Marissa Meyer - Cinder

Cinder shrank back, uncomfortable under his eager stare.

“Do you recall anything from your childhood that could be connected to this?” he continued. “Any horrible sicknesses? Near brushes with death?”

“No. Well…” She hesitated, stuffing the wrench into a side cargo pocket. “I guess, maybe. My stepfather died of letumosis. Five years ago.”

“Your stepfather. Do you know where he could have contracted it?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. My step—my guardian, Adri, always suspected he got it in Europe. When he adopted me.”

The doctor’s hands trembled, as if his clutched fingers alone were keeping him from combusting. “You’re from Europe then.”

She nodded, uncertainly. It felt odd to think she was from a place she had no memory of.

“Were there many sick people in Europe that you recall? Any notable outbreaks in your province?”

“I don’t know. I don’t actually remember anything from before the surgery.”

His eyebrows rose, his blue eyes sucking in all the light of the room. “The cybernetic operation?”

“No, the sex change.”

The doctor’s smile faltered.

“I’m joking.”

Dr. Erland reassembled his composure. “What do you mean when you say you don’t remember anything?”

Cinder blew a wisp of hair from her face. “Just that. Something about when they installed the brain interface, it did some damage to my…you know, whatever. The part of the brain that remembers things.”

“The hippocampus.”

“I guess.”

“And how old were you?”

“Eleven.”

“Eleven.” He released his breath in a rush. His gaze darted haphazardly around the floor as if the reason for her immunity was written upon it. “Eleven. Because of a hover accident, was it?”

“Right.”

“Hover accidents are nearly impossible these days.”

“Until some idiot removes the collision sensor, trying to make it go faster.”

“Even so, it wouldn’t seem that a few bumps and bruises would justify the amount of repairs you had.”

Cinder tapped her fingers against her hip. Repairs—what a very cyborg term.

“Yeah, well, it killed my parents and threw me through the windshield. The force pushed the hover off the maglev track. It rolled a couple times and pinned me underneath. Afterward some of the bones in my leg were the consistency of sawdust.” She paused, fiddling with her gloves. “At least, that’s what they told me. Like I said, I don’t remember any of it.”

She only barely remembered the drug-induced fog, her mushy thoughts. And then there was the pain. Every muscle burning. Every joint screaming. Her body in rebellion as it discovered what had been done to it.

“Do you have any trouble retaining memories since then, or forming new ones?”

“Not that I know of.” She glared. “Is this relevant?”

“It’s fascinating,” Dr. Erland said, dodging the question. He pulled out his portscreen, making some notation. “Eleven years old,” he muttered again, then, “You must have gone through a lot of prosthetic limbs growing into those.”

Cinder twisted her lips. She should have gone through lots of limbs, but Adri had refused to pay for new parts for her freak stepdaughter. Instead of responding, she cast her eyes to the door, then at the blood-filled vials. “So…am I free to go?”

Dr. Erland’s eyes flashed as if injured by her question. “Go? Miss Linh, you must realize how valuable you’ve become with this discovery.”

Her muscles tensed, her fingers trailing along the hard outline of the wrench in her pocket. “So I’m still a prisoner. Just a valuable one now.”

His face softened, and he tucked the port out of sight. “This is much bigger than you realize. You have no idea how important…no idea of your worth.”

“So what now? Are you going to inject me with even more lethal diseases, to see how my body fares against those?”

“Stars, no. You are much too precious to kill.”

“You weren’t exactly saying that an hour ago.”

Dr. Erland’s gaze flickered to the holograph, brow furrowed as if considering her words. “Things are quite different than they were an hour ago, Miss Linh. With your help, we could save hundreds of thousands of lives. If you are what I think you are, we could—well, we could stop the cyborg draft, to start with.” He settled his fist against his mouth. “Plus, we would pay you, of course.”

Hooking her thumbs into the belt loops of her pants, Cinder leaned against the counter that held all the machines that had seemed so threatening before.

She was immune.

She was important.

The money was tempting, of course. If she could prove her self-sufficiency, she might be able to annul Adri’s legal guardianship over her. She could buy back her freedom.

But even that insight dulled when she thought of Peony.

“You really think I can help?”

“I do. In fact, I think every person on Earth could soon find themselves immensely grateful to you.”

She gulped and lifted herself onto an exam table, folding both legs beneath her. “All right, just so long as we’re clear—I am here on a volunteer basis now, which means I can leave at any point I want to. No questions, no arguments.”

The doctor’s face brightened, eyes shining like lanterns between the wrinkles. “Yes. Absolutely.”

“And I do expect payment, like you said, but I need a separate account. Something my legal guardian can’t access. I don’t want her to have any idea I’ve agreed to do this, or any access to the money.”

To her surprise, he didn’t hesitate. “Of course.”

She sucked in a steadying breath. “And one other thing. My sister. She was taken to the quarantines yesterday. If you do find an antidote, or anything that even holds promise as an antidote, I want her to be the first one to get it.”

This time, the doctor’s gaze faltered. He turned away and paced to the holograph, rubbing his hands down the front of his lab coat. “That, I’m afraid I cannot promise.”

She squeezed her fists together. “Why not?”

“Because the emperor must be the first to receive the antidote.” His eyelids crinkled with sympathy. “But I can promise your sister will be second.”

PRINCE KAI WATCHED THROUGH THE GLASS AS A MED-DROID inserted an IV into his father’s arm. Only five days had passed since the emperor had shown the first signs of the blue fever, but it felt like a lifetime. Years’ worth of worry and anguish rolled into so few hours.

Dr. Erland had once told him of an old suspicion that bad things always came in threes.

First, his android Nainsi had broken before she could communicate her findings.

And now his father was sick, with no hope for survival.

What would happen next? What could be worse than this?

Perhaps the Lunars would declare war.

He cringed, wanting to take back the thought the second he had it.

Konn Torin, his father’s adviser and the only other human allowed to see the emperor in such a state, clapped a hand on Kai’s shoulder. “It will be all right,” he said, without emotion, in that peculiar way he had of reading another person’s thoughts.

Kai’s father moaned and opened swollen eyes. The room was quarantined on the seventh floor of the palace’s research wing, but the emperor had been made as comfortable as possible. Numerous screens lined the walls so he might enjoy music and entertainment, so he might be read to. His favorite flowers had been brought in droves from the gardens—lilies and chrysanthemums filling the otherwise sterile room. The bed was dressed in the finest silks the Commonwealth had to offer.

But none of it made much of a difference. It was still a room made to keep the living separate from the dying.