Scarlet
He didn’t answer, just kept nursing the arm against his chest.
Setting her jaw, Scarlet stomped toward him and grabbed his wrist. He yelped and tried to pull away, but she held firm, shoving his sleeve up to his elbow. Scarlet gasped and let go, but the arm continued to hang in midair, like he’d forgotten to retract it.
The skin was covered in burn marks. Each one a perfect circle and placed in a neat, perfect row. Row upon row upon row, circling his forearm from wrist to elbow, some shining with wrinkled scar tissue, others blackened and blistering. And on his wrist, a scab where his ID chip had once been implanted.
Her stomach turned.
Back against the wall, her father buried his face in the mattress, away from Scarlet, away from the burns.
“Who did this to you?”
His arm fell, curling against his stomach. He said nothing.
Scarlet pushed herself off the wall and ran to the bathroom in the hallway. She returned a moment later with a tube of ointment and a roll of bandages. Her father hadn’t moved.
“They made me,” he whispered, his hysteria fading.
Scarlet eased his arm away from his stomach and began to dress the wound, as tenderly as she could despite her shaking hands. “Who made you do what?”
“I couldn’t get away,” he continued as if he hadn’t heard her. “They asked so many questions and I didn’t know. I didn’t know what they wanted. I tried to answer them, but I didn’t know…”
Scarlet glanced up from her work as her father tilted his head toward her and stared blankly across the tousled blankets. Tears had pooled in his eyes. Her father—crying. It was almost more shocking than the burns. Her chest clamped and she froze, the bandage wrapped halfway up his forearm. She realized that she did not know this sad, broken man. This was only a shell of her father, her charismatic and selfish and worthless father.
Where anger and hatred had flared before, there was now an aching sense of pity.
What possibly could have caused this?
“They gave me the poker,” he continued, his eyes wide and distant.
“They gave you—? Why—?”
“And they brought me to her. And I realized, she was the one with the answers. She was the one with the information. They wanted something from her. But she just watched … she just watched me do it, and she cried … but they asked her the same questions, and she still wouldn’t answer them. She wouldn’t answer them.” His voice hiccupped, his face flushing with sudden anger. “She let them do this to me.”
Struggling to gulp, Scarlet finished off the wrapping and leaned against the mattress, her legs beginning to tremble. “Grand-mère? You saw her?”
His attention flashed back to her, crazed again. “They had me for a week and then they just let me go. They could tell she didn’t care about me. She wouldn’t give in for me.”
Without warning, he pushed forward and clambered toward Scarlet on his knees, grasping her arms. She tried to shrink away but he held her firm, his fingernails digging into her skin. “What is it, Scar? What’s so important? More important than her own son?”
“Dad, you have to calm down. You have to tell me where she is.” Her thoughts stammered. “Where is she? Who has her? Why?”
Her father’s eyes searched her, panicked and shimmering. Slowly, he shook his head and dropped his attention to the floor. “She’s hiding something,” he mumbled. “I want to know what it is. What is she hiding, Scar? Where is it?”
He turned to rustle through a drawer of old cotton shirts that had clearly already been riffled through. He was sweating now, his hair damp around his ears.
Scarlet used the bed frame to hoist herself onto the mattress. “Dad, please.” She tried to sound soothing, though her heart was thumping so hard it hurt. “Where is she?”
“Don’t know.” He dug his fingernails into the space between the molding and the wall. “I was at a bar in Paris. They must have drugged my drink, because next I woke up in a dark room. It smelled damp, musty.” He sniffed. “They drugged me when they let me go too. One minute I was in that dark room, then I was here. I woke up in the cornfield.”
With a shudder, Scarlet pulled her hands through her hair until the curls knotted up around them. They’d brought him here, to the same place they’d kidnapped her grandmother. Why? Did these people know that Scarlet was his only family—did they think she would be the best person to take care of him?
That didn’t make any sense. Clearly they weren’t worried about her dad’s well-being. So what else? Was leaving him here a message to her? A threat?
“You must remember something,” she said, her voice taking on a tinge of desperation. “Something about the room, or something someone said? Did you get a good look at them? Could you describe one of them to a profiler? Anything?”
“Was drugged,” he said, quickly, but then his brow drew together as he struggled to think. He made to touch his burn marks, but then let his hand fall into his lap. “Wouldn’t let me see them.”
Scarlet barely resisted the urge to shake him and scream that he had to think harder. “Did they blindfold you?”
“No.” He squinted. “I was afraid to look.”
Frustrated tears were beginning to sting her eyes and Scarlet tilted her head back, gulping down patient breaths. Her worst fears, those sneaking, horrible suspicions, were true.
