Acknowledgments
Thank You, Thank You, Thank You …
To Jill, Cheryl, and Katelyn, for all your guidance and enthusiasm, and for not batting an eye when I was like, “Surprise! I wrote this thing, and I have no idea what to do with it.”
To Liz, Jean, and Jon, for believing in me as an author, and for believing in Levana’s story as one that needed to exist in the world.
To Rich Deas, for the most outstanding book covers a writer could ever hope for.
To the rest of the Macmillan team, for your tireless creativity and constant efforts on behalf of myself and the Lunar Chronicles.
To all of the folks behind NaNoWriMo, for reminding me every year what I’m capable of when I really put my mind to it.
To Tamara Felsinger, Jennifer Johnson, and Meghan Stone-Burgess, for being brilliant yet again.
To Jesse, for making me laugh even when the writing gets all depressing and stuff.
And lastly, to that girl who came to the Cress launch party dressed up as Queen Levana and pretended to kill me with her crazy-long fingernails. Thank you for not actually killing me with your crazy-long fingernails … Your Majesty.
Bonus excerpt from
Winter
The final book of the
Lunar Chronicles
By Marissa Meyer
(coming in Fall 2015)
BOOK
One
She had a little daughter who was as white as snow, as red as blood, and as black as ebony wood.
One
Winter’s toes had become ice cubes. They were as cold as space. As cold as the dark side of Luna. As cold as—
“… security feeds captured him entering the AR-Central med-clinic’s sublevels at 23:00 U.T.C.…”
Thaumaturge Aimery Park smiled as he spoke, his voice serene and measured, like a ballad. It was easy to lose track of what he was saying, easy to let all the words blur and conjoin. Winter curled her toes inside her thin-soled shoes, afraid that if they got any colder before this trial was over, they would snap off.
“… was attempting to interfere with one of the shells currently stored…”
Snap off. One by one.
“… records indicate the shell child was the accused’s son, taken on 29 July of last year. He is now fourteen months old.”
Winter gripped her hands in her lap, hiding them in the folds of her gown. They were shaking again. It seemed like she was always shaking these days. She squeezed her fingers to hold them still. Pressed the bottoms of her feet into the hard floor. Struggled to bring the throne room into focus before it dissolved entirely.
The view was striking from the central tower of the palace. From here, Winter could see Artemisia Lake mirroring the white palace back up to the sky and the city that spread to the very edge of the enormous clear dome that sheltered them from the outside elements—or lack thereof. The throne room itself was built to extend past the walls of the tower, so that when one passed beyond the edge of the mosaic floor, they found themselves on a ledge of clear glass. Like standing on air, about to plummet into the depths of the crater lake.
To Winter’s left, she could make out the edges of her stepmother’s fingernails as they dug into the arm of her throne, an imposing seat carved from white stone. Normally, her stepmother was calm during these proceedings, and would listen patiently to the trials without a hint of emotion. Winter was used to seeing Levana’s fingertips leisurely stroking the polished arm of her throne, not throttling it. But tension had been high in the palace since Levana and her entourage had returned from Earth, and her stepmother had flown into even more rages than usual these past months.
Ever since that runaway Lunar—that cyborg—had escaped from her Earthen prison.
Ever since war had begun between Earth and Luna.
Ever since the queen’s betrothed had been kidnapped, and Levana’s chance to be crowned empress had been stolen from her.
Winter tore her eyes away from the queen’s fingers. The blue planet hung above them in an endless black sky, looking like someone had taken a knife to it and shorn it perfectly in half. They were a week into the long night, and the city of Artemisia was aglow with pale blue lampposts and glowing crystal windows, the lights dancing across the lake’s surface and reflecting off the dome’s ceiling.
One week. Yet Winter felt that it had been years since she had last seen the sun.
“How did he know about the shells?” Queen Levana asked, her voice echoing off the smooth surfaces of the throne room. “Why did he not believe his son to have been killed at birth?”
Seated around the rest of the room, in four tiered rows, were the families. The queen’s court. The nobles of Luna, granted favor with Her Majesty for their generations of loyalty, their extraordinary talents with the Lunar gift, or pure luck at having been born a citizen of the great city of Artemisia.
Then, pitifully outnumbered, was the man on his knees beside Thaumaturge Park. He had not been born so lucky.
His hands were clasped together, pleading. Winter wished she could tell him that it wouldn’t matter. All his begging would be for nothing. She felt there would be comfort in knowing there was nothing you could do to avoid death. Those who came before the queen having already accepted their fate seemed to have an easier time of it.
Tearing her gaze from the man, she stared at her own hands, still clawed around her gauzy white skirt. Her fingers too, she saw, had been bitten with frost. It was sort of pretty. Glistening and shimmering and cold so very cold …
“Your queen has asked you a question,” said Aimery.
Winter flinched, as if he’d been yelling at her.
Focus. She must try to focus.
She lifted her head again and inhaled.
Aimery was wearing white now, having replaced Sybil Mira as the queen’s head thaumaturge. The gold embroidery on his coat shimmered as he paced around the captive.
“I am sorry, Your Majesty,” the man said, his voice restrained. Winter couldn’t tell if he was disguising hatred for his sovereign, or merely trying to keep from turning into a blubbering mess. “My family and I have served you loyally for generations. I am a janitor at that med-clinic, and I’d heard rumors, you see. It was none of my business, so I never cared, I never listened. But … when my son was born a shell…” He whimpered. “He is my son.”
“Did you not think,” said Levana, her voice loud and crisp, “that there might be a reason your queen has chosen to keep your son and all the other ungifted Lunars separate from our citizens? That we may have a purpose that serves the good of all our people by containing them as we have?”
The man gulped, hard enough that Winter could see his Adam’s apple bobbing. “I know, My Queen. I know that you use their blood for some … experimentation. In your laboratories. But … but you have so many, and he’s only a baby, and…”
“Not only is his blood valuable to the success of our war efforts and our political alliances, the likes of which I cannot expect a janitor from the outer sectors to understand, but he is also a shell, and his kind have proven themselves to be dangerous and untrustworthy, as you will recall from the assassinations made on King Marrok and Queen Jannali eighteen years ago. Yet you would subject our society to this threat?”
The man’s eyes were wild with fear. “Threat, My Queen? He is a baby.” He paused. He did not look outright rebellious, but his lack of remorse would be sending Levana into a fury soon enough. “And the others that I saw in those tanks … so many of them, children. Innocent children.”
The room seemed to chill.
Clearly, he knew too much. The shell infanticide had been in place since the rule of Levana’s sister, Queen Channary, after a shell sneaked into the palace and killed their parents. Many citizens, but certainly not all, had been convinced that the precaution was necessary, and no one would be pleased to know that their babies had not been killed at all, but really locked away and used as tiny blood platelet manufacturing plants.
Winter blinked, imagining her own body as a blood platelet manufacturing plant.
Her gaze dropped again to her fingers, and she saw that the ice had extended nearly to her wrists now.
That would not be beneficial for the platelet conveyor belts.
“Does the accused have a family?” asked the queen.