Cress (Page 27)
“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.
“Well, one day Sybil asked me to hack a communication between a couple of European diplomats and I told her that the signal was too weak. I needed to be closer to Earth, and I required better net connectivity, and advanced software…”
Cress shook her head, remembering how she had told Sybil exactly what Sybil would need to craft the satellite for her young prodigy. Cress had practically designed her own prison.
“A few months later, Mistress came to get me, and told me we were going on a trip. We boarded a podship, and I was so, so excited. I thought she was taking me to Artemisia, to be presented to the queen herself, to be forgiven for being born a shell. It feels so stupid now. Even when we started flying away from Luna, and I saw that we were heading toward Earth, I thought that’s where we were going. I figured, all right, maybe Lunars really can’t accept me this way, but Mistress knows that Earthens will. So she’s letting me go to Earth, instead. The trip took hours and hours and by the end of it I was shaking with excitement, and I’d worked up this whole story in my head, how Mistress was going to give me to some nice Earthen couple, and they would raise me as their own, and they lived in an enormous tree house—I don’t know why I thought they would live in a tree house, but for some reason that’s what I was hoping for. I mean, I’d never seen real trees.” She frowned. “Still haven’t, actually.”
There was a short silence, before Thorne said, “And that’s when she took you to the satellite, and you became the queen’s programmer.”
“Programmer, hacker, spy … somehow, I never stopped believing that if I did everything she asked, someday they would let me go.”
“And how long before you decided that you’d rather be trying to save Earthen royalty than spy on them?”
“I don’t know. I was always fascinated by Earth. I spent a lot of time reading Earthen news and watching their dramas. I started to feel connected to the people down there … down here. More than I ever did to Lunars.” She wrung her hands. “After a while, I started to pretend that I was a secret guardian, and it was my job to protect Earth and its people from Levana.”
To her relief, Thorne didn’t laugh. He didn’t say anything for a long time and Cress couldn’t determine if the silence was comforting or awkward. Maybe he thought her fantasies were childish.
A long while later, Thorne finally spoke. “If I’d been in your position, and I had only one D-COMM chip that I could use to communicate with Earth, I would have found some dirt on a hotshot spaceship pilot and blackmailed him into coming to get me out of that satellite, rather than trying to rescue the emperor.”
Though he looked serious, Cress couldn’t help but smile. “No, you wouldn’t have. You would have done the same thing I did, because you know that the threat Levana poses to Earth is much bigger than you or me … much bigger than any of us.”
But the captain just shook his head. “That’s very good of you to say, Cress. But trust me. I would have blackmailed someone.”
Nineteen
Kai scooped his hair off his brow, staring at the holograph that floated above the conference table with a mixture of horror and awe. Part of him wanted to laugh. Not at all because it was funny, but because there didn’t seem to be any better reaction.
The holograph showed the planet Earth. And all around it were hundreds of small yellow lights, many clumped above Earth’s most-populated cities.
Hundreds of tiny spaceships.
They were surrounded.
“And they’re all Lunar?” he said. “We’re sure?”
“Without a doubt,” said European Prime Minister Bromstad, his face grouped with the other Earthen Union leaders on the massive netscreen. “What’s most disconcerting is that we were given zero indication of their approach. It’s as if they all just … flickered into existence, ten thousand kilometers over our heads.”
“Or,” said Queen Camilla of the United Kingdom, “as if they were there all along, but we were unable to detect them. Haven’t we been hearing for years about these Lunar ships sneaking into our atmosphere, bypassing all of our security measures?”
“Does it matter how long they’ve been there, or how they got there in the first place?” asked American Republic President Vargas. “They’re obviously there now, and this is obviously a threat.”
Kai squeezed his eyes shut. “But why? She’s getting exactly what she wants. Why threaten us now? Why show us her hand?”
“Perhaps to ensure the Commonwealth doesn’t back out of the marriage alliance at the last minute?” Bromstad suggested.
“But she has absolutely no reason—” Kai huffed and dropped his hand to the back of his chair … what had once been his father’s chair. He was far too restless to sit down as he glanced around at his cabinet members and advisers, his country’s highly educated experts, who were looking as baffled as he felt. “What do you all make of this?”