Cress

  The door opened and a cloud of stale hot air swept into the hallway.

  Adri stood before her, tying the belt around her silk bathrobe. She almost always wore her bathrobe when she was at home, but this was not the same one Cinder was familiar with. Her hair was pulled back, and she wasn’t yet wearing any makeup. There was a fine sheen of sweat on her face.

  Cinder expected her body to recoil under her stepmother’s inspection, but it didn’t. Rather, as she looked at Adri, she felt only a detached coldness.

  This was just a woman with an invitation to the royal wedding. This was just another task to cross off the list.

  “Yes?” said Adri, skeptical gaze swooping over her.

  Cinder-the-Palace-Official bowed. “Good morning. Is Linh Adri-jiĕ at home?”

  “I am Linh Adri.”

  “A pleasure. I apologize for disturbing you at such an early hour,” said Cinder, launching into her practiced speech. “I am a member of the royal wedding planning committee, and I understand you were promised two invitations to the nuptials between His Imperial Majesty, Emperor Kaito, and Her Lunar Majesty, Queen Levana. As you are one of our distinguished civilian guests, I am honored to personally deliver your invitations for tonight’s ceremony.”

  She held out two pieces of paper—in reality, disposable napkin scraps, but to Adri’s eye, two finely crafted, hand-pressed paper envelopes.

  At least, she hoped that’s what Adri was seeing. The closest Cinder had yet to come to changing the perception of an inanimate object was her own prosthetic hand, and she wasn’t sure if that counted.

  Adri frowned at the napkins, but it quickly turned into a patient smile. No doubt because she now believed she was talking to someone from the palace. “There must be some mistake,” she said. “We received our invitations last week.”

  Cinder feigned surprise and withdrew the napkins. “How peculiar. Would you mind if I took a look at those invitations? So I can make sure some mishap hasn’t occurred?”

  Adri’s grin tightened, but she stepped aside and ushered Cinder into the apartment. “Of course, please come in. Can I offer you some tea?”

  “Thank you, no. We’ll just clear up this confusion and I won’t intrude anymore on your time.” She followed Adri into the living room.

  “I must apologize for the heat,” said Adri, grabbing a fan off a small side table and flicking it before her face. “The air has been broken for a week now and the maintenance here is completely incompetent. I used to have a servant to assist with these things, a cyborg ward my husband took in, but—well. It doesn’t matter now. Good riddance.”

  Cinder bristled. Servant? But she ignored the comment as her gaze traveled over the room. It hadn’t changed much, with the exception of the items displayed on the mantel of the holographic fireplace. Belongings that had held such prominent position before—Linh Garan’s award plaques and alternating digital photos of Pearl and Peony—had been crammed together at the mantel’s far edge. Now, at its center, stood a beautiful porcelain jar, painted with pink and white peonies and set atop a carved mahogany base.

  Cinder sucked in a breath.

  Not a jar. An urn. A cremation urn.

  Her mouth went dry. She heard Adri padding across the living room, but her focus was pinned to that urn, and what—who—would be inside it.

  Of their own accord, her feet began to move toward the mantel and Peony’s remains. Her funeral had come and gone and Cinder had not been there. Adri and Pearl had wept. Had no doubt invited every person from Peony’s classes, every person from this apartment building, every distant relative who had barely known her, who had probably griped about having to send the expected sympathy card and flowers.

  But Cinder hadn’t been there.

  “My daughter,” said Adri.

  Cinder gasped and pulled away. She hadn’t realized that her fingers were brushing against a painted flower until Adri had spoken.

  “Gone only recently, of letumosis,” Adri continued, as if Cinder had asked. “She was only fourteen.” There was sadness in her voice, true sadness. It was perhaps the one thing they had ever had in common.

  “I’m sorry,” Cinder whispered, grateful that in her distraction, some instinct had maintained her glamour. She forced herself to focus before her eyes started trying to make tears. They would fail—she was incapable of crying—but the effort sometimes gave her a headache that wouldn’t go away for hours, and now was not the time for mourning. She had a wedding to stop.

