Eighteen
It didn’t take long for Cress and Thorne to fall into a pattern. As Thorne became more comfortable with the movement of the sand underneath them and the sensation of the cane in his hand, he grew more confident, and their pace increased. Three dunes. Five. Ten. Before long, Cress realized that it took a lot less energy to stay in the valleys between the dunes when they could, so she began cutting a slower, yet less exhausting zigzag route across the desert.
As she walked, the towels around her feet began to loosen and grains of sand slipped in and got caught between her toes, despite how tight Thorne had tied the ropes of hair. The soles of her feet began to burn and a cramp was threatening to overtake her left foot from the constant grab and release of her toes on the unstable ground. Her legs ached. Cress’s body began to rebel as they rambled up yet another dune. Her thighs would burn as she crested one more hill—but then her shins would cry out as they descended the other side. Her silly fitness routines aboard the satellite hadn’t prepared her for this.
But she did not complain. She panted a great deal. She swiped at the sweat drops on her temples. She clenched her jaw against the hurt. But she did not complain.
At least she could see, she reminded herself. And at least she didn’t have to carry the supplies. She heard Thorne switch shoulders from time to time, but he didn’t complain either.
Sometimes when they struck a flat spot, she closed her eyes to see how long she could go without opening them. Vertigo would set in almost immediately. Panic would blossom at the base of her spine and crawl up it until she was sure each new step would bring her in contact with a rock or a small hill and she would stumble face-first into the sand.
The fourth time she did it, Thorne asked her why they kept slowing down. She kept her eyes open after that.
“Do you need to take a break?” Thorne asked, hours later.
“N-no,” she huffed, her thighs burning. “We’re almost to the top of this dune.”
“Sure? No point passing out from exhaustion.”
She breathed a sigh of relief upon reaching the top of the dune, but dread quickly took its place. She didn’t know why she’d expected this dune to be different from the dozens they’d already crested. She didn’t know why she’d been thinking that this must have marked the end of the desert, because she didn’t think she could go much farther.
But it was not the end. The world was made of more dunes, more sand, more nothingness.
“Really. Let’s take a break,” Thorne said, setting down the pack and stabbing the cane into the ground. He spent a moment working the kinks from his shoulders, before hunching over and undoing the bundle’s knot. He handed Cress one of the water bottles and took another for himself.
“Shouldn’t we ration it?” she asked.
He shook his head. “It’s best to drink when we’re thirsty, and just try to keep sweating to a minimum—as much as possible. Our bodies will be better able to maintain hydration that way, even if we do run out of water. And we should avoid eating until we find another water source. Digestion uses up a lot of water too.”
“That’s fine. I’m not hungry.” Which was true—the heat seemed to have stolen what appetite she’d had.
When she’d drank all she could, Cress handed the bottle back to Thorne and fantasized about collapsing into the sand and going to sleep, but she dared not, fearing she would never get up again. When Thorne lifted the pack, she took off down the hill without question.
“What do you think is happening on your ship?” Cress asked as they descended the hill. The question had been echoing in her mind for hours, but the water had finally made her capable of speech. “Do you think Mistress Sybil…”
“They’re fine,” Thorne said, with unrelenting confidence. “I pity the person who goes up against Wolf, and Cinder’s made of tougher stuff than people realize.” A pause, before a hearty laugh burst through the quiet desert air. “Literally, in fact.”
“Wolf. That must be the other man on the ship?”
“Yes, and Scarlet is his … well, I don’t really know what they call themselves, but he’s lunatic-crazy for her. Scarlet’s not a bad shot, herself. That thaumaturge had no idea what she was walking into.”
Cress hoped he was right. Mistress Sybil had found them because of her, and the guilt was as painful as the deep aches in her bones.
“So how did a girl born on Luna get stuck in a satellite and become an Earthen sympathizer, anyway?”
She wrinkled her nose. “Well. When my parents found out I was a shell, they gave me up to be killed, because of the infanticide laws. But Mistress saved me and raised me instead, along with some other shells she’d rescued. She mostly just wanted us for some sort of experiments they’re always running, but Mistress never really explained it to me. We used to live in some of the lava tubes that had been converted into dormitories, and we were always being monitored by these cameras that were connected to Luna’s communication system. It was sort of cramped, but not too bad, and we had ports and netscreens, so we weren’t entirely cut off from the outside world. After a while I got really good at hacking into the communication system, which I mostly just used for silly stuff. We were all curious about school, so I used to hack into the Lunar school system and download the study guides, things like that.”
