Twenty-Nine
Stepping back from the Rampion’s hulking side, Cinder shaded her eyes with one arm and peered up at their slipshod work. Jacin was still up on one of the squeaky metal ladders the townspeople had brought them, painting over all that remained of the ship’s signature decoration—the lounging naked lady, the mascot that Thorne had painted himself before Cinder had ever met him. Cinder had hated the painting from the moment she laid eyes on it, but now she was sad to see it covered up. Like she was erasing a part of Thorne, a part of his memory.
But word had gotten out through the media that the wanted ship had this very specific marking, and that was unacceptable.
Swiping a bead of sweat from her brow, Cinder surveyed the rest of their work. They didn’t have enough paint to cover the entire ship, so they’d opted to focus on the main ramp’s enormous side panel, so that it would at least look like that exterior piece had been fully replaced, which wasn’t uncommon, rather than looking like they had tried to cover something up, which would defeat the purpose.
Unfortunately, it seemed that as much black paint had ended up on the dusty ground and the townspeople, who had come out in droves to help them, than had actually ended up on the ship. Cinder herself had paint dried on her collarbone, her temple, clumped in her hair, and stuck in the joints of her metal hand, but she was relatively unscathed compared with some of their assistants. The children in particular, eager to be helpful at first, had soon made a game of seeing who could paint up their bodies to look the most cyborg.
It was a strange sort of honor. Since Cinder had arrived, she’d been seeing this mimicry more and more. The backs of T-shirts illustrated with bionic spines. Shoes decorated with bits of assorted metal. Necklaces hung with washers and vintage lug nuts.
One girl had even been proud to show Cinder her new, real tattoo—wires and robotic joints overtaking the skin of her left foot. Cinder had smiled awkwardly and resisted the urge to tell her that the tattoo wasn’t cybernetically accurate.
The attention made Cinder uncomfortable. Not because she wasn’t flattered, but because she wasn’t used to it. She wasn’t used to being accepted by strangers, even appreciated. She wasn’t used to being admired.
“Hey, mongrels, try to stay in the lines!”
Cinder looked up, just as Jacin flicked his paintbrush, sending a splatter of black paint at the three children beneath him. They all shrieked with laughter and ran for cover beneath the ship’s underside.
Wiping her hands on her cargo pants, Cinder went to look at the finger painting the kids had been doodling on the other side of the ramp’s plating. Simple stick figures depicted a family holding hands. Two adults. Three children of various heights. And at the end—Cinder. She knew it was her by the ponytail jutting out from the side of her head and how one of the stick figure’s legs was twice as wide as the other.
She shook her head, baffled.
The ladder shook beside her as Jacin clambered down. “You should wipe it off,” he said, unhooking a damp rag from his belt.
“It’s not hurting anything.”
Scoffing, Jacin draped the rag over her shoulder. “The whole point of this is to get rid of obvious markings.”
“But it’s so small.…”
“Since when are you so sentimental?”
She blew a strand of hair out of her face. “Fine.” Pulling the rag off her shoulder, she set to scrubbing the paint off before it could dry. “I thought I was the one giving the orders around here.”
“I hope you don’t really think I’m here just to be bossed around some more.” Jacin dropped his paintbrush into a bucket at the ladder’s base. “I’ve taken enough orders in my life.”
Cinder refolded the rag, searching for a spot that wasn’t already soaked through with paint. “You have a funny way of showing loyalty.”
Chuckling to himself, though Cinder wasn’t sure what he found so amusing, Jacin stepped back and peered up at the enormous black square that now made up the ship’s main ramp. “Good enough.”
Scrubbing away the last bit of the painting—her own amateur portrait—Cinder stepped back to join him. The ship no longer looked like the Rampion she’d come to think of as home. It no longer looked like the stolen ship of Captain Carswell Thorne.
She swallowed the lump in her throat.
All around her, strangers were helping to gather up the painting supplies, scrubbing paint off one another’s faces, pausing to take enormous drinks of water, and smiling. Smiling because they’d spent the morning together, accomplishing something.
Somehow, though Cinder knew she was at the center of it all, she couldn’t help feel disconnected from the camaraderie, the friendships that had been forged over years of being part of one community. And soon, she would be leaving. Maybe, someday, even returning to Luna.
“So. When do we start your flying lessons?”
Cinder started. “Excuse me?”
“Ship needs a pilot,” said Jacin, nodding toward the front of the ship, where the cockpit windows were glinting almost blindingly bright in the sun. “It’s time you learned how to fly it yourself.”
“But … aren’t you my new pilot?”
He smirked. “In case you haven’t noticed, people tend to get killed around you. I don’t think that’s a trend that’s bound to stop any time soon.”
A boy a few years younger than Cinder ran up to offer her a bottle of water, but Jacin took it out of his hand before Cinder could and took a few long drafts. Cinder would have been annoyed, if his words—at once so practical and so painful—weren’t keeping her from feeling anything other than shock.
“I’ll start teaching you the basics after we eat,” he said, passing the bottle to her. Cinder took it numbly. “Don’t worry. It’s not as hard as it looks.”
“Fine.” Cinder finished off the water. “It’s not like I’m busy trying to prevent a full-scale war or anything.”
“Is that what you’re doing?” He eyed her suspiciously. “Here I thought we were painting a spaceship.”
A comm pinged in the corner of Cinder’s vision. From Dr. Erland. She tensed, but the comm was only two tiny words that made her entire world start spinning again. “He’s awake,” she said, mostly to herself. “Wolf is awake.”
Turning away from the ship and lingering townsfolk, Cinder thrust the empty water bottle into Jacin’s stomach and took off running toward the hotel.