  “Do you have children?” Adri asked.

  “Er … no. I don’t,” said Cinder, having no idea if the palace official she was impersonating did or not.

  “I have one other daughter—seventeen years old. It was not very long ago that all I could think of was finding her a nice, wealthy husband. Daughters are expensive, you know, and a mother wants to give them everything. But now, I can’t stand the thought of her leaving me too.” She sighed and tore her gaze away from the urn. “But listen to me, carrying on, when you must have so many other places to be today. Here are the invitations we received.”

  Cinder took them carefully, glad to change the subject. Now that she was seeing a real invitation up close, she changed the glamour she’d made up for the napkins. The paper was a little stiffer, slightly more ivory, with gold, embossed letters in a flourishing script on one side and traditional second-era kanji on the other.

  “Interesting,” said Cinder, opening the top invitation. She faked a laugh, hoping it didn’t sound as painful as it was. “Ah, these are the invitations for Linh Jung and his wife. Your addresses must have gotten switched in our database. How silly.”

  Adri cocked her head. “Are you sure? When they arrived, I was certain—”

  “See for yourself.” Cinder angled the paper so Adri could see what wasn’t there. What Cinder told her to see. What Cinder told her to believe.

  “Goodness, so it is,” said Adri.

  Cinder handed Adri the napkins and watched as her stepmother handled them as though they were the most precious items in the world.

  “Well then,” she said, her voice barely warbling. “I’ll see myself out. I hope you’ll enjoy the ceremony.”

  Adri dropped the napkins into her robe’s pocket. “Thank you for taking the time to deliver these yourself. His Imperial Majesty certainly is a gracious host.”

  “We are lucky to have him.” Cinder meandered into the hallway. As her hand landed on the door, she realized with a jolt that this could be the last time she ever saw her stepmother.

  The very last time, if she could dare to hope.

  She attempted to smother the temptation that roiled inside her at the thought, but she still found herself turning back to face Adri.

  “I—”

  … have nothing to say. I have nothing to say to you.

  But all the common sense in the world could not convince her of those words.

  “I don’t mean to pry,” she started again, clearing her throat, “but you mentioned a cyborg before. You wouldn’t happen to be the guardian of Linh Cinder?”

  Adri’s kindness fell away. “I was, unfortunately. Thank the stars that’s all behind us now.”

  Against all her reasoning, Cinder stepped back into the apartment, blocking the doorway. “But she grew up here. Didn’t you ever feel that she could have been a part of your family? Didn’t you ever think of her as a daughter?”

  Adri huffed, fanning herself again. “You didn’t know the girl. Always ungrateful, always thinking she was so much better than us because of her … additions. Cyborgs are like that, you know. So self-important. It was awful for us, living with her. A cyborg and a Lunar, although we didn’t know it until her mortifying spectacle at the ball.” She tightened her belt. “And now she’s soiled our family name. I have to ask that you not judge us by her. I did all I could to help the girl, but she was unredeemable from the start.”

  Cinder’s fingers twitched, a familiar taste of rebellion. She ached to toss off her glamour,
to yell and scream, to force Adri to see her, the real her, just once. Not the ungrateful, self-important little girl that Adri thought she was, but the orphan who had always just wanted a family, who had only wanted to belong somewhere.

  But even as she thought this, a darker yearning climbed up her spine. She wanted Adri to be sorry. For how she had treated Cinder like a piece of property. For how she had taken Cinder’s prosthetic foot and forced her to hobble around like a broken doll. For how she had taunted Cinder again and again for her inability to cry, her inability to love, her inability to ever be human.

  She found herself reaching out with her mind, detecting the waves of bioelectricity that shimmered off the surface of Adri’s skin. Before she could rein in the anger that roiled through her, Cinder pressed every ounce of guilt and remorse and shame into her stepmother’s thick skull—twisting her emotions so rashly that Adri gasped and stumbled, her side slamming into the wall.