Cress squinted up at the moon, now so far away. It was hard to believe it’s where she came from. “Then one day, one of the older boys—Julian—asked me if I thought I could find out who his parents were. It took a couple days, but I did, and we learned that his parents lived in one of the lumber domes, and that they were both alive, and that he had two younger siblings. And then we figured out how to send them a message and tell them that he was alive. He thought that if they knew he hadn’t been killed after all, they would come find him. We got so excited, thinking we could all contact our families. That we would all be rescued.” She gulped. “It was really na?ve, of course. The next day, Mistress came and took Julian away, and then some technicians removed all of the monitoring equipment so we couldn’t access the net anymore. I never saw Julian again. I think … I think his parents must have contacted the authorities when they got his comm, and I think he may have been killed, to prove that the infanticide laws were being taken seriously.”
She ran her fingers absently through her hair, surprised when they slipped through it so quickly. “After that, Mistress Sybil started to pay more attention to me. She sometimes took me out of the caverns and up into the domes and gave me different tasks. Altering the coding of the broadcast system. Tapping into netlinks. Programming intelligence software to pick up on specific verbal cues and divert information to separate comm accounts. At first I loved it. Mistress was nice to me then, and it meant I got to leave the lava tubes and see some of the city. I felt like I was becoming her favorite, and that if I did what she asked me to do, eventually it wouldn’t matter that I was a shell anymore, and I would be allowed to go to school and be just like any normal Lunar.
“Well, one day Sybil asked me to hack a communication between a couple of European diplomats and I told her that the signal was too weak. I needed to be closer to Earth, and I required better net connectivity, and advanced software…”
Cress shook her head, remembering how she had told Sybil exactly what Sybil would need to craft the satellite for her young prodigy. Cress had practically designed her own prison.
“A few months later, Mistress came to get me, and told me we were going on a trip. We boarded a podship, and I was so, so excited. I thought she was taking me to Artemisia, to be presented to the queen herself, to be forgiven for being born a shell. It feels so stupid now. Even when we started flying away from Luna, and I saw that we were heading toward Earth, I thought that’s where we were going. I figured, all right, maybe Lunars really can’t accept me this way, but Mistress knows that Earthens will. So she’s letting me go to Earth, instead. The trip took hours and hours and by the end of it I was shaking with excitement, and I’d worked up this whole story in my head, how Mistress was going to give me to some nice Earthen couple, and they would raise me as their own, and they lived in an enormous tree house—I don’t know why I thought they would live in a tree house, but for some reason that’s what I was hoping for. I mean, I’d never seen real trees.” She frowned. “Still haven’t, actually.”
There was a short silence, before Thorne said, “And that’s when she took you to the satellite, and you became the queen’s programmer.”
“Programmer, hacker, spy … somehow, I never stopped believing that if I did everything she asked, someday they would let me go.”
“And how long before you decided that you’d rather be trying to save Earthen royalty than spy on them?”
“I don’t know. I was always fascinated by Earth. I spent a lot of time reading Earthen news and watching their dramas. I started to feel connected to the people down there … down here. More than I ever did to Lunars.” She wrung her hands. “After a while, I started to pretend that I was a secret guardian, and it was my job to protect Earth and its people from Levana.”
To her relief, Thorne didn’t laugh. He didn’t say anything for a long time and Cress couldn’t determine if the silence was comforting or awkward. Maybe he thought her fantasies were childish.
A long while later, Thorne finally spoke. “If I’d been in your position, and I had only one D-COMM chip that I could use to communicate with Earth, I would have found some dirt on a hotshot spaceship pilot and blackmailed him into coming to get me out of that satellite, rather than trying to rescue the emperor.”
Though he looked serious, Cress couldn’t help but smile. “No, you wouldn’t have. You would have done the same thing I did, because you know that the threat Levana poses to Earth is much bigger than you or me … much bigger than any of us.”
But the captain just shook his head. “That’s very good of you to say, Cress. But trust me. I would have blackmailed someone.”