Her grandmother had been kidnapped. Not just kidnapped, but kidnapped by cruel, brutal people. Were they harming her as they’d harmed her son? What would they do to her? What did they want?
Ransom?
But why hadn’t they asked Scarlet for anything yet? And why had they taken her father too, but then let him go? It didn’t make sense.
“What did you mean, when you said they made you? What did they make you do?”
“But how—”
“So many questions. I don’t know. I never knew my father. She doesn’t talk about him. I don’t know what she does here in her big ancient house. What happened on the moon. Don’t know what she’s hiding—she’s hiding something.” He pulled weakly at the blankets on the bed, glancing halfheartedly beneath the sheets.
“You’re talking nonsense,” Scarlet said, her voice breaking. “You have to think harder. You have to remember something.”
A long, long silence. Outside, the chickens were clucking again, their scaly feet scratching across the gravel.
“Tattoo.”
She frowned. “What?”
He placed a finger over one of the burns, on the inside flesh of his arm, just below his elbow. “The one who handed me the poker had a tattoo. Here. Letters and numbers.”
Her vision prickled with bright lights and Scarlet gripped the rumpled quilt, for a moment feeling like she could faint.
Letters and numbers.
“Are you sure?”
“L … S…” He shook his head. “I can’t remember. There was more.”
Her mouth ran dry, hatred overtaking the dizziness. She knew that tattoo.
He’d pretended to be kind. Pretended he only needed honest work.
When—days? hours?—before, he’d tortured her father. Kept her grandmother prisoner.
And she’d almost trusted him. The tomato, the carrots … she’d thought she was helping him. Stars above, she’d flirted with him, and all the while, he knew. She recalled those moments of peculiar amusement, the glint in his eyes, and her stomach twisted. He’d been laughing at her.
Ears ringing, she peered down at her dad, who was turning out the pockets of a pair of pants that probably hadn’t fit her grandmother in twenty years.
She stood. The blood rushed to her head, but she ignored it. Marching to the corner of the room, she grabbed her grandma’s portscreen from where her father had tossed it onto the floorboards.
“Here,” she said, throwing the port onto the bed. “I’m going to the Morel farm. If I’m not home in three hours, comm the police.”
Dazed, her father reached out and grasped the port. “I thought the Morels were dead.”
“Are you listening to me? I want you to lock all the doors, and don’t leave. Three hours and then comm the police. Do you understand?”
Again he succumbed to that frightened, child-like expression. “Don’t go out there, Scar. Don’t you get it? They used me as bait for her and you’ll be next. They’ll come for you too.”
Clenching her jaw, Scarlet zipped up her hoodie to her chin. “I intend to find them first.”
Six
CARSWELL THORNE
ID #0082688359
BORN 22 MAY 106 T.E., AMERICAN REPUBLIC
FF 437 MEDIA HITS, REVERSE CHRON
POSTED 12 JAN 126 T.E.: EX–AR AIR FORCE CADET, CARSWELL THORNE, HAS BEEN CONVICTED AND SENTENCED TO A SIX-YEAR PRISON SENTENCE AT THE END OF A SPEEDY TWO-WEEK TRIAL …
Green text trekked across Cinder’s vision, documenting the crimes of one Carswell Thorne, who had already led a very productive life of lawbreaking despite having just turned twenty a few months ago: one count military desertion, two counts international theft, one count attempted theft, six counts handling of stolen goods, and one count theft of government property.
That last conviction hardly seemed to do the crime justice. He’d stolen a spaceship from the American Republic’s military.
Hence, the spaceship that he was so proud of.
Though he was currently serving a six-year sentence in the Eastern Commonwealth for attempted theft of a second-era jade necklace, he was also wanted in Australia and, of course, his own America, and would be standing trial and no doubt serving time in both countries for the harm he’d done there as well.
Cinder slumped against a breaker panel, wishing she hadn’t checked. Escaping from prison herself was bad enough, but assisting the escape of this criminal—a real criminal—and doing it in a stolen spaceship?
Swallowing hard, she peered back through the opening she’d made between the mechanical room and the prisoner’s cell. Carswell Thorne still sat on his cot with his elbows propped on his knees, thumbs twiddling.
She wiped her damp palm on her bleached-white jumper. This was not about Carswell Thorne. This was about Queen Levana and Emperor Kai and Princess Selene. The innocent child Levana had tried to murder thirteen years ago, but who had been rescued and smuggled down to Earth. Who remained the most-wanted person in the world. Who just happened to be Cinder herself.