CINDER SLUMPED DOWN AT HER WORK DESK, RELIEVED TO finally be out of that stifling apartment. Not only was the air system down—again—with maintenance nowhere to be seen, but the awkwardness between her and Adri bordered on unbearable. They’d been tiptoeing around each other since she’d returned home from the lab two days before, Adri trying to remind Cinder of her superiority by ordering her to defrag their apartment’s entire mainframe and update all the software that they didn’t even use anymore, while at the same time lurking around as if she were—almost, kind of—ashamed of what she’d done to Cinder.
But Cinder was probably imagining that last part.
At least Pearl had been gone all day and had only shown up when Cinder and Iko were on their way out to work on the car.
Another long day. Another late night. The car was going to take more work than she’d realized—the entire exhaust system needed to be replaced, which meant manufacturing a lot of parts herself, which created any number of headaches. She had a feeling she wasn’t going to get much sleep if they were going to have it road ready by the night of the ball.
She sighed. The ball.
She didn’t regret saying no when the prince had asked her, because she knew how badly that would end. Any number of things were sure to go wrong—from tripping on the stairs and flashing the prince a sexy metal thigh, to running into Pearl or Adri or someone from the market. People would talk. The gossip channels were sure to look into her past, and pretty soon the whole world would know that the prince had taken a cyborg to his coronation ball. He would be mortified. She would be mortified.
But it didn’t make it any easier when she wondered, what if she were wrong? What if Prince Kai wouldn’t care? What if the world were different and nobody cared if she was cyborg…and on top of that, Lunar?
Yeah. Wishful thinking.
Spotting the broken netscreen on the carpet, she peeled herself off her chair and kneeled before it. The black screen was just reflective enough for her to see the outline of her face and body, the tanned skin of her arms contrasted with the dark steel of her hand.
Denial had run its course until it had nowhere else to go. She was Lunar.
But she was not afraid of the mirrored surface, not afraid of her own reflection. She couldn’t understand what Levana and her kind, their kind, found so disturbing about it. Her mechanical parts were the only disturbing thing in Cinder’s reflection, and that had been done to her on Earth.
Lunar. And cyborg.
And a fugitive.
Did Adri know? No, Adri never would have housed a Lunar. If she’d known, she would have turned Cinder in herself, probably expecting payment.
Had Adri’s husband known?
That was a question Cinder would probably never know the answer to.
Nevertheless, she was confident that so long as Dr. Erland didn’t say anything, her secret would be safe. She would just have to go on as if nothing had changed.
In many ways, nothing had. She was every bit an outcast as ever.
A white blob caught her eye in the screen’s surface—Kai’s android, its lifeless sensor staring down at her from its perch on top of her desk. Its pear-shaped body was the brightest thing in the room and probably the cleanest. It reminded her of the sterile med-droids in the labs and the quarantines, but this machine did not have scalpels and syringes hidden in its torso.
Work. Mechanics. She needed the distraction.
Returning to her desk, she turned on her audio interface for some tranquil background music. Kicking off her boots, she gripped both sides of the android and wheeled it toward her. After a quick examination of its external plating, she tipped the android over, laying it horizontal so that it balanced on the edge of its treads.
Cinder opened the back panel and inspected the wiring throughout the cylindrical frame. It was not a complicated android. The interior was mostly hollow, a shell for housing a minimum of hard drives, wires, chips. Tutor androids required little more than a central processing unit. Cinder suspected that the android would have to be wiped and reprogrammed, but she had a feeling that wasn’t a viable option. Despite Kai’s nonchalance, it was clear this android knew something important, and after their conversation in the research hall, she had an uneasy feeling it had something to do with Lunars.