  “But didn’t you ever wonder how hard it must have been?” Cinder said through her teeth. A headache was coming on fast, throbbing against her dry eyes. “Didn’t you ever feel guilty over the way she was treated? Didn’t you ever think that maybe you could have loved her, if only you’d taken the time to talk to her, to understand her?”

  Adri groaned and pressed one hand to her stomach, like the years of guilt had been eating away at her, slowly making her sick.

  Cinder grimaced and began to ease up on the attack of emotions. When Adri met her gaze again, there were tears watering her eyes. Her breath was ragged.

  “Sometimes…,” Adri said, her tone weak. “Sometimes I do think that maybe she was misunderstood. She was so young when we adopted her. She must have been afraid. And my darling Peony always seemed so fond of her and sometimes I think, if things had been different, with Garan, and our finances … perhaps she could have belonged here. You understand … if only she had been normal.”

  The last word struck Cinder between her ribs and she flinched, releasing the small strands of guilt.

  Adri shuddered, swiping her robe’s sleeve across her eyes.

  It made no difference. Adri could be filled with all the guilt in the world, but in her own mind the blame would always be with Cinder. Because Cinder couldn’t have just been normal.

  “I-I’m so sorry,” said Adri, pinching the bridge of her nose. She’d gone pale. The tears were gone. “I don’t know what came over me. I—ever since I lost my daughter, sometimes my mind just—” She turned her focus back up to Cinder. “Please, don’t misunderstand me. Linh Cinder—she’s a lying, manipulative girl. I hope they catch her. I would do anything to make sure she can’t ruin anyone else the way she ruined me and my family.”

  Cinder nodded. “I understand, Linh-jiĕ,” she whispered. “I completely understand.”

  Curling her fingers around the invitations she’d come for, Cinder ducked back out of the apartment. The headache was splitting against her skull now, making it hard to focus on anything other than putting each foot in front of the other. She managed to maintain a flimsy grip on the glamour, not sure if Adri was still watching her, until she’d stepped into the elevator at the end of the corridor.

  She froze.

  On the back wall of the elevator was a mirror.

  She stared back at her own reflection as the doors slipped shut behind her. Her heart started to pound. Thankfully no one else was in the elevator to witness her, because she lost her hold on the glamour immediately, gaping into her own brown eyes and, for the first time, felt horrified of who she saw in that reflection.

  Because what she’d done to Adri, twisting her emotions against her, forcing her to feel guilt and shame, for no other reason than Cinder’s own terrible curiosity, her own burning desire for retaliation …

  It was something Levana would have done.

  Forty-Five

  Iko blew kisses and waved—a fluttery, five-fingered wave—as the podship coasted off the road and merged with the morning traffic. It was not a far walk to the warehouse, but she could feel her internal processor humming with excitement the whole way.

  By her calculation, she would be arriving at the warehouse by 07:25. The delivery hover filled with the palace’s order of sixty escorts was set to depart from the warehouse at 07:32. Half of the escorts would be dropped off at the catering office by 07:58. The rest would be delivered to the florist at 08:43, to be taken to the palace along with the human staff.

  Iko expected that she would be inside the palace by no later than 09:50.

  The industrial district was mostly deserted. Much of the city, and perhaps the whole world, had taken this as a holiday in order to watch the royal wedding. No one was around to notice Iko as she strutted down the alley toward the warehouse or hopped blithely over the chain-link fence into the yard where five delivery ships were backed up to the warehouse loading docks.

  She was dressed simply in black slacks and a white blouse. She was still a little disappointed that she couldn’t wear a fancy ball gown, but she felt stunning in her own way.

  She couldn’t wait for Emperor Kai to see her. The thought put an extra bounce in her step as she rounded the front of the first ship and darted up the stairs into the loading dock.

  The sight before her made her pause and almost crash face-first onto her perfectly shaped nose.

