her, as if she’d seen him before, but that was impossible.

He whipped off his spectacles and rubbed at his eyes. When he replaced them, his lips were puckered and he was examining Cress like a bug for dissection. She pressed back against the wall, until Niels grabbed her elbow and yanked her forward.

“Definitely a shell,” the old man murmured, “and a phantom, it seems.”

Cress’s heart pounded a rough, erratic rhythm against her rib cage.

“I’m asking 32,000 univs for her.”

The man blinked at Jina like he’d forgotten she was there. He stood a bit straighter and made a great fuss about removing his spectacles again, to clean them this time.

Cress dug her fingernails into her palm to distract herself from her panic. She stared past the man. A single window was covered in blinds, and there was dust swirling in and out of a beam of sunlight that knifed through them. There was a closed door, presumably a closet, a desk, a bed, and a pile of rumpled blankets in the corner. The blankets were clotted with blood.

A chill raced across her skin.

Then she spotted the netscreen.

A netscreen. She could comm for help. She could contact the last hotel, in Kufra. She could tell Thorne—