Wolf was sitting up when Cinder burst into the hotel room. His feet were bare, his torso still covered in bandages. He didn’t look at all surprised to see Cinder, but then, he would have heard her pounding up the old wooden stairs. Probably smelled her too.
“Wolf! Thank the stars. We were so worried. How do you feel?”
His eyes, duller than usual, flickered past her toward the hallway. He frowned, like he was confused.
A second later, Cinder heard footsteps and turned just as Dr. Erland brushed past her, carrying a medical kit.
“He is still under heavy painkillers,” said the doctor. “Try not to ask too many confusing questions, if you would.”
Gulping, Cinder followed the doctor to Wolf’s side.
“What happened?” said Wolf, his words barely slurred. He sounded exhausted.
“We were attacked by a thaumaturge,” said Cinder. Part of her felt like she should take Wolf’s hand, but the most intimate contact she’d ever had with him before was the occasional friendly punch to the jaw. It wouldn’t have felt natural, so instead she stood just within arm’s reach, her hands fisted in her pockets. “You were shot. We didn’t know … but you’re all right. He’s all right, isn’t he, doctor?”
Erland flashed a light past Wolf’s eyes. Wolf flinched back.
“He is better than I would have expected,” he said. “It seems you’re on target to make a full recovery, so long as you can avoid re-opening your wounds in the meantime.”
“We’re on Earth,” said Cinder, not sure if that was obvious to Wolf or not. “In Africa. We’re safe here, for now.”
But Wolf seemed distracted and upset as he tilted his head back and sniffed. His frown deepened. “Where’s Scarlet?”
Cinder grimaced. She had known the question would be coming. She had known that she wouldn’t know how to answer when it did.
His expression darkened. “I can’t smell her. Like she hasn’t been here in … like she isn’t here.”
Dr. Erland pressed a thermometer against Wolf’s brow, but Wolf snatched it away before it could gauge his temperature. “Where is she?”
Miffed, the doctor fisted his hand on his waist. “Now that is precisely the type of jerky movement you should be avoiding.”
Wolf snarled, showing his sharp teeth.
“She’s not here,” said Cinder, forcing herself not to shrink away when Wolf turned his glare on her. She struggled to form an explanation. “The thaumaturge took her. During the fight on the ship. She was alive—I don’t think she was even injured. But the thaumaturge took her aboard the podship. Jacin thinks she needed Scarlet to pilot it.”
Wolf’s jaw went slack. With terror, with denial. He jerked his head, no.
“Wolf…”
“How long? How long ago…?”
She scrunched her shoulders against her neck. “Five days.”
He grimaced and turned away, his face contorting with pain that had nothing to do with his wounds.
Cinder took half a step toward him, but paused. There were no words that would mean anything to him. No explanation, no apology.
So she braced herself for Wolf’s anger instead. She expected fury and destruction. His pupils had narrowed to pinpricks and his fists started to flex. Though Cinder had practiced her mind control sporadically on Jacin and the doctor since they’d arrived in Farafrah, it would be a true test of her abilities if Wolf lost control.
And she could sense it brimming inside him. Fear burning and roiling. Panic writhing inside his chest. The animal straining to be unleashed inside the man.
But then Wolf’s breath hitched and all the fury drained out of him with a shudder. Like a man shot fatally through the heart, he collapsed over his knees, covering his head with his good arm like he wanted to block out the world.
Cinder stood, staring. All her senses were attuned to Wolf, focused on the energy and emotions that clouded around him. It was like watching a candle extinguish.
It was like watching him die.
Gulping, Cinder sank into a crouch in front of him. She considered reaching out and placing a hand on his arm, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. It was too much like an invasion, especially when her gift was attuned to him like this. When she was watching him break and crumble in front of her. She longed to put him back together. To take away the vulnerability that didn’t fit him. But it was his right to mourn. It was his right to be terrified for Scarlet, as she was.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “But we will find her. We’re trying to come up with some way to get to Luna, and we’ll find her. We’ll rescue—”
His head jolted up so fast that Cinder nearly fell over from surprise. His eyes had brightened again.
“Rescue her?” he seethed, his knuckles turning white. “You don’t know what they’ll do to her—what they’ve already done to her!”
It happened fast. One moment he was a broken man, crumpled over his own knees. The next he was on his feet, grabbing the frame of the bed and upending it against the wall. The medical kit crashed to the floor. The room shook. Crying out, Cinder scurried backward.
Then the chaos quieted, just as suddenly. Wolf froze, teetered on his feet, and fell so hard onto the floor that the hotel trembled from the impact.
Dr. Erland stood above his prone body, empty syringe in hand, glaring at Cinder over his thin-framed spectacles.
She gulped.
“Wouldn’t it be handy,” said the doctor, “if we had someone here with the mental faculties capable of controlling one of his kind when he goes on just that sort of a tirade?”
Hands shaking, Cinder pushed her mess of hair out of her face. “I was—getting around to it.”
“Well. Faster next time, if I might make a suggestion.” Sighing, he tossed the syringe onto the room’s small desk and glowered down at the unconscious man. Blood was beginning to seep through the bandages beneath Wolf’s shoulder blade. “Perhaps it will be best to keep him sedated, for the time being.”
“Perhaps.”
The doctor’s lips puckered, wrinkles creasing down his cheeks. “Do you still have those tranquilizer darts I gave you?”
“Oh, please.” Cinder forced herself to stand, though her legs still shook. “Do you have any idea how many times I’ve nearly died since you gave me those? They’re long gone.”
Dr. Erland harrumphed. “I’ll make you some more. I have a feeling you’re going to need them.”