  The warehouse was filled with escort-droids, mostly girls, of all different skin tones and hair colors. Most were unclothed, sitting on the ground with their arms wrapped compactly around their knees and their heads tucked down. There were well over two hundred androids lined up in neat rows. Some had packing tape and protective tissue wrapped around their limbs to protect them during shipping. Some had been loaded onto pallets and settled onto plastic crates. Packing foam and cardboard littered the floor around them.

  On the wall to Iko’s left there were three stories of metal shelving filled with the packing crates, all labeled with the escort’s makes and models and special features.

  “Is this all of them?” said a man.

  Iko ducked behind the wall of the warehouse, before inching forward and peering around the doorjamb. She spotted sixty androids—forty-five female and fifteen male, all standing in neat rows. They were all dressed in identical black pants and blush-toned silk tops, simple mandarin-collared dress shirts for the men, and elegant wraps for the women that tied at the waists and draped kimono-style on their arms. Each girl had her hair pulled into a tight bun with an orchid tucked into the side.

  “Checking off the order now,” said a woman, who was marching between the rows and making notations on a portscreen. “The order form specified a petite model of make 618, not the medium.”

  “I know, but our last petite got shipped out last week. I cleared the change with the palace on Thursday.”

  The woman tapped something into the port. “Fifty-nine … sixty. That’s all of them.”

  “Great. Let’s load them up. Can’t let them be late for their royal mission.” The man pulled up the massive rolling door, opening the bay to one of the delivery ships, as the woman began making her way through the androids again, opening a panel in each of their necks. Their postures softened.

  “Enter single file,” ordered the man. “Squeeze in tight. It’ll be a close fit.”

  The androids marched one by one into the ship.

  There was no way Iko could get all the way over there without being noticed, and her different clothes would make it clear that she didn’t belong.

  The idea that they could mistake her for a rogue android and send her out for reprogramming made her wiring quiver.

  Keeping low, she slinked along the wall, away from the two employees, and ducked beneath the first tower of industrial shelving. Hidden behind the crates, she made her way toward the rows of escort-droids that were waiting to be packaged up. Reaching the last row, she crouched down behind an android and felt for the latch on her neck. Iko glanced up to see that half of the rental escort-droids had already settled into the ship.

/>   Humming to herself, she turned the android on. The processor whirred and her head raised. This one had white-blonde hair tipped with florescent green that hung to her waist. Iko brushed her hair off her shoulder and whispered, “I command you to stand up, scream, and run for the exit.”

  The girl launched to her feet almost before Iko finished speaking. She started to scream, a spine-chilling, ear-bleeding sound.

  Iko threw herself to the ground behind the row of still-seated and oblivious androids and adjusted the volume on her audio processor, but it was too late. The android had already stopped screaming and was now running full speed for the exit, knocking her statue-like brethren over as she passed.

  Iko heard the two employees’ cries of shock, and then their footsteps pounding as they chased after the android. As soon as they jumped down into the loading yard, Iko bounced up and scurried through the rows of androids. The rental escorts said nothing, only blinked at her lazily as she pushed her way into their midst.

  “Sorry, sorry, don’t mind me, coming through, oh why hello there—” This to a particularly handsome Kai look-alike droid, which had no more reaction than any of the others. “Or not,” she muttered, brushing past him. “Pardon me, a little space, please?”

  By the time the two workers had returned, winded and ranting about faulty personality chips and those imbeciles up in programming, Iko had settled comfortably in the back of the ship, squeezed between two of her distant cousins and finding it difficult not to grin like a lunatic.

  As it turned out, being human was every bit as much fun as she’d always thought it would be.

  * * *

  It was easy to grasp why the government of 126 years ago had chosen this spot for the royal family’s safe house. It was less than ten miles from the city of New Beijing, but they were separated by such jagged cliffs that it seemed as though they had entered another country entirely. The house itself was built in a valley carved out with overgrown rice terraces, though Cinder doubted any rice had been cultivated there in generations, giving the house a sense of abandonment.